More tortoise than hare

On Oct. 2, a week after the conclusion of what would be his final tour, the American rock ’n’ roller Tom Petty succumbed to cardiac arrest. He was 66.

He’d recently said that this tour might be his last big one, that he was looking forward to spending more time with his granddaughter. Some inferred that Petty was announcing retirement, a milestone sometimes associated, if only anecdotally, with hastening the approach of death, especially in people closely identified with prolific productivity.

Petty was identified that way. So are the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan. Maybe staving off the potentially fatal consequences of resting on their laurels is a reason that they all keep going.

Petty had laurels aplenty (multiple gold and platinum albums, membership in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), and he’d earned them the old-fashioned way: through persistence, determination, and effort. Never the most glamorous, the most exciting, or the most controversial of rock stars, he was more tortoise than hare. But he left behind a body of work that crossed, and stayed across, the finish line.

“Breakdown,” “Refugee,” “The Waiting,” “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” “Jammin’ Me,” “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” and “Learning to Fly” may have stalled short of the Top 10. But between AOR radio and MTV, they rotated heavily enough to make Petty’s name synonymous with character-driven narratives set to swaggering heartland hooks.

Actually, Petty was a Southerner, a Floridian, who relocated to Southern California. In so doing, he bypassed the heartland altogether. But his formative experiences, such as enduring physical and emotional abuse from his father and feeling poverty’s spurs in his sides at a young age, made him sympathetic to outsiders and outsiders sympathetic to him. The dog-collar-wearing misfit who inspired the song “Spike” on Petty’s album Southern Accents would’ve been out of place anywhere. Stevie Nicks, who once said that she wanted to be “the girl Tom Petty,” grew up in five different states.

Another experience that ended up informing Petty’s songs was the friction between himself and his band, the Heartbreakers. Like most long-term relationships that mix business with pleasure, Petty’s and the Heartbreakers’ had exhilarating highs and acrimonious lows. Several members got pink slips. One, the bassist Ron Blair, was rehired. Petty fought, and won, headline-making battles with major record labels too.

His first marriage had highs (mostly at the beginning) and lows as well. Collateral damage from the divorce included Petty’s seeking refuge in heroin. (Other details can be found in Warren Zanes’ Petty: The Biography.) When Petty’s folk-rock singing voice constricted into a whine, the accumulation of pressures within his band or his family was one likely reason.

Ironically, for someone so closely identified with his band, Petty’s two strongest albums, The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 (1988) and Full Moon Fever (1989), were not Heartbreaker affairs. The latter contained “Free Fallin’,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” and “I Won’t Back Down,” songs so popular that they constituted three-fourths of his Super Bowl halftime concert in 2008. On the Wilburys album, he meshed with Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne and made the most effortless-sounding rock ’n’ roll of his career.

Petty’s other Super Bowl song was “American Girl,” the last cut on his band’s eponymous 1976 debut. It was also the final encore of every show on his just-concluded tour.

Like retirement, coming full circle is sometimes said to betoken the end’s drawing nigh. And, whether Petty realized it or not, full circle is what he'd come.