60 Songs That Explain the '90s - “It’s Good to Be King”—Tom Petty

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Rob explores the joy, terror, and fulfillment of fatherhood through one of classic rock’s dynamic frontmen, Tom Petty. Rob runs down Petty’s career, including his MTV music video impact, the ‘Wildflowers’ standout “It’s Good to Be King,” and how Petty prepared him for the most transformative experience of his life. Plus, a big announcement about the future of the show. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Stephen Rodrick  Producer: Justin Sayles Associate Producer: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Twice a week, Van Lathen and Rachel Lindsay dissect the biggest topics in black culture, politics, and sports on their show, Higher Learning. They discuss the most important and timely conversations while also frequently inviting guests on the podcast and occasionally debating each other. Check out Higher Learning on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone, a quick announcement before this week's episode. The announcement is that 60 songs that explain the 90s will be doing, 90 songs. 90 songs. We're doing 90 songs.

We're doing 30 more songs. We're doing more songs. There's too many songs. We are very excited to do more songs. We have not decided whether to keep the name, 60 songs that explain the 90s or changes in 90 songs. There are pros and cons to both, I suppose, but this whole thing is obnoxious.

We probably should have just done 90 songs to begin with, but I was worried nobody would like the show. And I didn't want to be the point. or sap with a show with 90 in the title. They got canceled after four episodes. Of course, 60 is a lot of songs already. And getting canceled after four episodes would hardly have been less embarrassing. But 30 seemed like too few.

Listen, let's focus. I would like to thank everyone deeply and sincerely for listening, for reaching out to me, for any kind words or any words at all that you've said about this show, publicly or privately to me or to anybody. It means the world to me. Thank you. That goes even for the guy who told me I look like a less doughy Ray Romano. Thanks to him especially. Thanks also to the guy last week who said a lot of folks trying to determine how at Harvilla plans to wrap up his 60 songs podcast. Give it up. This man is dangerous and unpredictable. Have you listened to those ramblings? Stay out of that headspace and respect the process. I agree with almost all of that. Thank you. as you may or may not be aware, this is the 59th episode of this show. After the 60th episode next week, we're going to take a break for a month or two.

My kids are tearing up the house. That's not a joke or an exaggeration. I got to put out some fires, possibly non-metaphorical fires, but we will return very soon to do 30 more episodes. And then that's it. I should say that. We will for sure stop at 90 when I asked the ringer's own Sean Fennett. Thank you, by the way, to Sean, Amanda, Mal, Juliet, Chris, and Bill. When I asked Sean if I could do this, he said, okay, but he was also a don't ask us to do more ever again.

This is a pain in the ass. And I was like, all right, got it. I'm rambling. In conclusion, 60 songs is doing 90 songs, and we are thrilled and honored and grateful to do so. Thank you. Here now is the 59th song. There are now 31 more where that came from. talk to you soon so the nurse hands me my son my newborn firstborn son born born like 90 seconds ago the doctors

are attending to my wife i am standing there in a hospital room trembling quite a bit and holding a baby holding my son i am a father now and you can spend your whole life you can spend years and years imagining this moment and you can spend the long months of your wife's pregnancy and a laughably inept scramble to prepare for this moment and you can spend the hours and hours and hours of your wife's quite difficult labor praying for this moment but you have no idea how exactly you will feel or what exactly you will do when this moment arrives or at least I didn't All the people who tell you when your kids are born, it changes your life and things will never be the same. That's all true, but quite vague and not terribly helpful in terms of a prep.

So the nurse hands me, my son. I am holding my newborn firstborn son. I am laughably unprepared. I have no idea what to do. And so with no premeditation whatsoever, I do the first thing that pops into my head. I sing my son a Tom Petty song. Good night, baby. Sleep tight, my love.

May God watch over you from above. I'm not even a Tom Petty fan like that in this moment. No offense. It would not have occurred to me 90 seconds earlier to do this, to sing this song to my son, to sing any Tom Petty song, to sing any song by anybody. But my thought process,

as best I can reconstruct it, must have been ooh crying baby sooth crying baby sing the song to sooth crying baby dad sing lullaby sooth crying baby what lullaby dad know what lullaby dad no fit momentous occasion ooh crying baby and it pops into my head and out of my mouth all right for now by tom petty 1989 from the album full moon fever i picture my newborn son shazaming this song shazaming me as i sing to him his little baby hand holding up his phone to my mouth. He's like, who is this trembling guy? More importantly, what's that song he's singing?

That's interesting. Is this Tom Petty? Is this from Damn the Torpedoes? I got to look this up. Spend my life free. I could not repay your son for me. Did this song soothe my trembling newborn son? Maybe.

Did it soothe me? No. But I was beyond grateful. for this song, which I do think was equal to the gravity of this moment, and conveyed some sense of my life-changing awe in the presence of my son, and conveyed some sense of my perpetual unease as well. So sleep tight, baby, unfurrow your breath and know I love. Because I always like the for now part of the title, All Right for Now. I think the peace, the safety, the comfort, the all rightness described.

So tenderly in this song is all the more precious for the acknowledgement that it's temporary. But now I've set a precedent, right? I have established a Tom Petty motif in terms of my parenting. And for whatever reason, I feel compelled now to keep singing my son Tom Petty songs, expand the repertoire, give him a greater sense of the Tom Petty catalog. My son slept quite poorly as a baby. And so there I am bouncing lightly on one of those blue exercise balls in a darkened room holding him as he cries. The exercise ball was some sleep experts advice.

It was bullshit. My parenting advice is don't take parenting advice from anybody. It's pretty much all bullshit, especially if you have to pay for it. But as I bounce on the exercise ball, I sing all right for now. And then I move on to Free Fallen, which needs no introduction. Even my newborn son doesn't need to Shazam free. Fallen. Here's the tricky thing, though, about singing Free Fallen is a lullaby.

The jump to falsetto for the chorus is quite jarring to a baby. His eyes all shooting back open and bulging. You can't really sing in falsetto quietly. You can't whisper in falsetto. So eventually I learned to drop an octave for the chorus so as not to startle my son awake. It's just a little parenting advice for you. Also, obviously, I'm singing this. this a cappella. And so I'm trying to work out precisely how many seconds of silence to put

between now I'm free and free fall. And if I should count it off in my head like I'm singing the recorded full band regular speed version of the song or should I stretch that pause out so as to prolong the silence and enhance the lullaby aspect or what? My presence is quite relaxing and soothing to babies. I assure you. And when I worry the baby's getting tired. to free fall and I move on to I Won't Back Down, which has a less severe version of the chorus falsetto problem, and provides an invaluable opportunity to sing the words, you can stand me up at the gates of hell to a baby. All three of those songs are from full moon fever, so much for giving my son a sense of the full Tom Petty repertoire. He's got like 16 albums. It's

terrible parenting. A real rock critic would have sung him something from southern accents. Full moon fever came out in 1989 when I was 12 years old and Tom Petty was 38 years old. As a 12 year old, I thought 38 year old Tom Petty was a charming, whizzened, impossibly old, rad old man, a grandfatherly paragon of classic rock excellence and graceful decrepitude. He was our link with history. He was holding court from a wheelchair on an ice flow, drifting off, toward the horizon. This was my first for a long time, my only Tom Petty album. I had it on cassette. Full Moon Fever was designed to be heard on cassette, in my opinion, in part because the

album art on the CD and now the streaming version, that's square. The art itself, the photo of Tom and the title, Full Moon Fever, is suspiciously cassette tape sized and shaped. It's a smaller rectangle within the square. And also when I did finally listen to this record not on cassette, I found out that Tom Petty inserted a jokey little spoken interlude halfway through the album right at the end of running down a dream, specifically for the people not listening on LP or cassette. Hello, CD listeners. We've come to the point in this album where those listening on cassette or records will have to stand up or sit down and turn over the record or tape. I find Tom Petty's speaking voice tremendously endearing and comforting. He's from Gainesville, Florida, but does not.

have a super thick southern accent and he sounds like a guy from the south too cool and rebellious to have a super thick southern accent. His voice is also ideal for delivering the driest rad old man jokes imaginable. In fairness to those listeners, we'll now take a few seconds before we begin side two. Side two starts with a fantastic cover of feel a whole lot better by the birds, which I was not aware of when I was 12. I thought it was just like the 200th fantastic original Tom Petty song because there are at least 200 fantastic original Tom Petty songs. And I sung three of them to my son on a loop during our arduous exercise ball bedtime routine for a year or so, which means I got 197 more Tom Petty songs to go. I'm going to do the whole

full moon fever album first. Obviously, my oldest doesn't need to be sun to sleep anymore, but maybe now, I'll wake him up for school by blasting, You're So Bad. I can jump on his bed and play air guitar between the lines of the chorus. I was determined with both my sons to not be overbearing rock critic dad guy and like subject them to Captain Beefheart or Cannes or Slint or whatever. Dress them in Sonic Youth onesies, slap giant ear protectors on them and drag them to hear free jazz or whatever. I wanted them both to gravitate organically toward whatever music they liked without my meddling or tainting their experiences. This may have backfired because my sons are 10 and 8 now. And for several

months, they've been obsessed with this musical video game called Friday Night Funkin. It's like a computer keyboard dance dance revolution sort of deal. Are you up on this? Don't get involved if you're not involved. It is quite loud, fast, shrill, grating, flabbergasting, parent antagonizing music. Is this hyperpop? Is this an 100 gex sort of deal? What is this? Tell me what this is. This is a song called Ugg from an artist named Kauai Sprite. Hold on to your butts. I listen to roughly an hour of this music a day currently. And I suppose I got to hand it to my sons that they have managed to musically antagonize their catastrophically musically obsessed rock critic father that is an impressive display of free teenage rebellion that's dedication

that's tenacity every time i get the urge to tell them to turn down that racket i realize that's the single most preposterous thing i could ever ask my children to do so i just watch my firstborn son bouncing around the living room to kawai sprite with some grand imaginative tableau in his head. I'll never have any access to. And as I'm standing there gritting my teeth all at once it dawns on me what he's doing. And more importantly, it dawns on me who he is. He's my son. He's basically me. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is 60 Saws that explained the 90s. And this week we're talking about it's good to be king by Tom Petty from 1994's Wildflowers. This one's for me. All these songs are for me, I suppose.

This show is mostly me talking, but this one's extra for me. This one's about the place of my mind where I spend the vast majority of my time. But really, it's about me watching my kids build their own places and their own minds and realizing that I played a major role in making them like this. They're doing what I do. But at the same time, I have no real control over what they're doing and no real access to where they are. are where they're going. And that's parenthood for you. This isn't quite as heavy as it sounds, I assure you. Most of this is at least a little silly. For example, a lot of the trouble here

started when I was eight, nine, 10 years old, basically as old as my sons are now. And I watched MTV for eight to 12 hours every day. And as each new music video started, MTV used to play music videos pretty much all day. This was pre-ridiculousness era MTV. As each new video started, my index finger would hover over the record button on our VCR with a blank VHS tape all loaded up because I was desperately waiting for one specific MTV video. Guess. I'm sorry, that's incorrect. Angel by the Boston rock band Aerosmith.

Power ballad, 1987, off their album, Permanent Vacation. not aware as a nine-year-old or whatever, that permanent vacation is Aerosmith's ninth album. They'd already been around for nearly 15 years. They'd flamed out hardcore. They'd already flubbed several comeback attempts. And thanks in a large part to MTV, this album was the comeback attempt that finally worked. I was not privy to that information. All I knew is that I loved the song, Angel, more than pretty much anything in the world,

with the notable exception of one particular fourth grade girl, with whom I very much wanted to couple roller skate as Angel played over the roller rink PA system at incredible volume. In addition, I enjoyed the fact that the salacious video for the song Ragdoll, scandalized both my parents and at least one of my uncles. In the ragdoll video, Aerosmith frontman Stephen Tyler, Sloppily Smooches, a comely young semi-dressed lady, either before singing this or right after singing this or possibly while singing this, Or maybe it was all three.

It was during, actually. Stephen detaches himself from the comely young semi-dressed lady and turns to the camera for the a bib-de-bib-dib-dib-dib-dib-bo part. I looked it up. This is such a banal observation at this point, but nine-year-old me would have flipped out if he'd known that one day you could type Aerosmith Ragdoll, or better yet, Aerosmith Angel, into a little box,

and the song would start within five seconds. the future, man. Keep your jet packs and give me angel on demand. Seriously, I was watching the rag doll video one day and my uncle walked in the room just in time for the makeout scene and my uncle turned and glared at me, disgusted, as though I just held up a liquor store at gunpoint. It was great. I felt so subversive.

Stephen Tyler was 39 years old when permanent vacation came out in 1987, a charming, wizened, impossibly old, and colossally skeezy, dirty old man, a grandfatherly paragon of classic rock excellence and disgraceful decrepitude, reborn, reanimated by MTV. MTV in the 80s and early 90s

arbitrarily had this effect on a handful of lucky 70s rock stars who are willing to embrace the music video revolution, who are willing to risk looking ridiculous and or criminally lecherous. In 1993, Aerosmith put out a little album called Get a Grip. The Get A Grip album cover is a close-up photograph of a cow with one of its udders pierced. Our friend Stephen Hayden once called it the worst album cover of all time. And this album would inspire the greatest high cultural trilogy since Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or the godfather. Yes, I refer to the Elysia Silverstone trilogy of Aerosmith videos for

Crying Amazing and Crazy. I'm a crying man myself. Surprise. Can I confess something to you? Elysia Silverstone gets her belly button pierced halfway through the Crying video. And then at the end of the Crying video, she fakes a suicide attempt and bungee jumps off a highway overpass. So as to more dramatically flip off her ex-boyfriend Steven Dorf, And at first I thought the bungee cord was connected to her belly button ring. And I was like, ow! I'm like 15 at this point. Leave me alone.

Anyways, when it came to early mid-career MTV reinventions, Tom Petty walked so Aerosmith could run. If you're a discerning MTV viewer of a certain age right now, you're thinking about Alice from Alice in Wonderland in the blue dress, except she's a cake. And Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are standing over. over Alice eating the Alice cake as Alice lies there squirming. It's an impressively perverse and macabre image for 1985 for the arms race of uncle

scandalizing perversion. That is 80s and 90s MTV. Don't come around here no more is from the Southern Accents album. Actually, Stan Lynch, the Heartbreaker's original drummer who looks like all three male leads from Full House simultaneously. he looks like John Stamos, Dave Cooley, and Bob Sagitt, RIP, genetically fused into one guy. I can't really explain it, but I mean it is a compliment. It's a chin.

It's a delightfully jaunty chin. Stan Lynch is especially psyched about the Alice cake. So I'm operating under the assumption that you do not require a lengthy, laborious Tom Petty primer from me, right? Born in Gainesville, Florida in 1950, radicalized by Elvis, re-radicalized by the Beatles pledges his soul to rock and roll, co-founds the band Mud Crutch, which heads out to LA and gets a record deal and flames out and reassembles as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, whose first album comes out in 1976, self-titled. Last song on the record is American Girl.

His third album, Damn the Torpedoes from 79, makes him a superstar. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are a whole-ass band. In this era, Mike Campbell on guitar, Ben Montench on keyboards, Ron Blair on bass. our pal Stan Lynch on drums, but the band is also him. Tom York once described the power balance and radiohead by saying something like, We're like the United Nations and I'm America. Close enough. Seven Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers albums total between 1976 and 1987.

And yeah, in the 80s, he becomes an unlikely MTV innovator. The Space Western video for You Got Lucky from the Long After Dark record in 82. Tom says that's one of the first MTV video. with like a lengthy cinematic intro before the song even starts. Very intense, jaunty hats in the You Got Lucky video. The chords there are FG and A minor for your reference. You got, you got when I found you, you could pick up any guitar, play FG and A minor, and there you go. You got lucky.

But it doesn't sound good when you do it, does it? No offense. It doesn't sound revelatory. It doesn't sound monumental when you do it, the way it sounds when Tom Petty does it. Like every plain old chord Tom Petty plays on his plain old guitar sounds like a new continent he just discovered. Every new chord in a Tom Petty song is like that first fresh footprint on the surface of the moon. I have watched, in its entirety, running down a dream, the nearly four-hour Tom Petty in the heart Heartbreakers documentary from 2007, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, RIP.

Boy, that's a complex moment when you fire this movie up in your eyes rest on the remaining time, when you're taking the full splendor of 3-58-10. But the best part of this movie is archival interview footage of Tom Petty, just sitting on a couch playing the chords to The Waiting. That's all I had, see. I did that for a week And then finally I'd hit the way It's the hardest part

This is getting lengthy and laborious I say unlikely MTV Innovator Because historically part of Tom Petty's charm Is how unamused he is By the music business And technological advancements And stunts therein He fights to get his publishing

He fights when the label Tries to sell his hard promises album For the exorbitantly jacked up price of 989. Much later, he's got a whole lot to say about Vapid pop stars and American Idol and so forth. Per that full moon fever joke, he doesn't seem too jazzed about CDs

even when CDs become a thing. You wouldn't peg him as the guy who'd see like Duran Duran's video for Rio on MTV and be like, yes, let's do that. But he did it. No Duran Duran Diyadh's, but he did it. And he was good at it. He made good, flamboyant, eccentric MTV videos.

Check out Jammin Me from 1987 sometime to get a sense of what information overload looked like in 1987, a lot of TV static. And so by 89, he's a classic rock guy who doesn't feel past tense. Yes, he's in the traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan and George Harrison and Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynn. But he's the youngest traveling Wilburry. And that feels important. Tom Petty is poised to represent here at the dawn of the 90s. a spry and laconic sort of rad old man integrity. Full moon fever is fantastic.

It is palpable greatest hits album energy. It's Tom Petty's first solo album, but most of the Heartbreakers play on it. The solo album versus Heartbreakers album, distinction is somehow both crucial and meaningless. But anyway, his next album, Into the Great Wide Open from 1991 is a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album.

And it opens with four chords that feel like four new first footprints on four new undiscovered moons. The chords are F, C, A, Minor, and G for your reference. That's basically the whole song. Try it sometime. FCA, minor, and G. It won't sound that good when you play it.

No offense. One destabilizing quirk of the physical media era when you had to buy all the CDs and tapes you listen to is that you could totally flip for full moon fever because you bought it. But then when Into the Great Wide Open comes along two years later, it's years before you hear that entire album because you didn't buy it. And by you, I mean me. Out in the Cold is a great song on Into the Great White Open.

It's like a running down a dream sequel. The guitars get super nuts. It's great. Shout out Mike Campbell. But Tom Petty had so many hit songs. You didn't ever need to buy a Tom Petty album to qualify as a Tom Petty expert. Tom Petty's music is invisible. and ubiquitous and free and necessary to sustain human life on earth, like oxygen or lust.

For example, in 1993, he puts out an actual greatest hits album, grudgingly, because he thinks it's just another greedy music business stunt. And my brother gets that on cassette, I think, in a Columbia house transaction, Tom Petty's greatest hits was a God-level Columbia House record, 12 cassettes for a penny or whatever. So you get your crash test dummies, you get your foreign. Iron Blondege. You get your cranberries. You get your primus. You get your cracker. You get your the, the dusk by the the the is a fantastic album, even if I never mention it again. You get your morphine.

You get your sugar. You get your Juliana Hatfield 3. You get your breeders. You get your belly. You got one tape left to pick. You want something a little older. Something classic. Something dependable. And oh shit. Hell yeah. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, greatest hits. And that's a tape that starts with American Girl. And that's the tape with a new song called Mary Jane's Last Dance. And there's yet another iconic Macabrew Tom Petty video with Kim BASicker as a cadaver. And he's dancing with her lifeless body in a room full of candles. A lot of candles.

That shot of her feet lightly dragging across the floor as they dance. Tom Petty is the coolest 43-year-old on earth. in 1993, even if he's bound for, you know, a nursing home within the next, I don't know, two to three years. At 15 years old, I had a somewhat distorted sense of how aging worked. I can say this now, speaking to you as one of the dupier 43-year-olds currently on Earth. Tom Petty puts out wildflowers in 1994, his second solo album. Maybe the solo album, Heartbreaker's album, distinction is a little more meaningful than I think it I don't buy wildflowers in 1994.

I don't hear this album in full for years. Do I regret not buying it immediately? Of course. But I do think this album found me when I needed it, or rather when I was ready for it. And in the meantime, I still knew plenty of this album intimately, because in 1994, you invited Tom Petty into your lungs with every breath you took. another joy

I'm so mad I can't find this Can somebody send me the true radio edit of this song You don't know how it feels The radio edit Prominent in the Midwest

In any event That delicately Surgically Almost imperceptively Modifies that line To let's rule Another Like it just thacks

The word joint brusquely and hilariously As though with a giant cartoon croquet mallet, just pancakes the word joint out of existence. It's just stupendous. Think of all the marijuana that did not get smoked thanks to the valiant efforts of that radio edit. This was Wildflower's first single and the platonic ideal of a Tom Petty chorus to my mind. Cords are E, B, S, S4, E, and A. But more importantly, this chorus pulls you closer. You can smell Tom's

aftershave, or maybe that's not aftershave, while pushing you away. It is endearingly grouchy. It is grouchyly endearing. This is a man who's voice is ingrained in your very being, even if you never spend a penny of your own money to hear it. You know him. You love him. And now he makes you love him more by reminding you that you don't really know him at all. And I didn't at 15, and I still don't at 43, but I know a whole lot more about how I think he must have felt. Some quick personnel stuff. Stan Lynch, Mr. Fullhouse is out as the Heartbreakers drummer.

He bails right after recording Mary Jane's last dance. And he's replaced. The first song he records is, you don't know how it feels. I believe by Steve Ferroni, great drummer. Tom loved him. Steve's in the band now until the end. Ron Blair, the original Heartbreaker's bassist, left the band in 1982 and was replaced on bass for about 20 years by Howie Epstein.

Great bassist and backup singer, Invaluble. high harmony parts, very prominent on Wildflowers in particular. Howie tragically will struggle with drug addiction, leave the band in the early 2000s and be found dead in 2003, at which point original basis Ron Blair returns to the heartbreakers and remains with the band until the end. This is an awfully tight-knit crew for a 40-plus-year rock and roll band. Your average fantasy baseball league has way more turnover and internal conflict. Wildflowers as a Tom Petty solo album features all the heartbreakers throughout, but Tom doesn't have to listen to their opinions. That's the main point of distinction, as I understand it, between a solo album and a heartbreakers album.

And finally, your producer is Rick Rubin. What we're trying to get at now is getting away from the idea of guitar as a bed and more as a prominent instrument played by a person with string sounds and finger sounds and the personality of a guy playing the guitar as opposed to just the sound of a guitar. Can you tell just from the sound of his voice that Rick Rubin is lying down as he says that? I think you can.

If you watch any documentary that even tangentially involves Rick Rubin, you are guaranteed to see video footage of Rick Rubin lying down. He is a man of profound leisure. He takes his guru role very. seriously. In this case, he appears to be lying down in the back of a car. He looks way more comfortable than you'd assume. He'd look. He's got that airstream camper remote studio deal. Maybe that's where he is here. But this is from a full-length 2020 documentary on YouTube called Tom Petty Somewhere You Feel Free, directed by Mary Wharton and laser-focused on the making of wildflowers.

It is indeed years in real time before I realize that Wildflowers is widely regarded as the best Tom Petty album, his Apex Mountain, if you will, or top three at least, damn the torpedoes and so forth. It's a crowded feel, but Wildflowers has an immediate mythic timeless quality to it. And that starts with track one, starts with the song Wildflowers, which is mythic in part because it does indeed convey the personality of a guy playing the guitar as opposed to just the sound of a guitar. Per longstanding Tom Petty lore, this song just fell out of Tom Petty one day. whole. In a recent Wildflower's boss at Tom's quoted as saying, I swear to God, it's an absolute ad lib from the word go. I turned on my tape recorder deck, picked up my acoustic guitar, took a breath, and played that from start to finish. It was Rick Rubin's job to preserve that spontaneity,

but also bolster it with all the other instruments, with all the other heartbreakers. Ben Montaancho piano kills it on this song, not for the last time, without killing the vibe. that documentary, Rick Rubin calls all the other instruments events. There are 50 or so events on this song that do not draw any attention to themselves. Your mileage may vary on Rick Rubin's whole prone super producer persona. There are times when his touch is so light, you suspect he never got around to touching anything at all. The dudes in Slipknot, for example, do not speak of him kindly. But here in 94, we find our pal Rick at the onset of quite a fertile and vital period in terms of capturing older gentlemen playing guitars with personality. Wildflowers came out in November

94, six months earlier in April. We got American Recordings by Johnny Cash, produced by Rick Rubin, which launched its own little franchise for their next record together, Unchained from 1996. Johnny Cash's backing band will be Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Wildflowers, meanwhile, is full of awfully stark American Recordings era Johnny Cash. tight moments, but Tom's breath gets warmer the closer it gets to your ear. Don't fade on me. In that YouTube documentary, Tom's daughter, Adriya singles this song out, Don't Fade on Me.

She says when she heard this song for the first time, that's when she realized her father was about to divorce her mother. Tom Petty's 90s output is in a large part animated. if that's the right word, by his divorce from Jane Benio. They divorced in 1996 after 22 years of marriage. Tom's underloved 1999 album Echo, unloved by him as well as informally considered his divorce album. Here on Wildflowers, what you get are the initial stirrings on record anyway of that trauma.

And you get in general a great deal of internal turmoil, as befits, a publicity shy, 43-year-old rock star. This isn't grim close to the end of my life rumination in the Johnny Cash sense, but there's a very explicit sense that this is Tom Petty's second act or his third or his fourth or is 12th. That keyboard sound on time to move on is a huge emotional trigger for me in a golden hour wheatfield forlorn dad Americana sense, super rustic, super rustic, super wist. full. I think Bruce Springsteen. I think Bruce Hornsby. I think Sting, who's not American, but Sting's Fields of Gold is probably the single most emotionally destabilizing song in this genre, keyboard sound-wise. As far as I'm concerned, don't even get me started. But of course, I'm already started. As a teenager, I didn't hear any of these deepish wildflowers cuts, though, just the singles,

which were great, which were huge, which were crucial elements of 1994's periodic tape. You don't know how it feels. You wreck me a little rockier. I'll be the boy in the corduroy pants. I could relate to that image quite a bit in high school. But even as a teenager, something about this song called to me, but from a great distance. I knew I liked it. I knew I probably loved it.

But I didn't know why yet. I didn't know what it was trying to tell me. I had this subconscious sense that I wasn't ready for it yet. But it would wait. Time waits for no man. And neither does. It's good to be. King.

I mean, I think I always got that this song was gently sarcastic and self-deprecating in a lonely at the top type way. And Tom Petty sings it with that cruelty-free smirk of his, with his not a southern accent, with the full weight of what he wishes he didn't know now that he didn't know then. That's a Bob Seeger line. My dad loves that Bob Singer line. Wish I didn't know now, what I didn't know then from against the wind. I tested my dad to ask me in any Tom Petty opinions or memories, just because Tom Petty makes me think so much about my own kids.

And first of all, Dad took like 24 hours to get back to me, which is a perfect dad text interval. But he told me he's not a super fan. His favorite Tom Petty song is Stop Dragging My Heart Around with Stevie Nix. That's a solid choice. I might actually agree with him there. But then Dad texts, I like Free Fallen too. look up free fallen AGT.

And I assume that's a typo or whatever and it auto corrected whatever word he was trying to type to AGT until I realize that it's not. And if you Google free fallen AGT, you get a clip from the reality show America's Got Talent in which a mime named Tapeface, thus name because he's got tape over his mouth, does a mime routine that includes free fallen. like tape face lies down on a stool on his stomach and pretends to be skydiving during freefall and and Simon Cowell is delighted. I'm watching this like, I'm sending this text message from my dad straight to the dad text Smithsonian. I told you not to get me started. This is the line and it's good to be king that hit me hard right from the jump and it hits

me harder every time even now. That and excuse me if I have this place in my mind. where I go time to time. My spaciness, my daydreaming, my awkwardness, my forgetfulness. My ADHD so ingrained to me that my parents had to remind me in my early 40s that I had ADHD as a kid. I don't know if I technically even have it anymore. If it's so ingrained in me as to be imperceptible to me now, my inclination towards super emo nostalgia, even as a teenager, my nostalgia in advance, my overly florid romanticism,

starting with that girl in the fourth grade. catastrophic musical obsession that fuels all of this and is fueled by it in turn. And above all, my suspicion that I've passed a great deal of this on to my kids. All of that is here in these lines, in these chords. C.G.D. C. G.E. Minor A. It took me quite a while to figure out why the guitar solo hit me so hard, too. Let It Be. The guitar solo and Let It Be. My favorite Beatles song. A year or so back, Let It Be came on the radio. while I was driving alone.

I was at a stoplight and I just started crying, not unhappily, but just instinctively. I'm the guy who cries now and ever let it be comes on. I'm the guy who was finally ready to receive wildflowers by Tom Petty in its entirety. And when I did, when I listened to this whole album and finally fully absorbed this whole album, the second most affecting moment for me

was buried deep in the song, crawling back to you. I'm so tired of being tired. Steve Ferroni, Tom Petty's drummer, got that line tattooed on his arm after Tom Petty passed. I was out walking, taking one of my patented dad walks when I first fully zeroed in on that line and I just about fell over on the spot, like one of those fainting goats. I did say this was the second most affecting moment on wildflowers, right? So the nurse hands me my daughter, my newborn daughter.

This is Halloween 2020, our third and last kid. My wife and I would like to think we know the drill at this point, but for my wife, this is another quite difficult labor. And everybody turns out all right in this story, but there's a substantial emergency at the moment my daughter is born and the nurse hands me my newborn daughter in an operating room with suddenly about two dozen doctors in it who proceed to tend to my wife quite vigorously for the next hour or so I am holding my daughter we are sitting in a chair next to my wife's head with the rest of her body obscured by screens and curtains and so forth and we are watching the doctors

operate on my wife this happened like 15 months ago and I recall basically nothing about what I thought or did while this transpired. There's a good chance I sung, all right for now, to my daughter as well, but it's a blank. Which was my brain, I suppose, running in safe mode as we watched all this happen, leaving me unable for my own protection to musically orchestrate the situation in my own head, as is my want. However, the doctors had the radio playing, just plain old pop radio. And at one point, jumper by third eye blind came on that radio mid operation and like a tenth of a percent of my brain was still able to go, oh, Jesus.

Not now. Not now, third eye blind. Ain't I got enough to contend with? Everybody turned out all right. Tom Petty might as well have written, you got lucky about how lucky I was defines my wife. But I try and picture my headspace now in that operating room. I'm ecstatic to be holding my dog. I am terrified about what's happening to my wife.

I try to fill in that blankness. What does it feel like? What does it sound like? And this is as close as I can get. Piano outro to its good to be king always shut me up. Even as a teenager, Ben Montention piano, I told you. It's not a piano. It's the personality of a guy playing the piano.

This part of the song made me shut up and look out my car window and just think real hard. even if I wasn't in a car if you get my drift as a teenager I think this was an instant nostalgia deal the sort of ultra melancholy I've always been drawn to the fields of gold

the glory days I'm older now but still running against the wind that's just the way it is some things will never change etc but as a super emo 43 year old sometimes I think that now the it's good to be king piano riff is just running in a loop in my head

forever usually so low soft, I can't hear it. But if you strip everything else away, like in that operating room, that's what's left. It's a sound of all the bad things I worry about. And it's there to soothe me the 2% of the time in which something bad is actually happening. Come to think of it, this song begins with a piano riff too. This always struck me as like a child's piano riff, a first piano lesson melody. I love that Tom Petty could make even a riff this simple, seem profound. found. My younger son, he's eight now and he plays piano and he's making up his own songs. He's

got his own notation system. He doesn't name his songs. He numbers them. He's composing. But sometimes he just freestyles is probably not the right word. But while he's playing, he looks away from the piano, looks up at the ceiling, as if he's looking at the notes in the air, or he's visiting the place in his mind where he goes time to time. Like anything great about my kids, I just assume he got that from his mother. I don't know where he goes and I never will. But I think I know why he goes there. Our guest today is Stephen Roderick, journalist and author. He's written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine and Men's Journal, among many other places. His book, The Magical Stranger, A Son's Journey into his father's life, came out in 2013. Stephen, thanks so much for being here.

So, Stephen, you did what turned out to be, I think Tom Petty's last big sit-down interview with Rolling Stone before he died in October 2017. You followed him a little on the big Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers tour that year. You saw a few shows. And you had a great and quite a lengthy conversation with Tom. And I can't imagine what that's like to spend time with a living legend like that and then find out a few months later that he's gone. Like, what do you remember most about him from that tour and from that conversation?

I think what I remember most is the juxtaposition of how frail he looked when he came into the room to talk with me and how great he performed. And one of the things that they were doing shows just every other night, you know, he basically said, I do a show for two hours and then from the next 46 hours recovering and then do another show. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things he mentioned was,

you know any new Netflix shows. You know, he was just hunkered down, taking it easy. And at that point, like I said, he seemed incredibly frail. I obviously didn't have any idea about the hip issue or the drugs he was taking. He was completely lucid and funny and articulate. So in some way, you know, it was a shock when he died. And, you know, I even, you know, I've watched kind of YouTube footage of his last show. And it was great.

Like I said, it's just like he could get it going for those two hours. And I do think that he still loved playing. And he also, I think he felt an obligation to, I guess, would say the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers machine. You know, there's a lot of people depending on him for a paycheck and, you know, the other guys love to play and stuff like that. And I don't think anybody was forcing him on the road, but I think he did feel an obligation. Yeah, I think he described that tour to you as the last big one, but some of the other

heartbreakers didn't believe that. Like, in that moment, did you have any sense of what the future held for them? They really did feel like a band that was going to play forever, tour forever. There was talk, and I don't think I really put in the story because it was just talking. Speculation is that they would play again, and maybe they'd do a week at the Hollywood Bowl, or maybe they'd do a week at Madison Square Garden. Tom seemed pretty adamant about not doing, you know, and this is open to interpretation, what you quantify as a big tour.

I don't think they were ending, but being able to see them say in St. Louis, where I saw them, or Denver at Red Rocks, where I saw the second show, that scene. at least at the time, you know. You know, I've written about the Who, and they've been on tour about seven times after they said it was their final tour. So, yeah, it's hard to know, but at least at the time, and, you know, Tom knew what was going on with his body in a way that probably few outside of his family knew that maybe he knew, I can do this, like if we go to New York for two weeks and we do six or seven shows or we do it in L.A., but the days of doing, you know, you know, 50 shows and 90 nights or whatever seemed to be over. Yeah, not going to make it to Peoria anytime soon. Wait a minute.

What Netflix shows did you recommend to Tom Petty? I remember at the time because I hadn't written about it for Men's Journal. It was Bloodlines because it's set in Florida. I mean, it's a different part of Florida than from where he's from. But I heard from his public sister manager a few days later that he was digging it. So he knows if that's true or not. He took you up on it. Wow.

That's a great honor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You said to him, and of course he didn't take offense or disagree with you at all, but you said, like, not to sound morbid, but you've probably got fewer shows ahead of you than you have behind you. Like, did you see that conversation and that whole experience in a totally new light once you heard that he'd passed? Oh, absolutely.

And the thing is that, again, to name other bands, like the Who are playing without two of the original members, is that these guys are playing, you know, even when they're bass player, you know, tragically died, they replaced them with the original bass player. So, you know, when they, they got, when they fired our Tom and Stan Lynch's original drummer split, they've had the same drummer for 20 years. So it's not right. A bunch of session guys and Tom Petty and Mike Campbell and then a bunch of faceless other people, they were still at the top of their game, which is I hadn't seen them in a few years

before that. I'd seen them, you know, on a great show they did about maybe 10 or 15 years earlier. when they had Lucinda Williams opening up for them and saw a couple shows on that tour. Yeah, so they were still at the top of their game. You didn't get a sense, you know, there was no, you know, you see Fleetwood Mac, and there's a series of session musicians that are playing behind the curtain to kind of augment the sound and stuff like that. None of this, none of that was going on with the heartbreakers.

They all seemed still sharp and amazing. Yeah. I think you call them a benevolent dictatorship, you know, because they're always fascinated to me because they're tombsious. Petty's band, but they weren't quite as backing band. He was a focal point, but they were all crucial. They all had their own opinions, and sometimes they were even to listen to. Like, what stood out to you about their dynamic on that last tour? Like, why do you think most of these guys hung together for 30, 40 years? You know, it's a great opportunity for the side players

to get out and be seen by thousands, thousands. But, you know, it sounds corny, but I think they really really loved each other. I mean, when I talked to them about Howie Epstein, who was their original basis, who left the band and then died shortly after with drug problems, you know, Ben Mont cried and Mike Campbell got chary-eyed. You know, it's often said that whether it's a ban or a sports team or something, that we are all brothers, you know, and I, you know, look at this guy as my brother, and we fight, but we still love each other.

And I think that's sometimes a lot of bullshit, but I think that in this case, it was true. They cared about each other, and I can't remember who, but one sold a house to the other. And, you know, I mean, it's just like their lives were intertwined. I'm not saying that they hung out all the time back in Los Angeles when they were not touring. But just as a contrast, it's not Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey recording their last album in the same building, but never being in each other's presence. Apart. And then, you know, not talking to each other as they're doing sound check and stuff like that.

that wasn't the vibe of that band at all. Yeah. Honestly, your piece on the Who for Rolling Stone is one of my favorite, you know, things of the last five years, pieces of journalism, just that bonkers dynamic between Pete and Roger. I was thinking about the romantic ideal of a big Rolling Stone story in the almost famous sense where, like, you get to hang out with the band and follow the tour a little bit.

You get, like, actual sustained access to rock stars. Like, being in a room with Tom Petty for an hour under any circumstances, is like a remarkable amount of access in 2021. When I first saw that movie, which I think now 20 years old, so it was 30, 32, or I can't remember exactly when I saw it. And there's a scene where the Miller goes and knocks on the door of the rock star. And he says, go away. And then he sits on a chair and starts crying and, you know, doesn't know what to do.

I remember seeing that with my best friend and saying, that's exactly how. it happens, but I'm 32. It's one thing to do that when you're 15, as that character was, but the Who's story is a good example of that. I flew from Vancouver, British Columbia to London to talk to Pete. Shortly after I landed, I got a text or an email saying his longtime guitar tech had died, and I waited around for three or four days, and Pete still did not feel like talking. So flew all the way home.

And then I flew to Dallas where I ended up talking to them at the two separate hotels they were staying at. The two five-star hotels in downtown Dallas that are about 100, 200 yards apart. Not even separate rooms, separate hotels, physical buildings. Exactly. And they were supposed to do a show the next night, but Roger blew out his voice. So I went home. Then like a month later, I went to go see them finally play at the Hollywood Bowl, which was a great show. But I'm just saying is that, you know, to string together that story, there was many miles put on my body wishing I was an economy plus.

A lot of crying. Yeah, yeah. It's not as glamorous in real life as it is in the movies. Where did you start with Tom Petty? Like, are you a lifelong fan? Like, what's the song or the record of the era that first grabbed you? You know, that's a good question. I think for a while Tom Petty was so omniscient. I went to college and grad school in Chicago. on the station WXRT where they seem to play different Tom Petty's song every 90 minutes or so. And I felt, I don't need to get the album. I'm hearing exactly. They kind of curate and play some of the album tracks that I hadn't heard before and stuff like that. And then I got the first greatest hits.

I started listening to Lurch as I got a little bit older and the into the Great Wide Open. And there's just a great line, you know, when he's talking about this guy, a kid trying to get into a band. And he just goes, the A&R guy says, I don't hear a single. And I was just like, that is, you know, as a magazine writer, I'm like, that is a great pinpoint detail. And from there, this is kind of a trend of mine with popular bands that I'm kind of behind on. I start on their sort of, whether on purpose or not, on their randomly unsuccessful or commercially dismissed albums. So for him, this one, I went to go see the movie, She's the One. All right.

Jennifer Anderson, right? Yeah, yeah. He and the band, they did the soundtrack for it. Walls. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the only song I know about that album, but yeah. You know, it's one of those great songs where you look at the liner notes and it's like backing vocals

by Lindsay Buckingham and Carl Wolfson. You know what I mean? It's like, and I actually talked to Lindsay for a different story just a few months ago, and he was like, yeah, it was even for me a bit surreal to be recording that part. And some of those songs, you know, in retrospect were supposed to go on the Wildflower's album when it was going to be a double album.

And I think both Wildflowers and the next album, you know, he did a couple years later, Echo, which was kind of his divorce album. Right. Both of those as I moved into my whatever 30s and I got divorced. The more introspective stuff is what really, really connected with me. And both Echo, which has got five or six songs that are really great. but then Wildflowers, which came before that, that's like a dream team of an album. It is. It is. The ninth guy on the team could be an all-star on another team.

So, you know, I just started listening to that relentlessly as I moved more into middle age. And, you know, and the song, Wake Up Prime, I think was probably my favorite on that album because, you know, my father, and this is what I wrote my book about, died in plane crash when I was 13. and just the laments that he sings about, you're just a poor boy alone in this world. It's something I connected with. Yeah, I've just played that album probably way too many times. Relentlessly is a great way to describe it. One of my favorite things about Twitter as a whole is when you tweet random song lyrics

and you've done quite a few Wildflower's tracks, like time to move on, you know, nauseous adrenaline, like breaking up a dogfight. What is it about wildflowers that resonates for you? Is it that feeling of being a little, and being able to relate to it as a little bit of an older guy. That's the way it is for me. Yeah, and I think that there are really, as you get older and you have kids and you're married and the world does not seem as infinite as they used to, there are tough decisions to make

choices you have to make that either choice is a choice that you're not welcoming. And I think that wildflowers just talks about that. And, you know, it's just kind of a John, it's both, you know, we're growing up now and we must deal with these problems or disintegrate. And I think on some of the songs, Tom suggests that at least for a while there, he disintegrated. That we have to, yeah, there are tough choices to make, and that's just the way life goes. The other thing that I like about it is good to be king. There's like kind of tongue-in-cheek, jaundice take on fame and success and stuff like that,

is that you can, you know, if you just looked at the lyrics, you might be like, oh, this is some like 19 year old snotty nose kid talking about how great it would be to be in charge and you know have women at your be back and call and this and that but if you listen to the way he delivers it you know if you see him perform it or the video for it you can say that he's he's putting it on you know i mean he knows that it's largely bullshit and yeah that while it's you know it would be good to be king but being king has its own problems right a sweet little queen that can't get away I confess that I'm not usually like a box set reissue, remaster, like bonus tracks guy, but like the Wildflower's box set, the four-diss set is legit.

Like the demos are early, what is it about this record specifically that warrants that kind of extended universe? Well, I think it's, you know, it goes back to what his original vision for it was. It was supposed to be a double album. So whether it's songs that didn't make it down to either album or is the she's the one songs that were split up and given the she's the one. That's, you know, whatever 60% of the box set right there, if you're just in two long CDs. This is an album that he recorded almost exclusively in his home studio.

So a lot of the tracks take you back even, you know, from, you know, the songs in the album are pretty bare-boned, but take you back to almost their skeletal formation. And to me, that's really fascinating. Yeah. That Wildflower's box set came out in 2020. There was another four-disc set from, I think, 2018. That was really good.

This feels like it could go on for a while, right? The way Prince's estate is still putting out all stuff. Like, do you want to hear new old Tom Petty stuff still at this point? Or does rating his vault start to feel a little ghoulish after a while? It all gets down to what the quality is of the stuff that remains. I mean, I didn't even get the box set from a couple years ago because I have most of the albums. Right. And I have, they put out a double CD or maybe, no, it's like four CD anthology back

around 97, 99. So I feel like I've got, you know, probably, you know, on my iTunes 200 to 300 songs of Tom Petty. And I think except for like, say the Beach Boys, probably don't need 400. There are probably people out there who do. Yeah. Like I said, you know, you know, it, you know. I don't want to pass judgment because I don't know what's in the vaults. But I think everything released so far has been high quality.

I agree. You've done the box set. You've done the triple box set of this one album. What possibly could be left. But who knows? Who knows? My favorite detail from your story is actually when Tom complains about zombie zoo, the last song on Full Moon Fever because he hates it.

And he's like, he thinks it ruined a perfect album. But I love that song. And I almost love it more now. because Tom hated it, if that makes any sense. Well, I kind of feel that way about the stuff on She's the One that he has dismissed for 25 years before he passed away. He was in the process of lightening up on it because, you know, this whole Wildflowers thing had been in the works for years and years.

So I don't know if he had settled on a complete playlist by the time he died. But, you know, I got the feeling that, you know, these songs from She's the One, like the on California I really like, that he had softened on. So I think that one, you know, he wasn't a huge fan of the song, but I also just think, I just think he thought it screwed up the sequencing, you know what I mean? They just sometimes you can have a great song, but it just doesn't belong with the, whatever, 12 others on that album. But it was kind of amazing how passionate he was about that.

I didn't expect him to be, you know, I can't even remember exactly how a phrase the question. It was like, you know, is there anything from your album? It was like a specific song or something that you kind of regret or you wish you'd done differently. He jumped on that like a dog on a bone. You know what I mean? He's been waiting for somebody. Yeah, he kind of like sat up and, you know, got very animated.

And I was like, okay. All right. Objection noted, you know. Yes. I love that detail too. I think he said, like, somebody brought him echo, you know, the album, you mentioned, his divorce album. And I don't know if he loves that one either.

But like this person was like this. I love this record. It got me through a hard time. And he signs it. And he's like, oh, even my, you know, relative failures in my mind are vitally important to other people. That's got to be a wild feeling. Yeah, and the do little armchair psychology there. I think that album was difficult also because Bena Tinch has always been my favorite heartbreaker.

But kind of hidden a little bit was, you know, the bass player, Howie Epstein, during those salad days. And if you look at the cover of Echo, it's not on it. He missed it because he wasn't doing well. And shortly after that day, kicked him out of the band. at least, you know, Tom had said in interviews it was to help him, that him being in the band was not helping him. So I think that factor in the recording of that album, I think, probably is really, you know, put a damper on its memory in Tom's eye. I occasionally play Tom Petty for my kids, for my boys who are 10 and 8 and are sort of politely indifferent to it, I think, is the way to describe it. Are you, is your son picking this up at all from you?

Are you trying to get him to pick it up? I'm not trying to, you know, it's funny. It's like, I'm not trying to get him pick up Tom Petty. Although, you know, from our conversation, I think I am going to play, it's good to be king for him because I think he will take it just at face value. That will be funny. Yeah. It's like, this is, this, it's going to be awesome when you're king. Absolutely.

Strangely, what he's got into and he's eight, I feel shamed to admit this is that in our car, you know, we've all gone digital except for like some CDs that's survived our last move. He is very much into Genesis, Three Sides Live, particularly the live version of misunderstanding. Wow. How long is that approximately? That song is probably seven minutes long, you know. Yeah. But there's a, I don't know, it's, it's very ornate and a faux classical, you know what I mean? Sure.

Don't be ashamed. That's awesome. That's the, I'm not, you know, what, you know, I, there's be, this could be a totally different podcast is about my, my love. and also sort of shame about my, you know, 75 to 82 Genesis Love. And I could go on about how I think, at least in those first five years after Peter Gabriel left the band, they were actually better with Phil Collins. Oh, wow. You put this in the podcast, I'm going to get hate tweets.

You're going to get added. You're going to get thrown in several Twitter canoes. We're going to have you back to have that conversation for sure. Stephen, this has been wonderful. Stephen. Thank you so much for talking. Happy to do. It was a great time. Thanks very much for our guests this week, Stephen Roderick.

Thanks, as always, to our producers, Devin Renato and Justin Sales. And thanks very much to you for listening. Without further ado, here's Tom Petty with its good to be king. We'll see you next week.