October Should Be Tom Petty Month: An Essay and Playlist
Tom Petty was both born, and died, in the month of October.
It should be his month, and we should name it so.
As Eddie Vedder said in Runnin’ Down a Dream,
I don’t know if an artist completely understands – or needs to be reminded of sometimes – is how deeply these songs affect people in such a way that when you hear the song you know, like where you were and even the feeling in your gut when you were 14 hearing that song.
That “feeling in your gut when you were 14” is, for me, Tom Petty’s music, more so than any other artist. In my developing years, there wasn’t a more significant performer.
Musically, and in probably all other ways, I was a bit odd for a teenager.
I made it a practice to deep dive, in rapid fashion, through the discographies of one musical legend after another. I was the kind of kid who felt bad for not having listened to The Times They Are A-Changing…at 14. So I listened to it, until I felt bad for not having listened to Blonde on Blonde, which I listened to until I felt bad for not having heard Blood On The Tracks…and so on.
The mixtapes in my car were a mix of bootlegs taped off the radio, (“The Joker”, “If You’re Going to San Francisco”, and “Everybody’s Talkin’”), and bootlegs of other tapes and CDs: the Best Of The Clash and Leonard Cohen on one, The Roots, Mos Def, and Common on another.
I studied the word play of The Wu-Tang Clan and Bob Dylan, I rocked out to Led Zeppelin and Ronnie Size, I marveled at Hendrix and SRV, I was an old soul for soul music, a sucker for Van Morrision, and yet Tom Petty – 20+ years after The Heartbreakers debut album – was the band me and my friends most agreed on. They were the band the guys and girls liked, the parents and the kids.
Bob Seger and Otis Redding knew the way into my 16-and-somehow-nostalgic heart, Abbey Road and What’s Going On? were the gifts my dad gave me through repeated play on work-around-the-house weekends growing up.
But no musicians were more important to me than Tom Petty.
That’s because Tom Petty came to Milwaukee every 4th of July.
We were possessed by Rock ‘n Roll music
Tom Petty
Summerfest
Summerfest is arguably the most underrated American music festival.
This may be because – compared to its progeny (Summerfest has been held every year since 1968) – it is a distinctly blue collar music festival.
Henry Maier Festival Park – the grounds on which Summerfest is held – might be compared to a state fair, but comparing Summerfest to a state fair is like comparing a show where a lot of cows walk in circles to a show where Tom Petty plays for 3 hours as 3rd of July Fireworks explode behind you.
The gates of Maier Park close down every night at midnight and open up every morning, the only people pitching tents in the area are doing so for survival; up until sometime in the mid-early 21st century there was even a Midway with janky rides and carnival games.
Summerfest is literally on Lake Michigan – teens smoke pot on the white rocks, boulders really, that separate the bay water from the festival land – and 100,000 pass through the gates every one of Summerfest’s (now) 10 days: over a million every year.
3 corridors run the lengths of the grounds north-south, between them are free stages, and midwest-expensive amenities: Saz’s mozzarella sticks, Miller Lite, 60 ounce sodas.
The stands are just that: benches. Long aluminum rows that reflect sunlight dully during the day, and are stood on every night as they fill with headliner crowds.
There’s one fee to get in the gates, and once inside, all of the 12 stages are free.
All except one of course, at the southern tip of Henry Maier Festival Park: The Marcus Amphitheater (which will forever be called the Marcus Amphitheater, much the way the Willis Tower in Chicago will always be the Sears Tower, as us midwesterners don’t take kindly to new corporations re-naming the landmarks of previous corporations).
I went to Summerfest every year of my life until the age of 3-…my mid 30s. Half of that time living 300 miles away.
Because it’s been around so long, generations experience Summerfest generationally. As a kid, I was just happy to tag a long with my parents and eat fast food, as a teen with my friends, sneaking in booze in our pants legs, and licking the freshly stamped re-entry ink off the back of each other’s hands, spreading it around until dry, getting as many of us in for free as possible. A horrifying sentence post-Corona, and probably pre-Corona as well.
I saw Nelly there, Common, Fitz and The Tantrums, Aloe Blacc, Third Eye Blind, G Love and The Special Sauce, 7 Mary Three, Gravity Kills, The Roots five times, and honestly more shows than I can remember.
If one could track exactly, every show I went to at Summerfest, year by year, one could create a map of my musical journey. And I’m probably not alone in that.
Summerfest held the title as the largest music festival in the world for almost 50 years until 2015 when the Germans, ever keen on gathering millions of their citizens on a gated grounds, surpassed them with Donauinselfest.
And, more importantly than any of this is that Summerfest was the place where – as a teen, in the stands of the Marcus Amphitheater – I met Tom Petty: the most important musician of my life, dried ink-saliva on the back of my hand, cheap booze in my belly, the excitement of youth abuzz in the night.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Summerfest, and The 4th of July
Eddie Vedder played Summerfest with Tom Petty one year.
We played in Milwaukee…and at the end we all kind of took a bow…and there’s a large crowd, a summer crowd, massive…and they’ve just had a really great time and their expressing themselves, massive adulation coming from really happy people, and Tom said, “look at that Eddie, Rock ‘n Roll heaven”, and I said, “yea, here on earth”. And he goes, “exactly”.
Eddie Vedder, Runnin’ Down a Dream
Tom Petty is why the 4th of July is my favorite holiday, his music is the music of high school summers.
Tom Petty’s music was the most important music in my life, in the time of my life when music would be its most important to me.
One warm summer night, as the Heartbreakers strummed the opening chords of “It’s Good To Be King” my friend appeared out of the crowd, passing to me a very large number (as Petty sometimes called them), and Petty gave me one of the Top 10 live music moments of my life (yes, I actually have a list).
Petty’s classics – and he has an unreal amount of them – are both nostalgic and very much present.
Not only are they timeless, so that they sound classic no matter what time period they’re played in, he created classic songs for 30 years, so that 2 generations in a single family could experience the release of a new Petty Classic in real-time.
Howie Epstein – the bass player and high-harmonist of the Heartbreakers since the early 80s, who Tom Petty stole from Del Shannon while producing Shannon’s record (an act that was, in more ways than one, very Petty) – was from Milwaukee.
I’m not sure if that’s why they came to Milwaukee every 3rd or 4th (or both) of July, but I’m forever grateful that they did.
It makes sense that Pettty headlined Summerfest’s largest stage more than any other artist, his music is the Summerfest of music: eternal, eternally summer, brats and lite beer, 3 chords and the truth, lighters in the air for decades in a row, distinctly American, perfectly unpretentious. In them both, their auras mingling in the July dusk, I became who I was to become.
Tom Petty gave me classic rock. In that, he gave to me the experience of experiencing classic Rock ‘n Roll music live, played by a master of the genre.
I often think that Hip Hop, the further it gets from the block parties of late-70s/early 80s New York, the further it gets from being what it was when it began.
So, if I grew up listening to A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang, and Nas, I grew up listening to people who grew up at those parties. In that way I would be a 3rd generation Hip Hopist (sorry). And if I made music that inspired the next generation who heard it, they would be listening to something completely removed from the physical experience of attending a Bronx block party in ‘79.
Same goes for Rock ‘n Roll.
Tom Petty was my link to that first birth wave of Rock.
He grew up on “Johnny B. Goode”, on The Beatles when The Beatles still played live. And so, me attending a show by an artist who attended live shows of – and was wholly influenced by – Rock ‘n Roll’s first incarnation, is me getting as close as I will ever get to knowing what Rock ‘n Roll felt like when it was first taking over the world, what it felt like to my parents generation: alive, wildly young, and overwhelmingly electric.
I mean, Tom Petty was in a band with Roy Orbison for god’s sake. I couldn’t have asked for a better ambassador.
TP (as no one should call him), once said, accurately, that “all the beginnings of Rock ‘n Roll come from the south”. All of my beginnings with Rock ‘n Roll – as Rock ‘n Roll only starts in the soul of teenagers first tasting heartbreak – come from Tom Petty. All the moments in which I could decide what I wanted to listen to, Petty was there, with his new music and old, pointing me in the right direction.
The Playlist: A Companion Piece
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers Greatest Hits must have been in every white American household in the 1990s at one time or another. If you didn’t have it, your friend’s parents did.
As such this image is one I will never get burned out of my memory:
I created a playlist intended as a companion piece to the above Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers Greatest Hits compilation album which was, believe it or not, released pre-Wildflowers.
My playlist, entitled Thank You For Coming To Milwaukee Tom Petty, is a collection of (mostly) post-Greatest Hits hits, a few b-sides, a couple Wilbury’s songs, and some pre-Greatest Hits deeper cuts.
It’s what 16-year old me should have listened to after playing Greatest Hits for the 1,765,842nd time.
And for the first time I’d like to say, thank you Tom Petty, for coming to Milwaukee.
Thank you very, very, very much.