“Downright stupid”: The shows Tom Petty was ashamed of performing
Tom Petty didn’t get to take any of the easy routes to stardom.
Half the reason why the Heartbreakers succeeded was because his first band fell apart before they could even press one of their singles, and once they did hit the ground running, it took a while for them to gain traction before breaking out of the underground on Damn the Torpedoes. But with an album that great, you’d think that they would be riding high for the rest of their lives, right? Who are we kidding? We all know that the world doesn’t roll that easy for even the most easygoing people like Petty.
He might have been one of the single most laid-back members of the rock and roll hierarchy, but he was willing to get his hands dirty whenever he needed to. His label didn’t really care for the kind of workarounds that he made all the time, but whether it was them threatening to take away all of his publishing or claiming that they would make more money if they hiked up the prices of his records, Petty was always there making sure that he was doing right by his fans and his bandmates at every opportunity.
But it turns out that fighting spirit can be directed inward as well. There had already been disagreements about Stan Lynch’s drumming on their breakthrough, but even when listening to their later records in the 1980s, they were still having trouble getting on the same page. Hard Promises was a lot more sombre than anything they had done before, and even if Long After Dark got them on solid ground, it was going to progress them forward by any stretch, either, even with new recruit Howie Epstein.
Petty needed a bit more energy on his next release, but Southern Accents became the sessions that would never end. Everyone in and around the group had their faces buried in piles of cocaine throughout the sessions, and given that Petty ended up breaking his hand after slamming it against a wall in a fit of frustration, it’s not like he was having the best time when he started putting the songs to tape.
But the controversy didn’t really end once the band hit the road. They were more than capable of stretching out now that they had songs with horns on them and backup singers, but the choice of breaking out the Confederate flag during the song ‘Rebels’ was a lot more ill-advised. The whole song was supposed to be a bit of a play on the archetype for how a Southern man should see himself, but when some fans began showing up at their concerts sincerely flaunting the flag, Petty knew that he had to backpedal a little bit.
He was more than happy to represent his Southern heritage, but doing it with a flag that was inherently designed to promote the freedom to own slaves was not the way to go about it, saying, “The Confederate flag was the wallpaper of the South when I was a kid growing up in Gainesville, Florida. I always knew it had to do with the Civil War. But the South had adopted it as its logo. I was pretty ignorant of what it actually meant. I just honestly didn’t give it much thought, though I should have. It was a downright stupid thing to do.”
And if you look at the live footage from Pack up the Plantation, it’s pretty clear that Petty’s team wanted to scrub every single piece of the flag clean when he first started putting the tour together. There was a lot more for him to offer the crowd than Southern hospitality, and while ‘Southern Accents’ is among his best songs, it was a lot easier for him to throw ‘American Girl’ into the set than having to dwell on the uglier tour amenities that he threw into the mix by accident.
Then again, you have to live and learn in this industry a lot of the time, and Petty was more than happy to put that piece of his past behind him after a while. It does look like a massive misunderstanding in hindsight, but if we’re being fair, the heartland rocker was able to do what a lot of other musicians simply couldn’t whenever he was at fault. A lot of celebrities double down and don’t bother to learn any lesson, but Petty knew that he would become a better person if he kept seeing the few errors he made along the way.
