His new album, ”Let Me Up (I`ve Had Enough),” doesn`t have the overtly Southern theme of his last one, ”Southern Accents,” or even as graphic a Southern image as his last tour, ”Pack up the Plantation.” Still, Tom Petty isn`t surprised to be asked whether his Heartbreakers, who are touring the country, play Southern rock.
”I always kind of wondered what `Southern rock` is,” he says. ”I guess 90 percent of the rock and roll in the `50s came from the South. Then there was the `60s soul sound, Stax and Memphis, and the Allman Brothers. In a more general sense, blues and jazz came out of the South.
”But for specific bands today, I don`t think you can define it all that closely. To me, the Georgia Satellites sound more Southern than .38 Special, who I think are closer to the Cars. I guess my band`s Southern because we got all those roots pounded into us in Southern bars, the kind of places where you still get requests for `Memphis.`
”There`s definitely that gunslinger vibe down South, where you don`t pull out your guitar unless you can play it. When we finally went to L.A., we said, `We could have gotten ourselves some hair spray and made a fortune here 10 years ago.`
”See, there`s a lot of places to play in the South, but not too many to get signed in. In L.A., you can get a recording contract if you can tune your guitar. But that actually isn`t good in the long run, because too much hype too fast and a band gets ruined. We had played gigs together for years; some groups had hardly played a week, and they couldn`t sustain.”
Sustenance hasn`t been a problem for Petty and the Heartbreakers, whose albums regularly go platinum and whose latest should follow suit. For one thing, it`s their best in a long time, a solid set of rock and roll created in the middle of a tour with Bob Dylan last year.
”We did it as close to live as possible,” says Petty. ”We treated it like a concert almost. We had a list of tunes and we`d go into the studio and play them every night, like a show.
”Some of them we played around with a lot; they would be country one night, heavy metal some other nights. Other ones we nailed on the first take. The take of `How Many More Days` on the album is the first and only time we performed it; by the time it came to picking tracks for the album, we had
(nearly) forgotten about it.
”I wrote `Jammin` Me` real fast with Bob (Dylan) one day. We just did it from headlines in the newspaper. He would throw off a line, I would throw one off, and pretty soon we had a song. Some songs were so fresh that when we made the final edit, we had to take out the chord calls; we were so new to the song that I`d be calling out the chords to the guys between verses.”
But learning on the fly was no big thing to a band in the middle of a Dylan tour–which they will reprise late this summer and fall in Europe and the Middle East, after Dylan finishes some dates with the Grateful Dead and Petty finishes the present tour with the Satellites and Del Fuegos.
”Playing with Bob was amazing,” he says. ”We learned something new almost every night. Sea chanties, Ernest Tubb songs, name it. One night in Japan we started doing an Ink Spots song, `We Three,` and it must have looked real weird to the audience, because the band was clustered around him, trying to watch his hands so we could pick up the chords.
The current tour spotlights the ”other” Heartbreakers–the headline rather than the supporting band.
”It`s like the old rock and roll caravans,” he says. ”Three bands playing basic rock and roll.”
”I keep trying to figure where the center of rock `n` roll is. I don`t think I know. Is it U2? I`m just encouraged that there are bands out there that know they have roots that go further than Deep Purple.”
