a note on Tom Petty's Damn the Torpedoes

Tom Petty has had problems with his image from the start. A thoroughly enjoyable and likable mainstream rock and roller in my book, Petty and the Heartbreakers first emerged on the scene with the sudden glut of arty New York New Wave bands like Television, Talking Heads and The Ramones, and was mistakenly categorized as being a punk outfit. After some exposure to his first record made it obvious that the Heartbreakers had little to do with the aesthetics of American punk posey (American new wave, like it or not, is loaded with semi-tough intellectuals who compromise a new generation of native "art-rockers," a dread thought to many who think being dumb somehow places you in a state of grace and frees you from good manners, healthy diets,and other conventions of everyday life: the classical artists' conceit), one too many critics made note of the similarity between Petty's nasal, braying voice and that of old Byrds helmsman Roger McGuinn, and concluded that the Heartbreakers were a band stuck in emulating the pop-rock shtick of the 60s. Petty, thankfully, is a feisty counter-puncher with enough good sense to ignore what others, aware, want him to be. Damn The Torpedoes, his new record, clears the ground, and should at once establish that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are their own men who play their own kind of rock and roll in a way that's all too rare: straight ahead, with conviction and feeling, without affectation or chest-thumping baloney. At the risk of sounding as though I'm over-reaching for a comparison, I consider Petty to be the closest thing to a Graham Parker that America has. Like Parker, Petty's lyrical persona is of someone who's overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of everyday life who, through a visage of someone scratching his head in a state of anger, confusion, and frustration, achieves a kind of calculated artlessness in his expression. There is little in Petty's words one would consider the equal of some of rock's better wordsmiths: nothing on the par with the Zen-like ambiguities of Steely Dan, the colloquized surrealism of the late Lowell George, the compounded paradoxes of Elvis Costello, or the sublimely etched ironies of Randy Newman. Rather, Petty's main lyrical strength is his directness. Like Parker, Bob Seger (when he's not being morose) or Garland Jefferies, Petty demonstrates that he can cut to the cause of disagreement, emotional snafus where equal combinations of anger and self-loathing make an ugly tattoo on a young man’s thin skin.