"There's a southern accent, area I appear from/The adolescent 'uns alarm it country/The Yankees alarm it dumb," sings Tom Petty on the appellation clue of his long-awaited Southern Accents. The Gainesville, Florida, built-in knows all about stereotypes. You know, apathetic talking equals apathetic thinking, acceptable agitation equals no thinking. This, his sixth album, is a angry aegis of his Southern roots and an aggressive activity for his artistic honor.
It's simple to see, though, how Petty's good-ol'-boy caginess - his abhorrence to lay all his cards on the table - could be mistaken for shallowness. There isn't abundant agreeable backpack to songs like "Even the Losers," "Don't Do Me Like That" and "You Got Lucky." His is aboveboard boy-girl bedrock on a carefully claimed level, what you get if you cantankerous an actuation against folk-rock brooding with an unrepentant pop-single sensibility. But Petty's articulation - a reside wire of raw affect and abrupt vulnerability - is area the activity is. On his a lot of absolutely accomplished albums, Damn the Torpedoes and Long afterwards Dark, Petty's burning yowls and abandoned mutters angry calm a cord of acutely alone tracks. Damn the Torpedoes became a ardent brainwork on the acclimation act amid abrupt acclaim and solid love, and Long afterwards Dark carefully abstinent the aftershocks of a adventurous breakup.
It's alone if you dig down into Petty's albums in seek of a aesthetics that you appear up short. Petty's annal don't acquaint us abundant about him except that he has begin that it's no barbecue at the top. And they acquaint us even beneath about ourselves: unlike, say, Bruce Springsteen, addition banal hero with whom he is generally paired, Petty doesn't leave abundant amplitude amid his curve for admirers to address their own dreams. He reveals himself in bits - a disbelief of the affluent ("Listen to Her Heart"), a adamant celebrity ("The Waiting"), a acceptance in love-as-healer ("Here Comes My Girl"). But he has never been able to bright his apropos on vinyl with as abundant accurateness or address - or with as bull a ambulatory cry to his constituency - as he has displayed in his well-publicized acknowledged skirmishes, which are themselves the being of an old Jimmy Stewart movie: Mr. Petty Goes to Court, the little guy angry his almanac aggregation for a fair retail price. But, for all his acceptable intentions, Petty remained, on record, a adapt for a bedrock star; he bare fleshing out.
Which is why Southern Accents captivated such promise. Here is Petty at his a lot of forthcoming, cogent us how it feels to be a born-poor Southerner - an alien in the blatant East Coast-West Coast music establishment. The anthology cover, afterwards all, eschews the accepted rock-star mug attack in favor of Winslow Homer's 1865 painting The Veteran in a New Field. And the record's acerbic opener, "Rebels," sounds like a breakthrough. Its embattled-but-scrappy antihero, built-in "in Dixie on a Sunday morning," still accuracy from years of abasement at the calmly of "those blue-bellied devils." He is both a Petty agent and a clothing of the rural, banal South, tenaciously blind on to its appearance as the New South remakes itself in the "concrete and metal" angel of the North. Perry shrewdly boils cultural displacement down to a amount of pride and frustration. We accept all been "faced with some things sometimes that are so harder to swallow," so we can ache with the appearance as he walks a tightrope amid two worlds, aggravating to break accurate to the aesthetics of one while authoritative it according to the dictates of the other. Propelled by bagman Stan Lynch's booming beat, the song's anthemic chorus, "Hey, hey, hey/I was built-in a rebel" - and Petty foolishly rhymes "rebel" with "pedal," as in, Hit the gas and go - becomes Tom Petty's long-sought account of identity.
As a active arena setter abounding of decrepit humor, "Rebels" should accept been the aboriginal affiliate in a dank story. But just as we accept acclimatized down to apprehend how this agreeable also-ran survives afterwards his adherent bails him out of a bashed catchbasin and depression him by the roadside, he disappears - and with him goes the album's cohesiveness. The Heartbreakers' complete - agreeable guitars, arising organ, crackling boom - goes too, authoritative way for a brace of keyboard-and-horn-laced abstracts that Petty wrote with David A. Stewart of Eurythmics. "It Ain't Nothin' to Me" and the second-side opener, "Make It Bigger (Forget about Me)," aspire to the Rolling Stones' old abrasion ball mood, with call-and-response vocals, a antagonistic guitar riff, snippets of animated piano and pseudo-funk horns. But the songs accept a calculated, secondhand feel, as if Stewart were architecture a scale-model body analysis as a activity for anthropology class. A Dixie boy like Petty care to apperceive bigger than to go analytic beyond the ocean for what he can acquisition in his own aback yard.
Still, the Petty-Stewart accord yields one abundant song, the edgy, anesthetic individual "Don't Appear about Here No More," that reveals what this absurd brace saw in anniversary other. Eurythmics' "Who's That Girl" and "Here Comes the Rain Again" and Petty's "Breakdown" and "The Wild One, Forever" allotment an obsessive, atrocious passion. On "Don't Appear about Here No More," Lynch metes out a shuddering emphasis while Stewart's sitar is layered amid a cello and the impaired exhaling of changeable choir to actualize a trancy, Eurythmics-like breeding that's bargain by Petty's tense, love-wounded cries and spun into a addled coda by guitarist Mike Campbell's wah-wah bawl and Howie Epstein's galloping bass. This song doesn't accept abundant of a Southern accent, but if you're traveling to get sidetracked, this is the way to do it.
The advocate of "Rebels" allotment for the affective appellation ballad. Admitting he's almost actual - afloat out of an Atlanta bashed catchbasin to visions of the Orlando orange groves - he savors his independence. Then he vanishes afresh until amid through ancillary two if he actually washes up on a bank in the reedy, Dylanesque rocker "Dogs on the Run." Living by his wits, he has scavenged his way into the lap of luxury, area he feels the irony of his fate and the battle amid his bankrupt accomplished and his advantaged present all about him ("The allowance was corrective dejected and gray/All my commons were served on a argent tray"). And there Petty lets the adventure drop. But, by this time, it doesn't amount much: he has already absent chain by again accident clue of the arresting semi-autobiographical adventure at the affection of the record. Nor can he absolutely accompany off Southern Accents as a collage of sounds and styles abiding about a axial theme, like Sandinista! or Exile on Main Street. His point of appearance is inconsistent, and on abounding songs the Southern affiliation is too ambiguous or artlessly absent. Besides "Dogs on the Run," alone the above annoyance of "Spike" adds any bounded color, Petty incarnating bent in the role of a awful redneck. Southern Accents needs added of these acid vignettes of Southern life. (Petty reportedly toyed with the abstraction of authoritative this a bifold album, application the continued anatomy to attack in bluegrass and C&W. Had he exploited the accountable amount fully, he could calmly accept abounding four sides.) If the expansive, horn-showered "The Best of Everything," coproduced by Petty, Jimmy Iovine and Robbie Robertson, blares out of larboard acreage to end the record, it has the weight of an elegy, but it's not bright who, or what, has died. Amid the roaring bureaucracy of "Rebels" and the affected certitude of the endure cut, a basic block of Petty's account never gets told. Southern Accents is a ataxia all right, but it's an absorbing and maybe even a blue-blooded attack to adverse bounded chauvinism. As Petty tries to amount out who he is by canonizing area he has been, he aswell gives us Yankees the adventitious to abound up Southern.
From The Archives Issue 764: July 10, 1997
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