Tom Petty |
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Fri. October 18.2002 3:00 PM EDT |
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Tom Petty: The Last Protest SingerVeteran rocker blasts both barrels at a shallow entertainment industry. by Brian Ives |
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Tom Petty (VH1.com) |
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Tom Petty is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it any more. He has cast his eyes into the great wide open and is appalled by what he sees. There are pop tarts on the TV. There are millionaires chugging champagne inside the Golden Circle area of
Petty’s analysis of the situation is written into The Last D.J. His latest album resounds with the protest music that was popular in the era that the singer holds so dear: the late 1960s. Built on a string of message songs, the disc laments the loss of individuality and skewers the dynamic of concept over content, ultimately finding its arch enemy in the greed that causes such a predicament. Like Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio,” it’s out to bite the hand that feeds it. Throughout the album, the still-feisty Heartbreakers give the necessary jolt to Petty’s barbs. When the singer sat down with VH1 to deliver his state of the music address, he made a point of explaining that art is everything, and greenbacks should be secondary. Along the way he addressed the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, the misuse of the term “rock,” and his pending tribute to pal George Harrison. VH1: The Last D.J. criticizes the music industry, but on the closing “Can’t Stop the Sun,” you sing, “There’ll be more just like me/ Who won’t give in.” Could you have written this album without a sense of optimism? Tom Petty: It’s ultimately a very optimistic album about hope and faith. People who say it’s about the music business haven’t listened to the whole album. The title track laments the dying art form of radio. “Money Becomes King” is about the concert business and artists that sell out. “Joe” is about a CEO, but it could be about any business, really. The Last D.J. is about morals. It’s about at what point do you care about the human more than money. I used the music industry as a metaphor because I knew it very well, and it was easy to write about. But making a record just about the music industry would be so dull. They’ve always been a joke and they always will be. The Last D.J. is a fable. Maybe it just hits too close to the bone for some people. But it is fiction. VH1: You blast Clear Channel’s radio monopoly and the Golden Circle concert seating on “Money Becomes King.” Both have been around for a while. Why write about them now? Petty: I thought the Golden Circle represented how we are these days. We all want to appear rich, even if we’re not. That’s the problem with America. People want every dollar. They don’t care about you or me or the product they’re selling. They don’t give a damn about art or music. They just want to fill the program. I care about music intensely. I’m at a position now, where if I play the music industry game, I have to give up caring about music. So I tried to write it like I saw it. If you’re upset with it, you’re part of the problem. VH1: In “Joe” an executive character says of girl singers, “You put ‘em onstage and you have ‘em undress.” Is the image-making of pop singers like Britney and Christina more intense today than ever? Petty: That’s all there is today. Music doesn’t come into it. There is no truth in pop music. It’s much easier to get a girl to undress and put her up there. That’s what I was trying to bring out in that character. He didn’t really care about whether it was good or bad. He just wants to sell it. I’m surprised the audience doesn’t expect and demand more, but they’re so anesthetized by the media that they don’t know that they’re not getting what they paid for. They’re missing a great element of truth. VH1: When was the last time there was good pop music on the charts? Petty: It’s a matter of taste. For me, I’d say 1968 or ’69. Maybe ’70. Not much of any significance has happened since then. This is an emergency crisis we’re in. The entertainment media is affecting everything on the planet in a very negative way. I’m only interested in rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll is a music that represents truth. Your TV channel has taken the word “rock” and knocked the “roll” off the end. You made rock this umbrella term for everything. That’s wrong. Shakira isn’t rock. These country artists with fur coats aren’t rock - or country. I offered a video to VH1 of my band playing in the studio and they don’t want to air it because it had musicians playing in it. They want some babe walking on the beach or whatever. I got turned onto this music by watching the Beatles and the Rolling Stones actually on TV playing their guitars. It completely took me over. When you can’t see musicians playing any more, I’m not interested any more. [Watch Clip] VH1: What was the impact of seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show like? Petty: It was like the world was black and white and then in the morning it was color. Everything changed in one evening. It was such a great event. In those days you didn’t have videos. You saw music once a week on Ed Sullivan, so everybody tuned in. It was like an underground thing, because Mom and Dad didn’t watch it. It was something of us and for us. That was the beauty of it. The Beatles were young people just like us, and they were independent. They were the first show business people that actually told the truth when they were spoken to. We really admired that. Now, people in rock groups are the people you got into a rock band to get away from. They’re sell-outs that want to be in People magazine and sell their songs to Mercedes-Benz. You deserve better. [Watch Clip] VH1: What was it like when you were listening to radio? Petty: The biggest difference was that all of the pop music was played on one station. Now there’s a specific kind of music on each station. But we had a much broader musical education. They would play literally everything that was pop. If you had the rules that you had today, nobody would make a “McArthur Park” or a “Strawberry Fields.” Nobody would dare try that. These days you’ve got to fit a very exact formula. These days, probably no one knows how the No. 1 song goes. Back then everybody could whistle the top 10 songs. There were still people involved in radio that chose the music they were going to play themselves. You came to know the personalities on the radio. Some of them you hated and some of them you really liked. But it was much more fun than it is now. Now you have people that advertise the fact that they don’t have any talking on their station, as if that was a plus. I think that’s kind of boring. [Watch Clip] VH1: If you were a young kid today, would you not be able get into the music? Petty: I wouldn’t be interested in it at all. Young people are being offered crap and drivel. It’s not about anything with any element of truth or danger or excitement or mystery. It’s five cats in sweaters doing dance steps. VH1: But paradoxically the audience at your concerts is getting younger. Petty: We’ve always had a healthy dose of teenagers in the audience. I think it’s probably because I don’t cater to them! I don’t pander to them. They may detect that this is an honest trip. They want to see it, because they’re tired of being burned. VH1: Does this form of musical protest can have a positive effect? Petty: Well, I’m going to go out trying. If no one speaks up, there won’t be any change. All I wanna do is raise the question because I love this music. I devoted my life to it. I’ve really given my life to this and I love it. I don’t want it to become a lumbering caricature of itself. It’s such a beautiful and liberating thing. The people need it, and it’s being denied them. I don’t have the answers, but I want to see more people care about what’s happening. We’re in a really weird time that’s just downright dangerous in some ways, so I think that we all better step up to the plate. VH1: You’re playing the upcoming George Harrison tribute concert. What are you going to do? Petty: Everybody is doing George songs. My understanding of it is that this is music that George would want to hear. Actually, he probably wouldn’t want to hear his songs, but that’s what we’re going to do. I think there’s going to be some Indian music and some ukulele music and the Voices of Bulgaria. These are things that he really loved. I’ve had two conversations with Eric Clapton that were very brief so far and Eric had written down some suggestions for me. I’m going to look at them and see which one comes out best. He asked me to sing “Isn’t It a Pity,” “Taxman” or “If I Needed Someone.” They’d also like to do a Wilburys number. So maybe we’ll do that. The song that George always played when he was hanging around my house is a kind of obscure one from the second Wilburys album called “If You Belonged to Me.” He used to play that on the ukulele a lot. I think I’m gonna play that. That reminds me of George. |
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