Tom Petty Attempted a Concept Album With Southern Accents

By the time Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released their 1982 album Long After Dark, they were a big-time rock and roll act who garnered the kind of scrutiny that music critics long for. When you’re at this level, critics want to know one thing. Is your sound evolving, or have you stagnated? Many critics thought the album found Tom Petty in a rinse-and-repeat cycle.

When the band took a break at the end of the tour supporting Dark, Petty was left to ponder an important question. How could he move the Heartbreakers into new sonic territory while keeping the essential sound of the band intact? To follow his answer (or answers) to this question is to trace the journey of the band’s sixth studio album, Southern Accents, which was released in 1985 and turned fifty this year.

Ostensibly a concept album about the South, the subtext of Southern Accents is a chronicle of the frustrations, successes, and failures of charting a new course. While the album is often cast into the category of “nice try, no cigar,” its legacy is ultimately more than that of a case study. Southern Accents contains some of Petty’s finest songs that break out of his personal writing on Dark to engage issues of individuality in the context of cultural identity.

While touring through the South and spending time in his hometown of Gainesville, Florida, Petty saw all around him life frozen in place by Southern tradition. “It’s hard to understand why,” he told Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times back in 1985, “but that tradition is so strong that they don’t ever realize that two hours in any direction gets you somewhere else.”

But as he began writing songs on this theme, Petty was puzzled over how the band was going to update its sound. One clarifying moment occurred when he gave a song to Robbie Robertson to use for the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese’s movie The King of Comedy. “The Best of Everything” had been left off of 1981’s Hard Promises. When Robertson got hold of the song, he added horns, some keyboard parts from Garth Hudson, and a harmony vocal from Richard Manuel to the basic track. This deepened the reliable Heartbreaker’s sound and, unintentionally, created a template for Petty to follow. Petty would ultimately keep the song and go on to add horns to six of the nine songs on Southern Accents. But the recording process (which took place in his home studio without help from an outside producer) was more frustrating than he had anticipated, and trying to get the sound he wanted turned into a slog.

Petty got what appeared to be another break in the form of David Stewart, half of the pop duo Eurythmics, who accidentally, as it were, co-wrote “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Stewart, who was working on an album with Stevie Nicks, asked Petty to help with a song that had stalled. By the time Petty was done, he had written lyrics and put a vocal track to it, and Nicks recognized that the song had become his, not hers.

“Don’t Come Around Here No More” functioned as the red carpet that ushered Stewart into Petty’s studio. As one of the brightest neon bulbs of synthpop, Stewart brought a quasi-psychedelic sound palette that intrigued Petty. No one would have guessed they would hear a sitar on a Tom Petty song, but suddenly there it was, fitting in and making sense.

Sort of. What began as a new direction for the band’s sound ended up as a distraction. The other two songs, “It Ain’t Nothin’ to Me” and “Make It Better (Forget About Me),” are fun and funky in a plastic '80s kind of way, but are also the worst songs on the album. In his biography of Petty, Warren Zanes wrote that the songs “felt like something else—fun afternoons at the studio that shouldn’t have been allowed to be more than that.” But they were, and they ended up muddying a concept that already had proved difficult to see through the recording process. Frustration ran so high that when Petty realized the album still wasn’t where he wanted it to be after a year’s worth of work, he punched a wall with his left hand, breaking several bones and almost ending his career as a guitar player.

While he healed up, he called in Jimmy Iovine to help clean up the mess, and the result is the album we have today. Southern Accents was promoted as a concept album, but most critics heard it as a failed concept album because the Stewart-helmed songs really have nothing to do with the concept. And yet, when you strip away what the album might (or should) have been, you find a record that still manages to compel you in ways that other Petty albums do not. It doesn’t carry off a complete narrative, but Southern Accents has, at points, a narrative flow that is almost strong enough to make you forget the sparkling misdirections.

The title track is a stunning song that holds out the central conflict between individualism and tradition with beautiful clarity. Petty viewed “Southern Accents” as one of his best songs, and he was not wrong. The spare piano and lush orchestra leave the writer bare and vulnerable. “There’s a southern accent, where I come from/ The young’uns call it country/ The Yankees call it dumb.” Forget the tropes you’ve been bludgeoned with by Southern rock bands. Even as a teenager, Petty, according to Tom Leadon in Zanes’ biography, didn’t have an accent as thick as his family’s. He isn’t setting up an ideal, but a conflict. “I got my own way of talkin’/ But everything is done with a southern accent/ Where I come from.”

Petty puts his finger on the friction between individual and cultural identity, between “my own way” and “a southern accent.” Whether stuck in a drunk tank, looking for work, dreaming about a deceased mother, or praying, that friction follows the singer everywhere, and it is the hallmark of the album’s best moments. The friction is palpable right from the beginning with the album’s opener, “Rebels.” If there’s a list of the best Petty songs that never made it to the radio, “Rebels” should sit at the top. The classic Heartbreaker elements of Benmont Tench’s organ and Petty’s 12-string guitars, crowned with Mike Campbell’s lead guitar and bolstered by a horn section, make an anthem latent with defeat, an irony that, far from undercutting the song, makes it all the more devastating.

“I was just thinking about the average young guy down there,” Petty told Hilburn, “who is brought up in this tradition that tells you, ‘this is the way it has always been and the way it should be.’ I’m not just talking about jobs, but a whole way of living.” Petty goes on to explain that this average young guy is born with the tradition “lined up against him” and is told he should conform, though his gut tells him not to.

“Rebels” pictures the young man hounded by “the way it’s always been” in the final verse. “I can still feel the eyes of those blue bellied devils/ Yeah, when I’m walking around at night/ Through the concrete and the metal.” For my money, this is not Lost Cause rhetoric, but someone seeing what the tradition has taught him to see. There’s something in this conflict that pictures Petty himself, who eventually left Gainesville and established a band with such a strong connection to Los Angeles that they were not, even at that time, considered a Southern rock band.

Another underrecognized song on side two finds Petty and the band loose and mellow. “Spike” is a darkly funny tune and the only one on the album to feature just the Heartbreakers, quiet but unsettled, pristine but unvarnished. “Spike” has a bluesy feel, but is pure theater as Petty hams up a southern accent, singing, “Oh, we got another one, just like the other ones/ Another bad ass, another troublemaker/ I’m scared, ain’t you boys scared?” The tradition is personified as a group of bullies surrounding the troublemaker. But the leader’s taunts take on an eerie vulnerability after the future comes up: “Maybe we oughta help him see/ The future ain’t what it used to be.” By the end, he’s asking, “Please, Spike, tell us ‘bout life?” in a way that may be partly honest.

“Dogs on the Run” follows up Spike as a tantalizing parable that finds the young man talking to a “young, bleached blonde” in a room painted blue and gray. If the colors feel a bit ham-fisted symbolically, the woman’s monologue stops you in your tracks when she says, “[H]oney, ain’t it funny how a crowd gathers around/ Anyone living life without a net?” As she goes on, you get the feeling that the bullies really are asking the troublemaker for answers. But in the blonde’s view, “there’s no way you could ever tell ‘em/ It’s just dogs on the run.”

The last two songs, “Mary’s New Car” and “The Best of Everything,” require a little more effort from the listener’s imagination, but it isn’t too hard to see closure in the sense of the young man getting out and looking back. “Mary’s New Car” is an atmospheric track reminiscent of Traffic that swirls around the car as escapism, and “The Best of Everything” finds the singer reflecting on a woman who could be working in a diner or singing in a club. The ambiguity of her ambitions leaves the singer wanting the best for her, whatever it is.

When you consider the best material on the album, the Stewart-helmed songs, even the hit single, “Don’t Come Around Here No More” (which, at best, is tangentially related), really do feel like they belong to a different album, a beach-themed album with dancing. It’s a shame that greatest hits volumes and treasure troves don’t dwell enough on the fantastic material that appeared on Southern Accents. Even with its distractions, the album is able to worm into your consciousness and find a place among the best Heartbreaker records. This says a lot about the durability of their music. Ironically, when you get close to Southern Accents, you stop hearing the horns and other embellishments, for the most part, and focus on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, a band that fundamentally proved indestructible.

Christopher Raley