Tom Petty "Highway Companion" (American)
By Dave Schutz
Wednesday. Sep 13, 12:27 AM
Please make dad listen to this before he marries that stripper.

I’ve been anxiously awaiting the late October release of novelist Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, the third in a trilogy including The Sportswriter and the Pulitzer-winning Independence Day. Awaiting it not like a kid waits for Christmas, but rather the way a kid waits until the Christmas shopping is done so s/he can find the presents hidden in the closet or the attic or wherever. Maybe that combined with the feeling of crawling through a traffic jam in morbid anticipation of the accident scene. Amidst all that waiting, Tom Petty threw me a bone with Highway Companion.

See, while 1999’s Echo was purported to be Petty’s “divorce album,” it’s pretty apparent here that there are some issues that weren’t resolved – more accurately, issues that have evolved – that were largely avoided on the underwhelming The Last DJ. Meanwhile, it’s been seven years since Echo, five since Petty remarried, but Highway Companion paints a picture of man in a kind of slow burning crisis that Frank Bascombe knows too well. Ex-sports reporter, current real estate agent Bascombe is the protagonist of Ford’s trilogy, and Ford’s mastery is not in the treatment of the physical and emotional upheaval of that character’s divorce (and the death of his son), but rather the adjustment to the existential wasteland that lies beyond the initial shock, triggering an overall crisis in which Bascombe is forced to question his place on earth as a lover, father, career man and, well, in general. And from there he has to come to some sort of peace with that: an equilibrium. The result is the “Existence Period,” stated well inside the dust jacket: “Frank is happy enough in his peculiar way, more or less sheltered from fresh pain and searing regret.”

However autobiographical (or current) the songs on Highway Companion are, Petty accomplishes something very similar. The songs here are not about the loss of a love, and they’re not particularly downcast, but there’s a restlessness, a need to move and reconnect with the past and with the significant: anything to escape the nothingness of the wasteland. And there’s an awareness of that from the beginning. The accusatory second person in the chorus of “Saving Grace” (“And it’s hard to say / who you are these days / but you run on anyway / don’t you baby?”) answers the first person in the verse. On “Square One,” he says, “My slate is clear,” but that “it took a world of trouble / it took a world of tears / it took a long time to get back here.”

Other songs deal with that need to reconnect. The beautiful “Down South” finds the narrator chasing ghosts and history around the chorus, “So if I come to your door / let me sleep on your floor / I’ll give you all I have / and a little more” (it’s a testament to Petty that at this stage in his career he makes it sound believable: imagine Bono spouting a line like that). “Big Weekend” finds him tracking down old friends (“Gonna hook up with them later / and go hit the bars”).

It’s an intimate picture painted as intimately by the music, likely attributable to the spare cast of players, including only Petty, Heartbreaker Mike Campbell, and producer Jeff Lynne. From the edgy and simmering shuffle of “Saving Grace” (which ABC used for their NBA Finals coverage, though I can’t quite picture it) to the soft melancholy of “Square One” and “The Golden Rose,” the trio consistently hits it on the head. Highway Companion is a rather inauspicious record: enough to fade into the background at times, but is ultimately brilliant for its humility, confidence, simplicity, and heart. It’s an exercise in self-examination without self-pity: a midlife crisis without the Corvette or the noose.

Frank Bascombe comes a little closer to confronting that dichotomy, which is perhaps why I’ve developed a morbid fascination with him. Finding out what happens next is like a peek into the terrifying future. Often the message is cautionary (be careful, or this could be you in 20 years!), but also heartening, that there is life beyond the wreckage of personal disaster, and that life is a new one. Highway Companion feels the same way, that despite the uncertainty and all that’s gone wrong, Petty is regaining freedom and newness in middle age. Beats the hell out of a Corvette or a noose.
www.tompetty.com
www.americanrecordings.com

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Dave Schutz

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