You Belong Among the Wildflowers

Tom Petty never liked when his band was referred to as “Southern rock.”

Yes, he was born and raised in Gainesville, Fla., as were the rest of the Heartbreakers (raised, if not born). Yes, he started his career there. Yes, he continually referenced the South in his lyrics, and yes, he and the band often were seen wearing all manner of University of Florida apparel throughout their 40-year career. But still, it just didn’t sit right with him.

“I often see us included in Southern rock. But honestly, when the Southern rock thing happened, we were long gone for the most part,” Petty told the Los Angeles Times. “I think we’re really Californians. I’ve been in California longer than I was in Florida. Certainly where you grow up is always going to be deeply embedded in your soul. I don’t know, but sometimes it kind of hurts my feelings that we’re not included in discussions of Southern California music. The Heartbreakers formed here. We really are an L.A. band.”

This is, in many ways, a rewrite of history — a version of his band’s story as Petty would have liked it to be remembered. For one, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers formed out of the ashes of Mudcrutch, a Gainesville band that was so popular locally they had their own music festival that quickly outgrew its humble origins.

For another, The Allman Brothers Band, which kicked off Southern rock as a genre, got going in Jacksonville, just up the road, and were releasing albums by 1968, when Petty was still in high school. In the book Conversations with Tom Petty, he even admits in an interview that he and the band went up to Macon, Ga., where ABB was based, to see if they could get a deal with Capricorn Records. They played a show there at Grant’s Lounge and were turned down. In the interview, he said they didn’t care for Macon and thought it was a little too much of a down-home scene for their tastes. Mike Campbell said in an interview with Marc Maron, briefly, that they had even played with Lynyrd Skynyrd (or an early version of the band) in Jacksonville or somewhere nearby in their formative years.

But, the gist of Petty’s story is true. Tom Leadon, who played in Mudcrutch, was the younger brother of Bernie Leadon, who is best known for his role in the Eagles. And while Mudcrutch did fall under the Southeastern hippie-dippie spell of mushrooms and winding jams from time to time, the core of Petty’s songwriting was always poppier, rockier and folkier. He was, from even the earliest days, influenced by The Byrds. Mudcrutch even borrowed the look of their album, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, for one of their early publicity photos. It was obvious that Petty’s talent could not be contained by a little college town like Gainesville. He was meant for showbiz.

And I get why he wanted to leave, if only for personal reasons. His father was, by many accounts, abusive. Gainesville, for all its college-town worldliness, was still a place full of racists and rednecks and drunk, belligerent frat boys. It’s a long way from North Florida to Miami, let alone Manhattan. Unless you want to teach at the University of Florida, Gainesville probably isn’t the place to do it.

And yet, you can take the boy out of Florida, but you can’t take the Florida out of the boy. Many know the lost-and-wonderful ‘70s track “Casa Dega” references the Central Florida city known for spiritualists and mediums. Various band members are seen in UF gear in early photos. In the early ‘80s, Petty did several interviews, including those in the Cameron Crowe-directed Heartbreakers’ Beach Party, where he talks at length about Florida, about Gainesville and the world he and the band came from.

All this culminated in one of Petty’s finest and also most problematic records – Southern Accents.

The album was intended to be a double album, one where he contends with the South, its histories and its mysteries – kind of an ‘80s Southern rock opera. This also coincided with a time of heavy drug use and stress for the band, and the decisions surrounding the record were spotty at best. Petty would shatter the bones in his hand punching a wall during a particularly fraught mixing session. The album is good, but it's not a masterpiece.

For one, the marketing and tour that followed the record featured prominent use of the Confederate flag, something that Petty called “downright stupid” in an interview with Rolling Stone 30 years later.

“... I regretted it pretty quickly. When we toured two years later, I noticed people in the audience wearing Confederate flag bandanas and things like that. One night, someone threw one onstage. I stopped everything and gave a speech about it. I said, ‘Look, this was to illustrate a character. This is not who we are. Having gone through this, I would prefer it if no one would ever bring a Confederate flag to our shows again because this isn’t who we are.’”

But again, this is a rewrite of history, the past as Petty wishes it was and not entirely as it was. Petty and the band went back to Gainesville with MTV around the time of the record, and though Petty is his usually gregarious, funny and compelling self, he’s noticeably wearing a trucker hat with a Confederate flag emblazoned on it. For a time there – a time when the usually controlled Petty was getting and staying pretty bombed – he was playing it up.

I don’t doubt that Petty wasn’t even slightly racist. For one, no one ever mentioned him saying or doing anything racist throughout his career behind the scenes (unlike Skynyrd, who did lots of that sort of thing), and Petty did come from a more enlightened scene. Years later, he would integrate the band by replacing recently departed drummer Stan Lynch with Steve Ferrone. And, in the context of the album and even his demeanor and comments in the MTV special, he is playing it up – something the ‘90s Gen X kids would call ironic. He is sending up the small-town attitudes of North Florida that he had long since left behind.

But the joke gets lost when you have a wide audience. The bigger the audience, the dumber it gets. So, like the shame of racism is an ever-present part of Florida, so it is with Petty’s history.

But if you’re willing to spend a little time with Southern Accents, you’ll find a compelling and rewarding album, one that is somewhere between the character-driven writing of Randy Newman and the rocking gothic tales of Drive-By Truckers. “Rebels” looks closely at a drunk Bubba who can’t move on from a war that ended nearly 100 years before he was born. “Spike” imagines rednecks harassing a punk rocker. “Don’t Come Around Here No More” mixes psychedelic sounds with Southern lingo in a way that would make R.E.M. proud. “The Best of Everything” finds Petty doing something he was especially great at – writing empathetically about women and their lives.

And of course there is the title track, the kind of thing that makes a certain kind of Floridian well up with tears in their eyes.

There's a dream that I keep having
Where my mama comes to me
And she kneels down over by the window
And says a prayer for me
I got my own way of praying
And everyone's begun
With a Southern accent
Where I come from

Petty would wisely retreat from his Southern muse for the next few albums, and the result would be one of his biggest triumphs. Full Moon Fever is very much a Los Angeles record. “Free Fallin’” and “Runnin’ Down a Dream” are pure California rock, and they would become monster hits. But even in his most SoCal pose, he couldn’t help but drop some Florida references, including shouting out Micanopy in “A Mind With a Heart of Its Own.”

And, like much of Petty’s career, Floridians have adopted Fever as well. “I Won’t Back Down” is the Florida Gators’ go-to stadium anthem. “Love is a Long Road” was even used in the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, an installment that sees the popular video game back in Florida.

And Petty would regularly come back to Florida. He and his family owned a beach house near St. Augustine, where they could be seen playing and relaxing and doing normal Florida beach things. Jimmy McDonough even recounts a story of Bob Dylan and Petty striking out amid a tour stop in Florida to track down country legend Gary Stewart in his Fort Pierce mobile home. Florida was never far from Petty’s heart, and Petty was never far from Florida’s.

But I would argue that Tom Petty’s biggest success is his most Floridian record.

Wildflowers, his 1994 solo album, is something special, something organic. Its opening track, “Wildflowers,” is a simple ode to freedom and pleasures, albeit with a bittersweet tinge. His daughter, Adria, said when she heard it she knew her parents’ marriage was over.

It’s true, in fact, that Florida had an outsized role in shaping the California sound that Petty admired so much. Gram Parsons, who introduced the Byrds to country music (and is rumored to have written “Wild Horses” by The Rolling Stones), attended The Bolles School in Jacksonville and grew up the son of a well-to-do orange farmer in Winter Haven. As mentioned earlier, Bernie Leadon had spent his formative years in Gainesville. Stephen Stills attended Gainesville High School a few years before Petty. Those Southern rockers Duane and Gregg Allman had logged time in Los Angeles as well, and Gregg knew Jackson Browne well enough to carry the song “These Days” with him back home to Florida and Georgia. The two regions were never that far apart.

Grunge, I think, freed Petty up to bring some of the pieces of his songwriting and musical sound that he had compartmentalized back together. He was able to jam a little and rock a little. He was able to bring in some folk and some country. Wildflowers works so well because it is easy. It’s Tom being Tom.

And Petty was a studious image maker. In the press photos around the time, he’s distilled his Floridaness into something more worn-in and comfortable. Always a snazzy dresser not afraid of paisley prints or angular New Wave patterns – he dialed it back to jeans and flannels. He posed in coffee shops.

In the documentary Somewhere You Feel Free, one of his confidants says he said at the time that this was who he always was, and, in this case, Petty’s memory is somewhat more accurate. You can see him in those early Mudcrutch photos looking like a ‘90s grunge rocker in jeans and flannels. He had come home.

And he was more astute with his headwear this time, too, opting to prominently wear a baseball cap sporting the logo of the then newly formed Florida Marlins.

A few years ago, the Cade Museum in Gainesville had an exhibit on the making of Wildflowers. I made the pilgrimage down and found a small room with Petty’s denim and flannels, as well as some Telecasters and lyric sheets. While I was there, I drove by the 34th Street Wall mural dedicated to him emblazoned with the phrase GAINESVILLE NO. 1 SON and then over to his childhood home that his ex-wife, Jane, purchased a few years ago. From there, I went to Tom Petty Park, not far from his house, which is often a center of the activities for Tom Petty Weekend. Then I turned my car back toward Jacksonville and headed home, considering the heavy weight of the city and its own sons, Lynyrd Skynyrd, who also adopted the Confederate flag for marketing purposes and have never quite been able to let it go. Different worlds in so many ways.

I moved back to Florida in late 2017, and I was traveling back from Jacksonville to Dallas the day he died. It was a bizarre scene in the airport. Initial reports pronounced him dead. Later reports walked that back before confirming it. You could see, in real time, his impact on the lives of people who loved his music. They were refreshing their feeds and talking with each other. No one wanted him to be gone. Not this soon. Not like this. No one thought Tom Petty was perfect, but people loved him. They thought he was a real one.

And, to me, a piece of Florida died that day with him – the hippie-dippie Florida of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s — the same spirit that blew through California had also blown through the Sunshine State. Even in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I remember Boomers holding on to that high. But he’s gone now, and it’s gone now, and this is a place beholden to its own abrasiveness. Things have changed. Now we live in a world where Margaritavilles dot the coastline and Ron DeSantis is using “Sweet Florida” by the warmed-over corpse of Lynyrd Skynyrd as a campaign prop. It means nothing to me except more of the same old “Southern” bullshit. I was never a good Southerner. I’m too Floridian for that.

Do I think Tom Petty was Southern rock? I really don’t.

I do think much of his story that I haven’t covered here – including his guest stint on The Larry Sanders Show and his recurring role on King of the Hill are decidedly L.A. Musically, I think he drew from the same well as many of the Southern rockers – country, blues and R&B – but with a poppier, punkier edge.

But I do think Tom Petty was a Floridian, through and through. Only a Floridian would fight the record label over raising the price of their album by a dollar – and win. Only a Floridian would write “just play dumb, whatever you know.” And only a Floridian would keep a special place in his heart for this weird and wonderful Fountain of Youth.

I’ll end this essay at the beginning of Petty’s story. When he was a child, Hollywood came to Florida. Elvis Presley showed up in the region to film a movie called Follow That Dream, and it would make a huge impact on Floridians of that time. My mom, who is about a year older than Petty, would often sing the theme song to me as a child. A stretch of highway where it was filmed is named in the somewhat forgettable film’s honor.

Petty had an uncle who worked on set, and he got the rare pleasure of meeting Presley. He would have been about 11 or 12 years old. He said it was a brief meeting, but it was the moment where his future came into focus. This, he knew, was what he wanted to do.

Hollywood came to Florida, and then Florida came to Hollywood, and all the lines on the map bleed into sound.