Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers Released Their Last LP 10 Years Ago
It was the end of an era, but we didn’t know it at the time. One decade ago, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers released their final album, the excellent Hypnotic Eye. Weirdly, and improbably, it’s the band’s only #1 album on the Billboard 200 album chart. And despite that accolade, it’s fair to say that the album is a bit underrated.
With a career like Tom Petty’s, that’s understandable. His catalog is packed with classics, both radio hits and deep tracks. And after a certain point, what do you write about when you have nothing left to prove? In a way, it’s a good problem to have, and it’s one that many of his peers had to contend with.
As Petty told journalist Alan Light in an interview with Relix promoting Hypnotic Eye, “I think what we can offer is to try to show growth at this point in our lives. A lot of people just give up and do retreads of what they’ve done before… and everything is in the shadow of those 30 hits you have, those really big songs. Everything has to compete with that.”
The true fans – the ones who embraced his new music over the years – know that Tom Petty never stopped writing great songs and making amazing albums. And in the 2010s, he still had something to say. As with 2002’s The Last DJ, there was a lot on his mind when he was writing the songs for Hypnotic Eye.
I was fortunate enough to interview Petty for The Last DJ back in 2002 for VH1. He was very passionate about the points that he was making with the record. “This isn’t an album about the music industry,” he insisted, looking me dead in the eye. “That would be so boring.” He acquiesced that while the title track and “Money Becomes King” was about the music industry, the album was really about greed. And this was a topic that he was clearly pissed off about.
Talking about the “golden circle” – i.e. the expensive seats at concerts – that he refers to in “Money Becomes King,” he said, “How much money do you need?” He, of course, noted that he was very wealthy, but didn’t feel the need to charge as much as he possibly could for his shows. He took pride in the fact that young people could actually afford to go to his concerts.
His next few efforts were a bit less topical. 2006’s solo album Highway Companion, 2008’s reunion/debut album by his pre-Heartbreakers band Mudcrutch and 2010’s Mojo were all excellent but were a bit more mellow.
Mojo saw the Heartbreakers in a more bluesy mode, as they let their Allman Brothers Band influences shine through. Hypnotic Eye sounded notably different; as most observers pointed out at the time, it felt tighter, leaner and more like the band’s first two albums: 1976’s Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and 1978’s You’re Gonna Get It. In the ‘70s, Tom Petty had a chip on his shoulder. It sounded as if that chip returned on Hypnotic Eye.
The leadoff track, “American Dream Plan B,” comes in hot: the guitars snarl at you, and so does Tom. “My mama’s so sad, daddy’s just mad/’Cause I ain’t gonna have the chance he had.” Two lines spoke to the economic anxiety so many of us were feeling. Will I be able to buy a house? If I go to the hospital, will I go bankrupt? Can I ever retire?
And, of course, we’re in a wealthy nation where a select few are insanely wealthy. In “Power Drunk,” he sings, “Pin on a badge and a man begins to change/Start believing and there’s nothing out of his range/You and I are left in the wind/In the wake of a rich man’s sin.” In “Forgotten Man,” he sings, “I feel like a forgotten man/I understand the dark.” The lyrics aren’t too specific, but the lyrics to “I Won’t Back Down” aren’t specific either. Petty was a master at being direct and (deceptively) simple. He could capture a feeling in just a few words.
Much of Hypnotic Eye dealt with what Petty felt was our moral decline. As he said in the Relix interview, “People get lots of money, and then get bored with money, and they want power. And then the power starts to get them off and they just become downright dangerous. They start adjusting their morality to keep the power and the next [thing] you know, you’re just a black-hearted f—er causing people to live in slums and you don’t care—you don’t think it’s your fault.”
He continued, “Education has been slashed to nothing, and if you have stupid people, they’re easy to manipulate and bad s— happens.” In the same interview, he discussed school shootings and the shrinking middle class, the latter of which he sang about in “Burnt Out Town”: “Yeah this is the burnt-out town/You wear the same clothes/They dancing on the glass ceilings/While the filthy money flows.”
It’s a bit depressing to note that a lot of what he was angry about in 2014 is still true today. Tom Petty wasn’t Joe Strummer (although he respected him): he wasn’t a rabble-rouser and didn’t usually get overtly political. But he really captured the vibe of the era in a way that wasn’t truly appreciated by most. In the album’s closer, “Shadow People,” he voiced what so many Americans felt at the time. “Well, I ain’t on the left, and I ain’t on the right/I ain’t even sure I got a dog in this fight/In my time of need/In my time of grief/I feel like a shadow’s falling over me.”
Of course, a lot of people still feel that way today. If you didn’t pay attention to Hypnotic Eye back in 2014, you can still catch up now. The album is timeless, and sadly, so are many of its themes. It’s worth listening to until the end. At the 6-minute mark, the song sounds like it’s over. After a few seconds of silence, as if coming out for one last encore, there’s Tom Petty, strumming his acoustic guitar, singing, “Waiting for the sun to be straight overhead/’Til we ain’t got no shadow at all.”
That little beam of hope is something that we can use today as well.
