Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
To call an artist “timeless” usually serves to strip them of their sociohistorical context, to make them into a symbol easily applied to any moment or feeling without realizing that the art and artist came from somewhere. To be timeless is to be flattened, to be drained of history, and potentially of meaning.
There are some artists who can’t help but embody that universality without ever losing their hard-won point of view. Tom Petty was one of those artists. He was a baby boomer, a white heterosexual man from central Florida who made rock ‘n’ roll for his entire career. And yet, those white-hot, exquisite, desperate, alive little diamonds of songs somehow managed to capture decades of history and whole swaths of culture in an instant. To invoke the old saw: A song like “American Girl” sounds as fresh and relevant today as it did 40 years ago.
Petty died suddenly of heart failure on Monday at the age of 66, and while nobody could argue that he had any unfinished business on this earth, his death leaves us to reckon with just what his art actually meant. That led me to revisit one of the most unexpected artist pairings in modern history, namely that of Petty with the director of the documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream, Peter Bogdanovich.
Despite the trappings of a traditional, straight-ahead music biography doc that most of us grew up seeing on VH1, Runnin’ Down a Dream is a strange beast. Firstly, the thing runs four hours long. It encompasses Petty’s entire life and career up until his 30th anniversary show in his hometown of Gainesville, Florida, in September 2006. Bogdanovich leaves unedited countless live performances of Petty with his band, The Heartbreakers. Few stones are left unturned without sacrificing a remarkably zippy and entertaining pace throughout its running time.
But perhaps the most important question to ask of Runnin’ Down a Dream’s existence is why was Bogdanovich chosen to direct it? By his own admission, the auteur behind such film-historical pastiches as Targets, The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, and What’s Up, Doc? didn’t Petty or his music before he began working on the project. In fact, Bogdanovich was only vaguely familiar with rock ‘n’ roll as a genre, despite being a teenager when Elvis blew up in America. He doesn’t make a lot of sense as a chronicler for one of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest scribes.
Slowly but surely, the personalities of both Petty and Bogdanovich reveal themselves as Runnin’ Down a Dream unspools. This connection also goes some distance toward answering why Petty’s music has managed to encompass the whole of modern pop history. Both Petty and Bogdanovich are history nuts, archivists to their cores, and it is is here where their work finds common ground.
It’s no secret that Petty was an encyclopedia of post-war pop music. This archival mind infected his songwriting, allowing him to carry the incisive poetry of Bob Dylan with the grit of Southern rock, the insouciant propulsiveness of punk with the textures of New Wave, and finally the thoughtful harmonics of country and folk.
It turns out that Petty was a similar historian of his own life. Bogdanovich utilizes a mountain of archival footage ranging from home movies of Petty’s childhood to super-8 travelogues of The Heartbreakers’ first tours. Seemingly every moment of every recording session from their first four albums was filmed for posterity. It’s one thing to have the talking heads of Petty and bandmates Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, Ron Blair, and Stan Lynch tell the story of The Heartbreakers; it’s quite another to see grainy small-gauge celluloid and smeary black-and-white video show us those stories. Suddenly, Petty is both past and present tense.
A particularly delightful sequence involves Petty and his first band, Mudcrutch, deciding to throw a makeshift music festival in the front yard of their practice space in Gainesville. As Petty and Campbell describe the process of setting up the field and marketing the event, we see the home movies shot while these teenage kids proceed to pull off a one-day festival that ends up drawing hundreds in its first year. The footage demonstrates that Petty was hungry and ambitious basically from childhood, and through the sweat of his own labor, alchemized all that he touched.
Bogdanovich must have appreciated this impulse. His films are steeped in movie history, be it the Westerns that informed The Last Picture Show, the screwball comedies that colored What’s Up Doc?, or the musicals that helped birth At Long Last Love. In addition to being a filmmaker, Bogdanovich has interviewed and wrote books about such Hollywood luminaries—workers—as John Ford and Orson Welles. Petty’s love of Ford, and of Bogdanovich’s early movies, is what bonded the two when Runnin’ Down a Dream was in its earliest planning stages.
Bogdanovich’s master stroke is incorporating complete live performances from all eras of Petty’s career. The Hearbreakers were a lethal rock ‘n’ roll band, and Bogdanovich makes sure that fact sinks in by letting whole songs play themselves out. He finds British and German TV performances from 1977; early music videos that helped make Petty a star in the early 1980s; rehearsals with Stevie Nicks for “Insider” and “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”; the creation of the Traveling Wilburys which, as George Harrison describes in the movie, “just sort of happened.” You believe him when you suddenly see that ridiculous supergroup sitting around, banging out song after song.
Bogdanovich uses this colossus of content to ultimately give us a grand unifying theory of Tom Petty. He is an historical completist who brings the entirety of that past to his work. He is an obsessively ambitious artist who bears no patience for those who may stand in the way of the work itself. His ego is subsumed to his work, and the history behind it. The work is everything. We see him work repeatedly across those four hours. We see what the work gains him, and what it costs him. In the end, the work was everything to Petty.
That’s obviously not totally true, as we see vague glimpses of his family. That arena was apparently shied away from by Petty, understandably. But it is the only area in Runnin’ Down a Dream where Petty’s life doesn’t feel fleshed out.
No matter. It’s the songs that we take with us for eternity, these jewels that feel as if they have been with us since time immemorial, and will live on until the heat death of the universe takes us all. Sit down and go listen to “The Waiting” and “Refugee” and everything else he did. If you want to really dive into what made those songs happen, go watch Runnin’ Down a Dream. It will be the most fun four hours you’ll spend all week.
Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter: @EvanDavisSports.
