Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers- Into the Great Wide Open 35th
As you will hear in my classic rock interview with Tom Petty, two significant events informed the songwriting on July 1991’s Into the Great Wide Open, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ first post-Traveling Wilburys/Full Moon Fever effort with his own band. First, Tom turned forty. “I’ll probably look back at this as some kind of mid-life crisis album,” Petty chuckled, “and go,’God, I should’ve just lightened up! Should’ve had a drink and forgot about it.’ But I suppose I’m just working a lot of things out. It’s very hard living your life as we have in tour buses and airplanes for all of this time.”
Having just recently lost his idol and fellow Traveling Wilbury Roy Orbison suddenly, Petty seemed increasingly aware of his own mortality. “I think when I turned 40 I kinda did, as most people do, get a little reflective about ‘Where have we been? And where are we going?’ And you do kind of realize that, ‘Gee, twenty more and I’m outta here!’ So you do take stock of that, you do.”
The second significant factor was that the songs for Into the Great Wide Open were written with a pre-9/11 perspective during Desert Storm Gulf War 1, which disturbed long-dormant feelings in Tom as well as many others who came of age during the nation’s lengthy, deadly, ill-advised Viet Nam War. “As I wrote this album, we went to war, and there were a few anxious moments there when you feel very vulnerable to people who are running the planet. Can those people just blow me up? Yes they can! And it was a very hard, painful thing to go through, the war was. I had extremely mixed emotions, I never felt good about it . And of course I support the troops, but I felt terrible about the fact that, in this day and age, that we’re still barbaric enough to roll out and kill thousands of people…’Dark of the Sun’ was one written during that period of the (Gulf) War. When I watched the oil fires in Kuwait, I had the image of the dark of the sun…imagining if it had been Indianapolis where the oil fires were burning, or Cincinnati, or Los Angeles instead of Kuwait on CNN.”-Redbeard
