C6 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2020
ONE DAY IN 1993,Tom Petty opened his
mouth, and a new song came out, fully
formed.
“I swear to God, it’s an absolute ad-lib
from the word ‘go,’ ” he later told the writer
Paul Zollo of the title track from his melan-
cholic and masterful second solo album,
“Wildflowers.” “I turned on my tape-record-
er deck, picked up my acoustic guitar, took a
breath and played that from start to finish.”
The extraordinary new collection “Wild-
flowers & All the Rest” lets listeners experi-
ence that mystical, intimate moment: The
first home-recorded demo of “Wildflowers”
is among the five-disc release’s many
spoils. (There are also 14 more home re-
cordings, a live album, a disc of alternate
takes and unreleased recordings of the 10
other tracks that would have made the cut
had “Wildflowers” become the double al-
bum that Petty, who died in 2017, initially in-
tended.) In a murmured vocal, Petty sounds
like a man fumbling for a light switch and
never quite finding it, though a quick flash
of luminescence brings a lyric that ex-
presses something simple and true: “Far
away from your trouble and worry,” he
sings in his tender drawl, “You belong
somewhere you feel free.”
Like a lot of great songwriters, Petty be-
lieved he channeled his music from some-
where else, so it wasn’t like him to immedi-
ately consider exactly who or what a new
song was “about.” (“I hesitate to even try to
understand it,” he said of his gift in Peter
Bogdanovich’s 2007 documentary, “Runnin’
Down a Dream,” “for fear that that might
make it go away.”) But some time later, Pet-
ty’s therapist floated his own theory: “That
song is about you. That’s you singing to
yourself what you needed to hear.”
That analysis, Petty recalled to his biog-
rapher, Warren Zanes, “kind of knocked me
back. But I realized he was right. It was me
singing to me.”
From the outside, in the early ’90s, it
would have been surprising to hear that
Tom Petty needed reassurance from trouble
and worry: The wryly grinning rock star
appeared to have the Midas touch. Petty
was then entering his second decade with
the Heartbreakers, the tight, rollicking
band that he and some fellow North Florid-
ian pals had formed in the early 1970s; in
the years since, they had put out a long, con-
sistent string of hit albums that seemed to
hover somewhere above the music indus-
try’s passing trends.
By the late ’80s, and his late 30s, Petty
had not only met his heroes (Roy Orbison,
George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Jeff
Lynne) but formed a band with them, the
Traveling Wilburys. He and Lynne had also
recently recorded “Full Moon Fever”
(1989), Petty’s first solo album, which they
captured quickly with charmed and re-
freshing ease. His record label almost didn’t
put it out because it didn’t think it was com-
mercially viable, despite its first two tracks
being “Free Fallin’ ” (!) and “I Won’t Back
Down” (!!). Instead, it became his biggest
seller yet.
And yet Petty was, throughout all the os-
tensible highs, outrunning some internal
demons that overtook him the minute he
slowed down. His two-decade marriage was
failing. (His wife, Jane Benyo, had been
with him since “the age of 17” — a fact that
Petty’s friend Stevie Nicks had once mis-
heard because of Benyo’s Florida accent;
you can fill in the rest of the story from
there.) Petty’s stormy relationship with the
Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch was
threatening the band’s future. And there
were all sorts of intrusive memories that
he’d been trying to bat away since leaving
Florida, of a childhood with a sick, saintly
mother and an abusive father whose ver-
sion of Southern masculinity he could never
quite live up to. In the respite after the
Heartbreakers released the Lynne-
produced “Into the Great Wide Open” in
1991, Petty entered the most searching and
fertile creative period of his career.
“There was definitely tension in his life,”
the “Wildflowers” producer Rick Rubin re-
called of the album’s sessions in Zanes’s bi-
ography, adding that it “seemed he didn’t
really want to leave the studio. Like he did-
n’t want to do anything else in his life. I think
he wanted to take his mind off whatever
was going on at home.”
But of course that all spilled out in the
songs he was writing, which were at turnsraw, funny, hopeful and, just below the sur-
face, throbbing with an almost constant
ache. “In the middle of his life, he left his
wife, and ran off to be bad — boy, it was sad,”
Petty sings atop the richly textured acous-
tic guitar and a lightly shuffling beat of “To
Find a Friend.” (Ringo Starr just happened
to swing by the studio one day and obliged
to sit in.) By the chorus, though, Petty’s
jokey, I-know-a-guy facade has fallen away
and revealed a confession of startling first-
person vulnerability: “It’s hard to find a
friend.”
Petty had long proven himself to be a
writer of incisive economy — a rock ’n’ roll
Hemingway in tinted shades. He had a
knack for assembling simple, everyday
words into spacious and evocative phrases:
Even on the page, to say nothing of all he
brings to the recorded vocal, there’s an en-
tire short story in the five words, “And I’m
free/Free fallin’.”
One of the geeky joys of “Wildflowers &
All the Rest” is observing Petty at the abso-
lute peak of his songwriting powers, mak-
ing small, intelligent tweaks to these songs
in progress. Sometimes it’s a single world, a
few letters. During the sessions, the guitar-
ist and longtime collaborator Mike Camp-
bell had brought Petty a driving riff around
which he wrote a song he called “You Rock
Me” — tentatively, because he knew thatwas an awful title. In the collection’s liner
notes, Campbell recalls Petty keeping the
problem of that lyric on the back burner for
months, then one day he arrived at the stu-
dio with a monosyllabic eureka: wreck.
“You Rock Me” is a cliché. “You Wreck Me”
is a whole vibe.
Toggling back and forth between the
home recordings, alternate takes and the
completed album versions reveals Petty
subtly moving puzzle pieces around: A
hummed bridge melody from the title
track’s demo finds its home in “To Find a
Friend”; “Climb That Hill” moves through
two different arrangements before being
cut from the finished record. Perhaps most
fascinating is the evolution of “You Don’t
Know How It Feels,” which shifts from a
somewhat pensive home-recorded ballad
to, on the live album, an anthemic, smoke-
’em-if-you-got-’em crowd-pleaser. In be-
tween, the recording that made the track a
hit adds in the drummer Steve Ferrone’s in-
delible beat, as produced by Rubin, a co-
founder of Def Jam Recordings. “The na-
ture of the drum pattern, how loud the beat
was mixed, spoke to the hip-hop producer in
me at the time,” Rubin says in the liner
notes, “and gave a new flavor to the Petty
palate.”
Like its predecessor, “Wildflowers” was a
hit: It went triple platinum in less than a
year, making it Petty’s fastest-selling
record. Even its staunchest believers were
not expecting it to become such a smash. “I
think the reason I was surprised,” Rubin
said in Zanes’s book, “has to do with the ideaof a grown-up making a good record. There
were so few grown-ups making good
records that it really stood out, for just that
reason.”
Sometimes the songs arrive at certain
truths before their singer does. “I’ve read
that ‘Echo’ is my ‘divorce album,’ ” Petty
told his biographer, referring to his 1999 ef-
fort, “but ‘Wildflowers’ is the divorce al-
bum. That’s me getting ready to leave. I
don’t even know how conscious I was of it
when I was writing it.” By that time table,
then, “Wildflowers” is also prelude to the
darkness to come: Petty’s debilitating de-
pression, and a mid-90s heroin addiction he
kept hidden from almost everyone in his
life.
And so the deep despair is there, too, in
the rich soil of these songs. But what makes
it bearable, and makes the record so time-
lessly listenable, is everything else that’s
mixed in: humor, wisdom, a little randiness
and a palpable sense of hope. I still find the
final song on “Wildflowers,” “Wake Up
Time,” to be the saddest song Petty has ever
written: verses of last-call, midlife musings
(“You used to be so cool in high school, what
happened?”) followed by a chorus’s inner-
child yowl, “You’re just a poor boy, alone in
this world.” But it’s also one of his most
hopeful. By its end — in this big, calming
voice, as warm as the sun — he has become
a third character, assuming the role of the
kind of parent he always needed.
“It’s wake up time/Time to open up your
eyes/And rise/And shine.” That’s Petty
singing to himself again. Self-soothing with
the creation of yet another perfect song.LINDSAY ZOLADZ CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKThe Raw Roots of Petty’s ‘Wildflowers’
A deluxe collection of his blockbuster 1994 solo album
reveals the ache and despair of a man at a crossroads.
‘I’ve read that “Echo”
is my “divorce album,”
but “Wildflowers” is
the divorce album.
That’s me getting
ready to leave. I don’t
even know how
conscious I was of it
when I was writing it.’
TOM PETTY
TO WARREN ZANES,
HIS BIOGRAPHER
“Wildflowers and All the Rest” pulls
back the curtain on the making of
Tom Petty’s second solo album.RON BULL/TORONTO STAR, VIA GETTY IMAGESThe Detroit Institute of Arts said Wednes-
day that a three-month review of a whistle-
blower complaint against its director and
board chair found they had not skirted con-
flict of interest rules when the museum bor-
rowed a $5 million El Greco painting owned
by the director’s father-in-law.
The complaint centered on the painting
“St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata” that
the museum hung in its medieval and Ren-
aissance galleries. The director, Salvador
Salort-Pons, said that his family’s interest in
the painting was properly disclosed and
that he informed the institute’s chairman,
Eugene A. Gargaro, about the plan to lend it
to the institute.
Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit law firm
in Washington representing staff members,
said Mr. Salort-Pons should have taken
more care in avoiding potential conflict of
interest problems. In a complaint filed in
June with the Internal Revenue Service and
the Michigan attorney general, it said that
he should have recused himself completely
from the loan procedure and formally in-
formed the entire board as well as the public
about any family interest.
Whistleblower Aid said that a lack of
transparency surrounding the artwork
cloaked a situation that could financially
benefit the director and his family, since a
painting’s exhibition on the institute’s walls
could burnish the painting’s value.
But the review, by the Washington law
firm Crowell & Moring, found differently,
the institute said. “The investigation found
that the Board Chair and Director acted in
all respects with the best interests of the
DIA in mind and did not find that they or
any employee or volunteer at the DIA en-
gaged in any misconduct related to the alle-
gations included in the whistle-blower com-
plaint,” the museum said in a news release.
“There was no finding of any intention to
mislead or hide information, nor was there
any finding of any conflict of interest, vio-
lation of DIA policy or violation of applica-
ble law.”
The institute said the law firm’s report
would not be made publicly available.
In the news release, it said the firm “un-
dertook an exhaustive review of key docu-
ments, interviews with numerous personswith relevant knowledge, and review of ap-
plicable law, related peer group policies and
industry association guidance and best
practices.”
It said the review had identified possible
changes that could be made to the DIA’s
processes and policies in order to avoid the
appearance of conflicts of interest “and to
clarify potential policy ambiguities,” but it
said it could not give details about what
these are until the board has considered
them further.
John N. Tye, founder of Whistleblower
Aid, said in a statement that neither he nor
his clients were contacted by the law firm
that conducted the review. That and the fact
that the report was not being made public
“are sure signs that DIA is not serious about
addressing the conflicts of interest dis-
closed by our clients,” he said.
The complaint was filed at a time when
other concerns about Mr. Salort-Pons’s
management style and DIA’s treatment of
its Black employees were roiling the insti-
tute.
DIA said a separate investigation into
workplace culture, carried out by another
team from the same law firm, was nearing
conclusion.Detroit Museum Inquiry Finds No Misconduct
A whistleblower complained
about the loan of an El Greco.
By GRAHAM BOWLEYAn outside law firm hired by the Detroit
Institute of Arts found no conflict of interest
in the loan of a painting to the museum by
the museum director’s father-in-law.BRITTANY GREESON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES