Into the Great Wide Open

Out of Gainesville and straight into the machinery of the record business, Tom Petty spent a career writing about the kid who shows up with a guitar, a tattoo, and no map. "Into the Great Wide Open," the title cut from the 1991 album of the same name, is that story told in one long camera pan. Eddie rents a room, gets a tattoo, meets a girl, learns to play guitar, and gets signed by a man who says he can make the boy a star. The chorus does not promise glory. It just drops him into the open with a rebel's pose and, as the line goes, no clue. That is pure Petty: a short story set to a twelve-string, dry as a Florida highway and sharper than the industry it is describing. On THE ZOO we play the album version the way it sat on the MCA disc, Jeff Lynne's harmonies tucked in behind the Heartbreakers, Mike Campbell's guitar answering every verse like a second narrator.

Thomas Earl Petty was born October 20, 1950, in Gainesville, Florida, and he got out the only way a restless kid with a bad ear for authority could get out: in a band. Mudcrutch was the first vehicle, a southern-rock outfit that included Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench and lived for a stretch on a place the locals called Mudcrutch Farm. They packed up for Los Angeles in 1974 chasing a deal, got one, lost it, and came back as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The 1976 debut carried "American Girl" and "Breakdown." "You're Gonna Get It!" followed, then the 1979 masterpiece "Damn the Torpedoes," with "Refugee" and "Don't Do Me Like That" turning a regional band into a national argument. Petty fought his label over the price of "Hard Promises," refused to let the album become a $9.98 list item, and won. He kept winning on his own terms through "Long After Dark," the synth-stained "Southern Accents," and the solo detour "Full Moon Fever" in 1989, produced with Lynne and loaded with "Free Fallin'" and "I Won't Back Down." The Traveling Wilburys sat in the middle of that run, Petty trading lines with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Lynne as if a supergroup were just another Gainesville rehearsal. He died October 2, 2017, after an accidental overdose, and the catalog did not go quiet. The estate still runs the official home at tompetty.com, where the fan club, the store, and the Buried Treasure archive live side by side.

The album "Into the Great Wide Open" arrived July 2, 1991, the Heartbreakers' eighth studio record and the second full collaboration with Lynne after "Full Moon Fever." Campbell co-produced. The band on the sessions was the classic lineup: Petty, Campbell, Tench, Howie Epstein on bass and high harmony, Stan Lynch on drums. "Learning to Fly" was the lead single and the radio monster. The title track came next, released in September, and it did the rock-radio job cleanly, climbing to number four on Billboard's Album Rock Tracks chart while stalling at number 92 on the Hot 100. In Canada it reached the low twenties. None of that chart math explains why the song stuck. It is a three-verse screenplay. Eddie shows up in Hollywood, falls for a girl with a tattoo, picks up a guitar, and gets handed a contract by a man in a suit. The suit promises the world. The world, in Petty's hands, is a billboard, a limo, and a future that narrows the minute the ink dries. Petty told Paul Zollo he did not plan the story. He was playing the chords and the kid named Eddie walked in. He carried the idea around, trimmed it, and kept the black humor. The song is light on its feet and mean underneath, which is the Petty balance from "Even the Losers" forward.

The line everybody quotes, "a rebel without a clue," did not come out of thin air. According to Bob Mehr's book on the Replacements, Petty lifted the cadence from "I'll Be You," the 'Mats single that sighs "a rebel without a clue." Petty heard it, liked the snap, and folded it into Eddie's biography. That is the kind of quiet trade classic rock has always run on, one band's aside becoming another's hook. The rest of the lyric is his own screenplay. Eddie's manager becomes a star-maker, the girl becomes a fixture in the photographs, and the last verse leaves the ending unwritten on purpose. Petty liked stories that stopped before the moral. He had lived a version of the trip west himself, Mudcrutch rolling out of Gainesville with a goodbye show at Westside Park to raise gas money, and he knew the wide open could just as easily be a parking lot behind a club that would not pay.

The video is the other half of the record, and Petty said so. Julien Temple directed it, and the shoot happened because another movie had stalled. Emir Kusturica was filming "Arizona Dream" with Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway when the production paused. Temple had the actors, Petty had the song, and the clip became a six-and-a-half-minute short. Depp plays Eddie, in what was his first starring turn in a music video. Dunaway is the manager. Gabrielle Anwar is the girlfriend. Matt LeBlanc shows up as the next kid in the tattoo chair. Terence Trent D'Arby and Chynna Phillips pass through the frame. Petty opens the book as narrator, then doubles as the tattoo artist, the roadie named Bart, and a reporter. Campbell hands Eddie an award. Tench plays the producer. Epstein sells the motorcycle. Lynch is the doorman who will not let the manager in. Petty's own manager, Tony Dimitriades, cameos as the A&R man with the pen. Temple shot so much footage that the band went back into the track, re-edited and remixed it, and stretched the song so the pictures would fit. Petty later called it one of the only times a video left him feeling the job was finished, and he said people asked about turning the thing into a feature. He also noted, with the dry grin intact, that he had never met so many women as he did once Depp was on the set. Depp and Petty stayed friends long after the shoot. The clip still plays like a warning label on the dream Eddie is buying.

Put the song next to the rest of the album and the argument gets wider. "Learning to Fly" is the hopeful exit. "King's Highway" is the road. "All or Nothin'" and "Two Gunslingers" keep the western costumes. "Into the Great Wide Open" is the caution sitting in the middle of the track list, third song in, right where a listener who bought the disc for the single would find it. Lynne's production is the same clean, stacked-harmony frame he had used on "Full Moon Fever," but the Heartbreakers are more present here than on the solo record. Epstein's bass walks under the verses. Tench's organ holds the room. Campbell answers the vocal with the kind of guitar line that sounds like it was written in the same sitting as the lyric. The album reached the teens on the Billboard 200 and went platinum. It was not the explosion of "Damn the Torpedoes" or "Full Moon Fever." It was the band proving the second act with Lynne still had songs, and that Petty could still write a character you recognized from the line outside the club.

For a station built on album rock and the long story between the hits, this is house music. THE ZOO keeps the deep cuts and the title tracks in the same rotation as the songs that owned the request lines, because the point of freeform is the room around the single. You can dig the whole trail, from the Gainesville years through the Wilburys and the later Heartbreakers records, over at thezoorocks.com, where the station lives without the commercials and without the countdown clock. The official channels still post from the vault: the band's page on Facebook, the photo stream at Instagram, and the updates on X. Fans who want the session notes, the rare sleeves, and the argument over which take belongs on the record keep a deep shelf at The Petty Archives. The Gainesville side of the map, the houses and the rooms where Mudcrutch learned the set, is walked out at tompettytrail.com. Eddie never got a map. The rest of us did, and it still starts with a twelve-string and a kid who thinks the wide open is going to stay wide.