Learning to Fly

Some songs strut into the room wearing leather and a smirk. "Learning to Fly" walks in with a paperback and a weather eye, and it still owns the room. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers cut it for Into the Great Wide Open, the 1991 album that brought the band back under one roof after Petty's runaway solo record Full Moon Fever, and it opened the door with four chords and a shrug that felt like wisdom. F, C, A minor, G. That's the whole harmonic map. No bridge that shows off. No guitar solo that takes a victory lap. Mike Campbell's twelve-string still rings like a porch light left on, and the song has been a Heartbreakers calling card ever since MCA shipped the single on June 17, 1991.

Petty wrote it with Jeff Lynne, the Electric Light Orchestra architect who had become his favorite co-conspirator. The seed was not a metaphor workshop. Petty caught a television interview with a pilot who said the easy part was getting the wheels off the ground. The hard part, the pilot said, was coming down. That line stuck. Petty and Lynne were already in the habit of finishing songs the way other people finish lunch, a carryover from Full Moon Fever and from the Traveling Wilburys, where Petty sat between George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Lynne and somehow never looked out of place. "Learning to Fly" is what happens when a Gainesville storyteller borrows a cockpit proverb and refuses to dress it up.

The album sessions ran at Rumbo Recorders in Canoga Park and at Campbell's home studio, with Petty and Lynne producing. The credit sheet tells you how the track was actually built. Petty sings and plays acoustic guitar. Campbell stacks electric, acoustic, and that twelve-string. Howie Epstein adds the backing vocals that make the chorus feel like a small town singing along. Stan Lynch plays drums, but the kick drum on the record is not his. Lynne fills the low end and the shimmer himself: bass, acoustic guitar, an Oberheim OB-Xa, a sampler, and an Oberheim DMX drum machine. Lynch, a live-band drummer to the bone, did not love the brick-by-brick method. The friction was real, and it pointed toward his exit from the Heartbreakers a few years later. The song did not care. It topped Billboard's Album Rock Tracks chart, hit number 28 on the Hot 100, and climbed to number 5 in Canada. The flip side was "Too Good to Be True." Into the Great Wide Open itself landed in July 1991, peaked at number 13, and went platinum, with Roger McGuinn of the Byrds turning up on "All the Wrong Reasons" like a family member who still has the spare key.

Julien Temple directed the clip out in the airplane boneyard near Tucson, old fuselages bleaching in the desert, the band perched on wings that would never leave the ground again. While they were filming, Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway wandered into Petty's trailer. They were stalled on a movie called Arizona Dream. Petty took one look and cast them for the title-track video, the one where Depp plays Eddie Rebel, the kid with a tattoo and a one-way ticket to the machinery of fame. Gabrielle Anwar, Matt LeBlanc, and Chynna Phillips pass through that other film. "Learning to Fly" kept the graveyard and the idea. Petty had a long habit of handing directors the keys. "You Got Lucky" was a wasteland. "Don't Come Around Here No More" was a tea party gone wrong. This one just needed the sky and the wreckage.

Thomas Earl Petty was born October 20, 1950, in Gainesville, Florida, and he got out the way a lot of great American bands get out: through a rented house, a bad PA, and a refusal to take the hint. Mudcrutch came first, with Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench already in the circle, playing farm festivals and bar gigs until the trail led west. The Heartbreakers locked in during the mid-1970s, and the run that followed is the textbook. Petty went to war with his label over album pricing and won the kind of fight that made other songwriters stand up straighter. Damn the Torpedoes, Hard Promises, Long After Dark, Southern Accents, the campfire of Full Moon Fever, the Wilburys, Wildflowers, the long reunion tours. He played "Learning to Fly" for a national audience in the Super Bowl XLII halftime show in 2008, straw hair, red vest, and a shrug that said the song still worked in a stadium. He died on October 2, 2017, and the catalog did not go quiet. The official estate still runs the store, the fan club, and the vault, and Campbell and Tench have kept the songs on stages where people already know the second verse.

What the record keeps teaching is how little a great rock song needs if the voice is right. Petty never belts the chorus. He offers it, the way a friend offers the passenger seat. The lyric is about being unequipped and going anyway: no wings, bad maps, a landing you have not practiced. That is heartland rock with the porch light on, closer to a Byrds record than to a hair-metal anthem, and it is why the track still opens sets and closes nights on classic-rock radio without ever sounding like a museum piece. Lynne's gloss and the Heartbreakers' churn meet in the middle and shake hands. Campbell's twelve-string does the flying. The rhythm section keeps the runway level. Petty just tells you the truth and lets the four chords carry it.

Into the Great Wide Open is the sound of a band agreeing to try the new method without throwing out the old instruments. Some fans wanted the dirtier Jimmy Iovine years. Some wanted another Full Moon Fever. What they got was a bridge: cleaner, wider, still Southern, still suspicious of anybody selling a shortcut. "Learning to Fly" is the best argument the album makes. You can hear the drum machine if you lean in. You can also hear a man who had already been to the top and was more interested in the descent. Coming down, the pilot said, is the hard part. Petty made a hit out of admitting he was still working on it.

Spin the rest of the record after this one. "Kings Highway," "All the Wrong Reasons," the title track with its cautionary Hollywood comic strip. Then go back to Gainesville in your head and remember that the kid who started in Mudcrutch ended up co-writing with the man from ELO and still sounding like the guy at the end of the bar who happens to be right. That is the Petty trick, and "Learning to Fly" is one of the cleanest examples he ever left us.

Keep it here with the Zoo Freaks for the deep cuts, the B-sides, and the records that still sound like a radio station instead of a playlist. The home base is THE ZOO. The estate keeps the lights on at the official Tom Petty site, with news, the fan club, and the store. Find the band on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the archival diggers, The Petty Archives is the fan-run stack of clippings, session notes, and rabbit holes. Coming down is still the hard part. The record makes it sound easy.