Rebels

The Zoo Crew has got "Rebels" up on the turntable right now, the opener from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' 1985 album Southern Accents, and if you are one of the Zoo Freaks riding along with us over at THE ZOO, you already know this one hits like a highway story told from the passenger seat. It is not a victory lap. It is a good old boy who is already in trouble in the first line, too far gone to follow anybody home, still trying to explain himself with one foot in the grave and one foot on the pedal. Petty told the Los Angeles Times, sitting in his house in Encino while the record was new, that he had been thinking about the average young guy down South who gets handed a whole way of living and is told that is how it has always been. The character is born with it lined up against him, and for some reason he still cannot get in line and play the part. Petty could relate. He said he never bought the idea of a life already laid out, and that music was one of the things that let him see the creases in the curtain early.

That is the funny thing about this cut. It opens a record that was supposed to be a whole Southern novel, and it nearly knocked the guitar out of the author's hands. Southern Accents started as a concept Petty wanted to chase after years of living in California. He had been touring the Deep South, jotting down words like rebels and trailer, and he meant to build a double album around the world he came from in northern Florida, closer to Georgia than to Miami Beach. "Rebels" was one of the songs that belonged to that idea, right alongside the title track and "Mary's New Car." The finished album only kept pieces of the plan. Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics walked into the sessions, the Heartbreakers came back into the middle of what had started looking like a solo project, and the double album idea went out the window. What stayed was the character sketch that leads the record off.

The studio fight over "Rebels" is the part the Zoo Crew always ends up telling. Petty had a demo he liked the minute he cut it, and he could not get the band version to sit the same way. He mixed the track for days. In January 1985, talking to writer Steven Rosen after the album was out, he said he had spent seven days on "Rebels" and still came up empty. One night in October 1984, down in the basement studio at the house, he backhanded a wall. He told people later it was not some furious smash, just a wrong swing at the plaster, and the wall won. The left hand swelled up. At the hospital they found several broken bones. Doctors put pins in, built a cast, and for a while the worry was that a right-handed guitar player might not get the fretting hand back. He later said the accident was unfortunate, but that it improved the album, because it made him sit back after a year and a half of being too deep in it, trying to rush a mix out for Christmas. He also said, plain as day, that the finished album take never quite rose to the demo. You can hear the pride in the chorus anyway. Hey, hey, hey, I was born a rebel, down in Dixie, on a Sunday morning.

The song rides on that inheritance line too. Even before my father's father, they called us all rebels. Petty was sketching a man who uses the family story to dodge the mess in front of him, the drinking, the tickets somebody else pays, the girlfriend who keeps coming back and keeps walking out. On the Southern Accents tour the band leaned hard into the Southern picture, plantation-style columns and a Confederate battle flag behind "Rebels," and Petty later said he would not do that again. He had meant the flag as a character's baggage, not a banner, and he came to see how badly that read in a room full of people. The song itself still works without the stage set. It is a rock and roll character who cannot swallow what he was handed and cannot quite leave it either.

If you want the long road that got Petty to a song like that, it starts in Gainesville, Florida, where Thomas Earl Petty was born in 1950. His old man sold insurance. Tommy was a quiet kid with a black turtleneck and Beatles boots, the kind of classmate people did not quite know what to make of until the music started. The turn came on a Friday night in 1964, when he saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. He said later that Elvis had already mattered, but the Beatles showed him the way out. You get your friends, you are a self-contained unit, and you make the music. The next day he was in a garage with a little group called the Sundowners, and he said it never stopped from that moment. He was about fourteen.

After a falling out with the Sundowners' drummer, he landed in the Epics with the Rucker brothers, Dickie Underwood, and Tom Leadon, whose older brother Bernie would end up in the Eagles. The Epics figured out fast that Petty was the real musician in the room. There is a Gainesville story that he skipped his own high school graduation to play a show in South Florida. He left Gainesville High around seventeen to chase the band. The Epics got more interested in the party than the work, which did not sit right with him, so he and Leadon walked and put an ad up at Lipham's music store. A drummer named Randall Marsh answered. Marsh's roommate came in carrying a Japanese guitar, kicked off "Johnny B. Goode," and that was Mike Campbell. Petty said they told him he was in the band before he had even decided he wanted to be. Benmont Tench came aboard on keyboards. They took the name Mudcrutch from the farm property where they played, and around Gainesville they got to be the band people actually came to see.

Mudcrutch pointed the car at Los Angeles and landed a deal with Leon Russell's Shelter Records, then came apart. Campbell and Tench were out west working with Ron Blair and Stan Lynch. Petty heard them, liked the band more than the idea of standing off to the side, and told them he already had a record deal, so they might as well go in with him and skip the whole try-to-make-it part. That was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Gainesville guys in California, still playing like a closed unit so that when you heard the drums you knew it was their drummer. The 1976 debut took its time, but "Breakdown" and "American Girl" put the Rickenbacker jangle and the Southern drawl in the same room, and the road from there ran through Damn the Torpedoes, a public fight with the label over album price, and eventually the long, bruised sessions that produced Southern Accents. "Rebels" is the song where the Gainesville kid looks back at the ones who never got two hours down the highway, and admits he almost broke his own hand trying to get the story right.

The estate still keeps the porch light on at the official Tom Petty website, where the Southern Accents track list still leads with "Rebels" and the old lyrics sit right there on the site. The band's official pages are still posting for the Zoo Freaks who never left: Facebook, Instagram, and X. If you want the room where the fans actually talk, Tom Petty Nation is the big active Facebook group, recognized by the estate as the official fan club. Diggers can also wander The Petty Archives, which keeps the 1985 interviews that tell the wall story in Petty's own words. Spin it again. One foot on the pedal.