Petty v. Springsteen

No one is famous by accident

I have been listening to the music of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen for nearly 50 years.  My introduction to Springsteen came via my Aunt Jenna, who gifted me a copy of Born to Run (1975) not long after its release. Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes (1979) was one of the first albums that I can remember purchasing with my own money (at a record store at the Tysons Corner mall in Virginia, if I’m not mistaken).  

Born a year apart, Springsteen and Petty have had roughly parallel careers, peaking commercially in the 1980s, when I was in high school and college.  (Petty died in 2017.)

So I’ve been thinking about Petty and Springsteen for a long time.  And, like a lot of people, I’ve always considered Springsteen the superior artist. But in the past couple of weeks I have come to a startling new conclusion: Petty is by far the better pop songwriter.

As Spotify shuffles through my favorite songs, it is hard not to sit up and take notice whenever it lands on a Petty track. As great a writer as he is, Springsteen has never created anything as catchy or as well-crafted as Here Comes My Girl, I Won’t Back Down, or The Waiting, to name just a few of Petty’s best. I think the New York Times got it right when it said that Petty was “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 entire short story in the five words, ‘And I’m free/Free fallin’.”

So why are there dozens of books about Springsteen and only a handful about Petty?  Why is Springsteen significantly more popular than Petty? (According to Wikipedia, Springsteen has sold roughly 150 million albums, compared to 80 million for Petty.)

The first answer is that there is more to being a rock star than great writing of course. At some visceral, undefinable level, Springsteen is just more appealing than Petty.  

But my theory about celebrity is that no one’s famous by accident.  Or, to put it another way, every famous person is as famous as they want to be. You always have a choice whether to say yes or no to any given media request. And I think that Springsteen was simply driven to say yes more often than Petty.

The people that are remembered the best tend to be the ones who have someone in their corner actively tending to their legacy. Call it the Jo van Gogh-Bonger principle. (Named for Vincent van Gogh’s sister-in-law, who made it her life’s work to help the artist become famous after his death.)  

There is no doubt that Springsteen has benefited enormously from Jon Landau’s presence in his life. Landau, a former Rolling Stone writer, took over management of Springsteen’s career in 1975.  It is safe to say that this was one of the best decisions Springsteen ever made.

Thanks in no small part to Landau, Springsteen has received exceedingly positive media coverage throughout his career.  A self-taught intellectual, Springsteen has done a good job of ingratiating himself with the journalists who covered him. (Perhaps there is also an element of east coast bias at work here. With much of the media headquartered in New York, Springsteen may have benefited from his roots in New Jersey, which probably made him seem more accessible, both literally and metaphorically, than Petty, who was raised in Florida and sometimes accused of being a “neo-Confederate”.)

In contrast to Springsteen, Petty wasn’t exactly reclusive or shy, but he may have been just a little bit less willing to play the game. He famously went to battle with the record industry, protesting his own label over the pricing of one of his albums. He stopped talking to his biographer as soon as the book was published. “Like Lou Reed, who said that if you tell journalists of the true mystic dimensions of songwriting they will ridicule you, Tom was reticent to shine much light into the mystery with most journalists,” says Paul Zollo, author of a book of interviews with Petty.

I don’t know that there is a tidy life lesson to be gleaned for us mortals from the gradations of mega-celebrity achieved by two rock and roll icons. Except perhaps this: fame and merit are rarely coterminous — the relationship between reputation and the quality of one’s work is almost always mediated by a host of factors, including how much self-promotion you are willing to do.