This is the first in a series of little love letters I am writing to things that make me happy, or have made me happy in the past. Today, Depot Dad rings the train bell for The Waiting by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers.

You can have your Beatles. You can have your Stones. For this child of the 70s, Tom Petty is the center of my rock and roll sensibilities. And for my money, it just doesn’t get any better than his 1981 album Hard Promises. Now Tom has been making great music for over thirty years, so I am well aware of the absurdity of singling out an individual album, let alone a single song to represent his amazing talent. But I can’t help it. Though I love almost everything Tom has done, one song stands apart as the Capital City of Tom Petty Country. That song is The Waiting.

Growing up in the suburbs of west Omaha, Nebraska, I can tell you that if you wanted to have fun, you had to get good at making your own fun. And if you wanted to dream big dreams, about yourself and your future, you could hardly do better than the solution I found in 1981. I would grab my big yellow Sony cassette Walkman, some cheap stereo headphones, ask to borrow my sister’s ten-speed road bike, and then head out of the suburbs to lose myself in miles and miles of recently paved, though still unused, roadway that cut through cornfields that extended out to the horizon. And the tape of choice during this particular summer was Tom Petty’s Hard Promises.

I love Tom for his straight ahead approach to music and his lyrics that speak to the everyman. And yet, compared to everything else I was hearing on the radio, Tom also sounded fresh, honest, young, and displayed a certain amount of hunger. The same qualities I imagined were in me too. To this day when I hear The Waiting, I am transported to the land of big skies and big plans. I remember feeling the youth in my legs as I pedaled furiously in the hot midwest summer.

As I’ve gotten older, it has been fun to see what favorite songs stay with me and what favorite songs quietly disappear into the ether, rarely to be revisited. The Waiting has been a mainstay in my music collection since that summer and I don’t think it is going away any time soon.

Recently, a very good documentary on the history of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers was released on DVD. Here is a little excerpt with Tom commenting on The Waiting, as well as a surprising live clip of Eddy Vedder singing with Tom in concert. Where can I get the rest of that clip? They sound amazing!



Damn, listening to that makes me happy. I think this Depot Bell series is going to be good for me. I hope it will be good for you too.

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