The 100: Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, ECHO

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ 1991 album Into the Great Wide Open was the first CD I truly appreciated as a complete thought. I had loved other albums before that, but I thought every song on Into the Great Wide Open was a smash. I loved the art work. I obsessed over the liner notes. I started watching VH1 because they played the video for “Learning to Fly” more often than MTV did. Even though I fell under the spell of Nirvana and discovered punk rock and old Iron Maiden records shortly thereafter, Petty continued to be one of my guys.

Despite all of the far more caustic ideas being tossed around in rock music in the ‘90s, Petty had a pretty strong decade. He rode into the end of the century on the wings of his biggest hit “Free Fallin’” and followed up the double-platinum Into the Great Wide Open with the Rick Rubin-produced solo album Wildflowers, which spawned one of Petty’s biggest hits (“You Don’t Know How It Feels”) and netted him a bunch of awards. He was so bulletproof that he put out an album of leftovers masquerading as a soundtrack to a movie nobody cared about and it still won a bunch of critical acclaim and sold a million copies.

What I didn’t know at the time was that despite the incredible success Petty was experiencing against all odds, there was a ton of inner turmoil in both his personal and professional life. Longtime Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch fought with Petty over the direction of the music and was irritated he was left out of the Wildflowers sessions (it’s technically a Tom Petty solo album but every one of the Heartbreakers except Lynch plays on it) and he was gone by the time the Heartbreakers got back on the road (Dave Grohl very nearly took the job, but he only ever played a one-off with the band on an episode of Saturday Night Live). As that was going on, bassist Howie Epstein became more and more erratic thanks to his heroin abuse, which is why he’s missing from the cover photo of Echo (he plays on the record but was AWOL for the photo shoot, and Petty insisted they carry on without him). Epstein was eventually fired from the Heartbreakers in 2002 and died of a heroin overdose a year later. During that same stretch of time, Petty was also in the midst of a nasty divorce from his first wife, a trauma that led to his own problems with heroin (he went to rehab in 1999 but ultimately died of an opioid overdose in 2017).

Which leads us to Echo, released on April 13, 1999. I was the type of kid who took album releases really seriously, and I would start to anticipate stuff years before it actually came out. I vividly remember the mix of anxiety and thrill that came with counting down to new release day and the release of something I had been looking forward to. It was like Christmas morning every Tuesday, and I can still access the visceral memories of nervously tapping my foot all day at school before I could come home and ride my bike over to the record store to finally possess Red Hot Chili Peppers’ One Hot Minute or Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness or Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire or Bjork’s Homogenic.

I had that same level of breathless anticipation for Echo. I really loved the songs on She’s The One but there hadn’t really been a proper Petty album since WIldflowers in ‘94 and not a true Heartbreakers record since Into the Great Wide Open. I expected big things from Echo, and though I did not love the first single “Free Girl Now,” I still made my way to the record store as soon as school got out to nab it (I was driving by then, but the feeling was the same).

From the jump, I instantly adored Echo. The opening track, “Room at the Top,” is a slow-burning and melancholic amble that expands and contracts while somehow feeling both sad and triumphant. All of Petty’s best songs have that sort of weary sneer to them, and even though I was decades younger than Petty, it still felt relatable. I was the kind of kid who was always trying to buck the system but was liable to fall apart at any time, so I loved the vacillation between confident toughness and crippling self-doubt.

The bulk of Echo plays out the same way, and a lot of critics at the time were hesitant to endorse it because it was such a bummer. But I loved it because it was so shattering, even though as a 17-year-old doofus with no life experience I had no way of relating to the musings of a middle-aged rock star whose marriage was crumbling and whose life was being altered by the worst drugs in the universe. I certainly felt it, from the weary tragedies of the title track to the bluesy end-of-days lament “Lonesome Sundown” to the twitchy “Rhino Skin.” Even the moments that are a little more arena-friendly, like the aforementioned rave up “Free Girl Now” or the defiant album closer “One More Night, One More Day,” have that twinge of disaster lurking on the edges. The clear highlight of the record is “Swingin,” a breezy anthem about getting knocked down but not out. Maybe it’s because I have always felt preternaturally old, but I genuinely felt Echo was speaking to me, even if Petty definitely was not.

I will always associate Echo with a trip to France. My French class went to Paris and the northern countryside over our April break, and in retrospect it is wild that happened without any major deaths or international incidents. We had a lot of scheduled stuff and time on a bus while we were touring various chateaus in the Loire Valley, but the days we were in Paris were just left on our own. I had an absolute blast, and I spent my down time listening to the three CDs I had on me: The Roots’ Things Fall Apart, Manic Street Preachers’ This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (purchased at the Virgin Megastore in Paris because it had not yet been released in the United States), and Echo. There’s nothing French about those songs, but there is a certain brand of doomy existentialism beneath “About to Give Out” that I think would appeal to Sartre.

I still watch most every documentary about Tom Petty, and in one of those films he talks about how much he doesn’t like Echo. I can understand it, as it undoubtedly reminds him of a deeply terrible time in his life, and all those songs are about a woman who didn’t love him anymore. But whatever he was trying to do, I got it, and even though I’m only now approaching the age Petty was when he wrote Echo, I have always gotten it.