I hope Stephen Paddock wasn’t a Tom Petty fan…

I can’t much make sense of the Las Vegas shooting. And truthfully, there isn’t much sense worth making regarding Tom Petty’s death. He was an old rockstar who lived a rockstar life and had just returned from a particularly grueling stretch of his band’s 40th anniversary tour.

But these things happened on the same day, and I have to confront each event, as well as their simultaneity for two reasons: in regards to the Vegas shootings, I am a human. And in regard’s to Petty’s death, I am a huge Tom Petty fan.

Let’s start there: I am thankful for Tom Petty and his music. Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers are #1 and #2 on my all-time favorite albums list (the She’s the One soundtrack is#5). When I sang to my oldest son every night before I put him to sleep, it was “Alright for Now” and “Crawling Back to You.” Now, when I sing to my youngest every night before I put him to sleep, it’s “Wildflowers” and “Angel Dream.” Next to my father — a folk musician who also died at 66 — Tom Petty was and will remain the second most important musician of my life.

Petty’s songs were never part of the “soundtrack” to my life, but I always admired the way they very obviously could be part of the soundtracks for many others’ lives. Certainly, I have memories about listening to his music, but they are vague and fairly banal memories. This is fitting, in a way, because one of the primary reasons why I love Tom Petty is his attention to vague and fairly banal events and concepts. Certainly, his oeuvre is full of love songs and fight songs and plenty of driving songs; songs like “Runnin’ Down a Dream” and “Last Dance with Mary Jane” and “You Wreck Me” and “Refugee” and “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Songs that are solid. Songs that serve as evidence of his longevity and (relative) relevance.

Yet, for me, his best songs are those that sing of quieter, more boring moments. “Big Weekend,” for example, a song from his 2006 album Highway Companion. Coming nearly 30 years into his career, one would expect the “big weekend” Petty to be singing about here to be one of lavishness and opulence; he was, after all, rock and roll royalty at this point, having been inducted into the Hall of Fame four years earlier.

Yet, “Big Weekend” is a story about a guy, kind of a loser, who is on the road and passing through a town where some friends of his live “in a brick house/painted white and brown.” The guy cleans up his hotel room, and excitedly hits the road so he can hook up with his friends later “and go hit the bars.”

As a guy, kind of a loser, finishing up college in 2006, “Big Weekend” became my anthem when I would drive to visit all my college buddies that I missed after graduation. As I excitedly looked forward to hitting the bars, I guess I kind of glossed over the final lines of the song: “There’s times when I’m down/ And nothing’s to blame.” No, I needed a “big weekend/Kick up the dust…if you don’t run, you rust.”

I think this loser-y, everyman quality that is the foundation of so many of Petty’s songs is the very thing that sustained his 40 year career. He appealed to losers — like me — who probably thought they got a bum wrap in life, thought that they were owed something or that most of their problems were brought about by something or someone other than their own mediocrity. His music didn’t invent this sentiment, but the pervasiveness of the sentiment — and the ubiquity of folks who felt it — nurtured his music.

Recently, I’ve been struggling to come to terms with this aspect of Petty’s music. I’ve started to shudder at some of the more obvious and ham-handed appeals to some of his audience bases. I can look back at the thinly veiled pro-Confederate sentiments of “Southern Accents” and “Rebels” as being of a moment in Petty’s career in which his musical inclinations were pulled in equal parts between California and Florida, between the folksy and experimental sensibilities of the Byrds and the good ol’ boy Appalachia of Lynard Skynard. I can even forgive Petty’s obnoxious pander to pro-America vengeful patriotism when he played “Won’t Back Down” for the 9/11 memorial album America: A Tribute to Heroes, even though other Heartland rockers such as Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young opted for mournful and reflective pieces about love and loss.

But “Forgotten Man” from 2014’s Hypnotic Eye? Ostensibly a song about love lost, “Forgotten Man” was the song that triggered my suspicion of Tom Petty. I guess I sort of realized then that Petty was an artist still making radio-ready tunes 35 years into his career, so I know I certainly couldn’t have been the only one listening to him. He had a larger audience. And much of this larger audience had been listening to his songs very differently than I had been. This was part of Petty’s brilliance; one song for many listeners.

And this is why I worry that Stephen Paddock was a Tom Petty fan. Because the same stupid sentiment of feeling put upon, of feeling down and out with everyone and everything to blame but yourself, of feeling like it’s appropriate to hold a 150 year grudge over a wrongly fought and rightly lost war, of feeling like righteous and vengeful anger at an ill-defined enemy is more appropriate than compassion for victims, of looking out for “even the losers,” that same sentiment that nurtured Tom Petty’s longevity, and which he nurtured in and through his music, maybe that’s the same sentiment that nurtured Stephen Paddock. Maybe Paddock — like so many other mass murdering white men — thought himself forgotten, overlooked, underappreciated, and deserving.

I hope not, I really do. Because now’s a time when I’m down, and I really hope Tom Petty’s not to blame.