TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS Southern Accents (MCA)

by Mitchell Cohen

Pretty soon, it will be an established practice for earnest rockers to start off albums by announcing the circumstances of their birth. Springsteen didn’t do at ail badly by declaring his native citizenship, and now Tom Petty, proudly but not without ambivalence, kicks off Southern Accents shouting “Hey, hey, hey, I was born a rebel.” Not as in James Dean, as in Johnny Yuma. This is Petty’s roots album, the one where he visits the locale of his past, restates grievances that have accumulated over generations. The confederate flags are surely gonna unfurl below the MasonDixon line when Petty does “Rebel” onstage, but the LP isn’t as simple as all that. Petty, in his earliest bands, may have emulated the Allman Brothers, and he may evoke the name of Lynyrd Skynyrd on the flip side of the new single, but the accents here aren’t exactly orthodox Southern rock.