There’s a great moment in the Tom Petty documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream: he’s just made it from Florida to Los Angeles, and as I recall it, steps into a phone booth to page through the directory when serendipitously, on the floor between his feet, he finds a sheet of paper listing the phone number of every major record label. Great, he thinks, this saves him a lot of time and trouble. Then the fact of this list makes clear the commonness of his dream and his odds dawn on him: He’s not the first guy with this plan for rock n’ roll stardom, nor the only.
