My Middle Name Is Earl - The Official ILM Track-By-Track TOM PETTY Listening Thread

Here we go. From Florida to Heaven.

https://i.discogs.com/BTKO_wl8Hx8SV2OCJxHWNjU1SiLXfBcONAPY0SSwmN8/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:402/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9BLTI2MDU3/NS0xMTEwNTcxMjQ2/LmpwZw.jpeg

Rockin' Around (With You)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB_eHi7HcTM

It's 1976. The first track on your debut album is 2 minutes long. You are not prog. Are you punk? We are intrigued...

hey, this guy is good...

a sampler of things to come. its comfortably retro and yet...there is something new about it.

i HIGHLY recommend the oral history book of Tom and the band if you haven't read it and dig him. its one of the best rock books i've ever read. compelling!

also, it goes without saying, Petty in the wild/pictures/ephemera/anecdotes welcomed and appreciated.

"Rockin' Around (With You)": Nice little song. Really reminds me how close style-wise Petty and Dwight Twilley were at the time. Tench throwing in a little synth action near the end to remind you that it's 1976.

yeah that synth thing is funny. just shows up out of nowhere.

tom kinda got the career dwight wanted? is that unfair? petty don't mind.

I like it, but there's not really much to this song; if you played a demo of it on a piano or acoustic guitar it would likely seem underwhelming. Songs like this one are highly dependent on good production, good arrangements, and good playing; fortunately, it has all three.

stan lynch kicks ass on this song

i dig rockin around with you too tom

cool hangdog bassline too, i guess that's ron blair?

punk velocity, anyway. maybe his first nyc gig was cbgb?
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Bc8AAOSwXVJjWtqv/s-l1600.jpg

Y'all need that Paul Zollo book where Petty discusses every song he's written.

man, those are some good bands. suicide commandos. reddy teddy. i like that album of theirs that willie alexander produced a lot. kinda proto-punk/glam. laughing dogs. they were cool. for tuff darts fans. earth opera! can't believe they were still around in 1976. but i dig their records. the good rats were rockin' back then with a major label deal. honey davis was a weirdo. his albums are not for everybody. i never dug the shirts despite loving annie golden in hair. they were pretty boring. and then you have the ramones and television coming soon. and orchestra luna. everyone should own their album. i think me and andy zax are the only big fans of that album of people i know though. i own two dirty tricks albums but i don't play them much.

needless to say, suicide commandos debut one of the great punk/rock albums made in this country in the 70s.

that might be the only thing i have in common with tom petty. i graced the stage at CBGB once. dressed as a witch. matador NMS showcase. pizzicato five/chavez/customized/barbara manning/bunnybrains.

well that and we both worship the byrds.

Also you have a short "o" in your first name and short "e" in your last name.

hey yeah!

wait, that should be Kustomized, right? i don't remember what they sounded like...

I’m not a fan other than full moon fever so I won’t be weighing in, but I’m really looking forward to ilx analysis on this !

I am not sure how much I know about anything pre-Torpedoes except "Breakdown."

Dude was cool as fuck, but I secretly believe he peaked in 1979. Musically speaking, I mean.

how much might tom's early success owe to his uncanny evocation of grown-up Bad News Bear (1976) Kelly Leak (Jackie EARLE Haley)

I just watched Jackie in a terrible action movie. He deserves better. He's a really good actor but he does look like a fucked up bad guy now. he's awesome.

Breakdown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqxns-JTTqA

His first hit! I forget how slow it is.

i'll be back wth thoughts. gotta do stuff.

Maybe they only showed the theatrical trailer in Jamaica!

hey yeah!

wait, that should be Kustomized, right? i don't remember what they sounded like...

"Breakdown": The rare instance where imo the Grace Jones version is not funkier.

go ahead and give it to 'em

this sounds like a Steely Dan song

it doesn't really remind me of anyone weirdly! it just reminds me of tom petty. maybe fleetwood mac at the start...

the keyboard riff is objectively similar to "pretzel logic." the bass moves differently tho

(and it's not even that similar, just both electric key riffs in the key of a minor. petty moves from a minor to g major, the dan have a more intricate am to bm7/a to amin7)

Basically like the Volcano Suns. They’re great and the Suicide Commandos Make A Records is one of the best records of all time. I bought the short lived Mercury CD reissue in ‘96.
― from a prominent family of bassoon players (Boring, Maryland), Wednesday, February 28, 2024 9:13 AM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Make a Record is just an amazing, wonderful record I wish more people had heard

"Breakdown": On the verses, Petty sounds like how Springsteen looked in '73-4. Phil Seymour on backing vox! Electric Piano!

Wiki:

"Breakdown" was a song written and recorded for the band's debut album. Initially, the song had lead guitarist Mike Campbell with a distinct guitar lick being played only near the end of the song. While playing it back one night, Tom Petty and Dwight Twilley, a friend of Phil Seymour, were in the studio, and Twilley enjoyed it. He suggested that the lick should be used throughout the song, and Petty obliged. At 2 AM, he gathered the Heartbreakers to join him in re-recording the song. Their final take was seven to eight minutes long, but it was pared down to 2 minutes and 39 seconds on the album. Guests on the song's recording include guitarist Jeff Jourard, a common collaborator with the band in their early days, and Phil Seymour, who sings backing vocals.

One of those great live album moments nobody ever talks about is the audience singing the first two verses to Petty on the extended version Pack Up The Plantation!:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNxfPAF1frM

wow i don't think i knew that phil seymour was on that. love him. i wanna hear that original 8 minute version now.

Yeah, Seymour is on this and "American Girl", plus Twilley steps in on "Strangered In The Night".

for some reason its just nice to know that those guys were friends. phil, dwight, and tom. all very talented.

there's a little bit of cod reggae going on in the vocals. i wonder if this was originally envisioned to have more of a reggae feel. man right out of the gate these guys were great arrangers and players. love their early dedication to keeping things short.

i think i remember reading richard meltzer, re. some BOC recording, saying "i know it's alright but i love when rock bands tell me anyway." i thought about that here.

i don't hear cod reggae, more an exaggerated 50s rock styling a la buddy holly (but filtered thru petty's drawl)

The backing vocals are very present on "Breakdown." It's almost like there's a whole other song there.

for true cod reggae Petty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwGFoGsEGMU

i love the pace/pacing of "breakdown". it just creates this great mood of expectation. i want to know what's going to happen next! that , to me, is key to being a good artist.

I love how these two songs would be a perfect way to start a live set: the quick rave up to get the audience going, with room to patter over it even, and then settle into "Breakdown."

In The Wild: I'm hosting my weekly pub quiz tonight. For music, I use an ever-growing Spotify playlist curated by myself and several other hosts that is currently weighing in at over 1300 songs. I use it in Shuffle mode, which just spit out "American Girl" and then "Girls" by Dwight Twilley, which of course features Mr. Petty.

my primary exhibit that I use to demonstrate his association with 1976-77 era punk is his inclusion here:

https://www.discogs.com/release/2233401-Various-Whitmans-Punk-Sampler

Their final take was seven to eight minutes long

god I hope this gets released someday

dammit i didn’t even know you had started!

Rockin Around:
To me this is the Heartbreakers doing a kind of punk-ish ode to Buddy Holly & The Crickets. the skiffley kinda beat and that plaintive-yet-cool vocal … he gets all the girls. I love it. And the retro vibe is the mission statement for them

Breakdown:
There is a fever in the 70’s and that fever is reggae
Mike Campbell’s gorgeous guitar stings with Tench’s fucking beautiful keyboards on this. Petty’s angst hurling itself into the chorus. And it is only the second track and it is alreadt insane how so many genuiuses are in a single band together and sounding THIS good on their FIRST ALBUM?
also the production on Breakdown is so exactly the sound of 70’s radio to me, it sounds like standing in my childhood kitchen.
ugh i will love it til the day i die. this song is like a drug, intoxicating rhythym & swagger right out of the gate

My wife put on the Live Anthology box while making lunch today. We listened to Discs 2 and 3 together. It ruled.

anyway here’s lads

https://media.gettyimages.com/id/73998958/photo/tom-petty-the-heartbreakers.jpg?s=2048x2048&w=gi&k=20&c=-K753J3l35JogyLkn29lZOV7c1KSNQQkmIX_uoskMMo=

xpost Live Anthology is a gift that keeps on giving, love it so much!!

now with more ceiling tiles & wider pants!

https://media.gettyimages.com/id/73998942/photo/photo-of-tom-petty-the-heartbreakers.jpg?s=2048x2048&w=gi&k=20&c=KZ0nRfLYAfM_UnYIrhAr4JBbfEYUozF0g2tQqyLKadU=

Thank you for this thread, definitely here for it.

It makes sense that "Breakdown" was originally 8 minutes, it feels longer than it is to me — it has this great languorous groove, I'm always surprised that it's under 3 minutes. Also, the Grace Jones cover is good.

That photo looks so much like "freshman dorm" group pics.

let's not forget the insert tha tcame with teh album! (credits on back)

https://i.discogs.com/GwIH5C3R316WfJfwP_4uxA22ZrKYiT8Z-zZikeatIs8/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:484/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTMxNzgw/MTUtMTUwNzI0NDcy/Mi05Mzk2LmpwZWc.jpeg

maybe fleetwood mac at the start...

there's a LOT of fleetwood mac in this one. the bassline. the electric piano. the feeling that stevie nicks is about to walk up to the mic any minute now. i like tom's voice better on the lone verse (or maybe it's two short verses in a row?) than on the choruses. i wouldn't have minded if he'd written another verse.

this is one hell of a debut single.

Just realized another Steely Dan track this sorta sounds like is "Babylon Sisters".

happy to see this thread, Scott! and great comments so far.

i own five Petty albums, but a big part of that is that my partner has deep love for him, inseparable from Gainesville pride. and i came in the door as someone who'd always enjoyed all his hits, and made some halting effort to get into Hard Promises a couple years earlier. point is, I've spent a good amount of time listening to these albums, but usually in the background while we're doing chores or playing Dr. Mario. always like them when they're on, but I've never fully committed to him as a freestanding fan.

at this stage, what i hear is an especially strong and tight bar band, getting recorded by people who know how to get that their strong sense of groove on tape. a precious combination. the deep, smoke-hazy Mac vibe of "Breakdown" is definitely its biggest strength... it's *got* hooks, but they're less essential. i'd normally vote for Christine over Stevie but this could be fascinating with some ethereal grace wafting its way around the organ lines. I do love those lush 70s backing vocals tho.

Petty's own vocal take is all over the map to me... feels like he's going for "Italian street tough" after seeing too many gangster movies, and then when he peels that back he doesn't sound like *himself* either. whereas on "Rockin' Around With You," there's no mistaking him for a second, those oh-so-relatable layers of slightly reedy, slightly scruffy, Dylan-inflected southern Everyman. looking forward to spending some time with this guy.

Great start to the thread, everybody. I know all the hits and I have Damn the Torpedos and Long After Dark, but don't know the deep cuts outside those two albums.

Doctor, I agree on strong and tight, but "bar band" seems unfair at this point. The track is layered, *almost* too layered. To me it feels ilvery much like a 70s studio track in the Rumours style.

I would actually argue that Mr. Petty got way more bar-band-like later in his career, when he was already established and had nothing to prove.

Hmm, yeah. I guess I'm trying to get at a sense that these tracks feel like some extra high quality ambience for hanging out and having a good time, without necessarily grabbing me by the ear.

"Rockin'..." also has this quality where, it was a really good choice to make it track one, where it feels like an energy-boosting curtain raiser, because I could see it feeling like kind of a "breather" deep cut as track nine.

Hometown Blues

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN_j_tu5nqo

there is no picture sleeve for the breakdown single in the u.s. but there is this nice german one. also the debut album came out in november so worldwide a lot of the singles came out in early 1977.

https://i.discogs.com/BStlpVkG4Fr3GW7kCPqcvsCSA0kilLpiJl2oik9iHH0/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTE3OTcw/NTItMTUyMDc1Nzcy/OC0xODQyLmpwZWc.jpeg

I love these little ditties on the debut, he kind of stopped writing them after this. I guess the two big singles on the second album are kind of in this mode, too, but after that it's very sporadic. (Full Moon Fever includes a couple catchy little throwaways, like "Yer So Bad.") Anyway, this song's kind of a nothing but a totally likable one.

it is indeed a likable nothing. cutesy tom.

just jumping in. Have never actually heard the debut album.

"Rockin' Around (With You)" is not - reminds me a bit of like VG said rockabilly new wave impulse - "Someday Someday" by Marshall Crenshaw comes to mind

"Breakdown" I've heard so many times....one thing about this song is it really feels like it's got one foot in the 70s and one foot in the 80s, like the chorus feels 80s but that theme from Taxi Rhodes is so 70s

Yeah, the debut album in particular feels very '70s AM radio. Notable how much he's not trying to be Aerosmith or Zep or whatever the Rock Band template was in 1976.

Looking forward to tomorrow's discussion of the second-greatest song on the album ...

Hometown Blues - you gotta dance to this to truly enjoy it, you can’t catch the vibe just in headphones. It’s a groovy little two-stepper!

"Hometown Blues" feels a bit throwaway, like a Springsteen throwaway that got left off of The River or something, it's nice enough

Rosanne Cash's cover was my intro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk6p9QKU4ok

It's a very pleasant throwaway! Nice vibe laid on the skeleton of a country-rock song. The drum track is really basic though - some rhythmic variation or really cracking fills could take this a lot higher. I wonder if this is a basic track they laid down early in the sessions, and never had time to go back to? That Cash cover is pleasant and gives a sense of how it would work with a little more muscle. (It still struggles to find a really punchy way through the "if they don't or if they do" bit, which feels like it should really hit harder as a hook>). Linda Ronstadt would have done well with this too.

This time, the Fleetwood Mac connection is more hypothetical: boy would this work well as one of those maniacal late-night Buckingham songs on Tusk.

all i can hear now is a hypothetical stevie nicks singing "breakdown". she would be soooooo perfect for it.

Hey, she begged Petty several times to let her officially join the band.

never really thought of tom as a deep cuts kind of guy. most of the albums are front-loaded with hits, and with some exceptions, back-loaded with songs that are not super memorable. "hometown blues" is kinda like that, pleasant but slight.

happy to have this listening thread to see how wrong i am.

He so rarely offends that it's worth the effort.

oh man there is so much non-hit goodness on his records!

especially the later ones.

yeah there are def deep cuts i like. the second heartbreakers album is interesting because the hits open up side 2, instead of side 1

probably stating the obvious here but

wrt these deep cuts that are seemingly simpler than the band’s obvious chops
is because if their absolute worship of 50’s rock n roll. elvis, buddy holly, chuck berry all of it. petty especially. diehard early elvis fan, met him as a kid, stars in his eyes the works

he is not coming at his music in the 70’s solely to compete with the other new sounds or improve on punk or whatever

it’s so he can wear a guitar like his childhood heroes and when they do this simpler stuff it’s Tom & the band dressing up in cowboy outfits playacting roy rogers or whatever. this is what makes them happy, creating songs that sound like things THEY heard on the radio

it’s not a bug; it’s a feature

obviously they do create new sounds & explore new territory as well.

i’m just speaking to these little 2 minute throwaways. they’re not nothing.

"Hometown Blues": A thing about the first two Petty records is they are truly the work of a Saloon (not Bar) Band made good: the songs are occasionally great, and never less than good. This one falls in the latter camp, a nice little thing that hops along, doesn't wear out its welcome, and shows some promise of better things down the road (out of said Hometown).

ace post, VG.

it really is

yes, well put! i'm glad to have that framework going forward.

agreed, great post vg

Yep! And all of that is also key imo to him eventually becoming a pop star — he never stopped loving radio singles.

Rosanne Cash's cover was my intro

mine too.

tp's version is very very springsteen outtake or b-side, but also better than i remember it, and also also vg is one hundred thousand percent correct.

all i can hear now is a hypothetical stevie nicks singing "breakdown". she would be soooooo perfect for it.

exactly. and now i'm wondering if she ever *has* sung it. last time i saw her, a year and a half ago in asbury park, she did "free fallin" and "stop draggin my heart around" and she walked onstage to "runnin down a dream" and walked off to "learning to fly."

When Stevie guested on the Heartbreakers' 30th Anniversary Tour, she took the lead on "I Need To Know":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnpdZU8lhus

fantastic

She sang with them and Bob Dylan on their Australian tour in 1986 at her coke-fueled nadir and it's petty good.

The most shocking thing about Petty's late-career drug use is that *Stevie* intervened to tell him to knock it off.

The heroin addiction of the late '90s between his divorce and meeting his new wife shocked me when I read the Zanes bio. He'd been open about the band dabbling with coke during the L.A. Southern Accents period when, according to him, they had two years off from touring for the first time in their existence but -- yeah, wow.

It was extra shocking because it's not in the Zollo conversations book *or* the four-hour doc. Apparently in the case of the latter he requested it not be included.

"and it's petty good."

petty good is good enough for me.

I am not a member of the Church of Stevie but that performance rips.

wow, she sounds great! She generally should've rocked more than a little.

Breakdown has a bit of a Dire Straits thing going on too.

A shared JJ Cale influence, no doubt.

What startles me now about "Breakdown" is how young he sounds.

The Wild One, Forever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US-pEqevjvc

forgotten how much i like this song. its all tension. it never really explodes. and its not really a ballad either? who does THIS sound like from the 70s???? and could Stevie sing it?

*Could Stevie sing it?* is the new sub-genre of Petty songs.

it also sounds like a prelude to "Even The Losers". wonder if they ever did them back to back live.

I love this one. Evocative lyrics, I love the little piano line. I also think this is first in a line of Petty songs that pair kind of spectral verses with more chugging, hooky choruses — not ballads, right, they're moody rock songs. Thinking also of "A Woman in Love," "Straight Into Darkness," "Runaway Trains," even "Don't Come Around Here No More" kind of fits that template. All bittersweet relationship songs, like this is his mode for romantic reflection.

Stevie on John Stewart's Gold gives a good hint of what her "Breakdown" would sound like. Similar shuffle, similar Rhodes.

Oh, I could totally hear Stevie Nicks singing it. That piano melody is exactly the kind of thing she was writing in the late '70s and early '80s.

This gets by on the tightness of the arrangement and Petty's singing, some of the most passionate of his early career.

there's a touch of 50s ballad filtered through early springsteen romanticism. also maybe bob seger dramatics.

i did think of seger singing this. though it would have been more overblown.

and bruce would have added sleigh bells like he was writing a christmas carol to his sweetie.

specifically 1:16 thru 1:22 is springsteen.

i appreciate your specificity!

i think this is going to wind up being my favorite petty album.

i was also thinking Seger! like if he tried to write "More Than A Feeling."

great earnest slow-burning feels on this one. like a lot of this record, I've always liked it when it's on, but never given it the attention it deserves. so far, giving several listens to these songs each day has been a very enjoyable experience.

the 1997 fillmore version of this song made me appreciate it a lot more

The heroin addiction of the late '90s between his divorce and meeting his new wife shocked me when I read the Zanes bio

yeah that really came out of nowhere, had no idea. btw, if anyone itt is thinking about a tom petty book it's a great biography.

"The Wild One, Forever": The secret gem on this album. Also feels like it would have been a perfect last track, or live set-closer (maybe it was, I dunno). But of course there's something else in store for us at the end of this one.

DON: When we heard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for the first time, we felt like we'd taken a time machine. It was like watching us at the dawn of the seventies. They had passion, they could play, and they could write songs. I knew Tom, who's become a good friend, was a lifer.

GLENN: When they came out with "American Girl" I said, "Henley! These guys have stripped it back to the essence. Girls, man! Girls, girls, girls!"

DON: Well, yeah.

LOLZ

Which reminds me: we're only four tracks deep on *the first* Petty album, and every plain album cut so far (and coming up too, for that matter) beats the pants off every Eagles album cut from their first two.

GLENN: ...and we would now about pants and beating off -- especially Don!

DON: Well, ye -- Hey!

Which reminds me: we're only four tracks deep on *the first* Petty album, and every plain album cut so far (and coming up too, for that matter) beats the pants off every Eagles album cut from their first two.

This is because every Eagles single is good to great, and every Eagles song that wasn't a single is trash. I thought this was universally understood.

don't remind us. believe me, we know.

Some of us wear our scars from the 2013 listening party proudly.

*eaglesflashback* *uncontrollabletwitching*

"CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG...."

“Wild One, Forever” is one of my alltime favorites

- the emotion & angst in Petty’s voice

- it’s so evocative! the lyrics are specific & vague at the same time, so you can picture the characters but fill in the blanks of the story/what happened on your own … his voice tells you how it felt.

- a 50’s trope but with lowkey great powerful swaps, ie making the female character the Wild One
+ the line “I'll never get over how good it felt / When you finally held me”
Petty not afraid to be vulnerable or emotional & be the one who is pining for a wild one

long story short Leather Tuscadero broke Tom’s heart

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFw4YR6IV7WMukLxfarXoQ_g_CLY6PQBV1FefhVXBQrsdpZiZw3AhkU3o-hripn_EVRwhVtK050ZzZvjN18zlRGtJFtMLHSdpnPTmCWaT0DNGuiLscT21S_U6puNLiBDnMlJdTNExnWvlZP4kFyameHDEwWXiPZ9dTQ6Uz3Nj3mbYUAkawSUNOemtLwA/s1200/Leather%20Tuscadero.jpg

omg leather! *swoon*

right!?

those first two lines -- "well the moon sank as the wind blew / and the street lights slowly died" -- could be the beginning of the worst segersteen pastiche you've ever heard. they're also the only tangible details or description of anything in the entire song. once he sees her eyes, which he never describes, it's all over. it's just him and her and that strange feeling and those few hours. he dives in and stops looking around. which seems an essential difference between him and bruce and bob. they'd use a lot more nouns, or something. they'd also...

its all tension. it never really explodes

...yes, this. the song is all verse and pre-chorus, with no chorus to speak of. bruce, especially, would have taken that next step, gone to the next musical level. the fourth of july fireworks. but that might ruin it for tom. he's in a moment and wants to sit right there in it, forever.

you guys are really bringing the heat! #handclapemoji

we weren't so enthused about "Witchy Woman"!

we better pace ourselves and drink plenty of water though. there is a long road to ride.

or fuck it just go for it. its fun.

Yup. Unlike our digs into the Elton, Don 'n' Glenn, and Rod discographies, Petty's has no doldrums.

If Southern Accents and The Last DJ are his worst, then he must have the best discography in rock.

i remember years ago i thought of pitching the idea of doing todd rundgren and one look at his discography and i was like yeah maybe not...

I’ll be “that guy” and say for a start that these tracks are unremarkable, banal, rote, and forgettable.

speaking of unremarkable and forgettable, inspired by not hearing "depot street" in a minute, i put together a youtube plist of the 9 released mudcrutch tracks from 1971-75, and threw on the 1976 "surrender" outtake. will listen to this with my brother on the beach when we hang out in vallarta in a couple weeks.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9PFuJri-u5krOOiW7Vzgd5Stubj7sPCV

calstars, do you like Petty?

i debated starting with the two mudcrutch singles but then i decided to start at the beginning of TP as an artist.

that's totally fair! i just have a fascination for juvenalia.

didn't like petty growing up in 80s kansas, he was closer to mellencamp than the slightly cooler like the cars or elvis costello, but breakdown i had to admit had that watching the detectives chill swagger.

That’s funny, Petty always registered as “cool” to me — in a way that Bruce/Mellencamp/Seger didn’t. Those guys WANT things. Petty’s perspective is a more circumspect — whatever he wants, which he’s not sure of himself, he doesn’t expect much to come of it.

It’s alright if you love me
It’s alright if you don’t

in a way that Bruce/Mellencamp/Seger didn’t

i would push back a bit and say these three are very different songwriters imo

I feel that Petty maybe had more in common with Seger than those other guys, but at times all of them overlapped stylistically at least a little, imo.

If Petty was cooler, it's because he (and Mellencamp) cared about good videos.

Was just looking up birthdates for comparison, thinking of Petty as more late-70s than Seger and Springsteen, and yet...

Seger - born 1945
Springsteen - born 1949
Petty - born 1950
Ric Ocasek...born 1944

yeah, late 70s rockers who were born pre-50s is an interesting group of weirdos and strivers - ric neilsen, lux interior, martin rev, andy summers, lowe and edmunds...

I like my rock stars to be cool and TP is not in my book. More like an uncle who lives in the suburbs and his band of fellow weekend warrior rock fans

Might depend on which era Petty you first encounter. Definitely from the Don’t Come Around Here video onward, he cultivated stoner uncle vibes.

In '76, he's not yer uncle...yet.

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8a/0b/8b/8a0b8b5cf0896e8190dbb7471e57d380.jpg

"Hey lil' dude, is your auntie home?"

Bar is playing “yer so bad” so ok

In '76, he's not yer uncle...yet.

🖼

"Hey lil' dude, is your auntie home?"

I have a couple of aunts who are only about 10 years older than me and one of them definitely dated some dudes who looked like that photo.

…right?

NOT cool? I’m sorry what???

GTFO

Tom was the coolest

https://i0.wp.com/www.elle.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2017/10/1507089974767_GettyImages-73998983master-scaled.jpg?w=1029&ssl=1

If you say so

Fun fact: I am actually in a band with someone from Gainesville, Florida. Petty songs are in his blood, but we try to be judicious about including them.

See?

wtf calstars

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/7e/d3/40/7ed34085513b6bf629a47fc0803fe782.jpg

he was
an American giiiirrl

scott, we doing one today? I can post if you can't.

just a reminder that we aren't doing weekends. for some reason. i guess because that's how Eagles thread was. feels like tradition.

i’m happy with weekends off!

Weekends are when we can relax and just enjoy Tom Petty of any vintage, at our leisure. For me this could include wearing my "Oh My My Oh Hell Yes" T-shirt to the gym.

hell yeah

wtf calstars

🖼

For the weekend, here's Tom Petty and Garry Shandling.

YESS

Shandling: This is the most fun I've had in a couple years.
Petty: The sad thing is it takes three cameras for us to feel good.

Thanks Eazy

“With the advent of the digital thing, a lot of the tone quality has gone out of recording”

Do you think Tom has ever smoked weed

I was looking on YouTube to see if there was the interview/calls with Petty on Rockline, which I heard on a classic-rock radio station as a kid (from searching, looks like it was 1981). He sounded so ridiculously high and out of it, I remember finding it so funny at the time.

And searching for that Rockline interview led me to the complete concert archives. Interesting to see who they started out opening for (Al Kooper, Blondie, The Runaways, Seger, etc.).

To tide everyone over, here's an hour of Mike Campbell talking about his guitars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHVf4C2x_3g

with cornrows

mike’s hair journey is a whole side thread
he looks like a cross between a farmer & an out of work magician now

also i hate mike’s band name but i kinda enjoy this song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2TSX5bnIQY

I loved his surf band.

we saw Mike in Sacramento last year & man they did some great Heartbreakers covers (incl a lovely slowed down version of Refugee) and Fault Lines! (this version not from my show but same vibe)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFxbXBcx_7c

Interesting to see who they started out opening for (Al Kooper, Blondie, The Runaways, Seger, etc.).

that *is* interesting, thanks

I cannot and will not defend every decision Mike Campbell has made, especially hair-wise.

But he should have gotten writing credit on more of Petty's music. Certainly "Breakdown" and "Refugee," because his riffs absolutely make those songs work.

Wait

After a quick check, it looks like he is co-credited on "Refugee," so never mind. But I do think he should have been given co-writer status on "Breakdown."

it’s really funny/weird how close Campbell’s singing voice is to Petty’s

Speaking voice too! East Florida runs deep, I guess.

Central-West Florida?

middle earth Florida
both have serious Gandslf vibes

*Gandalf

Gandalf, Florida Man

I think he has said in interviews that Tom discouraged him from doing any solo stuff because their voices were so similar.

I think his first album is really good, his second album is pretty good, then there’s only two songs from his subsequent career that I’d rank higher than “adequate, with a hook”. I was trying to think why I draw this line, and at first I wondered if his later stuff was too glib; but those first albums are not founts of wisdom either. As Lee626 said above, “Rockin' Around (With You)” is nearly a tossoff as a composition. Even “Breakdown”, which I’d call a perfect arrangement/recording, is maybe not a great song per se.
I think my preference comes down to the youthful energy of the band, the concision of the songs and the unfussy but atmospheric production. It's the brevity of the songs that connects this first record to the Ramones', even if they have different influences. I find the "arena-size" sonic sheen of Damn the Torpedoes and later puffs up the material to pretend to be more than it is.
Also, not being American probably leads me to regard Petty as less of a mythic figure than some of you of my age. He was definitely heard up here, but a lot of the radio and video real estate he could have occupied went to similar (Canadian-content) “uncomplicated quasi-roots guitar-rockers” like Tom Cochrane, Blue Rodeo and, God help us, Bryan Adams. I definitely thought of him as the junior Wilbury in 1988 (not just based on his age), and, though he’s not to blame, the same year he sang on Joni Mitchell’s worst song ever. So I have different associations with him than many. I’m planning to check out the Best of Everything compilation to see if I’ve missed some notable “mature” stuff post-1993.

That piano melody is exactly the kind of thing she was writing in the late '70s and early ‘80s.

“Breakdown” and “Dreams” use the same three chords - all white keys.

i remember years ago i thought of pitching the idea of doing todd rundgren and one look at his discography and i was like yeah maybe not…

What’s so scary about Todd…if you stop in 1985 with the demise of Bearsville…and maybe skip Utopia…and ignore the live album…and...

claps

xxpost I appreciate the explanation but still this absolutely wild to me

then there’s only two songs from his subsequent career that I’d rank higher than “adequate, with a hook”.

i hope this listening thread expands yr appreciation!

seriously, there is so much good stuff in there, some bizarre takes itt but I am enjoying this immensely

ranking the S/T ahead of Damn The Torpedoes is some all time ILM level challops

i like all eras. i have to say that i was not some superfan my whole life. he was everywhere of course most of my life. but i really began to appreciate him more at the dawn of the 21st century. i enjoy all his albums now. a big epiphany for me was hearing the soundtrack to She's The One in a record store around 2002 and not even knowing it existed and pretty much loving it. that's when i realized that i should seek out the stuff i hadn't heard. and to me its all pretty strong. not that its all the same but there is just a level that is consistent in the songwriting and music that is admirable to me. most people have a real stinker and i don't think he does. for comparison: any 21st century springsteen i've heard bores me to tears and is just no fun at all. not even as a history lesson or whatever. i could say the same about most 70s superstars. but tom and mike really loved guitars and so do i. that is probably half of it.

for me, Damn The Torpedoes hit the mainstream airwaves right when I started listening to the radio and buying LPs, in late 1979. so those songs in particular immediately conjure a very specific place and time to me, a world of video arcades, three black and white TV networks, and the radio stations. plus big concerts. the DIY wave hadn't hit Charlottesville VA yet really, that took another couple years.

I love She’s The One soundtrack! saw that movie once (lol remember when Ed Burns was a thing) but man I have listened to the record for years since, so good

these early albums are ones I came to later, when I was stocking up on LPs in the mid-2000s

(xpost to myself)

looking forward to any oddball tracks here, I can upload the live ones from that punk sampler if ppl want

i can remember sitting and listening to the Damn The Torpedoes album on vinyl in my town library wearing big headphones.

<3

My first Petty memory is hearing “The Waiting” in the jr. high cafeteria in 7th grade and thinking it was cool. Then “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” was in the radio, then “You Got Lucky” (and its video, which we can talk about when we get there), and Long After Dark was the first album of his I owned. (Swiftly went back and bought the earlier ones.) He was a persistent presence for an ‘80s adolescent.

yep, I remember the first time I got burned by forgetting to fill out a Columbia Record House card was when I got Southern Accents in the mail

I came in even later than Scott; I owned Full Moon Fever, but was basically a Greatest Hits-level fan all the way up till The Live Anthology and then Mojo.

My father's vinyl copy of Damn the Torpedoes, was the gateway for me, circa 1981. We'll get to it when get to it, but I may lose interest... that, for me, is the Petty Pinnacle. Later stuff can sound a trifle phoned-in. Which is fine.

In maybe 1990 my college buddies had a stupid parody of "Free Fallin'" called "Beer Gogglin.'" It was amusing for perhaps 38 seconds.

I’ve always loved this guy but wildflowers came at a particular time for me that makes it special. I was 14 and smoking pot and causing trouble but mostly
I was confused about life and my place in it. That album had some really comforting songs. Like a cool dad telling you everything would work out. It’s time to move on it’s time to get going hits during differently when you’re the dad but it really does hit

I knew I was a budding music critic when an aunt bought me Wildflowers the holiday season Petty released it and as soon as I heard the simple mastery of the title track I thought, "This album is way better than even the positive reviews are claiming." Song after song after song -- killers all. Rick Rubin's best.

He also picked one of Beck’s best songs on She’s the one

I’m not sure when I first heard Tom Petty but I knew Refugee and The Waiting when I was really little, like 4 or 5, because they played on the radio a lot and Mum & Dad had the radio on all the time at home & in the car

it was a long time before i bought his records because his songs were always around on the radio, it was like I didn’t need to.

I think the first albums of his I bought for myself was Wildflowers & the She’s The One soundtrack

i guess I became a diehard “head” in 2002 once Last DJ came out and he toured with the Heartbreakers - that’s when I saw them live for the first time and just fully rabbitholed and have been there ever since

it was a long time before i bought his records because his songs were always around on the radio, it was like I didn’t need to.

^^This. I'm not sure where I first heard him, other than it was on Rock radio when I was little in the mid-'80s. I do remember the Full Moon Fever singles blowing up in '89 ("Running Down A Dream" was a favorite), and of course everything afterwards. It's important to remember how ubiquitous he was if you were a Rock fan from '89-'97 or so: The new stuff was all over AOR, and the old stuff was a staple on Classic Rock stations, who also --being my neck of the woods anyway -- frequently dipped into his contemporary releases as well. That's something only Petty, Clapton & Aerosmith (and maybe the definitely less prolific AC/DC) pulled off in the same timeframe.

And then in the middle of all that there's the 1-2 Punch of Greatest Hits & Wildflowers!

All that said, I didn't seriously get on board until the early '10s cheap CD boom, picking up all the early album remasters for $4-5 apiece over a couple months after getting some of the later ones used or as cutouts much earlier. (I could kick myself for missing out on his stuff during the cheap vinyl days -- I flipped past so many $1-2 copies of Torpedoes in the '90s.)

It's been a terrific catalogue to explore.

tom and mike really loved guitars

gonna bookmark this for use throughout the thread

i guess i've been in since the beginning. sharing a lovely fb post that an ex-bandmate, ex-rock scribe, and current guitar maker/technician to the stars wrote upon Tom's death. names blanked to protect the innocent. this sort of shocked me when i read it; i was surprised he remembered my name let alone felt that way.

A few light years ago, in a basement underneath a dry cleaners in Hicksville NY, **** ******, **** ****** and I (along with some maniac drummer whose name escapes me) worked ourselves into one helluva rock'n'roll band.
It was an odd mix of talent...I was enamored with progressive rock and fusion, and **** and **** were rock'n'roll animals. **** was the more accomplished guitar player, but it was **** who had a real rock'n'roll heart.
**** was the only one of us who really understood that - at its core - the best rock'n'roll was a couple of raw guitars, killer vocals and straight-to-the-heart lyrics. I didn't realize it then, but **** was Keith to my Mick Taylor...Lennon to my Harrison...from watching him, I finally understood what playing rock guitar was all about.

**** and **** turned me on to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' debut album, and for that I'll be eternally grateful. "American Girl" and "Breakdown" became staples in our set. They also became two of my all-time favorite songs, and they turned me into a TP and the Heartbreakers fan for the next 40+ years.

Like ****, Petty knew what great rock'n'roll was all about...pure, unadorned, real, heartfelt and loud !
If TP didn't do anything past "Damn The Torpedoes", his place in rock history would have been secured...but he just kept doing what he always did - writing and playing songs with one of the best rock'n'roll bands that this country ever produced...

Gone too soon....thanks for everything,Tom. Rest easy....

Petty live experiences:

— Grateful Dead & Bob Dylan/TP& the Heartbreakers, Rich Stadium, Buffalo, July 4, 1986: A legendarily terrible Grateful Dead show, the only time I ever saw them and I wasn't even a fan then. My friends and I were in a significant minority at Rich Stadium in being there to see (in order of priority) Petty, Dylan and the Dead. The Dead played first and eventually got off stage. (Where Jerry famously collapsed and landed in the hospital.) Then Petty and the Heartbreakers played, with Dylan cycling in and out. That part of the show was good, but as my first Tom Petty live experience something less than ideal.

— July 1987, Darien Lake NY: On the Let Me Up tour. Good show.

— September 1995, Knoxville TN: On the Wildflowers tour. GREAT show, best I ever saw them, Petty was wearing a leather jacket with long fringes that whirled when he spun around, it was a sold-out show and the crowd was wired and the band was just on fire. Fantastic.

— June 2013, Bonnaroo: They were the closing band on Sunday night — a slot that had to that point been mostly reserved for jam bands as a nod to the festival's origins. As a nod to that, they included a cover of "Friend of the Devil" in the set (bringing my Petty/Dead experience full circle). It started lightly drizzling about halfway through the set, but the crowd was sufficiently buzzed and the evening was warm and it was the last night of the festival, so everyone stayed and danced in the light rain. They closed with "American Girl." I didn't know it would be my last time seeing him, but it was a good one to go out on.

I got to see him a few times, and to be honest they all seemed kind of run of the mill. I wish i saw one of those fabled club shows here.

i saw him with dylan, which was rambling but fun. i *almost* saw him in 1983 at the nassau coliseum. this one still makes me cringe. the show had been rescheduled from its original date to one that was inconvenient for us. we made it in to see nick lowe's opening set but had to leave before tom petty came on. i can't for the life of me remember what was so important that we had to miss TP.

Out of TP?

ha that doesn't ring a bell though.

Stuck inside of Gainesville with the no TP blues again

TP & The Shartmakers

when i saw him on the tour in early oughts, i thought 02 but maybe it was 05, i was comped a seat in a VIP box for work, my first time in a box.

that tour Petty instructed the venue stop drinks/food to the boxes at the start of his set because he hated the extra distraction and richies talking during the show etc

my boss was SO mad about it & would not shut up about it for months afterwards

i could not have cared less, i thought being in the box was weird enough as it was being penned off from the crowd like fancy zoo animals, without adding personalized service into the mix.

and it was a great show.

Anything That's Rock 'n' Roll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy6cMrXH09U

love the guitars. love the vocals. also i'm pretty sure i like every song about the radio or that mentions radio.

mister messthetics himself chuck warner was selling insane and obscure 45s at the record show yesterday and i thought it was cool that he had a copy of this picture sleeve single alongside all the KBD rarities!

https://i.discogs.com/WkB7VJA5MqLJydX-L7jz1aPI8WKL0kUX7nDYCGWLdzs/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:594/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTE3OTcw/NDctMTMwNDc4MDY3/Mi5qcGVn.jpeg

Not punk or new wave but I think this one is credibly power-pop. Love the bridge.

another short one! i'm sure i slotted this album in with dwight twilley 'sincerely,' the 'piper' album, etc. power pop for sure.

one thing i love about this album is how tom is wearing a leather jacket and bullet belt like he's in Exodus or Testament or some band like that

love the guitar solo. can it be described as "interplay" if both guitarists are just alternating (the same) one note? or maybe it's just campbell playing "both" parts with a little channel-switching voodoo? either way, i dig it

solo is very modest and non-showy. almost hints in the direction of "this is a singer/songwriter + backup" vice "we are a band," which would become more apparent later in his career.

Mike Campbell's like Lindsey Buckingham: a terse soloist who thinks like a producer-arranger (which he is).

his lead melodies are as memorable as the vocal melody much of the time: "the waiting," "breakdown," "running down a dream," "american girl," etc.

how does this song *not* have a cowbell?

"Anything That's Rock 'n' Roll": Another one on the pleasant, doesn't wear out its welcome side. Only one LP side in, and we've had two songs about Rockin' -- if he kept that pace up, he could have been AC/DC or Motörhead.

Instead, we get one more rock'n'roll title reference on album two, and then ... I don't think there's another one, except for the cover of "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star."

"Don't Rock Around Here No More"

he does have more songs about things being "around" tho

lol xp

The rocking is the hardest part.

Free Rockin'

Better yet:

"I'm Free, Freedom Rockin'"

Didn't "You Wreck Me" start out as "You Rock Me"?

Stop rockin' my heart around

I def knew the 70s/80s radio hits, but Free Fallin was when I really got on board, and when I saw them Feb 20, 1990 (one day shy of turning 14) "Free Fallin'" had just crested in popularity (at least radio-wise), I remember a feeling coming from the band onstage and in the crowd of the show being this pent-up release, I mean they played it back-to-back with "Won't Back Down" at nearly the start of the set, like everyone was just enjoying this feeling of being back on top.

But the biggest moment was TP opened a trunk on stage and there was huge light underneath the stage that we could see from the kind awkward, almost behind the stage, section our seats were in, it lit up the whole arena, or least it felt like it and he pulled out the top hat and they did "Don't Come Around Here No More" and the place went bananas.

It was my first concert and it really did a number on me

I was ending my freshman year of high school when Full Moon Fever was released, so Petty was always this weirdly cool star well into 1997. I never NOT knew him as a radio/cultural/MTV presence. Of course, I was too young for the DTP/Hard Promises peak and for the Let Me Up doldrums -- an album by the way I will have a lot to say about when we get to it.

I fell behind a little bit, but just here to say I never heard The Wild One, Forever before and that one part of the song sounds so much like Donny Iris' "Ah! Leah!"

Or I guess the other way around given when they were released.

he does have more songs about things being "around" tho

He's the poet of around, like Bernard Sumner's the poet of love.

always enjoy this song when it's on. I struggle to reconstitute any part of it once it's over, except the "playing on your radio" part, which is indelible. the sound/stomp of it just works tho. you'd never mistake it for The Sweet but there's a pinch of that magic. feel like it could be a real grower as i spend more time with it.

enjoying all the personal Tommy journeys. wish i had more of one to share! becoming a radio listener in the mid 90s, he was just already part of the firmament, the big hits were mixed right in with the songbook of songs everyone knows, in continuing rotation.

Strangered in the Night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC9FDx3HISw

bob dylan's bastard florida baby on vocals. just bypassing the whole roger mcguinn thing altogether. those guitars! yum. i will talk more later. gotta go work a 45 collection. one that includes tons of stuff that tom probably loved. i definitely saw some mitch ryder and del shannon in there.

which came out first -- this or dwight twilley "i'm on fire"? i guess the twilley song. basically the same riff. the vibrato effect on the harmonies also straight outta dwight twilley. trying for a stagger lee saga?

Mike Campbell's like Lindsey Buckingham: a terse soloist who thinks like a producer-arranger (which he is).

There was a great interview with him in TapeOp where he stressed that all his solos were always totally worked out and never too long, because the band was consciously writing for the radio, aiming for hits.

Twilley vibes

bob dylan's bastard florida baby on vocals. just bypassing the whole roger mcguinn thing altogether.

tom petty? bypassing roger mcguinn???

another good one! sort of a power-pop take on a CCR riff. a lot of meat-n-potatoes classic rock acts would have let the tempo sag, or let the solo wander into a two-minute, spaced-out "night" sections. the drive towards early R'n'R 45 greatness is keeping them focused. everybody sounds great too. one of my fave tracks so far.

That opening riff's a grabber.

"Strangered In The Night": My other big keeper from the deep cuts from this one. I think I first this album some time in the '00s as a "Classic Disc" airing my old local Classic Rock station did as weeknight at midnight programming. This was the immediate standout for me then too. A Springsteen (by way of CCR) street scene stripped for speed and devoid of any romance.

the vibrato effect on the harmonies also straight outta dwight twilley

No coincidence: Twilley sings harmony here!

Thematically his first nighttime narrative — Perry’s a very nocturnal guy, “Long After Dark,” “Nightwatchman,” “we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon,” “Straight Into Darkness,” “all the bad boys are standin’ in the shadows,” etc.

I don’t think he was much for sunrises, unless he happened to still be up.

Petty! Not Perry! Stupid autocorrect.

Tom Perry=Walmart Great Value Petty

Tom Perry = Rick Perry’s younger brother who leads a cover band doing Tom Petty songs rewritten with right-wing messaging. “We don’t/ Have/ To let in these refugees”

So I checked out the Conversations With... book from the library again! On today's song:

That was the first session I brought The Heartbreakers down to. They were watching that go down, and they did the next song, and I overdubbed them onto the track. And that's when I stopped being a solo artist.

"strangered in the night" is okay, nothing too special, feels like it needs a better chorus that's not there

lyrics are...something

I love “Strangered In The Night” but the syntax/title breaks my brain bc it’s such a weird word

like i get it for the song but my brain does not enjoy reading the title, it’s reminds me of weird shitty metadata from an mp3 rip
i wanna correct it so bad!

but the song itself? Boss. Cool as hell.

Strangered in the Night by an Angel of the Morning

that reminds me that i always had a problem with "Vivrant Thing" by Q-Tip. just seeing the word repelled me a little. kinda like Trump's ""Bigrant problem" thing. the mayor of the town i live in calls the town "rurban". don't like that either. i don't know why i'm even typing all this...

i should really take it to that ILE thread...

Don’t Strangerer Around

strangered anger

Strangered, Then Fiction

xpost lol

jim gordon on drums

Fooled Again (I Don't Like It)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIh3hMRIAbk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5GwA6Zri4M

i like the sound on that live clip. this song is all atmosphere.

not my favorite tune on the record. that minor-to-major thing is nice but not that nice. sort of a proto-"here comes my girl"?

it's a cool riff, not so much more. the live version is pretty cool tho

studio version can't help but miss that ripping campbell solo and ultra-atmospheric intro

"Fooled Again (I Don't Like It)": More Synth Action! Weird little varispeed break @ around 1:56 forecasting those similar bits on Torpedoes. This is the first one so far that kind of outlasts its welcome, certainly could have faded out sooner, although the length might have worked if they'd thrown a screechy "Miss You" sax* over the extended coda.

*Remembering just after I typed that we're actually 1 1/2 years before "Miss You".

Also right at the top we get an early pronounced appearance of a Petty Power Grunt.

Sounds like he just expelled a big one

That vocal choice will increasingly become a problem.

The spidery guitar lick and the synth are cool, but this track is filler.

Fooled Again
I dunno about all these lukewarm
comments, guys- this one kinda rips? it’s got a lot of atmosphere & anguish & a killer groove

Specifically in my own weird brain it sounds like a cross between Seger & Alice Cooper

something about the first verse & slow build specifically reminds me of Alice’s I’m Eighteen - different arrangemts & tempos obviously but they feel like cousins or something maybe idk

and um his voice sounds great? wtf have you not heard of anguish? He’s been fooled again! He doesn’t like it!

It's not one of my faves, but I do like the range of phrasings and tonalities he gives to "I don't like it" at different points in the song. One thing on this album is I think you can hear him trying to figure out his voice and what he can do with it.

he sounds pretty angry singing it live.

i'm hearing maybe a little springsteen "darkness on the edge of town" moodiness (speaking of albums that won't be out for another couple years). but more anguish. and less, um, song.

this track is filler

yes

He doesn’t like it!

haha I picking up on that

not a bad song but I can't remember it already (I realize I've never actually heard this album before which is weird for me)

feels very first album to me, like he's honing in on what he does but it's not all quite there yet

it's actually kind of cool in that way it's going to end with American Girl, like just this transcendent moment

there's something about Rockin Around With You, the whhhhyyyy bee lonely parts, the harmony, something about it reminds me of mid period Beatles in some way that's cool

yes!!

and that repeated riff in Fooled Again reminds me of something Beatley too but I can’t quite get it

Yeah, when my wife somewhat randomly put on this album a while ago (mostly just knowing his radio songs), one of her reactions was that she didn't realize how influenced he was by the Beatles. That's always there in his stuff to some degree but I think most obviously here (and maybe on Wildflowers). You much more often see references to the Byrds, Dylan even the Stones in relation to him, but he loved him some Beatles.

Beatles & Elvis man - open your third eye it’s all right there

he’s preaching to us all

also not to be uh all rockist or whatever but analog rock records from the 70s just sound so fucking good, never got better than that era

the drums are so great

otm

yeah i agree, lotta uh “warmth”?
or some other nebulous word

Not just rock records either, there's a reason '70s funk is such a trove for hip-hop. It's the beats and bass and whatever, but it's also the vibe of it. There was this coming together of ace players and great recording equipment, in rock and soul and country, across the board.

Fooled Again: I don't mind it! There might not be enough there to justify the run time (an epic, by this album's standards), but it's okay as something to keep a moody head-bob going at the bar. There are a couple of places where it feels lik they might have been planning to come back and fill in something more sonically exciting later ("Look out!") and I'm enjoying all these swings from Tom, working out his vocal options as tipsy pointed out.

Mystery Man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPRSc6IBPtY

the Dead could have covered that. Phil could have sung it. did the Dead ever do a Petty song? i know Tom used to cover "Friend Of The Devil".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLWHmmcdPyc

If Little Feat were a highway, this would be the little adjacent road off to the side
Nice lyric though

Dig the sound for sure. Very "country soul," no? Maybe the genre that benefited the most from that 70s studio warmth/fullness. They're really trying their hands at a lot of things on this album - anything that's rock 'n' roll, anyway.

Petty wrote this song that Dylan covered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaVwvhpZyho

very 70s album track. get graham parker on this one. or garland jeffreys. or willy deville.

I like "Fooled Again" better than this; the biggest flaw of this album is that the two weak tracks sit right in the middle of either side of the LP. I wouldn't like it any better if Little Feat or any of those other people just named had done it either.

listening to the double disc Live at the Fillmore 1997. tons of fun covers. sounds great.

i love when they do "call me the breeze" because it completes the shelter records jj cale lynyrd skynyrd florida circle of life.

thanks for this thread, really enjoying it.

i'm from the southeast so i grew up with so much tom petty in the air that actually putting on an album would've seemed a little ridiculous, it was as much the background to my life as my dad's favorite sports. so in that sense i can see why he can seem boring or as calstars was saying, uncool. however due to comments of some ilxors, alfred i believe specifically, i started listening to him intentionally over the past few years, but i'd still avoided the debut. it just seemed like it'd be obvious, or too 50's rock'n'roll for my taste or whatever. but i have to say i'm kinda blown away by it. it has a humble love of the idea of rock that is a little self-conscious (which reminds me of paddy mcaloon minus the dreamy irony,) and yet its more confident than it has any right to be. that tom petty is from gainesville and looks like tom petty and still became tom petty through sheer force of will and desire to play the part of a rock star is what makes him so cool.

the wild one, forever is the one i hadn't heard before that most impressed me, i think it's like an all-time great song. the restraint, the lack of histrionics, the focus on a single image and moment, make it a perfect paean to the one-night stand, something that remains so small yet has the potential to crystalize into something so achingly beautiful in it's unresolved in/significance. to make more of it would be embarrassing but to make less of it would be dishonest

one of the things that surprised me about my late-in-life Petty fandom is how much i enjoyed PLAINTIVE Tom Petty. the guy can choke me up with sad and pretty when he wants to. i guess when i thought of his slower stuff in the past i thought of big rock radio ballads. but there is later stuff that is smaller and more delicate. can't think of examples off the top of my head but we will get to them. "angel dream". that's one of them.

Great posts.

"Mystery Man": Heartbreaker Reggae! It was '76, after all. It was, like, a law or something. Everybody in the biz must *try* doing Reggae (if you hadn't already done so -- Zep, Paul Simon etc.).

A very "First album, middle of side 2" track.

Mystery Man has such good Southern vibes, musically feels like an Allman Brothers song or something, just such a nice easy groove & Mike’s lead guitar part is so goddamn ~pretty~ it practically sparkles. They are establishing their chops on this record, for sure.

Also gives me a bit of a Van Morrison vibe vocally kinda, or maybe just the tone in Tom’s voice here

Anyway, this song is a good time.

xxpost Scott yeah I love plaintive Tom too.
He’s never too cool to tell you just how sad or lonely he is. But it’s not an earnest soul baring like Elvis -Petty is a little more circumspect so even when you feel what he feels, he’s not scooping his heart and soul onto a platter. He keeps something for himself too.

terrific run of posts today/tonight, thanks y'all.

one of the things that surprised me about my late-in-life Petty fandom is how much i enjoyed PLAINTIVE Tom Petty. the guy can choke me up with sad and pretty when he wants to. i guess when i thought of his slower stuff in the past i thought of big rock radio ballads. but there is later stuff that is smaller and more delicate. can't think of examples off the top of my head but we will get to them. "angel dream". that's one of them.

― scott seward, Thursday, March 7, 2024 4:28 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

"crawling back to you"

Also gives me a bit of a Van Morrison vibe vocally kinda, or maybe just the tone in Tom’s voice here

Anyway, this song is a good time.

― werewolves of laudanum (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, March 7, 2024 6:49 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i definitely thought of van morrison, partially the vocal but something about the tone of his voice in combination with the vibe of the song

"crawling back to you"

top five Tom Petty

i definitely thought of van morrison, partially the vocal but something about the tone of his voice in combination with the vibe of the song

the particular way he vamps on the last line of the song for 25 or 30 seconds has a very vanmo quality to it, though van, to be fair, might have gone on for more like 25 or 30 minutes.

yeah Petty keeps a lid on that lol

Luna

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fOKtWW8Xvo

that is a weird song. i don't have any memory of that song. i love how he says the word "shiver" like a toddler.

i have no recollection of this one either. maybe it's the onset of full moon fever? that break with the triplets on the keys doesn't really merit its multiple appearances.

What a strange vocal.

"Mystery Man" is a nice groove and they play it well, again the song feels a little slight

huh "Luna" is really odd! I like it though...the organ and weird little pomp breakdown in the middle is like...fuckin Procal Harum or something

like the least "Tom Petty" Tom Petty song I've ever heard

but i'm into it for some weird reason

If "Breakdown" was an emulation or anticipation of Nicks-era Mac, the triplet rhythm and supernatural theme of this song makes me think of Bob Welch doing "Hypnotized".

This led me to check if Petty ever played a show with Boz Scaggs (apparently not).

Weird strings at the fadeout!

out of curiosity, how would you check that? is there like a 1-page gigography that you can ctrl-f?

Yep, right here!

The intro/outro to Luna is so playful and great, and love the Christmas carol instrumental after the verses (whotf thought that was a good idea? Genius!) Would be a great soundtrack for a midnight Christmas eve drive home to your girlfriend/boyfriend.

Real strong juxtaposition of atmospheres in the three parts of this song. Not a stand out, but interesting enough to give your time to it with a smile

BTW these threads are so great. Always a pleasure to read through

kinda makes me think of The Band’s “Chest Fever” - Petty’s weird vocal spunds a bit like he’s doing Richard Manuel

apparently it’s all cobbled together from a one-day jam session which may account for it’s oddness

there’s a bit about it here though idk this dude’s sources

https://somethingelsereviews.com/2014/04/29/into-the-great-wide-open-tom-petty-and-the-heartbreakers-luna-1976/

Xp thus sang Freud. This so would be a bore without that instrumental. The chord the strings play at the intro after the drum fill establishes a key to the song that wasn't suggested in the intro playing before it. Nice little surprise.

The instrumental gets more ridiculous the more I play this song. I feel like I'm laughing at this song rather than along with it, but that's not a negative criticism imo. Childlike "wtf who thought of this? laughter is key to a lot of music I like at first listen

afraid this one is doing the least for me off this LP. i get what it's going for, but it's forgotten when it's over. idk if the early 70s Procol Harum organ/mood thing really plays to this group's strengths, but it's interesting that it was part of their repertory despite the focus on Elvis and the Beatles etc. i guess it was just part of the lingua franca of working 70s rock bands.

"Luna": COWBELL! I kinda like this one, mainly because of the atmospherics. Tench & Lynch carry it. Still, very "Side 2", and gets bulldozed by the closer.

Tench Petty & Lynch carry it.

Reading the blog entry now.

this song is terrible what are you all on about

yr mom is terrible

Where's your sense of humour calstars?

one of the things that surprised me about my late-in-life Petty fandom is how much i enjoyed PLAINTIVE Tom Petty.

Just wait I am going to cry all over this thread when you get to Wildflowers

Where's your sense of humour calstars?

I think the real question is - do you like any of Tom Petty's recorded material? cuz I am cool with u harshing on the "it's ok" tracks as long as you actually like some of it? also "terrible" is reserved for arguably 69% of all recorded music (coincidentally yr mom's favorite number) and this is well into the top 31%

Xp, no I just think you've got to be humourless to call Luna terrible. It's a fun silly little bop trying to do 5 things at one and sounding totally off-kilter because of it. If someone told me this track was from ween I'd believe them.

I realise I'm probably annoying both Petty lovers and Petty haters with that comment, but I stand by it.

Also just want to acknowledge you got totally owned by Vg's and Sleeve's comment and we shouldn't rush past that

So you’re saying the song is funny
That I agree with

Then laugh along and enjoy ya sob! ;)

Will do

just gave the album a full spin (excepting the closing track, which i imagine will be some lightweight jammy throwaway), and it really goes down easy. it's nowhere close to the best rock debut of 1976, but it's greater than the sum of its parts. i do think I've struggled for not being able to pick out so many specific awesome instrumental moments, or specifically killer lyrics, which are usually my gateways into songs/artists. i just dig rockin' around with these fellas.

"Fooled Again" and "Luna" are the only ones that I doubt will grow on me much, but the rest are already starting to do so. "Anything That's Rock n Roll" especially, that seemed kinda disjointed at first but is now proving to be a genuine earworm.

“luna” sounds like a weird al style parody of roxy music’s “strictly confidential” with a little bit of “breakdown” thrown in

did people write music on quaaludes in the 70s? or did they make you too sleepy? it is kind of a sleepy song. but not pot-sleepy. i was too young for quaaludes. missed it...by that much. they did have more sleepy drugs back then in general. they gave out librium prescriptions like they were aspirin. i should check out that link upthread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmBEPEidGJw

I'm not saying Luna is some classic but it's odd and an interesting song for Tom Petty. Overall, that's what's interesting about the album to me in general in the context of who he would become, some songs feel like mediocre attempts to do things he would perfect later on, some things feel like them trying out things that ultimately he would shed - roads not taken so to speak. like the springsteen ambition of "the wild one, forever" (definitely the new-to-me highlight of the album) or the country soul of "mystery man" (not nearly as effective) or "luna" (which again i like i think mostly because it feels sort of weird and odd in a way that i don't associate with tom petty)

then obviously you have "breakdown" and "american girl", two early masterpieces that point the way towards what he's becoming.

that's the point of a listening thread to me, just to take it all in in sequence and see how an artist evolves.

i do like Luna! sounds kinda like he fell out a window drunk in the grass with his guitar and started playing.

ums otm
l

the live versions have been my way into some of those deep cuts and while i do like that version better than the studio version, just isn’t happening with the song for me

petty on organ + lynch on synth is an interesting combo tho, i’m sure that didn’t happen again

Timely!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2024/03/08/one-of-tom-pettys-biggest-hits-is-back-on-the-billboard-charts/

Had never heard this 10 minute petty song from 1976, a sort of can't you hear me knocking type jam. there's a later song petty wrote with basically the same title but it's a different song. it was on a one-sided live album, kind of interesting, if not truly great. there's a bootleg from 1977 called "new york shuffle" that is streaming on spotify that has a version of it, and a few more interesting and not truly great rarities on it. i'm not sure why it's on spotify, being a bootleg; it's not listed under his albums, but you can search for it (kind of a bug i'd guess). just thought i'd share over the weekend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KaZBwsSLqE

American Girl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIhb-kNvL6M

i always like hearing it. that is my praise for a song that you can a hear a LOT in this country.

i like how those drums totally could have been on one of the new wave records that i listened to in the 80s.

this my favorite tom petty song, and i'm so glad it happened on the first lp. that pumped-up double time tempo is so critical. the byrds would’ve keeled over if they tried taking a song at this pace. i LOVE how this song is basically over by the two-minute mark. the rest is an extended mic drop courtesy mike campbell -- what a great, building coda. i love the competing syncopations on that high note in the double-tracked guitar part.

plus those lyrics. I love the past tense. i love how "he" doesn't appear until the line before the last. two short verses and so many perspectives. who's saying "make it last all night"? the american girl? the narrator? "he"? is "he" the narrator? to whom is it “so painful”? are we still in the past tense now?

Thank you, Silence of the Lambs.

never heard a bar band that gets campbell's part exactly right

we did it respectably in, like, 1977. i must have a cassette of it somewhere.

oh yeah

I love that this was recorded on July 4, 1976. Looking for a way to cash in on all the bicentennial hoopla.

Lyrically his first great song? It has the same existential longing — for escape/love/transcendence — as Thunder Road and Born to Run, but without their overblown trappings. In those songs, Springsteen gives the women names (Mary, Wendy) but no characteristics beyond Mary's dress, they're generic romantic stand-ins. The American girl doesn't get a name, but she gets some specificity — the lost or abandoned love who creeps back in her memory while she's alone on her balcony, the cars rolling by out on 441 like waves crashing on the beach. The song is actually from her POV, something I'm not sure Springsteen has ever really done? Not sure, I'm sure someone can come up with an example. But the point is that there's no man here who's going to save her, she's positioned not as someone needing rescue but someone moving under her own power.

And I think "God it's so painful/Something that is so close/And still so far out of reach" is a pretty good thesis statement for the internal struggles that Petty's narrators and characters enact across his catalog, the "something" often not clearly defined and usually elusive. The disquiet of the soul that runs through "Refugee" and "The Waiting" and "Rebels" and "Runaway Trains" and "Time to Move On" etc.

Stan Lynch is a beast here, isn't he?

What's interesting about Lynch vs. the rest of the band is that he's doing this locomotive thing while musically the rest of them are moving in single time, working in these kind of stately 8th-note triplets. It's not til the coda that the whole group really steps up to Lynch's gear. Like the drums are the revving engine that eventually the rest of them (and the title character) hitch a ride out of town with.

I also love this Mike Campbell explainer on the structure of the song and solo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XEeZmsv5fc

What's interesting about Lynch vs. the rest of the band is that he's doing this locomotive thing while musically the rest of them are moving in single time, working in these kind of stately 8th-note triplets.

if you want to hear what it would sound like if they were moving in lockstep with lynch for the whole song, just listen to "last nite" by the strokes

funny timing, dierks bentley just hit the country charts with an "american girl" cover

part of a forthcoming "country celebration of tom petty" tribute album

The only weak part of "American Girl," if there is one, is the late C part that suddenly sounds like the theme to a '70s sitcom, but even that part works in context.

"And I think "God it's so painful/Something that is so close/And still so far out of reach" is a pretty good thesis statement for the internal struggles that Petty's narrators and characters enact across his catalog..."

Camus Rock!

also the bass part rules.

Camus Rock!

And Sisyphus roll.

"God it's so painful/Something that is so close/And still so far out of reach"

an all-time great rock lyric sung perfectly.

the gall choose to embody a pov as broad and iconic as the "american girl" on your debut album and to do it with uncloying bittersweet vulnerability, but to still capture the grandeur required to cut across generations of radio is astonishing to me

great posts, can't really add anything here but this is obv an enduring classic of the rock form

Pretty sure that just a handful of years after the fact, Beatles (and Byrds) worship around this point was at a low. That's kind of why Beatles-esque bands, from Big Star to Cheap Trick to Raspberries or whomever, were often relegated to the power-pop gulag, while groups like ELO were doing the Beatles as kitsch; the Byrdsy jangle of "American Girl" was probably heard as a notable novelty, just as it would be later with REM. Iirc, even stuff like the Vox amps Petty and Campbell (later?) used, my understanding is that they were considered pretty uncool.

i kinda feel like the beatles still ruled in the 70s no matter what year it was. paul mccartney was huge. badfingers and raspberries started the 70s and the knack and all those skinny tie bands ended it. there were tons of covers. disco covers. funk covers. elton john covers. stupid stigwood movie. shaved fish in 1975. they were friggin' everywhere.

i don't have a lot to add to some great posts

it's almost too perfect to talk about

i second skot - i've never changed the channel on this song my whole life, as overplayed as it is

i actually went to a Beatles convention in the 70s! it was nostalgia for six years ago! people selling beatles merch. we watched the Magical Mystery Tour movie. the band Apple played. it was fun. that was probably 1977 or 1978. oh yeah Beatlemania was HUGE on Broadway. that started in 1977.

Was just doing some googling, and allegedly interest in the Beatles had indeed begun to fade a little (relatively speaking) by the late '70s. In Lennon's final interview, he apparently says: “When a radio station has a Beatles weekend, they usually play the same 10 songs — ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ ‘Help!,’ ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Something,’ ‘Let It Be‘ — you know, there’s all that wealth of material, but we hear only 10 songs." Then, not-surprisingly, his death sparked renewed interest, and soon after the rise of the classic rock format further helped renew interest, and it's probably never faded since, spiked with the occasional well-timed release, like the catalog on CD in 1987, the Anthology a few years later, The Number 1s, etc.

In the UK, I've read (c/o Marcello) that Beatlemania was at a much lower ebb.

In Lennon's final interview, he apparently says: “When a radio station has a Beatles weekend, they usually play the same 10 songs — ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ ‘Help!,’ ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Something,’ ‘Let It Be‘ — you know, there’s all that wealth of material, but we hear only 10 songs."

but that's a radio playlist complaint, not a beatles popularity complaint. they were ridiculously huge, still, in every way. to wit, beatles weekends were very much thing.

*a* thing

tipsy mothra so completely otm on this song i don't know what else is there is to say except for how much i adore the hiccup-y enunciation of "a-an-american girl" in the final chorus.

"American Girl": Petty claimed the inspiration was less Byrds and more Bo Diddley, the combo of which more or less = The Heartbreakers.

When did this become *The Tom Petty Song*? I guess it got airplay at the time, there was the McGuinn cover, movie synchs (Fast Times..., SotL etc.), it was on Greatest Hits...but speaking as someone who heard A LOT of Classic & Album Rock Radio in the '90s, I don't remember really hearing it get spun heavily until sometime in the '00s. What was at work (other than corporate homogenization of the formats)?

Silence of the Lambs helped. The way it's used to show a facet of Katherine's personality is touching.

Yeah tipsy otm

This is the start of something that Petty will continue through his career, singing about women with inner lives & quirks & personalities, who want things, women who exist not solely because they’ve walked out or left him or Are Hot or whatever.

And when there is need/longing/loss, he often puts himself as secondary to whatever she wants.

As a concept this isn’t world shattering but as a woman who listens to & worships at the altar of Classic Rock, it is rare to feel included in a song in this genre at this time period. He’s not threatening or threatened or leering. He’s quite welcoming and cool about it without being patronizing and it feels sort of special somehow.

He’s really good at it :)

Not sure where you grew up Grisso but this song was played every day on NY classic rock radio in the 90: Beatles not so much as i recall, weirdly enough. Maybe not “hard rock” enough

in my memory the Beatles weren't played all that much, primarily it was "Come Together" which as you say had just enough of a 70s hard rock vibe

but they were never played as much as, I dunno, Eddie Money or Bad Company

XP I'm in Houston, where in the '90s we had 1 Classic Rock station and an AOR station, which we lost in 2004 (the CR station I. question eventually was superseded by another CR station that transitioned away from Oldies, and it folded in '13 or '14).

The at least once a day Petty songs then were "Refugee", "Breakdown", "Don't Do Me Like That", "The Waiting", "You Got Lucky", "Don't Come Around Here No More", "Free Fallin'", and "Mary Jane's Last Dance." Down here, "American Girl " didn't join that class (and overtake about half of it) until the '00s.

The holy trinity of classic rock radio : Eddie money, bad co, and foreigner

i had the no DJ FM robo-oldies station on in the car the other day and a voice comes on and says: "Before you were the establishment you used to fight the establishment and this is what it sounded like..." and then they played "I Shot The Sheriff" by Bob Marley.

it was weird.

which is why tom petty was a prophet with the last dj...

Per Setlist.fm, "American Girl" is Petty's most-played song in concert. But that's not surprising, given that it's the one from his first album that got played the most — "Breakdown" comes in at no. 10 overall, and runners-up like "Refugee" and "I Won't Back Down" obviously had fewer years of touring to make the list.

In terms of its place as THE Petty song, I'm not sure the exact arc of that. On '80s rock radio I definitely remember it being played but probably not as much as the tracks from Damn the Torpedoes or "The Waiting."

i feel like "Refugee" was played every hour on the big rock stations where i lived in the 80s. it felt like it anyway. i heard it sooooooo many times.

i was listening to a robo college station at lunch today and when i turned it on they were playing roger mcguinn's version of american girl. it's really bad! with yackety sax.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kOID3Pv6-Q

He gets the lyrics wrong too.

seemed to be a pattern with him ("pack up your money, pack up your tent, mcguinn")

*pick up your tent

When the Time Comes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykCmB_ZlI68

*DIFFICULT SECOND ALBUM ALERT*

nice Stooges intro to a Byrds-y song.

i like that the cover says *we are on Leon Russell's record label but we are not Poco*.

https://i.discogs.com/uk-A5XfpgFczeit8esrGCkSVKKE0kY6o0JreGBhW3dU/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTE0MjQ4/MzYtMTMxOTc4MjI5/Ny5qcGVn.jpeg

a nice solid song with yet another twilley-esque bridge. as the leadoff track it should have more though.

like, it doesn't seem like destiny that that particular verse should go into that particular chorus.

I like this song, but it does feel worked on, the effort shows. True of a lot of this album.

And imo it sounds not so much Byrdsy as solo-McGuinny — particularly the Cardiff Rose album.

yes to solo mcguinn-y! was actually gonna type that but i was lazy. also yes to the bridge! which is totally noticeable as not fitting the song somehow.

this is totally watching people learn how to write songs on the job. everyone has a few bangers - or more hopefully - for the first album. and usually they've been playing them for years. but when you have to go back to that well again...

having said that, they got REALLY good at it really fast and then kept the ball rolling for an insane length of time. longer than most. not everyone has mike campbell in their band though.

also just so weird that he makes this album and one year later makes one of the most iconic rock albums of the 70s that goes triple platinum. what a difference a year makes.

Part of my problem with Petty, especially during this period but intermittently until 1989, is that strangled whine he alternates with the mushmouth. "When the Time Comes" doesn't have this problem.

the album title/cover photo combo on this really cracked me up. smile fellas!

I like how most of them seem goofy-trying-to-look-tough, but Benmont Tench looks like he straight will kick your ass between the first and second verse and make it back in time for the bridge.

Showing my Petty catalogue ignorance… I didn’t even know they put out an album in between the debut and Damn the Torpedoes! I was ready to jump start the day with Refugee

there's a few great songs on it, mostly on side 2 iirc

what a difference a year makes.

A year plus Jimmy Iovine.

i used to get "very coked-up vibes" from this record. maybe it had to do with the production? or more likely just me being too stoned.

good album track, great guitars, but this is the second straight album where better -- and more obvious -- options were available for side one track one.

the repeated promise "i will stand by you" is very springsteenian, even if springsteen himself hadn't yet articulated it so succinctly.

I like the way the multi-tracked vocals are buried in the centre under echo and reverb, there's something modest about it.

They had no money for coke.

not with that attitude!

"When The Time Comes": Good opener, Nuggets-y Byrds energy. They've learned a bit since last album!

big stereo separation happening here w/ the guitarists

love the echo on the vox

this sounds like a big leap in concept/sound/execution to me, I bet it's a perfect-sounding segue from "American Girl", especially whatever that is that happens around 1:45 that seems to point the way forward for his sound and emotional delivery/sense of desperation and inchoate longing

as the leadoff track it should have more though.

I kinda remember this album as one where they could have flipped Sides A & B to positive effect, with "I Need To Know" crashing in and knocking you on your ass.

Related to radio, I’m thinking of the moment in the Eagles documentary (wish I could quote it verbatim) where someone talked about the big hits of 1978-80 creating the Classic Rock Radio format, which set the canon of artists and songs we all know. Petty hit the same pot of gold as Eagles.

That's interesting, that exactly coincides with when I started really listening to pop and rock radio, and it definitely tracks with my experience. My hometown rock station still plays like 80 percent the same playlist they did when I was a teenager, but it was all recent stuff then, the oldest things were like 15 years old. Now those songs are 40-50 years old, but it's like it just got frozen in time.

Petty ruled AOR thru the early '00s. That's how I knew even album tracks like "Out in the Cold."

Man, I thought "Out In The Cold" was Long After Dark-era or prior up until a few years ago.

In Houston his last real serious radio impact was "Climb That Hill" in '97. "Free Girl Now" got a little bit of play in '99, but by then good ol' KLOL was leaning hard into NuMetal and, like, Foo Fighters, Godsmack, stuff like that in terms of featured new releases.

I feel like I should point out that Houston was one of the first radio markets Clear Channel gutted. IIRC, they owned all three stations -- AOR, Classic, and Alternative, plus the Oldies -- by '98.

Believe you me, Clear Channel was not giving "The Last DJ" any air.

American Girl: so, this is obviously a Big One, and I have to admit that I've never been 100% won over by it. dunno if I've ever changed the channel on it, but not sure I've ever turned it up either. I can remember complaining, in my college days, that the lyric was needlessly generic, with around 150,000 people who could meet the title's criteria. But I think that if I'd *felt* what the song was about, then I wouldn't have noticed this or found it bothersome. but: Petty, at least at this stage and throughout this album, is very good at vibes, moreso than specifics, and this really does nail a sense of youthful, strident passion tinged with desperation. It's not Dancing Queen or anything, but it's pretty good, and obviously the band are doing something really special as everyone's been articulating so well.

On my listens today I finally noticed the actual lyrics of the second verse (Petty's delivery has a tendency to kind of slosh over the words) and damn, that delivers. And I like that it's route 441, and she's on a balcony (either an old creaky Gainesville house, or some motel-style housing, close to the highway), and her reference point is the beach --- this *is* specific, or at least *more* specific; it's southern emotional geography, Florida emotional geography. shrinking the pool of possible Girls somewhat.

I still wouldn't mind if he dialed in the focus a bit more, but maybe at this stage, part of the appeal is that Petty arrives at his emotional core like a guy who's had a couple of drinks, hadn't been planning to talk about this, and certainly wasn't expecting to find himself half-shouting, half-blubbering out his pain. or this girl's pain, for that matter.

Petty's delivery has a tendency to kind of slosh over the words

otm.

When the Time Comes... More like, when the time comes, we'll write a better hook for this song!

...Okay, it's not really that bad. I like the guitars, and the echo effect is cool even if it saps some of the out-the-gates immediacy that this could probably use. If it weren't rolling up as side one, track one, I'm sure i'd be more quickly on board.

it occurs to me that all of the running around and wherever-you-go stuff recurs on "You Wreck Me" ages later. that says something about Petty's songwriting voice, i think, but i can't quite articulate it right now.

in the wild: yo la tengo singing "american girl" at this very moment to the tune of the modern lovers' "pablo picasso" as part of the closing melody of their annual all-request wfmu fundraiser show and i would very much like to believe someone on this thread requested it.

re. american girl, i hear it as much more complex. he's trying to be all virtuous by setting it in the past tense, but he is still very currently filled with desire for her and doesn't want her to leave (while still respecting her for wanting to leave). when he says "he creeps back in her memory," that's a sort of wish fulfillment -- he's *wondering* if he ever creeps back in her memory. "make it last all night" is *his* rememberance of their time together. "something that's so close, but still so far out of reach" can be equally applied to his and her different desires.

You're Gonna Get It

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzrEY9-uQd8

Thus Sang Freud - I was reminded of a great comment you posted about that amazing clip from the Midnight Special. (from Who exactly was Tom Petty trying to sound like on his early albums? )

Just posted on the Midnight Special YT channel. I dare you to pause it midway through...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4ygBn6NJM

― Elvis Telecom, Wednesday, July 26, 2023 4:13 PM

your dare made me realize another great thing about this song -- the words end less than halfway through. the rest is an extended mic drop.

― Thus Sang Freud, Thursday, July 27, 2023 6:17 AM

despite the fact that the insistent piano riff in this song reminds me of a stupid randy newman movie theme i still really like it. and they throw everything in there. guitars, guitar solo, synths. and you totally can't remember the lyrics or even understand WHAT the lyrics are and there is no real memorable chorus and i STILL like it. thus, the enigma of petty. how does he still make me like it even though its really just a glorified studio jam with a title tacked on? its a vibe.

(i actually kinda wish this song kept going. just trail off into the sunset for another couple of minutes.)

i'm almost hearing a sort of proto "don't do me like that."

I was gonna say the same! Plus a tiny hint of "You Got Lucky." Wiki tells me that DDMLT had been in Tom's pocket since Mudcrutch days, and that he almost gave it away to the Gap Band (!). I can imagine part of the brainstorm might have been "hey, what if we tried playing it like You're Gonna Get It, with the piano?"

song itself is pretty meh to me on first listen. i like the gesture in the direction of a spacey synth landscape in the middle, but i wish it went further. boy do they repeat the title a lot without it ever being all that clear. was their gimmick "the power-pop band that doesn't enunciate?"

Song kinda gives me Hall & Oates vibes, especially on the verses.

I hear it, too! "Your Kiss Is On My List."

"You're Gonna Get It" sounds like one of those songs that got played live, like, twice between this tour and his final tour, and both times a handful of people in the crowd perked up and were all "oh, shit, deep cut!"

This song is great. It starts simple, so you think you know where it's gonna go, and yeah there are definitely ideas he'd bring back on "Don't Do Me Like That" and "You Got Lucky," but then they go crazy and I love it. The strings (real or a synth?) sound like they're going for Isaac Hayes string grandeur on a budget, there's that sharp, ringing acoustic guitar in the right speaker, the female background vocalists are an unexpected and welcome surprise, and the lyrics are basically nothing, but they have just enough implied drama to really work in context. This is a wild song that gets weirder (and better) the more you listen to it.

In terms of live performance, JiC more or less otm. According to Setlist.fm, he played it only 14 times, all but one of them on the 1978 tour for this album. Then it popped up once in 1981, and never again.

On a quick scan, it looks like that's true of most of this album except the two hits — songs got played on this tour and then at best a handful of times after. EXCEPT for one cut, which became something of a live staple. Any guesses?

there's no question that "American Girl" wasn't part of the Petty rock radio canon in the '80s: even during peak Full Moon Fever/Wilbury, I'm confident that I didn't hear it once on the radio, and since I wasn't super into him, I probly never heard it before Silence of the Lambs. And I think the reason for that is two fold…

1. It's really quite candy, quite power pop in ways that commercial rock radio didn't really fuck with in the 80s. Marshall Crenshaw didn't get any play in that format, but the Smithereens did. Cuz Marshall and "american Girl" have a spring in their step, a lightness that Smithereens and radio rock singles mostly foreswore. Early Beatles and Byrds, which sounded AM and that girls liked it too much, was out, and the portent of late Beatles and CS&N, the FM music of the serious minded older brother, was emphasized for many many years. The times obit of Eric Carmen quotes some guy saying that power pop was invented in the early 70s by Raspberries et al, but is it not fundamental that power-pop is the name of the kind of music that the Beatles and the Who stopped making in 1967 and was later adopted by people like Crenshaw and Carmen? (it really is odd that the Beatles style from 1962-1966 was the most popular style of music the world had ever encountered to that point, and it stopped dead in 1967, never really being truly popular ever again.)

2. It was our beloved Glenn, whose dedication to ILM is such that he and Don continue to offer their maunderings herein on subjects hither and yon some 8 years after his own death, who said in the Eagles doc that the advent of classic rock radio was a boon to their legacy and to their pocketbooks. But to me 1986 was the year that classic rock fully transitioned over from AOR. AOR really was more a fluid, almost Top 40 approach, playing shit that was out at the time, and would only go back about five years. The AOR station in Louisville played 38 Special, Coug, Dire Straits, VH, Robert Plant, the Firm, singles from whichever Rolling Stones album it would have been, the singles from Building the Perfect Beast, and stuff that had a certain shit-kicker quality that characterized the Mid South, like ""Jammin Me" "You Got Lucky" and "Runaway Trains." But no AC/DC, because you will recall that from For those… to Razor's Edge, that band's records produced no memorable radio fare, and no Zep, because that band was defunct. No 70s Van Morrison, no Dylan of any kind, no 70s Springsteen (he wasn't particularly big in lville, and my understanding is that the acts just mentioned were perennial on east coast rock radio), no Fleetwood Mac or Eagles, and certainly no hair metal or anything new wave-associated. And no "American Girl," not only because it doesn't sound the way rock radio needed it to, but that it was too old. "Breakdown" was the only pre Dame the Torpedoes" tune that stuck around…

And then AOR mutates into classic rock, and then you have an unchanging canon: or rather, it changes at a glacial pace. Who's been let into the classic rock radio canon? Nirvana, U2, RHCP, Metallica, Pearl Jam…and who else?

Hmmm...my AOR station played Plant + Zep, mid '80s Zep, Don Henley, The Cars, whatever new single Rush released, a lot of Petty and Coog, some Fleetwood Mac -- well into 1992 or 1993.

I think the power-poppishness of "American Girl" is why it didn't get as much rock radio play as "Refugee," for sure. But it was definitely playlisted pretty regularly on my local rawk station in Rochester, NY. As was "Breakdown" and the two hits from You're Gonna Get It.

Basically there was no Petty album up until Let Me Up ... that didn't add at least a couple of tracks to regular rock radio rotation, at least in my neck of the woods.

"you're gonna get it" is cool, really dramatic. campbell and tench sound fantastic.

"Jammin' Me" didn't get airplay, tips? That was his biggest AOR hit to date even though for some reason lots of people (inc Petty) don't consider part of the canon.

Any song that mentions Joe Piscopo in the lyrics is permanently locked out of classic status. It's in the Constitution.

EXCEPT for one cut, which became something of a live staple. Any guesses?

"Listen to her heart"?

100%

Any song that mentions Joe Piscopo in the lyrics is permanently locked out of classic status. It's in the Constitution.

But Petty pleaded for someone -- anyone -- to take him back.

"Jammin' Me" and "Runaway Trains" both got airplay when that album came out, but my sense is that they didn't stick or join the canon — the ever-growing snowball of inescapable Petty. But also, I kinda stopped listening to rock radio around that time so I may be wrong.

And the live cut here I mean is besides "Listen to Her Heart" and "I Need to Know." There's one non-hit from You're Gonna Get It that was on the setlist for a bunch of tours into the early 2000s.

The legacy of "Jammin' Me" was really hurt by it being left off the Greatest Hits.

Yup -- a bigger hit than "Breakdown" and 'Into the Great Wide Open.'

I suspect Petty's reluctance to discuss the worst period of his life -- the arson, marital trouble -- prompted him to keep it off the comp. A shame. I'll have more to say in a couple months, but I consider it and Let Me Up among the best things he's recorded.

Yeah, we can talk more about this when the time comes, but I was just thinking how odd it is the way Greatest Hits short-sells his non-FMF '80s work: three songs representing for five (counting the live one) albums!

I definitely heard "American Girl" as much as any other Petty on classic rock radio in the '80s. When "Silence of the Lambs" came out a lot of people pointed out its good use, but I was 15? 16? and I already knew the song. For sure his MTV dominance made sure he got reciprocal love on the airwaves, and post "Full Moon Fever" there was no way a cut like "American Girl" needs a movie soundtrack to coax it out of mothballs. Maybe it depended on where you were and the quality of your classic rock station?

"You're Gonna Get It": A verse that's in your face like a chorus, a chorus that's not in your face until the coda, synths...who *are* these guys? Very "1978" the way some of the the album cuts on the debut are "1976."

would love to hear comments on this? is this the right spot to talk about this?

https://www.discogs.com/master/656871-Tom-Petty-And-The-Heartbreakers-Official-Live-Leg

also this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRGs7tJkapg

And the live cut here I mean is besides "Listen to Her Heart" and "I Need to Know."

doing a full album listen rn and this has gotta be "Restless"

I will reveal when we get to it! (Or of course anyone curious can spend 5 minutes on Setlist.)

TP and the Heartbreakers is such an odd band, all these clear elements of southern rock, country and soul without really fitting/hitting any of those categories.

but also seeming fresher/newer/short/sharp without being new wave or skinny tie or power pop? i mean the cars had been hippies too and they kinda fooled everyone into thinking they were from mars. but TP&HB didn't seem like they were from mars. and yet they weren't lynyrd skynyrd. or any of the southern stuff out there. i guess 38 special would end up being a hybrid of sorts.

just now watching TULSA KING on PARAMOUNT PLUS starring SYLVESTER STALLONE MARTIN STARR AND DANA DELANY at the end of SEASON ONE EPISODE SEVEN while STALLONE'S character DWIGHT "THE GENERAL" MANFREDI learns some disturbing news "SAVING GRACE" by TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS

is played at the bar.

that is all.

They were the most California of the Southern rockers and the most Southern of the California rockers. There's a strong West Coast vibe in there too, including the Byrds obv.

Patterson Hood said Petty & The Heartbreakers were the best Southern Rock Band.

oh right and they had that eagles connection too. bernie leadon's brother was in Mudcrutch. i hate to bring it up...

all roads lead to don henley...

XPS Actually his co-favorite

Doing what I do, I am often asked about my favorite Southern rock band. It’s a term I always hated (and used it with that in mind as part of a title for one of Drive-By Truckers’ albums). The question is usually prefaced with another, framed as a simple choice: Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd?

The correct answer for me is R.E.M. and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. On any given day, the Heartbreakers could be the greatest band on the planet.

https://bittersoutherner.com/from-the-southern-perspective/music/like-sonny-liston-tom-petty-patterson-hood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7l5pA3EPug

When The Time Comes
- nice Byrdsian track that says to the world you guys do whatever new punk thing you’re doing, we’re gonna be over here doing our own thing

You’re Gonna Get It
- it’s not quite there yet BUT this is an example of how Tom as singer can change the context of a song by his delivery
This COULD be threatening with a different less nuanced, less present singer
But Petty puts the focus on himself as the false-bravado clearly-lovesick dude who wishes he didnt love her so much, when this song could easily be aggressive and full dude-rejection- energy.
To me it’s an early unformed example of how Petty as a singer can do to a song what Brando could do in a movie. It’s all the little choices of phrasing & backing off insteaf of belting that make his songs so much more textured and human
Sometimes even more than the lyrics would suggest
Also so much swagger from these Heartbreakers! chef’s kiss
Love it

Hurt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojlIbccEMxc

"Thank God for California" is not something you ever heard from Florida rockers Molly Hatchet.

who are playing here in, like, two days. would almost be tempted to go see them if i wasn't afraid that a Trump rally might break out...

those little garcia squiggles have me picturing bob weir singing this for some reason. an 18-bar blues? cool!

Funky break followed by mandolin flourishes…weird

re. molly hatchet, "As of August 2, 2020, all of the band's original members are deceased. The Molly Hatchet trademark is owned by Bobby Ingram, their guitarist since 1987 (when he replaced founding member Dave Hlubek, who rejoined the band eighteen years later and stayed with them until his death in 2017). The other veteran in the lineup is keyboardist John Galvin, who has been a member since 1983 (with the exception of a break between mid-1990s). Also included in the current lineup are veteran musicians of the Southern scene, drummer Shawn Beamer, bassist Tim Lindsey and vocalist Parker Lee."

Good playing, sounds like the Dead, total filler.

would love to hear comments on this? is this the right spot to talk about this?

https://www.discogs.com/master/656871-Tom-Petty-And-The-Heartbreakers-Official-Live-Leg

My hometown Petty evangelist let me tape his copy back in the day, so used to play it regularly. Great sound quality iirc. And i always thought that Dog on the Run was a jam

Dead Petty absolutely my least favorite Petty. There's a pseudo-Dead song on Mojo, otherwise one of my favorite Petty albums, that's a total speed bump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcAwPBtaMxk

Hard pass

That's the Bonnaroo show I saw. The Dead cover was apropos there, it was in deference to the tradition (up to that point, since abandoned) of having a big jam band close out the fest on Sunday night.

Overall a really good show!

It's funny, there are complete videos online of 2 of the 4 Petty shows I saw. But not of the best one.

those little garcia squiggles have me picturing bob weir singing this for some reason

and those little mid 60s beatle gtr riffs starting at 1:44 have be pre-picturing the traveling wilburys.

i saw molly hatchet when all the original members were very much alive (as far as i know), opening for kansas, with whom i was briefly infatuated. it was a strange pairing. my only memory of molly hatchet was realizing "oh, they're the guys who do that song."