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

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!!

great post omar <3

I’ve been revisiting Jason Molina recently and I find this Petty connection in that they both choose this sort of fighting posture to their depression. Molina really explicitly states what Tom sort of just hints at.

That riff is so basic and feels so primal that it's hard to believe nobody ever built a song around it before.

It owes a lot to the piano riff of "Hey Bulldog".

This song (and really this whole album side despite my caveats) is well-done, but my mind tells me "you should be enjoying this" rather than "you are enjoying this".

"it just had this directness and clarity which made it sound so potent, and it had the air of a comeback, like a genuine pro coming in and reasserting themselves in an arena full of fly by night amateurs."

this was also the time of Neil's Freedom and Ragged Glory. i remember those albums seemed refreshing at the time even if they were built on Neil's trusty rusted chassis of the 70s. they just seemed like something that i really needed at that moment. maybe they were just preparing me for the onslaught of grunge to come.

hmm i guess “rockin in the free world” is probably the last classic rock song

good thread idea, that, it's an interesting question

my fave classic rock song from 1989 was probably "sowing the seeds of love".

"sowing the seeds of love" will forever remind me of the dream academy's classic rock cover of john lennon's "love". the "love" cover had whales on it i think. though now that i look the "love" cover came out in 1990. and also featured Junior Vasquez remixes.

Oh yeah! I remember that one.

World Party and XTC too. All that psychedelic stuff.

last classic rock song? Probably some of that early '90s Clapton. Maybe Layla unplugged. the sound of three million people nodding off on the couch, after dinner.

the sonic depth and scope of these songs, and the lyrics feeling a lot more immediately lived in, hit pretty hard.

Sonically it definitely stood out — not a particular Lynne fan myself as noted above, but it had a warmth and intimacy to it that was quite different from the peak '80s Mutt Lange powerhouse sound we were still immersed in. (Which I love fwiw for its own sake.) The album I think it's probably most in line with in a lot of ways is Tunnel of Love — also a solo album by a band leader, also with warm acoustic strumming, also stripped of previous big-boom bombast. Also full of self-doubt and looming middle age.

As for "last classic rock song," you can draw that line a lot of ways but on a visit to my hometown recently I checked out the rock station I used to listen to in high school and the most recent song that I noticed was "Black Hole Sun."

to me, clapton unplugged feels more like nostalgia for that era (“layla” did come out in 1970 after all) than anything “of” the era

anything post nevermind feels ineligible

not to derail further but grunge and everything after does not feel like part of the same era at all

It wasn't part of the same era, but also it was a sort of return to the era right? A selling point of grunge was that finally we're getting back to long-haired guitar heroes after the synthpop '80s. So even though we all have associations that make us draw a line between Soundgarden and Zeppelin, "Black Hole Sun" sounds right at home in a classic rock setting.

Idk Layla is both a throwback bit of nostalgia but also sort of the last gasp

Audioslave's "Like a Stone" is the last classic rock song.

It wasn't part of the same era, but also it was a sort of return to the era right? A selling point of grunge was that finally we're getting back to long-haired guitar heroes after the synthpop '80s. So even though we all have associations that make us draw a line between Soundgarden and Zeppelin, "Black Hole Sun" sounds right at home in a classic rock setting.

Completely disagree. The willingness of classic rock radio programmers to assimilate a few grunge and post-grunge songs into their format isn't about Soundgarden sounding like Led Zeppelin (they didn't, at all); it was about them needing to maintain/reassert AOR's relevance after almost losing their grip — remember that hair metal was not accepted into the pantheon; you'll never hear Poison or Ratt or even Bon Jovi on classic rock radio, except for one NY station that used to play "Runaway" a lot when I was a kid. Classic rock radio programmers grabbing Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and Nirvana is them saying, "Yeah, this is our thing too, because we still matter, goddammit!"

as far as classic rock goes, TP still hadn't recorded "into the great wide open" or "learning to fly". maybe those are his last classic rock songs.

you'll never hear Poison or Ratt or even Bon Jovi on classic rock radio

erm I heard all of those on the same station where I heard Black Hole Sun. Maybe WCMF is a classic rock outlier idk, but viewed from the current distance without the sense of grunge as this big game-changer, it isn't at all illogical to basically draw a line of guitar rock from say 1969 to 1996ish.

unperson is wrong on Bon Jovi, et al., those absolutely do get played now on CR stations... but right overall. voodoo chili was talking about the core of the Classic Rock format that came out of AOR, and specifically disincluded the later updating of playlists to bring in more 'modern' songs.

we've definitely explored this on other threads, but a key thing to bear in mind is that the addition of Bon Jovi, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, etc., happened wayyyyy later. Like, circa 2010-ish, maybe in an effort to keep up with "Dave FM" type stations. It was definitely something that stood out when it started happening --- for 20+ years those playlists had all stopped around 1990, the classic rock canon was locked. They didn't even fold in new songs by the old artists, except maybe some token airplay when they first dropped (with unplugged Layla being the very rare exception).

With all this in mind, I do think "Mary Jane's Last Dance" is actually the right pick for this slot. Feels good thematically too - "this rock block weekend, we're bringing you everything from Aerosmith to Zeppelin --- one more time to kill the pain."

The last time I was a serious radio listener was in the 80s, junior high and high school, and there were two NYC-area stations I listened to - one was absolutely "classic rock," which basically meant white rock bands from 1969-78. Zeppelin, Stones, Who...I don't even remember them playing that much Beatles. The other was "rock," too, but broader - I used to hear REM's "Superman" and "Can't Get There From Here" alongside Petty, the Cars, and Zep/Stones/Who, and there was one DJ who would occasionally scream "Ramones attack!" and play, like, five Ramones songs in a row.

Sure, but I mean that that era is NOW safely folded in. And it makes sense! Much more through-line than disruption from ‘70s dude-led guitar rock to ‘90s dude-led guitar rock. And it’s pretty specific to the big early ‘90s bands, afaik classic rock stations never added Hole or even Smashing Pumpkins, nothing too “alt-rock.”

Which is to say, "classic rock" is a mutable construct, so if you wanted to identify the last classic rock song you'd need to set some parameters around it. Is it "only boomers"? People who released their first album before 1980, or 1985? There's certainly a know-it-when-you-hear-it dimension to it, but it's not really that easy to define.

Anyway, Tom Petty obviously qualifies no matter how you frame it.

Unperson,

Here's the 1987 Top 1027 of All Time Listener Poll from that "broader" rock station -- WNEW:

The 1987 WNEW-FM Top 1027 Songs of All Time Listener's Poll

Pre-Wilburys and Full Moon Fever, there's 8 Petty tracks on the list:

-- #232 - REFUGEE
-- #321 - BREAKDOWN
-- #358 - AMERICAN GIRL
-- #385 - THE WAITING
-- #458 - HERE COMES MY GIRL
-- #559 - DON'T DO ME LIKE THAT
-- #859 - EVEN THE LOSERS
-- #881 - LISTEN TO HER HEART

feels like Lynne auditioning to produce Bob's next album

BOB DYLAN:
I don’t compromise and I don’t pretend
I don’t even care if I ever see her again
Most of the time

TWENTY HARMONIZING JEFF LYNNES:
Most of the TIIIIIIIME

Wow you guys are still doing this

local classic rock station played Whitesnake into Pearl Jam the other day

Here I go again, picking on the boy

I have listened to Face in the Crowd like 5 times a day since it came up here. Feels like it could have been on Tunnel of Love but at the same time I can hear a killer Leonard cohen version. The opening verse is so foreboding, like it creates an openness that is frightening but so simple that it feels almost inevitable.

Feel A Whole Lot Better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZxHLkA5EcU

respectable.

We needed an interval after this killer run.

same key, same tempo as the byrds classic. suffers only from "every hair in its place" perfectionism.

the gap between "i'll feel a whole lot better" and full moon fever: 24 years
the gap between full moon fever and now: 35 years

Fine version of a great song. Does this make the Byrds the only artist he covered twice, at least as far as released recordings goes? (Reminds me, we didn't do the live album — maybe should have at least hit on "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star.")

and "Needles and Pins," an actual top 40 single.

i did mention at the appropriate time that people should feel free to post anything from the live album that they wanted to post or talk about. but nobody took me up on it. and we moved on. like thieves in the hollywood night.

listening to this it struck me that TP actually sounded a little LESS like roger mcguinn on it than he does on some of his own songs.

also i feel like a shout-out to songwriter Gene Clark is in order. always say hi to gene when the opportunity arises.

hell yeah

Clark is the best rock songwriter most people have never heard of

i did mention at the appropriate time that people should feel free to post anything from the live album that they wanted to post or talk about.

oops, missed that. But as we're on a Byrds cover, I'll just drag the other one in here. Got a fair amount of rock radio airplay at the time. (The band's 32nd-most-played song in concert, at least per setlist.) As with this one, I don't think they improve on the original, but they do show an unsurprising affinity for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q3dXiQJukM

God, that sounds great despite the trumpet. Stan and Howie were such necessary improvisers.

*harmonists, sorry

gene clark is the best but so so sad lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ0KRApU-pI

Ai yi, was just reading that the royalty infusion from Petty's cover sent Clark on a relapse binge that more or less continued til his death a few years later. Feel a whole lot better indeed.