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

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.

That little bent guitar "brreew!" at "dating a singer" and "can't get no lovin'" could be the Lynne-iest touch on the whole album. Overall very pleasant, I like the sound and the call-and-response of the ukulele strumming on the chorus is a nice change of texture.

This is one of the only post-1982 songs I've heard bands cover.

"Yer so bad/best thing I ever had" is one of the few times he sounds coquettish.

I guess I'm swimming against the tide on this one — I hate this song. The lyrics are so boneheadedly simple it's like a children's song. All the rhymes land like dropped bricks. It gives me a headache. I think my hatred of the word "yuppie" makes it impossible for me to even tolerate this song.

This is one of the only post-1982 songs I've heard bands cover.

e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7_LZZn7L5c

I love this one, to me it’s the upside of the slightness of the whole album — Petty feeling loose and goofy, letting himself have fun. Would’ve been a B-side on any prior album, probably. I agree about the pre-chorus, just crazy catchy and likable.

this song is a total earworm.

pretty sure there have been other threads, but were there any other 70's rockers who took to video as much as Petty and ZZ Top? he loves the medium, you can tell. I love the sly little smile after "took him for all he was worth".

Rod Stewart.

Elton too.

journey. aerosmith. styx. genesis. oh lots of 70s rockers liked to ham it up in the video years.

Heh, I actually wrote about MTV stalwarts last month.

Lots of '70s rockers adapted to MTV, but I think Petty was unusual in really leveraging it career-wise — MTV palpably made him a bigger star, while for a lot of the older more established acts it was more like an extended lease on existing stardom.

i think it made them all bigger! think of Genesis or Yes. they could have been donesville without MTV. dire straits! i don't think it was just an extended lease. they made so much money and it kinda became who they were! the 70s were dead. nobody was talking about Wind & Wuthering or whatever.

you could say that Peter Gabriel had been helping to invent the 80s with his solo stuff in the 70s and his 80s success makes sense but who would have known that phil collins would end up being one of the biggest stars of the decade? nobody knew that was going to happen. and i feel like MTV was totally the reason for it.

otm