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

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.