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

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.