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

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