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

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

Pretty sure that just a handful of years after the fact, Beatles (and Byrds) worship around this point was at a low. That's kind of why Beatles-esque bands, from Big Star to Cheap Trick to Raspberries or whomever, were often relegated to the power-pop gulag, while groups like ELO were doing the Beatles as kitsch; the Byrdsy jangle of "American Girl" was probably heard as a notable novelty, just as it would be later with REM. Iirc, even stuff like the Vox amps Petty and Campbell (later?) used, my understanding is that they were considered pretty uncool.

i kinda feel like the beatles still ruled in the 70s no matter what year it was. paul mccartney was huge. badfingers and raspberries started the 70s and the knack and all those skinny tie bands ended it. there were tons of covers. disco covers. funk covers. elton john covers. stupid stigwood movie. shaved fish in 1975. they were friggin' everywhere.

i don't have a lot to add to some great posts

it's almost too perfect to talk about

i second skot - i've never changed the channel on this song my whole life, as overplayed as it is

i actually went to a Beatles convention in the 70s! it was nostalgia for six years ago! people selling beatles merch. we watched the Magical Mystery Tour movie. the band Apple played. it was fun. that was probably 1977 or 1978. oh yeah Beatlemania was HUGE on Broadway. that started in 1977.

Was just doing some googling, and allegedly interest in the Beatles had indeed begun to fade a little (relatively speaking) by the late '70s. In Lennon's final interview, he apparently says: “When a radio station has a Beatles weekend, they usually play the same 10 songs — ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ ‘Help!,’ ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Something,’ ‘Let It Be‘ — you know, there’s all that wealth of material, but we hear only 10 songs." Then, not-surprisingly, his death sparked renewed interest, and soon after the rise of the classic rock format further helped renew interest, and it's probably never faded since, spiked with the occasional well-timed release, like the catalog on CD in 1987, the Anthology a few years later, The Number 1s, etc.

In the UK, I've read (c/o Marcello) that Beatlemania was at a much lower ebb.

In Lennon's final interview, he apparently says: “When a radio station has a Beatles weekend, they usually play the same 10 songs — ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ ‘Help!,’ ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Something,’ ‘Let It Be‘ — you know, there’s all that wealth of material, but we hear only 10 songs."

but that's a radio playlist complaint, not a beatles popularity complaint. they were ridiculously huge, still, in every way. to wit, beatles weekends were very much thing.

*a* thing

tipsy mothra so completely otm on this song i don't know what else is there is to say except for how much i adore the hiccup-y enunciation of "a-an-american girl" in the final chorus.

"American Girl": Petty claimed the inspiration was less Byrds and more Bo Diddley, the combo of which more or less = The Heartbreakers.

When did this become *The Tom Petty Song*? I guess it got airplay at the time, there was the McGuinn cover, movie synchs (Fast Times..., SotL etc.), it was on Greatest Hits...but speaking as someone who heard A LOT of Classic & Album Rock Radio in the '90s, I don't remember really hearing it get spun heavily until sometime in the '00s. What was at work (other than corporate homogenization of the formats)?

Silence of the Lambs helped. The way it's used to show a facet of Katherine's personality is touching.

Yeah tipsy otm

This is the start of something that Petty will continue through his career, singing about women with inner lives & quirks & personalities, who want things, women who exist not solely because they’ve walked out or left him or Are Hot or whatever.

And when there is need/longing/loss, he often puts himself as secondary to whatever she wants.

As a concept this isn’t world shattering but as a woman who listens to & worships at the altar of Classic Rock, it is rare to feel included in a song in this genre at this time period. He’s not threatening or threatened or leering. He’s quite welcoming and cool about it without being patronizing and it feels sort of special somehow.

He’s really good at it :)

Not sure where you grew up Grisso but this song was played every day on NY classic rock radio in the 90: Beatles not so much as i recall, weirdly enough. Maybe not “hard rock” enough