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

yeah the "don't need you" delivery is the best hook in the song, after the verse riff.

Petty also very much finding his voice as a singer here, amidst a lot of dubious experiments. multi-tracked, clearly-enunciating Petty just sounds terrific over anything.

where's calzino when you need'em?

he'd rather listen to anything else than her heart.

the greatest song gene clark never wrote. every detail perfect. including the way it's sequenced after "i need to know."

"i need to know" is also about her.

yes, and the sequence matters. reverse them and everything gets much darker, with him promising the money & cocaine dude in song #1 that his lines will never work on her, and then discovering in song #2 that, oops, they did, and now all he can do is complain as she walks away: "who woulda thought that you'd fall for his line?" the actual sequence gives him a fighting chance that he was wrong about her in "i need to know" and she didn't in fact fall for his line.

(or maybe "listen to her heart" is just the story he makes up to make himself feel better -- a whole lot better, as it were -- after she does run off with the money and the cocaine. there's a good screenplay here, either way!)

he pulls off the beatles trick of making an unorthodox song structure sound totally organic

otm

Many posts ago but:

orchestra luna. everyone should own their album. i think me and andy zax are the only big fans of that album of people i know though.

Scott and I don’t know each other irl but as Biden says, come on man. I pretty much joined ilm to talk about Orchestra Luna.

My first question, about Orchestra Luna

Okay, back to Petty.

"Listen To Her Heart": Classic. Byrds fully updated for 1978. Another one I didn't hear much on the radio even though it was on Greatest Hits. I think I actually first heard it on a PBS airing of the '97(?) Fillmore special. In a time when the radio is packed with the dudes with the money and cocaine (and Champagne, as the label suggested for a replacement lyric) talking about their girls/women, Petty takes a look from the other side, taking those guys to task and trusting she will make the right decision. Not much on paper: two short verses separated by the chorus (halfway in now), a short guitar break takes us to the bridge before a quick final chorus and a 30-second coda. They make the absolute most of it. Of everything here on this album, this most clearly points to the breakthrough of ...Torpedoes.

Gene Clark comparisons OTM, this slots in perfectly alongside his Byrds songs and stuff on the Gosdin Bros. album. Didn't he (or McGuinn) cover it in the '80s?

I can't really see, but I kind of assume Stan is rocking a coke vial necklace on the album cover.

"It was a gift from Henley!"

"It came with a thesaurus!"

Indeed, verily.

Love this one, for all reasons stated above. The thing that really elevate the cocaine line is not so much the illicitness as the specificity. In five words — "your money and your cocaine" — Petty outlines exactly the guy he's up against, and dismisses him at the same time.

It's kind of funny that even as the entire music industry was inhaling dump trucks full of coke every day, it also became a go-to signifier of superficiality and sleaze. I guess they knew whereof they spoke.

soon enough petty would have plenty of money and cocaine

So many contemporary rock and rollers would've blamed HER for falling for the guy w/the money and the cocaine.

DON: well, yeah.

soon enough he would be declaring bankruptcy and suing his label and hiding the master tapes of his new album from them.

Petty was so strapped for cash that the band went on a mini tour to raise money for the case. Dubbing it The Lawsuit Tour, the band wore bitterness on their sleeves, even selling shirts to fans that read “Why MCA?” across the front.

Even when the label thought they could seize the tapes for the new record, Petty got crafty with storing them somewhere else. After the label got permission to seize the recordings from the studio, Petty convinced one of his guitar techs to hide the tapes in an undisclosed location. That way, when Petty was asked about the whereabouts of the tapes in court, he wouldn’t be lying when he said he didn’t know.

As the trial was wrapping up, MCA finally buckled, knowing that Petty would never back down from getting his songs back. Instead of welcoming him back to MCA, the label gave Petty his imprint, Backstreet Records, where he could release his albums without worrying about any of his royalties falling into the wrong hands.

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-reason-why-tom-petty-sued-his-own-label/

THEN he would have money and cocaine. he had to wait a bit.

"Scott and I don’t know each other irl but as Biden says, come on man. I pretty much joined ilm to talk about Orchestra Luna."

I stand corrected! i must have missed that thread. my apologies.

I also love the laconic roll of "Buddy, you don't even know her" — almost like it's one long word.

Surely the best use of "buddy" in popular song.

Petty achieves a rare trick here: he can speak confidently about HER heart without sounding like he controls her. It's in the way he comes down on those last syllables: "She's gonna listen to her heart, it's gonna tell her what to do..."

both of those syllables fall on the downbeats coming out of the 2/4 bars that thus sang freud talks about upthread. words and rhythm working really well together there. the craft throughout this song is immense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIJc3HQBUEI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4B3tivQqGs

Couple extra thoughts on Listen to Her Heart. The backing and harmony vocals are great, I don't know who all is layered in there. Lynch, Tench and Blair all sang, maybe an underappreciated part of the Heartbreakers' oomph. I love love love the coda. They have some of the best codas. And that final corny-but-heroic DAH/Da-DAH/Da-DAAAAAHHHH closing. Pros in the best way.

No Second Thoughts

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

#Dreamsfadehopedieshard

springsteen with tablas? interesting experiment.

strikes me as a little "we need one more...anyone got anything...?"

i like how in that interview i posted above tom credits denny cordell for teaching them how to work in a studio by letting them loose and having them jam and just get familiar with the process and also playing old records for them. and he also says that if they had signed to a label like Capitol they probably would have been thrown into a studio, made one semi-decent album that tanked, gotten dropped by the label, and ended up back in Florida! Ha! sometimes those first steps can be crucial.

And Cordell was robbing them blind. When Petty confronted him, Cordell said something, "Darling, that's the way the business works." Petty forgave him years later.

which is why its amazing that he still gives him so much credit! most people would just say that they were born in the studio and knew everything on their own.

i feel like getting robbed was the price of getting an album out into stores. what you did after that was up to you.

This one's pleasant. Kinda reminds me of "Bron-Yr-Aur" by Zeppelin. Unless you're the Ramones you probably need a few songs like this, just to give everybody in the band a break during the set. The "yeah, yeah ooh yeah yeah" thing is nice but I'd love one more extra-hooky hook tbh. Maybe the title line was gonna be that, and then the quaaludes kicked in right as Petty got to it..

i hear the seeds of "wildfowers"/"she's the one" era petty here. i like it.

Yeah I've always liked No Second Thoughts. I agree it's a slight thing, but good vibes and the "yeah yeah ooo yeah yeah" is nice.

Petty Dog Pondering. Sounds like spring to me!

Also, not the actor but

Phil Seymour – backing vocals on "Magnolia"

"No Second Thought": Yeah, this totally forecasts the off the cuff feel and POV of the post-Lynne stuff (even down to the title). Not much else going on, but who else sounded like this in '78?

label-mate j.j. cale?

i really love j.j. cale. from beginning to end pretty much. he never wavered from his sound. pretty impressive.

Yeah, Cale is a good one.

i love this one. i put it on that Not Dylan thread. its Leon Russell and J.J. Cale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpgfJf5ZT_I

who else sounded like this in '78?

wings,maybe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSJ4xSmonr8

Sounds like a rip of the stones “favorite girl” to me

Factory

boy, Paul sure could play bass.

Restless

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5QKYC7yp3o

i like it. all tight and contained, lots of potential energy and sharp corners. i like how it dances around the 12-bar blues changes, turning the 4-chord into a chorus. harmonies are great.