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

Whoever annotated this one on genius has a job waiting for them at the LA Chamber of Commerce:

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by Los Angeles and long for your hometown when you first move there.

Why live in your hometown where it rains and you’ve got hometown problems when you can live in Los Angeles?

Why live in your hometown where you have to deal with your mom and dad when you can live in Los Angeles?

Century City is a neighborhood of Los Angeles between Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. As a major metropolitan city, Los Angeles has a lot of modern technologies that small towns lack, and it lacks a lot of the embedded racism, homophobia and puritan ideals that make small towns unlivable for people with open minds. This makes LA a more modern city than conservative towns that prize the Bible as a guide to righteous living.

Living in Los Angeles can make people depressed as they struggle to find themselves and distinguish themselves in a city of other ambitious, creative people. Thus he doesn’t “know what about”, because it’s also a beautiful beach town with amazing weather all year ‘round. Over time, you start to recognize the patterns of your own thought living here, and you realize that the discouragement will pass like everything else.

But then:

This song probably has a strong dose of irony. While LA is great, Century City isn’t the sexiest part of town, but it is the seat of power of the big music and film corporations. You’ve got a bunch of people in suits controlling the careers of artists, actors and musicians, and taking power lunches between multimillion-dollar contracts. So of all the neighborhoods in LA, Century City is a weird one to write a song about unless you’re saying something about the culture there.

This is a little reminiscent of Bruce's "Pink Cadillac" to my ears (at least how the first verses are written/voiced)

it's pretty much the same song with a different topline, at least until he gets to the bubbleglam "we're gonna live in century city" bridge. it's a good bridge.

and, speaking of bubbleglam, yes thumbs up to that suffragette city ending.

Don't Do Me Like That

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFkJ_BOz88E

His first top ten!

This might be my least favorite of his early "hits."

i've heard it 400 million times and i don't hate it! another point for Tom.

the case for benmont tench album mvp grows

don’t care that it sounds like j geils band, i’ve always loved this one

don't do me like the centerfold

I will say that even great Petty songs often have weak, perfunctory C parts (imo), but "Don't Do Me Like That" actually has a relatively strong one.

i was also going to mention the j. geils band. though this actually came out before they updated their sound. proto j. geils band? sounds fine on the radio but i can't find much to say about it.

"Don't Do Me Like That": The most stereotypically "70s" of the singles off this album. Definitely sounds like J. Geils (specifically "Must Of Got Lost") with hints of Hall & Oates and, I dunno, Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds? Orleans? Very hooky. Never really thought before about how short it is -- only 2:41! If this was an Eagles song it would be 5 minutes long.

When I was a kid and flipping through Joel Whitburn's AT40 books at B. Dalton's at the mall, I expected to see "Refugee," "Don't Come Around Here No More," and "You Got Lucky" among Tom Petty's top tens...but no, they're "Don't Do Me Like That" and "Free Fallin'" and, if you wanna be generous, "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around."

i guess it borrows its chords from a slightly earlier pop era (late 50s / early 60s) than the era he usually borrows his chords from.

Maybe a little Motown. Could hear the Isley Bros. doing it in the '60s.

DDMLT is great, classic hook, and the whole band is just so on. Maybe because they'd been playing the song for years, it really feels inhabited. The organ, obviously, but this is also peak Stan Lynch imo. The fill coming out of the bridge back into the verse might be my single favorite fill of his. Also really shows their R&B chops, one of those songs where the Heartbreakers remind me of Booker T and the MGs.

he tried to give it to the j geils band!

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/peter-wolf-on-the-time-he-turned-down-tom-pettys-dont-do-me-like-that-201919/

(the fill at about 1:37 is the one I mean)

What I love about the Heartbreakers, both the band and the individual players, is that they're not particularly flashy but you can still get a sense of them as individuals and (at least in the case of Benmont and Mike) utter mastery of their instruments. It's as if session guys where hired not to showoff but to show more personality than the usual mold-fitters. Less meat and potatoes than, say, the more broad stroke and subservient E Street Band but never tipping over into the frenetic territory of (for example) the Attractions, or even Dire Straits. Just a great, great backing band, with the restraint of the best of the '60s juiced by the slightly more attention getting energy of the '70s. Like the Stax Records house band if they soloed more or something.

Hence why the Heartbreakers were a more appropriate fit as Dylan's backing band.

lynch is indeed great on this song. always air drum that intro (even tho a lot of it is kick. what can i say, i’m not a drummer)

so what's this song about? is the entire song a continuation of what his friend starts telling him in the first verse? is the rest of the song the friend still talking to tom, or does it switch to tom talking to a woman -- whose relationship to him is unclear -- starting with the first chorus? and is he pleading with her to not do him like that and threatening her not to be seen with another guy simply because he *might* love her and *might* one day need her? *does* tom in fact love/need her? is this his awkward way of confessing he loves her for the first time? or is he just mansplaining jealousy to someone he's fooled around with once or twice, if at all?

"if you were in the public eye / giving someone else a try" is such an awkward way of saying whatever he's trying to say. but it's fantastic pop song imagery, so musical, so lyrical, so loaded with heartbreak and anger, so quintessentially tom.

man, i posted that new single that lara trump just dropped with a thud on the Trump thread and then i had to go and listen to her cover of "i won't back down". yuck. i won't post it here out of respect for the memory of T.E.P.
she should have gotten a cease and desist letter from the petty family though.

The secret to the chorus of DDMLT is the little three-note guitar figure after he sings "Don't do me like that." Wonder if that was Petty or Campbell who landed on that.

i'm in the middle of a rewatch of "the wire." tonite is season 4, episode 10, "misgivings." bunny colvin having a heart to heart with namond, who's been arrested on a corner, and wondering if he should take him in or give him a taste of jail for a night.

"come on mr. c.," namond pleads. "don't do me like that."

You Tell Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjgY8OBf41k

this has some of that j.j. cale vibe to it but it gets bigger than j.j. liked to go. and longer for that matter. i like this song a lot. it has a really cool vibe. another one that could have been turned into a long jam live if they had wanted to go that route. plenty of room for piano and guitar solos. underrated! maybe. maybe its a fan favorite. i have no idea.

i think this is one of the few he never played live. i like it too. sheryl crow sort of borrowed that intro for "my favorite mistake." there's also maybe a beatles solo song this reminds me of but i can't place it.

The groove feels like kind of a warm-up for "Stop Draggin My Heart Around," listen to the first 10 seconds of each. Can definitely tell they're of close vintage.

I like "You Tell Me" a lot, classic Petty album cut — a lil moody, a lil groovy.

Like me.

another one that could have been turned into a long jam live

Intro would've been perfect for introducing the band.

Century City: Love the driving forward energy of this. Of all the things we've labeled as borderline "new wave," this feels closest to the mark. To that end, I wish the guitar lick that answers Petty's verse lines were a little louder and sharper in the mix, but maybe it would end up sounding too much like Elton's "Grow Some Funk of Your Own." Cool song. The shuffley kinda thing Lynch does at the end of the verses is one of my favorite things he's done so far. It gives this nice off-kilter, buffeted-by-the-good-times-in-the-city quality. The vocal there also reminds me of Bo Diddley's delivery rolling into the chorus of "You Can't Judge a Book by the Cover."
In case anyone doesn't know, the real-life Century City is so named because it's the old 20th Century Fox studio backlot, which the studio decided was more valuable as a short-time real-estate sell-off, especially after the Cleopatra flop. I don't think that was much on Tommy's mind here, but the enthusiasm of the song kinda sells the idea of it as an Emerald City kind of place, or a sci-fi novel's obligatory glimmering capital. I once had "we're gonna live in spatula city" as my display name.

Don't Do Me Like That: What can I add? Great, anxious, bright radio-ready pop-rock. I don't LOVE the bridge but otherwise this is just hooky as hell.
To fcc, re: "if you were in the public eye / giving someone else a try" --- awkward yes, but in this way that seems very much in the tradition of rock's jealous creeps. John Lennon on "You Can't Do That" comes to mind. They're so wound up in their paranoia that even the language comes out detached from reality.

You Tell Me: No memory of this one - huh! It feels most of a piece with the midtempo tracks on You're Gonna Get It. The production keeps it a little punchier of course. The groove reminds me of some song by another artist that I can't place. I like the way Petty delivers "yeah the last thing that I needed was to finally realize that you were lying," sort of spilling over the boundary lines.

very much in the tradition of rock's jealous creeps. John Lennon on "You Can't Do That" comes to mind.

yes!

benmont tench fanboy checking in once again to give this one the official seal of approval

there’s only two songs from his subsequent career that I’d rank higher than “adequate, with a hook”

"You Tell Me" is the first of these; I don't suppose I could defend it as a better-crafted song than the hits on this album, but I find the mood and playing really gripping.

there's also maybe a beatles solo song this reminds me of but i can't place it.

Lennon's "I'm Losing You" (which postdates this)?

i'm searching on that Bm-A-E chord progression and all i'm coming up with are "wicked game" and "behind blue eyes," but i don't think it's either of those i had in mind. maybe it's nothing.

What Are You Doin' In My Life?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxEPG7o1-oo

An album track. The most pedestrian thing on DTT.

yeah, not a fave.

For a split second "You Tell Me" sounds a bit like King Crimson's "Heartbeat" (#onethread).

The chorus is catchy but this is one of the more sour songs in the catalog. Maybe based on a real experience with a stalker or something? I don’t know, but it’s pretty bilious.

Tomorrow's our last DTT tune. I forget: we doing B-sides too?

here tom's blessing and curse start to clarify. he can churn these things out in his sleep and the band can spiff them up to a nice sheen 'til they sound just fine on the radio. then they're over and you forget them.

Album filler maybe, but the hook pops into my head every once in a while. I like the solo too. It'd benefit from a shorter runtime and a real ending. Tom is surely thinking of Chuck Berry's "some stupid jerk tryin' to reach another number" at one point, and I think a "cha-cha-cha!" finish, like Chuck or the early Beatles, would have been handy here.

there are two b-sides for this album? if i am remembering right. i could just add them after the last album track tomorrow. as a special friday bonus.

That works! Is "Stop Draggin'..." among them?

^^That one's later (cut during the Hard Promises sessions).