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

Yeah, Petty said the Mad Max film had impressed all of them.

It didn't make it into my book, but someone told me a story of running into Cecil Taylor walking out of a showing of The Road Warrior. He loved it.

“you got lucky” is possibly my favorite petty song. perfect but if late night sleaze, incredible arrangement (campbell’s baritone guitar >>). also if tench hated playing the synth too bad, because that’s one of the legendary synth moments a decade that did not lack for them

yeah love that synth so much

The usual don't-trust-the-creator axiom applies.

Classic tune, and I feel like the bed of slightly mournful synths with tasty guitar licks gave Mike Campbell some ideas.

Deliver Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sXP17MbvBQ

Is it my imagination that the riffs sound tougher and the drums louder?

Yeah I think the production has taken an ‘80s turn here although I don’t know what exactly Iovine did to juice it.

I think “Deliver Me” is great, one of my absolute favorite Petty album cuts. Big crunchy riff, soaring chorus. And the bridge gets me:

Sometimes I wonder if this is worth the trouble
Sometimes I wonder if this is worth the fight
I never have made my mind up about it
I've just decided to let it all ride

I feel ya Tom.

this one comes back to me postage due. but i don't want to stop the tom love. it does sound great while it's transpiring.

this sounds like something he might have written for del shannon or roger mcguinn. for some comeback album. their version would have lots of female backup singers. or maybe not. i dig it. i like the E Street piano. i'm realizing throughout this whole thing that i am a very definite tom petty ALBUM listener. i enjoy his whole album experience. divorcing things and listening to them one by one is a little challenging. songs that would just flow into the next album track taken on their own can sound different to me. i dunno. its weird. he obviously had a ton of great singles. but i think of him as an album guy.

i was thinking that too. this one might be bolstered by the change in tone from the previous one.

Stop Draggin'...: Def know this better from Weird Al's version, which never did much for me. But it's a charming little thing. Kinda feels like an album track elevated to single staus by the all-star teamup. Stevie's voice slots perfectly into the Heartbreakers in "bluesy groove" mode, and makes a great pairing with Tom's... Not sure she could have really made it work for every tune in their setlist, but it's an appealing thought experiment and I wish they'd tried it for at least one legendary tour and associated live album.

A One Story Town: Hmm. Feels like a return to the underwritten territory of the second album. Feels like they arrived at the "story: building or narrative?" conceit, and were satisfied with that. Once again, the band is energetic enough... and one riff is like a much more rootsy, garagey version of "Material Girl," which I dig. But the "she was just seventeen" verse, even if it's intentionally gross, is not working for me.

You Got Lucky: Here the "intentionally jerky narrator" thing works, and dovetails with the cold synthy soundscape. I gave this a thumbs up on the classic "Classic Rock Classics" thread, and I still dig it, even if the main synth riff sometimes hits my ears as a charmingly shoddy demo rather than a New Wave update of the Psycho strings, and the solo is almost parodic. The real save is the secondary and more convincingly Kraftwerky synth riff. I kinda wish that, in the Stop Draggin' way of things, this had been recorded by Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army and then redubbed with Tommy's lead vocal. But it's good.

lol a Tubeway Army version of You Got Lucky is an amazing idea.

Circling back on "One Story Town," I think it's worth mentioning that the entire song betrays its opening lines about "I'm for standing up/I'm for breaking free" — this guy's not going anywhere and he knows it (no matter how many 17-year-olds he hits on). Which are also the opening lines of the album. Overall this a record of frustration, resentment, being stuck and outta luck, in or out of bad relationships. But it has a lot of energy for being a bummer.

lol a Tubeway Army version of You Got Lucky is an amazing idea.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra)

seconding!

some real sweet Tench action on Deliver Me here

fwiw here's the minimally-attended ilm poll of this album that I started (lordy) 15 years ago.

then one day the feelin just died: Tom Petty LONG AFTER DARK POLL

C+ ?!?!?! WTF Christgau

he was particularly stuck up about petty. thinking long after dark is prob the best album qua album of petty's heartbreakers run. i still believe he's primarily a crafter of great singles, as each album has 3 or so songs that absolutely tower above the rest, but he definitely cared about creating a good album experience. and even the lesser tunes have some great heartbreakers moments to liven things up

I'm thinking it too but I've a special affection for Let Me Up (I've Had Enough0

Speaking of singles, tomorrow we get one of my faves (though overlooked and under-compiled).

and here howie joined up…he was known as a singer of high harmonies, whereas previously I can't pick out another distinct voice harmonizing with TP, it seems like mostly he tracked all the harmonies himself…can anyone single out a song on this record or others where Howie's voice pops?

One time my father in law quite charmingly asked "what if someone in the E street band doesn't like something bruce has decided?" I said that I don't think anyone in the E street band gets to question Springsteen's choices, but it seems like, re: alfred's citation that Tench has some pull, the Heartbreakers did have some say?

Unlike the E Street Band, the Heartbreakers were eventually songwriters and producers in their own right. Howie Epstein produced those two John Prine comeback albums, one of which is pretty great, and girlfriend Carlene Carter's I Fell in Love, also a comeback. Stan Lynch we know from his Don Henley writing sessions. Benmont Tench wrote Fergal Sharkey's "You Little Thief" (his only listenable single) and co-wrote with Petty a terrific Rosanne Cash song called "Never Be You."

mike's home demos would end up being the music for a lot of songs, no? thought i remembered that from the oral history. he would send stuff to tom and tom would write lyrics.

Yep!

Or each would start a song the other would finish.

So far, this listening project has cemented my sense that the albums all have great singles, a few really likeable album tracks, 1-2 duds that will never grow on me, and some "filler" that doesn't really play as filler when listening to the albums straight through. Consistently strong album sequencing has played an important part, I think.

Versus, say, Billy Joel, where we discovered a persistent (if not quite universal) pattern of distinctively weaker Side Bs, that almost always got worse as they went before rallying on a strong closer.

well Steve Van Zandt produces and had(has?) a solo career, as has Nils, and Steve, Tallent and Bittan have produced just as much as anyone in the Heartbreakers. But yeah, its fundamental that the Heartbreakers had more of a say… campbell was the principal (only?) cowriter, Lynch's views were heard enuff to be annoying enuff for TP to want him out (as well as his inability to play parts to order in the studio)…

What the guys in each bands have in common additionally is that they are well known within specific fanbases of each lead dude as well as the 80s rock world: Coug and BJ bands only have well known known drummers, Kenny Aronoff and Liberty Devitto, and the other guys in both bands are even obscure to all but the most hardcore stans. Segers has…who? Alto Reed? Don Brewer?

Deliver Me: This is nice! Has the range of a longer, jammier song, tied down to a nice 3:28 length. In particular I appreciate the effort put into the bridge.

Re: the 80s sound - could it just be a pinch more volume and compression on the guitars and drums? The snares maybe have a teensy extra "boom" on the chorus. "Standing at the gate," but not going through. Blown up to full arena size, this kind of rootsy rockin' will ultimately collapse under its own weight, but it works here.

tipsy, nice read on "One-Story Town."

XP Adding to the relative anonymity of the Silver Bullet Band is that they aren't even on most of Edger's studio recordings, which are packed with hired guns from LA, Nashville, and Muscle Shoals.

I've been on the road, but I'm back now and I'll try to catch up on tracks by the weekend.

Edger Seger, Bob's Albino Brother.

Overall this a record of frustration, resentment, being stuck and outta luck, in or out of bad relationships. But it has a lot of energy for being a bummer.

Man I bet that was a great show. What a setlist.

FWIW, even though Gram Parsons popularized "I Can't Dance," he got it off Tom T. Hall.

Unlike the E Street Band, the Heartbreakers were eventually songwriters and producers in their own right. Howie Epstein produced those two John Prine comeback albums, one of which is pretty great, and girlfriend Carlene Carter's I Fell in Love, also a comeback. Stan Lynch we know from his Don Henley writing sessions. Benmont Tench wrote Fergal Sharkey's "You Little Thief" (his only listenable single) and co-wrote with Petty a terrific Rosanne Cash song called "Never Be You."

Petty & Campbell also wrote Lone Justice's "Ways To Be Wicked"

Change Of Heart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6tOlI2hqMM

in general, i can't say that i'm a huge jimmy iovine fan, but i do like the punchiness of this record. i always think of him as putting a kind of glossy echo on everything he touched like that shiny phil spector sound of "because the night". as much as i love the first side of Making Movies i always kind of wished that it had a little more punk immediacy instead of that roller rink echo chamber vibe. van morrison lost at the roller rink. that's obviously why he worked for bruce. the ultimate wind machine. and for stevie too. that 80s blow-dryer ronettes sound.

what's with the pinched annunciation? this sounds like something off one of those powerpop albums by the look or the pop or whomever if a super-competent band of pros took over the instruments. frustrating because he can do much better. super-competent nonetheless.

I love the crunch, but, yeah, when I think about what I dislike about Petty's affectations it's his decision to sound as if he's singing through his colon.

to be fair, this would have been a lot of nameless power pop bands' best song by far.

GREAT song, love it so much. “I’ve stood in your gallery/ Seen what’s hanging from the wall.”

The singing doesn’t bother me but as noted above this is my default/baseline Petty album so I just accepted it as the way he was supposed to sound.

The bridge is perfunctory, would be my only note. Other than that, grade A work fellas.

Change of Heart - haven’t heard this in ages. Great tune, I like Petty in power pop riff mode

Speaking of underlicks, how about that pretty little Campbell filigree on the intro around the 10-second mark?

Finding Out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IljIy5lP0R4

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

this one works for me. the tempo, and all those slashing non-gendered guitar chords. (i just made that up. campbell loves omitting the 3rd of the chord, leaving you guessing whether it's major or minor.) the third part toward the end, which switched over to major, stands out for that reason. one cavil: shouldn't "looking over something" be "overlooking something"?

Change of Heart: wow - no memory of this. Really convincing early 80s power-pop, as others have noted. This definitely feels like it should have become a bigger hit and radio recurrent. The particular details in the mix make me think that Semisonic could have done well with this - or maybe I'm just casting about for a different lead singer. Hate to say it, but I'm not loving Tommy here. "CHAYYYYYYYYYYIIIINNNNGE" more like "cringe." I could see it growing on me, but the Adam Sandler baby voice on the bridge is gonna be tough to get past.

Very glad to confirm that he is not in fact intoning "I've stood in your cavity, to see what's raining from the walls!"

Finding Out: oh fascinating --- all of a sudden the blueprint for "Runnin' Down a Dream" comes into focus. Uptempo, urgent. Has any drummer ever grown by as big of leaps as Stan Lynch between the first couple albums and these last few? This has so much forward momentum, I love it.

Also a classic Petty lyrical position - somehow, finding a honey who takes him out of his river of hardcore loneliness becomes, primarily, an occasion for mulling back over the bad times. He doesn't *sound* like he's been rescued in the slightest!

iirc Petty singled out Lynch for particular praise on "Finding Out"