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

HEY!!!

This is one where Petty's strangled vocals AND the massive, booming cocaine soundscape both work incredibly well for me. The echoing drum hits and each additional element just coil around each other in this perpetual forward motion spiral, an endless-staircase illusion. Fabulous 80s digital psychedelia.

Nothing about this really has much to do with not coming around here no more, and when the beautifully lush haze of backing vocals envelops the chorus, they could just as easily be singing basically anything. "We've got to save the whales," maybe. But Petty's miserable verses and especially the anguished "admit it's OVERRRRRRRRR" are the actual cotter pins holding the whole thing together. (His cry of "eeghleyh!" at 3:18 probably could have been dropped out.)

The only thing is - and perhaps the rest of the album will prove me wrong - I don't think it really establishes a viable model for further songs in this vein. Until the reins are loosened for the coda, the Heartbreakers are just too marginal to the proceedings. It's sort of like "Yesterday," if the other Beatles had come in just to tap on the violin cases or run their fingers noisily up their guitar strings. And yet, one of Petty's most massive and undeniable singles and earworms. I've probably listened to it twelve times in the past couple days --- I usually wait til the day of, but this one has been tempting me for the last week or more.

Wonder how Petty fans responded when they heard that drum machine in the summer of '85? That Coral guitar (not a sitar!) found an echo in another summer-of-1985 hit "Everytime You Go Away."

I really hate the synth string solo on this song

Just an awful sound

Oh, that's my favorite part, especially when the backup singers float above it.

Ah Really? It sits in the mix well, but to me the melody is so dumb and the sound just deflates the… “monumental”-ness of the rest of the arrangement

i'm givin' up!

Until the reins are loosened for the coda, the Heartbreakers are just too marginal to the proceedings.

Funny story about the first time I heard this — I was a big enough fan to know that a new single was on the way, and I happened to turn on the radio the day it was released just in time to catch only the coda. Which I thought was great! I was like, seems like a rocker, can't wait to hear the whole thing. I was pretty confused when I did.

I don't hate the song, I get why it was a hit — that sinuous sitar sounded good on the radio, the video was cool, it all sounded extremely 1985. But it's always felt like a bit of a slog to me. And yeah, for those averse to his more creative vocal stylings, this one has plenty of them.

holy moly this video is fucking bonkers, never seen it!

ha really?

when I saw him live around 2000 he pulled a mad hatters hat out of a smoking guitar case for this one, guess thats SOP

holy moly this video is fucking bonkers, never seen it!

― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Wednesday, May 8, 2024 10:11 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

incredible, it is like the music video (i would love to see it for the first time again)

The popularity of the video made the song seem bigger than it was -- it peaked at #13.

#2 on the Album Rock charts though! (Today's Mainstream Rock.)

Meandering goofy live version from 1991 that's compellingly great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9jDoXitEO0

this one works for me the same way "you got lucky" does -- an effective combination of his own influences and modern radio production. another good driving song. i could do without the double-time part at the end which breaks the mood.

Mentioned this earlier but now that we're at the actual song, I think both this song and video are key to establishing the Tom Petty persona that dominated the late '80s to mid '90s, and maybe really the rest of his career. It's where he crosses over to "Gen X's Favorite Boomer Uncle" status, this kind of hip older dude (he turned 35 in '85) who knows how to MTV and seems like he's probably fun to party with. Full Moon Fever was the full realization of that character, but I think this is where it starts.

otm

the melody, performance and production around the basic seven-syllable hook is mesmerizing and i could listen to a loop of that for 20 minutes straight, even the part where he tries to make five syllables ("you daaar-ken my door") fill the space. i'm not sure anything else in the song is necessary, especially, yeah...

i could do without the double-time part at the end which breaks the mood.

...that

It's where he crosses over to "Gen X's Favorite Boomer Uncle" status, this kind of hip older dude (he turned 35 in '85) who knows how to MTV and seems like he's probably fun to party with. Full Moon Fever was the full realization of that character, but I think this is where it starts.

Southern Accents

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po8RCVlQZGc

Like many people, my intro was the Johnny Cash cover.

Yeah, Cash treated it like a standard and essentially turned it into one. I think it's a good song, lovely melody, and as far as expressions of Southern pride go it's on the less noxious end of the spectrum.

dolly covered it too, for a tom petty tribute album.

I like Dolly's version, except for the "not ashamed" coda — I get it, I know where she's coming from (literally — I know Sevier County pretty well), but it smacks just a little of uninterrogated Skynyrd-style Southern defiance.

A shrewd political calculator, that one.

perfect. no notes.

i love the echo of "wichita lineman" wafting through "think i might go work orlando / if them orange groves don't freeze."

Make It Better (Forget About Me)

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

i've gotta say it. this is my LEAST favorite song so far. yuck. one of the three dave stewart co-writes on the album. i have no memory of the song OR the video. MTV did not make this video ubiquitous. and aren't they kinda ripping off that Cars video?
i have absolutely nothing good to say about this. this could be the sound of cocaine. this could also totally be a j. geils band song. one of those songs that they stretch out to 20 interminable minutes live.

sounds like something Paul Shaffer would have produced for a forgotten rocker in the 80s. or Bruce Willis.

If it helps, Petty loathes it too; he's called it the worst song he ever wrote.

oh good. that does make me feel better.

I give it a small edge over “It Ain’t Nothin to Me” on coherence alone — it all sounds like one song. Just not a good one. A clunky Southern soul pastiche. Totally forgot it was a single, yikes.

starts out like a reasonable sam cooke inspired southside johnny or gary u.s. bonds track, but soon devolves into chord progressions that sound randomly selected. no amount of raving up could help this one.

southside and gary us bonds otm. this is both the most, and worst, asbury park 1980s song ever.

as a big fan of q-tips, thumbs up to that specific part of the video.

The good news is that the next two songs are good. (imo ymmv etc)

this is them trying to do Talking Heads right? it kinda stinks but it at least has me tapping my toes. "Southern Accents" just didn't land for me at all, must be a genre/sound aversion or something. ploddy 80s piano ballad vibes, idk.

is this what Graceland would have sounded like, in a universe where Hearts and Bones hadn't completely flipped? god it's dreadful. the video really captures the way-too-long, go-nowhere quality of the song. Petty clearly on something --- he's lost his usually decent knack for lip-synching, and his clap-synching seems intended for some different song entirely. i wonder if the ghastly-looking giant ear inspired the equivalent obstacle on Double Dare.

Spike

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu8qe2vUUoA

i usually use tom's official youtube audio but that clip sounded way better. i would expect nothing less from someone called "steelyman08". maybe tom's team needs to think about an upgrade.

you be the judge. from tom's channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7ALjBfVn9I

When Tom Petty sings In Character it's time to duck under the table like the Soviets fired their nuclear missiles.

its pretty goofy! maybe this is what mike judge heard that made him think of tom for a part on king of the hill.

finally listening to "make it better" - one-stop train to huey lewis town, but the way tom sings it seems to presage the eventual psamawayah of rusted root

not great!

and it's 5 mins long, why

at least "beat on the brat" doesn't beat around the bush.

https://i.imgur.com/OKX2MMv.jpg

Fun song, I like that by the end there's some ambivalent level of empathy from the surly redneck barfly. ("I might need me a dog collar too, boy/Might keep me safe") I don't think Petty ever wore a dog collar, but I assume he and his longhair buddies ran into some surly rednecks of their own. I also like the lazy bluesy shuffle, it feels like a hot afternoon at a dark dive bar.

And even tho Southern Accents isn't really a concept album, it has threads of one and this song is one of them. The narrator could be the same first-person as "Rebels" and the title track.

yeah for me Spike is the best thing on here so far besides the big hit

https://www.gainesville.com/gcdn/authoring/2017/10/02/NTGS/ghows-LK-571315dc-1d90-04fa-e053-0100007f7ff1-f5523cb6.jpeg?width=660&height=497&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp

the Mudcrutch/Road Turkey picnic of 1973.

a long way from Los Angeles.