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

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the Mudcrutch/Road Turkey picnic of 1973.

a long way from Los Angeles.

at fillmore southeast

i kinda like the laid-back swampy groove but this mostly sounds like a sketch for a much better song he could've written if someone had splashed some water on his face and told him to try harder.

I'm with fcc on both pros and cons. I'd also like it better without the put-on voice, in the hands of say... Roger Miller?

Dogs On The Run

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV5F1C2NLdI

Petty does Springsteen! i like it!

it's ok. mid-level tom. he was born in a crossfire hurricane. then he met some babe?

The only Campbell credit on the album and also my favorite song on it.

Here's Campbell doing an acoustic version of it (video appears to only be on Facebook): https://fb.watch/s3871tc-9s/

this could've could've been a good bryan adams single. i think bryan would've sung it better.

Least objectionable horns on the album here too imo, they're relegated to a supporting role and don't overwhelm the mix.

this is a major breath of fresh air after these last few tracks imo. energetic, forceful, has convincing instrumental and vocal hooks. it finished and I wanted to start it over again just to hear that guitar part.

Om glad y'all think this album is misbegotten.

this is the first track that actually feels like what the whole album should have been. with DCAHNM as a slightly left-field climax, maybe. i guess the drugs are to blame - their quality control just seems WAY off what it was.

i'm appalled to report that I did have the obnoxious "forget about me! forget about these eyes! bit stuck in my head on loop for a couple hours earlier today tho.

Mary's New Car

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6_ZJbK4Qi4

there must be 80s Joe Walsh that sounds like this. just a guess.

a sweet, compact little song. he should have joined forces with scritti politti instead of dave stewart.

Too much inauthenticity for him.

I still feel like the band's adrift in the sound and the studio. Punched-together parts and echo/delay effects are creating a track out of what's actually a limited handful of ideas. I'm not sure this is a band that needs to make tracks of this kind, but it goes down better than it might, and I guess it's nice that they tried.

another one that is better than I remembered

i wonder if nile rodgers would have done something cool with TP & the HB. something slinkier. they could do slinky. they knew how to create good grooves. might have just come out like mick solo though. ooh, bill laswell! instead of dave stewart. that would have been weird.

I still feel like the band's adrift in the sound and the studio. Punched-together parts and echo/delay effects are creating a track out of what's actually a limited handful of ideas. I'm not sure this is a band that needs to make tracks of this kind, but it goes down better than it might, and I guess it's nice that they tried.

This feels like a Petty solo track. I mean, the only musician standing out is the saxophonist. And if the Heartbreakers had a full-time saxophonist I'd probably hate them.

there's a sort of floaty "sweetest girl" feel that made me think of green gartside.

Yeah I like Mary’s New Car. “We wanna go where she goes/We wanna listen to the radio”

This stretch of the last 3 songs is the best part of the record imo. Like, it could be a good album-track deep-cut Side B to a much better album.

The next track is the best imo.

i really like the b-side i'm gonna post after the last track. you get to hear tom say the words "lynyrd skynyrd". there's also a good nick lowe cover b-side.

If it's "Trailer" you mean, it absolutely should've been on the album.

yeah that's the one.

this reminds me of a dozen new wave one hit wonders that i can't quite place. i like.

also, that last Mudcrutch album starts off with "Trailer".

(also, it's impressive to put both "mary" and "car" in the title of your song, and have a saxophone, and not even remotely evoke bruce springsteen.)

mary's dog on the run.

something tells me they were taking it easy with this album? or maybe there are stories about how hard and torturous it was to make. though they aren't really the hard and torturous kind of band. they just played something in the studio that was already pretty fleshed out until they had it down and there was the song. usually. but maybe dave made things harder.

(i made it sound like it was easy what they did. it takes skill to do what they did. but having mike and tom working beforehand makes things way easier when its time to cut a record. they both had studios at their houses.)

The album sounds like Petty said, Fuck this and released it as is.

The album sounds like Petty said, Fuck this and released it as is. too much coke

It's really his only sloppy album in a remarkably consistent career.

It’s funny that it ended up so unfocused and incoherent, because the early narrative on it was that he was trying to make a thematic/concept album about growing up in the south. But it’s like he wrote a couple of songs in that direction and then just said “whatever.”

I was thinking about that earlier! Like, nothing at all about this screams "attempted concept album." If you compare it to The Nylon Curtain, say, this just feels like a band that was kinda low on material when the label came knocking and demanded a new album, with an up-to-date sound to catch the ears of today's teens. It doesn't even really feel like a Press to Play, where the artist's inescapable idiosyncracies end up turning that swing at relevance into something that at least feels memorably weird. I think the coke just deluded them into thinking they had more of a 'concept' than they ever even genuinely tried to have.

kind of amazing that he could shatter his hand out of misplaced perfectionist frustrations, over this.

He shattered his hand iirc because the concept wasn't coming together, they couldn't concentrate, etc. He had to call Iovine at the last minute to sort the album out.

and, right, it was supposed to be a double album!

"When I broke my hand, I mean … it was just … it's hard to explain … I don't really know exactly why I broke my hand. I know I was very frustrated at the time with the record. I'd finished recording," he remembers, "and I'd been over to the record company and played 'em some stuff. They weren't pushing me, but they were saying, 'Can we have it by the end of the year?' I said, 'Yeah, all I gotta do is mix it. I'm not gonna do a double — I'm gonna pare it down.' So then, tying up the ends was another six-month job, which I wasn't prepared to accept; I thought it was a six-week job to go in and mix it. And the day I broke my hand, I think we'd been in there around the clock for a week with two teams of engineers and I was in the other room playin' the mixes on a ghetto blaster, And I'm sayin', No, this isn't what I pictured, and I was bummed. Walkin' up the stairwell back to the house, I just (throws his arm out to the side) hit the wall and broke my hand.

"I think the record made me so nuts that I did it," Petty says with a wry smile, then adds, "but it made a much better record. Because, after I got out of the hospital, I could hear very clearly things that I'd overlooked. [Producer Jimmy] Iovine showed up at that point, right after I broke my hand, just out of friendship and because he loved the songs so much. [After the last three] I was consciously tryin' to stay away from Jimmy on this album. I wanted to do something else. So, when Jimmy showed up, he was real fresh and I was real burnt. He helped me a lot with the mixing and added a few overdubs and some arrangement changes Stuff I wouldn'ta heard, 'cause I was just too immersed in it. So anyway, [the accident] forced me to just calm down a little bit, basically, I think I'd been staying up and working for days on end for about a year when I broke my hand!

I think I'd been staying up and working for days on end for about a year

(on coke)

(love u Tom)

Whoooof, yeah, that sounds rough. If this is what we got, I have to wonder if his career could have survived the double-album version containing numerous "overlooked" errors. Although I also read this entertaining this longform piece from Michael Washburn, who wrote the 33 1/3 book for this album. And he makes lost track "The Image of Me" sound great:

Another thing about “The Image of Me” that both Tench and Campbell stressed when I chatted with them about Southern Accents was that this was the last time that the band recorded with producer Denny Cordell. Cordell was already a legend by the time he adopted the Heartbreakers as a project, and he produced the first two Petty and the Heartbreakers records. Petty and Cordell had a falling out—about money, of course—but the next decade, Cordell showed up at the Southern Accents sessions and had Petty and the band perform the Kemp/Twitty song.

The Southern Accents sessions were a bit of a quagmire. (...) For the bulk of the project Petty and Campbell served as producers. Despite the labor, Petty often wasn’t that pleased with the outcome of his work. This was, it seems to me, in large part due to the nature of the recording process for Southern Accents. The band was tracking things individually, punching in to add vocal lines or guitar parts. Standard procedure for many bands, including the Heartbreakers, but anything but rock ‘n’ roll. When Cordell parachuted in for his brief work with Petty and the Heartbreakers, he brought them back to where they’d been when they recorded their first record in 1976. Rather than Petty singing bits of lyrics over several takes and stitching them together, Cordell demanded that Petty cut the vocal track live with the band for each take. According to Campbell, this was a bit of a shock to Petty who had grown accustomed to punching in and overdubbing. You can hear the liveliness of this on the recording. It sizzles, and it’s as good a testimony to Denny Cordell’s brilliance as a producer as I can think of.

(..) “[‘The Image of Me’] was cut during Southern Accents,” Tench said. “They mixed it, but I don’t think it was touched,” before being released on the Playback box set." (...) “To have Cordell come back for something like this record was really wonderful, really magical. And when Tom was cutting the vocal, Tom told me that he sang up to a point and, as you do, you say, okay, stop and pick it up there and we’ll go in there on the top of the second verse. And Cordell said ‘no, TP, we’ll go back to the top and sing it all of the way through.’ And he didn’t let him do anything on it. He made him sing it all the way through in the same voice, in the same emotion, in the same thing. And I don’t remember him being like that when we did the first record, but that’s what he did. And he was right.”

The Best Of Everything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hySGRNEKYN0

Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7miwvJq3Rk

Cracking Up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOxdkY0i-GE