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

"it's hard to believe nobody ever built a song around it before" is the Petty credo imo

yeah this one rocks. otm about the interaction between guitar and drums --- this is still very locked-down rhythmically, but absolutely conveys a band enjoying rockin' out with a rockin' riff, and it is absolutely perfect highway music. Petty's delivery is beautiful, too, especially on "The last three days, the rain was unstoppable." secretly the best hook of the song, next to that brilliantly focused little riff. i shudder to imagine a younger Petty squeezing that line out in Bobcat Dylanthwait mode.

"last classic rock" song is fascinating. looking at some of the year-end charts, I think the only competition might be "Mixed Emotions" and the Pump singles (all 1989) and maybe "Blaze of Glory," "Black Velvet" and "Hard to Handle" (1990), though I can no longer remember if classic rock stations used to play those. out of all of them, "Running Down a Dream" seems closest to the center of the format, and surely wins out on recurrent spins, ime. in any case, i've long felt Petty was definitely the last classic rock artist - I think this maybe got discussed in the run-up to the classic rock ballot poll.

have also long meant to start a thread asking what kind of "mystery" we think Tom Petty is "working on" in this song. it'd be good theme music for a juiced-up new Hardy Boys TV series, that's for sure.

love the strumming responses in the chorus. and yeah the outro solo is one of those transcendent ones that makes it seem like there are a billion chord changes or something… and such a feel.

As a kid I thought the lyric was “born wherever it leads”, like he was describing some cliche crime fiction thing

the strumming responses are sililar to "queen of hearts."

similar

i was very close once to making a playlist on youtube of live versions of this song because i kept searching for them. i just love that forward momentum so much. and every live solo is awesome. one live clip from 1991 and one from right before the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihzbaj-zoi0

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

that last one the last time they would ever play it with tom.

I relate very much to these lyrics. There’s a real sadness to it. The dream here is anything better than what he’s currently doing, but he has no idea what that is. So he does what most American searchers do- he gets in his car and drives, hoping to find something more meaningful

"A Face in the Crowd" has always been a favorite, very haunting quality

i probably heard both songs at around the same time (back in the summer of '89), but I always associate "Face In The Crowd" with the Cure's "Lovesong"

totally get that

“face in the crowd” was kind of scary to me as a kid, it sounds like an endless chasm

yeah, as a kid it felt like a spooky outlier on the album, almost too real! the terror of limitless possibilities.

This ain't bad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0AM2Dons5w

No one, Petty least, expected Full Moon Fever, a solo album, to be the biggest-selling album of his career, selling more copies than Damn the Torpedoes. I'm not sure what zeitgeist it exploited -- I was there and still can't figure it out. His first album with three top 40 singles, all of which get airplay somewhere today ("I Won't Back Down," "Runnin' Down a Dream"), a bunch of other big ones on the mainstream rock chart ("A Face in the Crowd," "Yer So Bad," "Love is a Long Road"). The damn thing kept selling and selling well into 1990. A total triumph for Petty and the Wilbury sound.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

I think it had something to do with the fact that for the previous several years, arguably the biggest music genre in the country was hard rock, and some of the biggest hits were these vv melodramatic power ballads or tough-sounding midtempo rockers which had a lot of surface appeal but were ultimately pretty shallow once you got past the superficial sweep. And I think probably reflective of people getting a little bored of that shallowness, growing up just a little bit, after years of rock radio being inundated with a lot of dross, the sonic depth and scope of these songs, and the lyrics feeling a lot more immediately lived in, hit pretty hard. I think when this was released it definitely crossed over to various formats and in every single one the singles sounded fresh, tough, and honest. And I think it was marketed really well. I can recall when "I Won't Back Down" was released, it just had this directness and clarity which made it sound so potent, and it had the air of a comeback, like a genuine pro coming in and reasserting themselves in an arena full of fly by night amateurs. And then the hits on that album just kept coming. I can tell you as someone wasn't even old enough to drive at the time, who didn't really seek out Tom Petty's music because I was still in the phase where I was looking forward to the next skid row or guns and roses album, for whom much of what came out of the time in the mainstream just went in one ear and went out the other, as soon as I started hearing these songs, I never forgot them.

great post omar <3

I’ve been revisiting Jason Molina recently and I find this Petty connection in that they both choose this sort of fighting posture to their depression. Molina really explicitly states what Tom sort of just hints at.

That riff is so basic and feels so primal that it's hard to believe nobody ever built a song around it before.

It owes a lot to the piano riff of "Hey Bulldog".

This song (and really this whole album side despite my caveats) is well-done, but my mind tells me "you should be enjoying this" rather than "you are enjoying this".

"it just had this directness and clarity which made it sound so potent, and it had the air of a comeback, like a genuine pro coming in and reasserting themselves in an arena full of fly by night amateurs."

this was also the time of Neil's Freedom and Ragged Glory. i remember those albums seemed refreshing at the time even if they were built on Neil's trusty rusted chassis of the 70s. they just seemed like something that i really needed at that moment. maybe they were just preparing me for the onslaught of grunge to come.

hmm i guess “rockin in the free world” is probably the last classic rock song

good thread idea, that, it's an interesting question

my fave classic rock song from 1989 was probably "sowing the seeds of love".

"sowing the seeds of love" will forever remind me of the dream academy's classic rock cover of john lennon's "love". the "love" cover had whales on it i think. though now that i look the "love" cover came out in 1990. and also featured Junior Vasquez remixes.

Oh yeah! I remember that one.

World Party and XTC too. All that psychedelic stuff.

last classic rock song? Probably some of that early '90s Clapton. Maybe Layla unplugged. the sound of three million people nodding off on the couch, after dinner.

the sonic depth and scope of these songs, and the lyrics feeling a lot more immediately lived in, hit pretty hard.

Sonically it definitely stood out — not a particular Lynne fan myself as noted above, but it had a warmth and intimacy to it that was quite different from the peak '80s Mutt Lange powerhouse sound we were still immersed in. (Which I love fwiw for its own sake.) The album I think it's probably most in line with in a lot of ways is Tunnel of Love — also a solo album by a band leader, also with warm acoustic strumming, also stripped of previous big-boom bombast. Also full of self-doubt and looming middle age.

As for "last classic rock song," you can draw that line a lot of ways but on a visit to my hometown recently I checked out the rock station I used to listen to in high school and the most recent song that I noticed was "Black Hole Sun."

to me, clapton unplugged feels more like nostalgia for that era (“layla” did come out in 1970 after all) than anything “of” the era

anything post nevermind feels ineligible

not to derail further but grunge and everything after does not feel like part of the same era at all

It wasn't part of the same era, but also it was a sort of return to the era right? A selling point of grunge was that finally we're getting back to long-haired guitar heroes after the synthpop '80s. So even though we all have associations that make us draw a line between Soundgarden and Zeppelin, "Black Hole Sun" sounds right at home in a classic rock setting.

Idk Layla is both a throwback bit of nostalgia but also sort of the last gasp

Audioslave's "Like a Stone" is the last classic rock song.

It wasn't part of the same era, but also it was a sort of return to the era right? A selling point of grunge was that finally we're getting back to long-haired guitar heroes after the synthpop '80s. So even though we all have associations that make us draw a line between Soundgarden and Zeppelin, "Black Hole Sun" sounds right at home in a classic rock setting.

Completely disagree. The willingness of classic rock radio programmers to assimilate a few grunge and post-grunge songs into their format isn't about Soundgarden sounding like Led Zeppelin (they didn't, at all); it was about them needing to maintain/reassert AOR's relevance after almost losing their grip — remember that hair metal was not accepted into the pantheon; you'll never hear Poison or Ratt or even Bon Jovi on classic rock radio, except for one NY station that used to play "Runaway" a lot when I was a kid. Classic rock radio programmers grabbing Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and Nirvana is them saying, "Yeah, this is our thing too, because we still matter, goddammit!"

as far as classic rock goes, TP still hadn't recorded "into the great wide open" or "learning to fly". maybe those are his last classic rock songs.

you'll never hear Poison or Ratt or even Bon Jovi on classic rock radio

erm I heard all of those on the same station where I heard Black Hole Sun. Maybe WCMF is a classic rock outlier idk, but viewed from the current distance without the sense of grunge as this big game-changer, it isn't at all illogical to basically draw a line of guitar rock from say 1969 to 1996ish.

unperson is wrong on Bon Jovi, et al., those absolutely do get played now on CR stations... but right overall. voodoo chili was talking about the core of the Classic Rock format that came out of AOR, and specifically disincluded the later updating of playlists to bring in more 'modern' songs.

we've definitely explored this on other threads, but a key thing to bear in mind is that the addition of Bon Jovi, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, etc., happened wayyyyy later. Like, circa 2010-ish, maybe in an effort to keep up with "Dave FM" type stations. It was definitely something that stood out when it started happening --- for 20+ years those playlists had all stopped around 1990, the classic rock canon was locked. They didn't even fold in new songs by the old artists, except maybe some token airplay when they first dropped (with unplugged Layla being the very rare exception).

With all this in mind, I do think "Mary Jane's Last Dance" is actually the right pick for this slot. Feels good thematically too - "this rock block weekend, we're bringing you everything from Aerosmith to Zeppelin --- one more time to kill the pain."

The last time I was a serious radio listener was in the 80s, junior high and high school, and there were two NYC-area stations I listened to - one was absolutely "classic rock," which basically meant white rock bands from 1969-78. Zeppelin, Stones, Who...I don't even remember them playing that much Beatles. The other was "rock," too, but broader - I used to hear REM's "Superman" and "Can't Get There From Here" alongside Petty, the Cars, and Zep/Stones/Who, and there was one DJ who would occasionally scream "Ramones attack!" and play, like, five Ramones songs in a row.

Sure, but I mean that that era is NOW safely folded in. And it makes sense! Much more through-line than disruption from ‘70s dude-led guitar rock to ‘90s dude-led guitar rock. And it’s pretty specific to the big early ‘90s bands, afaik classic rock stations never added Hole or even Smashing Pumpkins, nothing too “alt-rock.”

Which is to say, "classic rock" is a mutable construct, so if you wanted to identify the last classic rock song you'd need to set some parameters around it. Is it "only boomers"? People who released their first album before 1980, or 1985? There's certainly a know-it-when-you-hear-it dimension to it, but it's not really that easy to define.

Anyway, Tom Petty obviously qualifies no matter how you frame it.

Unperson,

Here's the 1987 Top 1027 of All Time Listener Poll from that "broader" rock station -- WNEW:

The 1987 WNEW-FM Top 1027 Songs of All Time Listener's Poll

Pre-Wilburys and Full Moon Fever, there's 8 Petty tracks on the list:

-- #232 - REFUGEE
-- #321 - BREAKDOWN
-- #358 - AMERICAN GIRL
-- #385 - THE WAITING
-- #458 - HERE COMES MY GIRL
-- #559 - DON'T DO ME LIKE THAT
-- #859 - EVEN THE LOSERS
-- #881 - LISTEN TO HER HEART

feels like Lynne auditioning to produce Bob's next album

BOB DYLAN:
I don’t compromise and I don’t pretend
I don’t even care if I ever see her again
Most of the time

TWENTY HARMONIZING JEFF LYNNES:
Most of the TIIIIIIIME

Wow you guys are still doing this

local classic rock station played Whitesnake into Pearl Jam the other day

Here I go again, picking on the boy

I have listened to Face in the Crowd like 5 times a day since it came up here. Feels like it could have been on Tunnel of Love but at the same time I can hear a killer Leonard cohen version. The opening verse is so foreboding, like it creates an openness that is frightening but so simple that it feels almost inevitable.

Feel A Whole Lot Better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZxHLkA5EcU

respectable.

We needed an interval after this killer run.

same key, same tempo as the byrds classic. suffers only from "every hair in its place" perfectionism.