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

I think the Lynne+Heartbreakers experiment is mostly working here... except for that click-track "just keep the beat" mandate seemingly imposed on Stan Lynch. This is the only one of Lynne's tics that grates on me more and more as I age - most of his style is very comfortable to me, it's what records sounded like when I was a kid. But Lynch here sounds nearly identical to Jim Keltner on the Wilburys album, Phil Jones on Full Moon Fever, and Paul on Flaming Pie - just trucking along keeping the beat. It took the Heartbreakers, like, three albums to get this guy to start playing interesting fills that added something to the songs --- and now it's just been steamrolled back out of him. There are a couple of really great moments, around the solo and the outro, where he somehow slips through Lynne's fingers.

If I can take my ears off of that ingredient, it's a great track and a lovely song. Always makes me think of my best friend and musical goofball partner in college, who would strum the chords going "Learning to Fly, doooo doooo.... Learning to Fly, Doooo, dooo." Must be one of the first things he'd learned on guitar.

Stan (Benmont too) was quite vocal in disliking Lynne's uh disciplinary tactics.

I too only know the singles from this one and don’t care for them. I can’t tell if Jeff Lynn made them worse or if he just made mediocre songs sound weirdly “classic”/“timeless” (not a compliment)

Wonder if they ever played the title track faster, it is really quite slow

the brimstead man said I don't hear a single
The future was wide open

really dislike the clattering drum break towards the end, and those insistent handclaps(?) that recur throughout.

it's the first Petty album I bought in real time

Ha, it was the first one since Hard Promises that I didn’t get when it came out. I hadn’t loved FMF and I thought the singles were drab. Plus I was in college and Public Enemy and De La Soul and Sinead were happening and Tom Petty felt a bit played out to me. I eventually picked up the CD for a buck in a used bin somewhere. It has some good tunes. But also a bit of a placeholder imo.

i will stand up for "Learning To Fly," i think it's the best of Petty's handful of big enduring '90s singles (although some minor singles like "Room at the Top" and "Swingin'" may be better songs). i've never loved "Free Fallin'" as much as many people do, but "Learning To Fly" has a same kind of directness and simplicity that works for me.

i don't think the recurring tok-tok-tok-tok rhythm is handclaps -- i've long wondered exactly what it is, i feel like it's a cowbell or something else metallic. one of my favorite parts of the track, in any event.

thought it was a woodblock

i like "learning to fly" a lot. i like the whole mellow vibe of it. and this is the evolution of tom's voice. gentler. not straining. not doing faux-dylan/mcguinn. this is his grown-ass voice. and i like it.

otm

Haaaate this song. Mostly because of Jeff Lynne. He's got Petty enunciating (god, I hate how he sings the words "coming down" - it's like he's trying to teach you the song), he's handcuffed the drummer, he's got the ooh-aah backing vocals going again, it's like music for a TV show aimed at four-year-olds. I like music that's beautiful, I like music that's noisy, I like music that's aggressive, I like music that's relaxed to the point of catatonia, but one thing I can't fucking stand is music that's nice. Jeff Lynne makes music with the express goal of making it sound nice. Someone should have fed his hands into a garbage disposal before they ever got near a mixing board.

Kings Highway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h3gXKArWyw

An album track that earned a lot of AOR play, became a concert staple. Campbell as usual is on point.

yeah, the guitars are definitely my fave thing about it for sure.

i like that little ga-lumph on the drums at the very end, as if to say "hey guy's i'm still here!"

guys

One of the stronger tracks on the album imo. A step up from "Kings Road."

another well-written song taken to cheeseville by lynne’s comically washed-out ride cymbals and blocky snares. still like the song tho, with petty’s winsome delivery and campbell’s heroics.

i’ve liked every live version i’ve heard tho, especially this rehearsal version from one of his vh1 specials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnMT-46q3mo

i'm generally a fan of the lynne candy-coated thing, but I do sometimes wish some of these songs had been produced/arranged in a more Wildflowers-style.

have a big soft spot for Into the Great Wide Open, maybe not one of his best but I listened to the shit out of it when it came out. Iconic CD album.

saw them on this tour when I was 12 or 13 — one of my first "real" concerts, great seats (I think my older brother pretty much camped out to get them). completely blew my mind, incredible show.

i wanna hear the heartbreakers when listening to a heartbreakers album. tench’s keys added such warmth to those iovine records that it’s depressing to hear him relegated to those piddly ornamental synth lines. lynch, too, once the swinging backbone, is similarly anonymized, except when he sounds like a sputtering machine.

i didn’t really have these problems with full moon fever, but idk, lynne’s hand is just so heavy on this album

I can hear what y'all are saying, but the songs on this album are for the most part so good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFPxn08Jb88

i can see why dylan likes that song, the lyrics have that kind of folk music economy he likes

i love "learning to fly" — such a simple song, not overthought, feels perfect.

i do, too even if as someone alluded to it does feel like hey it would be cool if you wrote another free fallin'

Part of the healthy tension never resolved between Lynne and Petty is how his simple instincts wash against his maximalist tendencies.

We're gonna get an attempt to rewrite "Free Fallin'" on this album soon enough! xpost

xp they may have resolved some of that tension on Highway Companion a decade and a half later — but the songs on that one aren't nearly as good. Not a bad album, though.

This is a pretty decent "second track." It's nice to hear a little more bottom-end and a teeny bit more crunch. I've listened to it a few times today and even if I can't quite remember it once it's over, I've never minded listening to it.

I'll say, though - King's Road was a stupid lyric and sounded like the tape had been left out in the sun too long, but it had *hooks*. To pick up from voodoo chili, I'm also longing for something to push against the general sense of pleasant forward strumming, to interrupt or at least complicate the rhythm.

Previously on ILX. THREE threads?

TS: "Learning to Fly" by Pink Floyd vs. "Learning to Fly" by Tom Petty
Learning to Fly: Pink Floyd vs Tom Petty
The "Learning to Fly" battle: Pink Floyd vs Tom Petty

lol, never even heard that Pink Floyd song. is it actually in the same league?

no

Before we great to the next track, it's worth searching around on "tom petty the replacements tour" - there's a dozen different articles that dish up one version or another of the TP&TH / The Replacements 1989 tour but Bob Mehr's section on it in Trouble Boys has the best perspective.

Into The Great Wide Open

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOQ-h-2pDDU

It surprised me to learn a decade ago that this song peaked at #93 on the Hot 100; you'd never know it from its blanket MTV airplay.

It's fine, I guess. Its shaggy dog tale purloins its best line from the Replacements. I like how "The sky was the limit" accrues irony each time it's sung.

I prefer this to "Learning to Fly," I guess I'm a sucker for Johnny B. Goode stories. Fave bits: "a tattoo too" — can imagine him smiling at that, it's just fun to say/sing; the A&R man, of course; and I want to know more about the roadie named Bart, he should've gotten his own sequel song.

I've always assumed he stole the line from the Replacements too, but he professed innocence didn't he? I did a bit of a Google dive once and there were definitely some citations pre-Westerberg, he wasn't the first. Still seems like quite a coincidence after touring together.

i really like this one

This song is less than four minutes long but feels like twelve. I feel like I'm waiting for my number to come up at the DMV when I listen to it.

I would have guessed five and change

biden just ended his rally with "i won't back down". #inthewild

more like "I won't sit down"

to me, the very worst song I have ever heard by Petty…like, I'm sure that there would be others on records I haven't internalized (I only own Damn the…), but it's smug ("ha ha, this is what it's like for lucky guys with no talent, I'm several orders of superior to hapless schmucks like this caricature I'm presenting"), very very long, plodding, and then there's the video, with Johnny Depp (who did indeed intend to be a rock performer rather than an actor) and thus a hideous cliche.

Yeah, it might not be Petty's worst song, but it's the one I actively dislike more than any other. (I have never heard The Last DJ.)

Back then, this song put me off Petty just about for good. Sold the CD back to Aron's Records the week after it came out and never listened to the album in full again until this thread. Listening to this song now, especially with that super-narcotic Lynne beat, it sounds like someone who just got into heroin and thinks they can maintain.

Wow you guys

yeah i like into the great wide open — what a great chorus! I'm not sure if it's totally mean spirited. Maybe a little smug, but remember this was just post hair metal in LA, it was hard not to see a lot of that as just insanely cartoonish and dumb. At the same time, Petty could certainly see himself in there, too ... he waited til he finished high school, went to hollywood ... I don't know, did Tom have any tattoos? And hey, Faye Dunaway does some of her best work in the video.

Yeah I’ve always heard it as more or less sympathetic, in a that’s-the-biz-kid way. I don’t love it or the album as a whole, but the song is likable enough.