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

Here we go. From Florida to Heaven.

https://i.discogs.com/BTKO_wl8Hx8SV2OCJxHWNjU1SiLXfBcONAPY0SSwmN8/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:402/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9BLTI2MDU3/NS0xMTEwNTcxMjQ2/LmpwZw.jpeg

Rockin' Around (With You)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB_eHi7HcTM

It's 1976. The first track on your debut album is 2 minutes long. You are not prog. Are you punk? We are intrigued...

hey, this guy is good...

a sampler of things to come. its comfortably retro and yet...there is something new about it.

i HIGHLY recommend the oral history book of Tom and the band if you haven't read it and dig him. its one of the best rock books i've ever read. compelling!

also, it goes without saying, Petty in the wild/pictures/ephemera/anecdotes welcomed and appreciated.

"Rockin' Around (With You)": Nice little song. Really reminds me how close style-wise Petty and Dwight Twilley were at the time. Tench throwing in a little synth action near the end to remind you that it's 1976.

yeah that synth thing is funny. just shows up out of nowhere.

tom kinda got the career dwight wanted? is that unfair? petty don't mind.

I like it, but there's not really much to this song; if you played a demo of it on a piano or acoustic guitar it would likely seem underwhelming. Songs like this one are highly dependent on good production, good arrangements, and good playing; fortunately, it has all three.

stan lynch kicks ass on this song

i dig rockin around with you too tom

cool hangdog bassline too, i guess that's ron blair?

punk velocity, anyway. maybe his first nyc gig was cbgb?
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Bc8AAOSwXVJjWtqv/s-l1600.jpg

Y'all need that Paul Zollo book where Petty discusses every song he's written.

man, those are some good bands. suicide commandos. reddy teddy. i like that album of theirs that willie alexander produced a lot. kinda proto-punk/glam. laughing dogs. they were cool. for tuff darts fans. earth opera! can't believe they were still around in 1976. but i dig their records. the good rats were rockin' back then with a major label deal. honey davis was a weirdo. his albums are not for everybody. i never dug the shirts despite loving annie golden in hair. they were pretty boring. and then you have the ramones and television coming soon. and orchestra luna. everyone should own their album. i think me and andy zax are the only big fans of that album of people i know though. i own two dirty tricks albums but i don't play them much.

needless to say, suicide commandos debut one of the great punk/rock albums made in this country in the 70s.

that might be the only thing i have in common with tom petty. i graced the stage at CBGB once. dressed as a witch. matador NMS showcase. pizzicato five/chavez/customized/barbara manning/bunnybrains.

well that and we both worship the byrds.

Also you have a short "o" in your first name and short "e" in your last name.

hey yeah!

wait, that should be Kustomized, right? i don't remember what they sounded like...

I’m not a fan other than full moon fever so I won’t be weighing in, but I’m really looking forward to ilx analysis on this !

I am not sure how much I know about anything pre-Torpedoes except "Breakdown."

Dude was cool as fuck, but I secretly believe he peaked in 1979. Musically speaking, I mean.

how much might tom's early success owe to his uncanny evocation of grown-up Bad News Bear (1976) Kelly Leak (Jackie EARLE Haley)

I just watched Jackie in a terrible action movie. He deserves better. He's a really good actor but he does look like a fucked up bad guy now. he's awesome.

Breakdown

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

His first hit! I forget how slow it is.

i'll be back wth thoughts. gotta do stuff.

Maybe they only showed the theatrical trailer in Jamaica!

hey yeah!

wait, that should be Kustomized, right? i don't remember what they sounded like...

"Breakdown": The rare instance where imo the Grace Jones version is not funkier.

go ahead and give it to 'em

this sounds like a Steely Dan song

it doesn't really remind me of anyone weirdly! it just reminds me of tom petty. maybe fleetwood mac at the start...

the keyboard riff is objectively similar to "pretzel logic." the bass moves differently tho

(and it's not even that similar, just both electric key riffs in the key of a minor. petty moves from a minor to g major, the dan have a more intricate am to bm7/a to amin7)

Basically like the Volcano Suns. They’re great and the Suicide Commandos Make A Records is one of the best records of all time. I bought the short lived Mercury CD reissue in ‘96.
― from a prominent family of bassoon players (Boring, Maryland), Wednesday, February 28, 2024 9:13 AM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Make a Record is just an amazing, wonderful record I wish more people had heard

"Breakdown": On the verses, Petty sounds like how Springsteen looked in '73-4. Phil Seymour on backing vox! Electric Piano!

Wiki:

"Breakdown" was a song written and recorded for the band's debut album. Initially, the song had lead guitarist Mike Campbell with a distinct guitar lick being played only near the end of the song. While playing it back one night, Tom Petty and Dwight Twilley, a friend of Phil Seymour, were in the studio, and Twilley enjoyed it. He suggested that the lick should be used throughout the song, and Petty obliged. At 2 AM, he gathered the Heartbreakers to join him in re-recording the song. Their final take was seven to eight minutes long, but it was pared down to 2 minutes and 39 seconds on the album. Guests on the song's recording include guitarist Jeff Jourard, a common collaborator with the band in their early days, and Phil Seymour, who sings backing vocals.

One of those great live album moments nobody ever talks about is the audience singing the first two verses to Petty on the extended version Pack Up The Plantation!:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNxfPAF1frM

wow i don't think i knew that phil seymour was on that. love him. i wanna hear that original 8 minute version now.

Yeah, Seymour is on this and "American Girl", plus Twilley steps in on "Strangered In The Night".

for some reason its just nice to know that those guys were friends. phil, dwight, and tom. all very talented.

there's a little bit of cod reggae going on in the vocals. i wonder if this was originally envisioned to have more of a reggae feel. man right out of the gate these guys were great arrangers and players. love their early dedication to keeping things short.

i think i remember reading richard meltzer, re. some BOC recording, saying "i know it's alright but i love when rock bands tell me anyway." i thought about that here.

i don't hear cod reggae, more an exaggerated 50s rock styling a la buddy holly (but filtered thru petty's drawl)

The backing vocals are very present on "Breakdown." It's almost like there's a whole other song there.

for true cod reggae Petty:

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

i love the pace/pacing of "breakdown". it just creates this great mood of expectation. i want to know what's going to happen next! that , to me, is key to being a good artist.

I love how these two songs would be a perfect way to start a live set: the quick rave up to get the audience going, with room to patter over it even, and then settle into "Breakdown."

In The Wild: I'm hosting my weekly pub quiz tonight. For music, I use an ever-growing Spotify playlist curated by myself and several other hosts that is currently weighing in at over 1300 songs. I use it in Shuffle mode, which just spit out "American Girl" and then "Girls" by Dwight Twilley, which of course features Mr. Petty.

my primary exhibit that I use to demonstrate his association with 1976-77 era punk is his inclusion here:

https://www.discogs.com/release/2233401-Various-Whitmans-Punk-Sampler

Their final take was seven to eight minutes long

god I hope this gets released someday

dammit i didn’t even know you had started!

Rockin Around:
To me this is the Heartbreakers doing a kind of punk-ish ode to Buddy Holly & The Crickets. the skiffley kinda beat and that plaintive-yet-cool vocal … he gets all the girls. I love it. And the retro vibe is the mission statement for them

Breakdown:
There is a fever in the 70’s and that fever is reggae
Mike Campbell’s gorgeous guitar stings with Tench’s fucking beautiful keyboards on this. Petty’s angst hurling itself into the chorus. And it is only the second track and it is alreadt insane how so many genuiuses are in a single band together and sounding THIS good on their FIRST ALBUM?
also the production on Breakdown is so exactly the sound of 70’s radio to me, it sounds like standing in my childhood kitchen.
ugh i will love it til the day i die. this song is like a drug, intoxicating rhythym & swagger right out of the gate

My wife put on the Live Anthology box while making lunch today. We listened to Discs 2 and 3 together. It ruled.

anyway here’s lads

https://media.gettyimages.com/id/73998958/photo/tom-petty-the-heartbreakers.jpg?s=2048x2048&w=gi&k=20&c=-K753J3l35JogyLkn29lZOV7c1KSNQQkmIX_uoskMMo=

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

BONUS TRACK!!!!

Band Of The Hand · Bob Dylan · The Heartbreakers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxGzJQV1MI0

Image Of Me (Live)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiScs1JWscc

I love "Band of the Hand," hard to find for many years.

For "The Best of Everything" Tom Petty handed production reins to Robbie Robertson, who brought it back dressed with the album's subtlest, most necessary horns. The vocal is understated. The chorus melody is lovely.

"Crackin' Up" is a Nick Lowe song where Petty sounds like Mark Knopfler.

Agree, The Best of Everything is sweet. The way the harmonies emerge on "sometimes she used to sing" is a nice moment.

So it's interesting, taking the album as a whole I feel like there are only two real disasters, the songs are mostly OK-to-pretty-good. But few are great, the production's bad all over and the general vibe is just very diffuse and scattered — overdone and half-baked at the same time.

"The Best of Everything" just hit me like a ton of bricks on first listen. Where has *that* level of writing and performance instincts been this whole album? Damn.

when i first listened, "the best of everything" struck me as a band / richard manuel song. i didn't realize robbie robertson was involved.

Tom Petty:

"I can thank Robbie for opening my eyes, really," Petty says. "I knew 'The Best Of Everything' was a good song, but it just couldn't come through. So I played it for Robbie, who liked it a lot and asked, 'What do you think if we take some liberties with it?' I said, Fine. [Later] he called and said, 'Look, I've had another idea. What do you think about a horn here and there?' I said, Sure, Robbie, whatever.

"He didn't want me to come in the studio while he was doin' the horn arrangement, which confused me at the time. Now I see why, because I probably would've backed him off. When he called me up to come hear it, I couldn't really even speak, you know. I heard it, and just, Yeah-yeah-yeah, I like it. So, from hearing that, I thought, Now, there's another way to go about things that's much more interesting."

But the liberating revisionist approach Robertson had formulated got no support when Petty, the band members, and Iovine entered the studio for the Long After Dark sessions.

"It was stomped down at the door, which was what was frustrating about that album to me," Petty snarls, reliving the torment. "Me and Iovine would have these huge disputes. I was tryin' to get a little wacky, and everyone in the group felt like this was a time for no wackiness; they thought that I'd gotten too wacky already. They'd say, 'No, let's just do a real good rock album,' and I'd think, Well, yeah, but there's a lot more we could be doin'. So I went along with it and did that album. But then I had the Southern thing goin' I still hadn't put together. On the Long After Dark tour, I played Nick Lowe 'The Best Of Everything' one night, and Nick lost his mind — he must've played it twenty times over and over. He's sayin', 'This is it, man — this is what is goin' on!' He thought it sounded real Southern, and I thought, It'll work then; I'll put it on the album. I didn't even remix it."

if you guys want to say anything about the live album or post a video from it go right ahead. i wasn't planning on covering it. the Byrds cover was a hit on radio i think. they had three singles from the live album and two for southern accents. i think. but tomorrow i will post the first track from the next album.

the inner sleeve doesn't age well...

https://i.discogs.com/HjcxgokJRf2HpV_OuNjUTfl7gp-lacSLBmGwI_6lsbk/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:598/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTI1OTU1/NjQtMTMyMDYxMTIz/My5qcGVn.jpeg

i swear that damn flag just meant "SOUTH" to a lot of people. i didn't even think about it when i was a kid. it was everywhere.

"Needles and Pins" with Stevie Nicks made the top 40. It's fine; as usual they sound great duetting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aayuDpDDgM

The next album is one of my favorite Petty albums and I can't wait.

I listened to most of the live album yesterday. My main feeling was that it was unfortunate that they felt they had to find a use for the horn section on every song. Seems clear that an album or two earlier would have been the right time for a really barnstorming live record.

Jammin' Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCFAzPl1QmE

https://i.discogs.com/EZcuWeZYRBMcpS7eAyGKzpV_bDwUyqLHjD5nSw5gh9g/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:578/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTE1Nzk5/MjEtMTMwMDcxMDc1/NC5qcGVn.jpeg

Aw yeah. Bob Dylan co-write. A "back-to-basics" move that sounds fresh. I don't mind the Vanessa Redgrave and Joe Piscopo references. I suppose it's "about" media overload but really it's about Tom Petty's innate conservatism, an early draft of "I Won't Back Down." But for once he sounds like the media overload got to him, producing this excellent car song which he left off the first Greatest Hits because it reminded him of the darkest period of his life (an arsonist burned his Hollywood home to the ground).

nice write-up! i love this song. love the forward momentum. it sweeps me away with it. it could just keep going and i'd be fine.

very curious about this album! pretty sure I've never heard a note of it.

i have a thing for chorded riffs with lots of empty space and the steady drum beat. the ac/dc / easybeats thing. i don't remember hearing this on ny radio, though i get the sense it was played elsewhere?

I did a little Billboard research last night. Radio programmers greeted the self-produced Let Me Up (I've Had Enough) with palpable relief; I suppose no one liked Southern Accents. "Jammin' Me" immediately hit #1 on the Mainstream Rock (aka AOR) chart in the spring of '87 for four weeks, his biggest hit on that chart to date. Let Me Up came out at the same time as Bowie's Never Let Me Down and Fleetwood Mac's Tango in the Night, all with high expectations. It earned good reviews -- Christgau even liked it!. ""The general feeling from most people I'm talking to is that it's the best record Petty's done," one industry guy told Billboard. "["Jammin' Me"] is the first No. 1 most -re- quested record I remember Tom Petty having."

Well! Let Me Up, like Never Let Me Down, flopped: his first album to miss the top ten since 1978. "Jammin' Me" stopped at #18 and like I said earlier wasn't even included in his first comp despite doing better than many of its inclusions.

In the Zollo book, Petty still sounds like he suffers from PTSD as a result of that spring '87 fire. He recalls having to throw his maid in the pool because her clothes were on fire. He grabbed a garden hose and it melted in his hands. Then when he and the half-dressed kids are standing on the street in a daze Annie Lennox suddenly appears, whisks the kids away to a hotel, and with a credit card buys them thousands of dollars in clothes and basics (he says he was wearing some of those clothes for years). He says he's forever grateful to her.

Jammin’ Me his most throwaway hit, in a good way. Kind of a palate cleanser after Southern Accents.

This is their back-to-basics just-5-guys-in-a-room album.

oh man i remember that annie lennox angel of mercy story. bless her.

unperson posted an interview he did with the late Keith LeBlanc who also had nothing but good things to say about her as a person and musician.

It's crazy that they never caught or knew whoever it was that set the house on fire. Traumatic to start with, but to know that somebody was basically trying to kill you ...

More shocking than the loss of their home and possessions (estimated at about $1 million) was the fact that investigators determined that the fire was not an accident. According to a report, an arsonist had drenched the house's back staircase in lighter fluid. Petty and his family were deeply disturbed by the fact that someone had wanted to kill them.

“We were shaken for years by it,” Petty admitted in Paul Zollo's 2005 book Conversations With Tom Petty. "It’s sort of like being raped, I would imagine. It really took a long time. And it was 10 times as bad, because you knew that somebody just went and did it. Somebody tried to off you.”

Petty said that, as a result of the blaze, he had trouble using the word "fire" in his lyrics. But he did write one of his most famous tunes about the experience: "I Won't Back Down," which appeared on 1989's Full Moon Fever, was inspired by defiant feelings toward his attacker. "I'll stand my ground / And I won't back down," he sang.

hmm. nice riff, nice chords. they definitely seem much more in their comfort zone. gotta say it's not grabbing me after the first couple listens. weak chorus, maybe. the chords are good but idk if i need to hear them THAT many times.

the chart performance doesn't really surprise me either --- can believe this was welcomed by rock radio on the sound and narrative alone, but if you're looking to top the Hot 100, "vague list of things that I'm tired of hearing about on TV" might not be the most direct route. unfortunately, Tom doesn't quite have Billy Joel's ear for syllables...

"jammin me" is a banger, idk if i have ever heard it on the radio but it def belongs there. gotta think the hold steady had this in their subconscious when they wrote "stuck between stations."

i have never heard any of the album's other songs, but i am excited to

I'm not sure I would've put my money on Tango in the Night outselling its two contemporaries, but then it was the weirdest, most out-of-time album of the three.

After a couple more listens and a viewing of the video, I'm willing to upgrade "Jammin' Me" to "okay.". Some of that is just delayed relief upon realizing it was neither an attempt at reggae or an anti-reggae screed, as I had long feared based on the title. Maybe I had crossed wires with Tom's desire to "destroy disco," which I encountered in the 1995 History of Rock n Roll TV doc before I knew much of anything else about him.

He avoided cod reggae for a long time but he gave in in the end.

when?

“Don’t Pull Me Over” on Mojo