RIP Tom Petty

omg thank u rog, that means so much!!!

He never meant much to me, as a musician/songwriter. But I always supposed him to be a decent sort, as a man. His passing certainly didn't hit me the way Bowie, Prince, and Grant Hart did. All of whom really took the wind outta my sails. Still, I think he was a true believer in the R-n-R dream, etc. And that kinda corny stuff means alot to me. More and more with each passing year, for me and the rest of the planet. RIP Tom Petty

Veg, thanks for that obit -- just the counter I need for men too woke to peek behind Petty's angels and honeys.

I liked that a lot, too.

I must admit I never much rated Petty as a lyricist - universal is also generic. But if I was going to err on any side today, I'd say he hit the bullseye so many times that it was more than just luck at work. And per CAD, I think I noted it earlier, but his songs are often so meat and potato simple, musically, but I've really grown to appreciate Petty's vocal phrasing and way with a melody, which are carrying far more weight that one first thinks when faced with so many major and mini instrumental hooks. Like, the "Refugee" hook is huge, but it's his singing (and universal/generic lyrics) I think that really sell the song.

That is a lovely and insightful remembrance, VG. Thanks for sharing it.

Wonderful and moving piece, VG.

thanks everybody!

the economy of his writing is staggering--i've recently had the time and space to start playing a little guitar again and it is stunning to see how many of his biggest hits never change their chord progression

otm. i love this kind of songwriting and he was a master at it.

omg VG beautiful

<3

yeah that was great, thanks

roger mcguinn said something in the Bogdanovich doc that i loved - he said that Petty wasnt afraid to reach up into the heavens for big ideas & abstractions but he was able to express them in real, everyday terms

i think Petty’s economy of language (and the fact that he liked shorter songs) gives the illusion that there isn’t a lot of there there.. but there’s so much subtlety & depth beneath the simplicity of his lyrics.

^^ OTM

If y'all want an example of what Petty could do with economy, check out "Time to Move On."

Listened to "The Waiting" a couple times yesterday and thought about Tom and Mike's dual Rick 12-strings and did some lite-googling to find this pretty good short article (for the gearheads):

https://reverb.com/news/tom-petty-describes-the-allure-of-the-12-string-in-previously-unpublished-interview

mr veg got the Live Anthology & we were listening to it all night last night. God what a beautiful treasure THAT is. Repeatedly gobsmacked by that one

so dean garcia played on don't come around here no more?!?

Curve's label, Anxious, was run/begun by Dave Stewart.

I think one of Toni Halliday's solo albums features Garcia, Mike Campbell, Eurythmics' drummer, *and* Dave Stewart.

Jason Aldean playing “I Won’t Back Down” right now on SNL.

Hometown salute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1iG-t9rsss

(He's from FLORIDA)

So I ended up on local TV on Tuesday to talk about Tom Petty -- mostly because I'd written some things about him on Facebook, and when the station called a friend of mine to come on and she couldn't do it, she suggested me. Hard to do a lot of justice in 3 minutes in that format, but I was happy to try. Also, I love that since nothing about my day job qualified me to be there (and I guess "former part-time music writer" didn't carry much oomph), they just have me labeled as "Tom Petty Fan."

http://www.wbir.com/news/local/five-at-four/remembering-tom-petty/480566891

And VG, I'm late to yr blog post, but it's terrific. I've had conversations along those lines with women friends who are Petty fans -- there's a much greater sense of empathy there than with Bruce or most other guy rockers.

Yeah, VG's piece really was great.

I'd forgetten how amazing "Change of Heart" is

the way those guitars chug

har, you got a Garth smile like me Tipsy

Veg, thanks for that obit -- just the counter I need for men too woke to peek behind Petty's angels and honeys.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, October 7, 2017 7:11 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

barf (on said "woke" men, that is)

tipsy that was great. i really relate to the family aspect, certainly Tom Petty's music always was there when i was a kid spending time with my family on road trips and hanging out drawing and stuff at home. the good times, the idyllic childhood, which fits perfectly w songs like "American Girl" and "Free Falling". this was music i first heard before my parents got divorced, before i went through puberty, etc. feel like this is a common thing, and Tom Petty's music has been a big part of the lives of multiple generations of people.

it helps that his music is very open hearted and very real. it feels universal in some ways. very authentic but still playful/punk - poking fun at Springsteen at times w the "she's a good girl, crazy bout Elvis, loves Jesus" American dream crap, but selling that shit nonetheless. even if this stuff is tropey, these are the tropes we were raised on, this is the pop iconography, Petty illuminating the emotional symbolism of youth. imo there is really nobody else who could write and sing "Free Falling"?

Johnny Cash does a great "I Won't Back Down". what more can you say? the guy joined a supergroup with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Bob Dylan, and no one thought "why is this guy here"? it was just pretty much agreed yeah Tom Petty belongs alongside these other legends. it felt right because Tom Petty is a legend.

tbf Jeff Lynne was there, too. (much as I like ELO).

Yeah if you think about his arc, from being a huge Beatles/Dylan/Byrd's fan to eventually getting to not just meet but play and write with and produce his idols (including Del Shannon, for that matter), it's pretty cool. I'm sad he's gone but he def made the most of it.

(And I don't know what is a Garth smile, but the one I have is the one I got. I'm not a fan of seeing myself on TV, but I've done it enough that I manage to not think about it much.)

he just treated his audience with more contempt/disdain/whatever you wanna call it than tom petty did

a few words in defense of the replacements: i don't think they treated their audience with contempt/disdain/whatever. i do think they treated fame and the music biz with contempt/disdain/whatever. and i think there's a difference. they were a generous live band, sometimes sloppy, sometimes not, sometimes drunk, sometimes not, sometimes interested in their own songs, sometimes not. but i never got the feeling they were trying to put one over on their fans and i never got the feeling there wasn't genuine love extended in both directions. they never didn't rock. they never didn't put their feelings out there. they never weren't in love with the music they were performing, whether it was a westerberg song or a defranco family song. they shot themselves in the foot repeatedly, pathologically, but that was between themselves and their record company handlers and their other demons, not between them and me.

or, rather, they never didn't do any of that stuff until relatively late in their career when they pretty much gave up. for my money, they were better at every aspect of being a band when bob was with them. he had the goofy in-love-with-being-in-love-with-rock-and-roll spirit that defined the band for me. in the post-bob days, they made exactly one good album and spent too much time being an opening band, doing boring tour promo, writing shitty songs and all that other stuff they clearly had no interest in doing. i saw them open for petty, elvis costello and keith richards along the way, and i got the sense each time they'd rather be doing laundry. they may well have had contempt/disdain/whatever for each of those bands' fans, but that's a whole 'nother thing. could they have been a little more respectful of their fellow humans in general? well, yeah.

not trying to derail this amazing tom petty thread though. i had never heard the story of why petty cribbed "rebel without a clue." that's fantastic. i now like "into the great wide open" 10x more than i did before.

also i would like to pile on and say, hell yeah, VG's piece is fantastic.

Adding my claps to the applause for Veg's remembrance

so dean garcia played on don't come around here no more?!?

He was the bassist in Eurythmics at the time.

the guy joined a supergroup with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Bob Dylan, and no one thought "why is this guy here"? it was just pretty much agreed yeah Tom Petty belongs alongside these other legends.

I would disagree with this - Petty stuck out like a sore thumb in that line-up.

As it would, since Petty's profile in the UK was, like, a zillion times lower than everyone else in the band.

yet another problem with UK rock

Re. "other guy" status..unlike the rest, there was no 'angle' to Petty before, during, or after the Wilburys and,as probably noted before, in the UK that can go one way or the other. Straight ahead rootsier rock is never the guarantee of iconic status in the way that it is likelier in the US.

lol i misread that as “rooster rock”

Cock Rock with a Country accent.

that vg piece is really wonderful, i’ve been thinking about it a lot.

years ago in orlando i was driving down a long hot dreary road when i realised tom petty was the front seat passenger in the car behind me, looking very relaxed and cheerful. they were behind me for a few miles (quite slow miles because i was new to driving and a complete ilx-style duffer at it and i was petrified of making a mistake and harming tom petty.)
but anyway i liked getting to see him not performing, just chatting in a car, and how the person appeared to match the persona.
another time on that same road i saw a space shuttle going up which was a stupendous sight even from 50 miles away so to be fair it wasn’t really a dreary road at all.

omg estela that is super cool

thanks everyone for all the great feedback <3

Very good stuff vg

Finally catching up on my non-academic reading of the week (*sigh*) means that I'm now getting to most of these Petty obits. VG's was revelatory--I had never considered how uncommonly generous (by male boomer rock standards) he was in his perspective towards the women he sang about. If anyone has seen the (admittedly not very good) Simpsons episode he did, his "lyric seminar" might even be an oblique nod to this.

I really liked Tipsy's interview as well. The cross-generational appeal that is discussed definitely mirrors my experience of Petty: in the mid 90s, most of my high school peers couldn't give a shit about Springsteen or the Stones, but Petty was generally considered cool. "Let's roll another joint" probably takes a good deal of the credit for this , but I remember one of my friends regularly throwing on Full Moon Fever as well.

The general outpouring of tributes this week have been a little surprising and a lot heartwarming. In addition to SNL, I just heard "The Waiting" played during the football game that my father-in-law is watching. For all of the public mourning over Prince and Bowie last year, I don't remember the reaction from the general (read: non-music nerd) public being quite like this. A testament to his genial likability, I guess: Prince and Bowie were brilliant weirdos; Tom Petty was a guy you'd love to hang out with who just happened to write a lot of killer songs.

(apologies if much of what I just said comes off as a rehash of thoughts that others have already posted; I haven't really had time to keep up this week)

i just remember when the greatest hits album was released in 1993, it was for awhile the biggest album in the country. a lot of that had to do w/Mary Jane's Last Dance and the accompanying video but the comp itself was i think a pretty illuminating one for kids like me who were in high school at the time, who had heard Petty on the radio but maybe weren't quite as wise to him as the kids from the previous generation. but the spring after that came out, and the following summer even, it seemed like everyone i knew owned a copy and played it all the time. it sold 12 million copies! every single track was killer. i guess the forgotten one is the Thunderclap Newman cover but that's a really good cut.

Greatest Hits re-entered the chart this weak at #2, a new peak.

So far, Echo really stands out as one of his most underrated albums

already covered I know, god that Petty Shandling video is so good. They have such a good vibe together...if you didn’t know they were friends or had never seen them appear together before you would never think on paper that they would hum at almost the exact same frequency ... fkn magic

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