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

Timely!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2024/03/08/one-of-tom-pettys-biggest-hits-is-back-on-the-billboard-charts/

Had never heard this 10 minute petty song from 1976, a sort of can't you hear me knocking type jam. there's a later song petty wrote with basically the same title but it's a different song. it was on a one-sided live album, kind of interesting, if not truly great. there's a bootleg from 1977 called "new york shuffle" that is streaming on spotify that has a version of it, and a few more interesting and not truly great rarities on it. i'm not sure why it's on spotify, being a bootleg; it's not listed under his albums, but you can search for it (kind of a bug i'd guess). just thought i'd share over the weekend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KaZBwsSLqE

American Girl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIhb-kNvL6M

i always like hearing it. that is my praise for a song that you can a hear a LOT in this country.

i like how those drums totally could have been on one of the new wave records that i listened to in the 80s.

this my favorite tom petty song, and i'm so glad it happened on the first lp. that pumped-up double time tempo is so critical. the byrds would’ve keeled over if they tried taking a song at this pace. i LOVE how this song is basically over by the two-minute mark. the rest is an extended mic drop courtesy mike campbell -- what a great, building coda. i love the competing syncopations on that high note in the double-tracked guitar part.

plus those lyrics. I love the past tense. i love how "he" doesn't appear until the line before the last. two short verses and so many perspectives. who's saying "make it last all night"? the american girl? the narrator? "he"? is "he" the narrator? to whom is it “so painful”? are we still in the past tense now?

Thank you, Silence of the Lambs.

never heard a bar band that gets campbell's part exactly right

we did it respectably in, like, 1977. i must have a cassette of it somewhere.

oh yeah

I love that this was recorded on July 4, 1976. Looking for a way to cash in on all the bicentennial hoopla.

Lyrically his first great song? It has the same existential longing — for escape/love/transcendence — as Thunder Road and Born to Run, but without their overblown trappings. In those songs, Springsteen gives the women names (Mary, Wendy) but no characteristics beyond Mary's dress, they're generic romantic stand-ins. The American girl doesn't get a name, but she gets some specificity — the lost or abandoned love who creeps back in her memory while she's alone on her balcony, the cars rolling by out on 441 like waves crashing on the beach. The song is actually from her POV, something I'm not sure Springsteen has ever really done? Not sure, I'm sure someone can come up with an example. But the point is that there's no man here who's going to save her, she's positioned not as someone needing rescue but someone moving under her own power.

And I think "God it's so painful/Something that is so close/And still so far out of reach" is a pretty good thesis statement for the internal struggles that Petty's narrators and characters enact across his catalog, the "something" often not clearly defined and usually elusive. The disquiet of the soul that runs through "Refugee" and "The Waiting" and "Rebels" and "Runaway Trains" and "Time to Move On" etc.

Stan Lynch is a beast here, isn't he?

What's interesting about Lynch vs. the rest of the band is that he's doing this locomotive thing while musically the rest of them are moving in single time, working in these kind of stately 8th-note triplets. It's not til the coda that the whole group really steps up to Lynch's gear. Like the drums are the revving engine that eventually the rest of them (and the title character) hitch a ride out of town with.

I also love this Mike Campbell explainer on the structure of the song and solo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XEeZmsv5fc

What's interesting about Lynch vs. the rest of the band is that he's doing this locomotive thing while musically the rest of them are moving in single time, working in these kind of stately 8th-note triplets.

if you want to hear what it would sound like if they were moving in lockstep with lynch for the whole song, just listen to "last nite" by the strokes

funny timing, dierks bentley just hit the country charts with an "american girl" cover

part of a forthcoming "country celebration of tom petty" tribute album

The only weak part of "American Girl," if there is one, is the late C part that suddenly sounds like the theme to a '70s sitcom, but even that part works in context.

"And I think "God it's so painful/Something that is so close/And still so far out of reach" is a pretty good thesis statement for the internal struggles that Petty's narrators and characters enact across his catalog..."

Camus Rock!

also the bass part rules.

Camus Rock!

And Sisyphus roll.

"God it's so painful/Something that is so close/And still so far out of reach"

an all-time great rock lyric sung perfectly.

the gall choose to embody a pov as broad and iconic as the "american girl" on your debut album and to do it with uncloying bittersweet vulnerability, but to still capture the grandeur required to cut across generations of radio is astonishing to me

great posts, can't really add anything here but this is obv an enduring classic of the rock form

Pretty sure that just a handful of years after the fact, Beatles (and Byrds) worship around this point was at a low. That's kind of why Beatles-esque bands, from Big Star to Cheap Trick to Raspberries or whomever, were often relegated to the power-pop gulag, while groups like ELO were doing the Beatles as kitsch; the Byrdsy jangle of "American Girl" was probably heard as a notable novelty, just as it would be later with REM. Iirc, even stuff like the Vox amps Petty and Campbell (later?) used, my understanding is that they were considered pretty uncool.

i kinda feel like the beatles still ruled in the 70s no matter what year it was. paul mccartney was huge. badfingers and raspberries started the 70s and the knack and all those skinny tie bands ended it. there were tons of covers. disco covers. funk covers. elton john covers. stupid stigwood movie. shaved fish in 1975. they were friggin' everywhere.

i don't have a lot to add to some great posts

it's almost too perfect to talk about

i second skot - i've never changed the channel on this song my whole life, as overplayed as it is

i actually went to a Beatles convention in the 70s! it was nostalgia for six years ago! people selling beatles merch. we watched the Magical Mystery Tour movie. the band Apple played. it was fun. that was probably 1977 or 1978. oh yeah Beatlemania was HUGE on Broadway. that started in 1977.

Was just doing some googling, and allegedly interest in the Beatles had indeed begun to fade a little (relatively speaking) by the late '70s. In Lennon's final interview, he apparently says: “When a radio station has a Beatles weekend, they usually play the same 10 songs — ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ ‘Help!,’ ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Something,’ ‘Let It Be‘ — you know, there’s all that wealth of material, but we hear only 10 songs." Then, not-surprisingly, his death sparked renewed interest, and soon after the rise of the classic rock format further helped renew interest, and it's probably never faded since, spiked with the occasional well-timed release, like the catalog on CD in 1987, the Anthology a few years later, The Number 1s, etc.

In the UK, I've read (c/o Marcello) that Beatlemania was at a much lower ebb.

In Lennon's final interview, he apparently says: “When a radio station has a Beatles weekend, they usually play the same 10 songs — ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ ‘Help!,’ ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Something,’ ‘Let It Be‘ — you know, there’s all that wealth of material, but we hear only 10 songs."

but that's a radio playlist complaint, not a beatles popularity complaint. they were ridiculously huge, still, in every way. to wit, beatles weekends were very much thing.

*a* thing

tipsy mothra so completely otm on this song i don't know what else is there is to say except for how much i adore the hiccup-y enunciation of "a-an-american girl" in the final chorus.

"American Girl": Petty claimed the inspiration was less Byrds and more Bo Diddley, the combo of which more or less = The Heartbreakers.

When did this become *The Tom Petty Song*? I guess it got airplay at the time, there was the McGuinn cover, movie synchs (Fast Times..., SotL etc.), it was on Greatest Hits...but speaking as someone who heard A LOT of Classic & Album Rock Radio in the '90s, I don't remember really hearing it get spun heavily until sometime in the '00s. What was at work (other than corporate homogenization of the formats)?

Silence of the Lambs helped. The way it's used to show a facet of Katherine's personality is touching.

Yeah tipsy otm

This is the start of something that Petty will continue through his career, singing about women with inner lives & quirks & personalities, who want things, women who exist not solely because they’ve walked out or left him or Are Hot or whatever.

And when there is need/longing/loss, he often puts himself as secondary to whatever she wants.

As a concept this isn’t world shattering but as a woman who listens to & worships at the altar of Classic Rock, it is rare to feel included in a song in this genre at this time period. He’s not threatening or threatened or leering. He’s quite welcoming and cool about it without being patronizing and it feels sort of special somehow.

He’s really good at it :)

Not sure where you grew up Grisso but this song was played every day on NY classic rock radio in the 90: Beatles not so much as i recall, weirdly enough. Maybe not “hard rock” enough

in my memory the Beatles weren't played all that much, primarily it was "Come Together" which as you say had just enough of a 70s hard rock vibe

but they were never played as much as, I dunno, Eddie Money or Bad Company

XP I'm in Houston, where in the '90s we had 1 Classic Rock station and an AOR station, which we lost in 2004 (the CR station I. question eventually was superseded by another CR station that transitioned away from Oldies, and it folded in '13 or '14).

The at least once a day Petty songs then were "Refugee", "Breakdown", "Don't Do Me Like That", "The Waiting", "You Got Lucky", "Don't Come Around Here No More", "Free Fallin'", and "Mary Jane's Last Dance." Down here, "American Girl " didn't join that class (and overtake about half of it) until the '00s.

The holy trinity of classic rock radio : Eddie money, bad co, and foreigner

i had the no DJ FM robo-oldies station on in the car the other day and a voice comes on and says: "Before you were the establishment you used to fight the establishment and this is what it sounded like..." and then they played "I Shot The Sheriff" by Bob Marley.

it was weird.

which is why tom petty was a prophet with the last dj...

Per Setlist.fm, "American Girl" is Petty's most-played song in concert. But that's not surprising, given that it's the one from his first album that got played the most — "Breakdown" comes in at no. 10 overall, and runners-up like "Refugee" and "I Won't Back Down" obviously had fewer years of touring to make the list.

In terms of its place as THE Petty song, I'm not sure the exact arc of that. On '80s rock radio I definitely remember it being played but probably not as much as the tracks from Damn the Torpedoes or "The Waiting."

i feel like "Refugee" was played every hour on the big rock stations where i lived in the 80s. it felt like it anyway. i heard it sooooooo many times.

i was listening to a robo college station at lunch today and when i turned it on they were playing roger mcguinn's version of american girl. it's really bad! with yackety sax.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kOID3Pv6-Q

He gets the lyrics wrong too.

seemed to be a pattern with him ("pack up your money, pack up your tent, mcguinn")

*pick up your tent

When the Time Comes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykCmB_ZlI68

*DIFFICULT SECOND ALBUM ALERT*

nice Stooges intro to a Byrds-y song.

i like that the cover says *we are on Leon Russell's record label but we are not Poco*.