RIP Tom Petty

He won't back down, man.

just read that Zanes bio...really great...so much I didn't know

man I miss Tom way more than I thought I would - a good bio of him sounds like a worthwhile read

yeah, i think the Zanes bio is pretty unflinching for an authorized book.

"Runaway Train" written in the same mold, and Petty accepted it because he didn't want another "Boys of Summer" situation.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, March 10, 2020 9:50 AM (one hour ago)

...but then it did (purportedly unintentionally lol*):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27_-AWZcZec

*lol because Campbell actually played on the studio track and didn't recognize his own composition until Stevie brought it up to him.

The Zanes bio is essential. One of the best rock biographies I've ever read. Petty was unflinching in interviews and 100% hands-off.

it's got everything and Stephen Stills!

I love "Oooh My Love."

Petty was unflinching in interviews and 100% hands-off.

Tbf, he was this after an epic documentary that overlooked (at his request) a lot of bad shit, and after that conversations book, which did the same. Third time's a charm!

more like Tom Pretty am I right (as in, pretty petty!!)

that Bogdo doc is a strange watch

yeah it was weirdly disjointed for such a long watch

Wildflowers deluxe thingy is pretty fuckin magic. It’s crazy how even the outtakes are just so goddamn good, and the live songs sound SO great - lots of care taken in the curation, really impressed

yeah, it's great. the outtakes are all pretty album ready imo

Like just about anyone with ears in the '80s, I liked a lot of Tom Petty, but I never really thought much of him (figuratively and literally) as a songwriter. That gradually changed over the years until I was able to recognize him as a great songwriter, but the rare one imo that never really made a definitively great album. Until this one. I remember really well the day I got it in the mail at the college paper in 1994 or whenever, putting it on, and thinking, instantly, for whatever reason, OK, this is the one that really finally clicks as a front-to-back classic for me. And years later I feel largely the same way. I'll give Rick Rubin this much credit: the guy (and his team) really know how to capture not just these skilled guys with warehouses full of vintage instruments, but the sound of these guys who *really know* how to play these vintage instruments the way they need to played. Just sounds so great.

I actually think Rubin’s work with Johnny Cash is underrated.

Underrated!?

Those records famously got a ton of acclaim and press after the clueless asshats at Mercury dropped Johnny.

The 70th birthday concert thing was v nice!

Highlight was Benmont Tench & Mike Campbell playing a few songs together- Tench played & sang a rearranged stripped-down piano version of “American Girl” w Campbell accompanying on guitar & I just there stunned with tears pouring out of my eyes

god it was beautiful

no clip on youtube yet but i’ll keep an eye out bc it was really something else

it's on Twitch via AmazonMusic because 2020 but you can also view the whole thing through the homepage at tompetty.com

campbell and tench together is real magic and deeply cathartic.

of the covers, all are sweet and sincere, some are bad, some are good, some are too pro to be bad or good... and one is amos lee absolutely taking up permanent residence inside "room at the top"

yeah that was great

At minimum, the two-disc version is worth getting to anyone who simply likes this album. (I think it's very good, but it's not even my favorite Tom Petty album - there's four, maybe five others I like more.)

For starters, the mastering is great whether you spring for the hi-res FLAC's, CD or vinyl - they're all better than the standard CD. (FYI, supposedly if you buy the CD's direct from Petty's official website, you get the hi-res downloads for "free" though to be fair the list price is a little higher there.)

But yeah, that second disc of extras is pretty good. There's at least four tracks that should have made the album IMHO - "Hope You Never," "Leave Virginia Alone," "California," "Harry Green," maybe "Climb That Hill Blues" - and the rest are fine outtakes, they would've been good B-side material. I don't think it was a bad idea for Petty to boil down those 25 tracks to a single CD, but almost anything from the outtakes disc would've been preferable to "Hard on Me" or "House in the Woods."

The four-disc "deluxe" edition and the five-disc "super deluxe" edition are pretty good too. Anyone who LOVES this album should consider the "deluxe" edition, the third and fourth disc are programmed wonderfully. If I liked this album more, I would myself - disc three and especially the live renditions on disc four were a good listen. But there's only one demo from disc three that I'll probably come back to ("There Goes Angela" which I would've put on the album as-is - it sounds great even for a demo) and I'm fine with just the studio renditions going forward. The fifth disc on the super deluxe is probably for students and die-hards, and I don't mean that as a put-down, that's just the nature of alternates and rejected versions left behind and this case is no different.

Heard "Leave Virginia Alone," and while in some ways it's kind of boilerplate (down to its Bob Seger vibe), but it sounded great.

This is his stoner record, right? The peak of his legendary pot smoking, right before his heroin addiction kicked in?

Rod Stewart covered LVA the following year.

Four of the outtakes surfaced basically as-is on She's The One, including that wonderful Beach Boys homage "Hung Up And Overdue" (Carl Wilson!)

never noticed how much "Time to Move On" is debt to the sound of Tunnel of Love era Springsteen and proto War on Drugs

yeah there’s a similarity in the seamlessness of the synth pads alongside the rootsier accompaniment

He may have been into heroin already, but nevertheless, I'd still call it his stoner record. It feels like one which is part of its charm.

To be brutally honest, a lot of the album feels boilerplate. Jim DeRogatis gave a scathing 1-star review in the Chicago Sun-Times back then, and while his observations aren't wrong, I think his judgment is way off. The album is very simple, it's not innovative and the musical parts aren't that original, but that's not a fatal flaw here. It's a stoner album in the sense of a middle-aged guy whose life is emptying out and all he can really do is sit alone (alone partly because his marriage finally went to shit) and reflect with the help of some good weed. And part of that reflection is tied to retreat, familiarity and comfort as a means of dealing with everything, so that's what the music feels like - familiar and comforting not as a retread but as a retreat into solace. That may not be my idea of a "masterpiece," but Petty for the most part sells the idea and connects with the listener on nearly every track (there's maybe two I definitely would have ditched) and then some (again, the best of the outtakes).

I think a lot of Petty is sort of boilerplate, which is why it took me so long to really click with him as a great songwriter. It's the subtle touches, the economy, the occasional turns of phrase and certainly the tasteful (but not boring) musicianship, though ironically this album is not particularly economical, which is part of its stoned-ness.

His lyrics are often boilerplate; his melodies are not. His bandleading skills are near genius.

i can't think of any petty record w/o the heartbreakers as his great work

i think that's why i can appreciate this record more than i love it

I opted for the 2-disc version of this and I'm really happy I did. Like birdistheword, I don't think I love the album enough for one of the more expensive versions. But I do want to give the Petty team a lot of credit for not skimping on options here - you can essentially pick your preferred version based on your budget and level of interest, which is refreshing. There was the $20 2xcd version with the album proper and the ten outtakes, a $50 4xcd version that adds a disc of home recordings and a live disc, a $160 5xcd version that adds another disc of alternate versions and a fancy book and stuff and vinyl equivalents of all those options.

As opposed to, say, the recent reissue of Goat Heads Soup, which was either the $19 2xCD with the disc of outtakes or the $130 super deluxe version with all the bells and whistles, nothing in between (meaning the only way to get the highly regarded live set was the most expensive option).

I wish more artists would cast a wider net with options like Petty's.

His band leading skills (esp. with the band he is leading) are indeed impeccable and more than make up for any boilerplate lyrics (which is why I put him in a class well above, say, Mellencamp). Aren't all the Heartbreakers (minus Stan) playing on Wildflowers?

yeah i think so but i dunno there are a lot of other people it has a feel more like they are being brought in as session players not as a band though, almost like when gene and paul made peter and ace be session musicians in their own band*

*i think campbell is an exception, based on the bio at least he was treated on a different level than the rest of the band

the whole thing w/a few exceptions like you wreck me doesn't feel very heartbreakers to me

I think that's partly Steve's boring drum parts, tbh.

it's on Twitch via AmazonMusic because 2020 but you can also view the whole thing through the homepage at tompetty.com

this doesn't seem to be the case anymore?

Rod Stewart's cover of "Leave Virginia Alone" is okay - apparently WB asked him to cover it after rejecting several tracks intended for A Spanner in the Works in a failed attempt to make it more commercial. ("Leave Virginia Alone" was the lead single and was something of a flop. Personally, I think the one keeper on that album is the cover of Sam Cooke's "Soothe Me.")

The She's the One soundtrack has a hilariously charming story that encapsulates everything I like best about Petty. He agreed to be the soundtrack supervisor, and normally that would entail him using his connections to get the songs and recordings needed for the movie. (Think of Dave Edmunds with Porky's II or Kendrick Lamar with Black Panther, etc.) But Petty was too embarrassed to go to his famous friends for contributions - he had nothing against the movie, he was just uncomfortable with asking favors from friends. At the same time, he didn't want to let Ed Burns down, so he tried composing as much music as he could, and obviously there's only so much usable material that can be written under that kind of pressure, so he padded things out with those leftover songs from the Wildflowers sessions. He felt really bad afterwards and kind of embarrassed about the album because of the way it came together. Anyway, I like the soundtrack's title single, "She the One (Circus)," and as mentioned, "California" is a real gem that should have made Wildflowers.

His band leading skills (esp. with the band he is leading) are indeed impeccable and more than make up for any boilerplate lyrics (which is why I put him in a class well above, say, Mellencamp).

Mellencamp's a really good bandleader too - I'd put him on par with Tom Petty. Lyrically, he probably has the opposite problem where he swings for the fences most of the time and winds up missing more often than not.

i prefer petty but i think you could make the argument that mellencamp in 2020 is as underrated as petty is overrated

Think of Dave Edmunds with Porky's II

also WHAT????

porky's revenge i guess
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porky%27s_Revenge!

I'm sorry, it was actually Porky's Revenge! (complete with exclamation point), which was the third movie. But yeah, it's one of the biggest WTF soundtracks of all-time. Willie Nelson? Carl Perkins? Jeff Beck? GEORGE HARRISON covering a previously unknown Bob Dylan song from the '60s?!?! What the hell are they doing on a Porky's soundtrack???

And I agree, Mellencamp in his old age is underrated. He may not be hitting the same exalted peaks as the good half of Scarecrow, but his albums are much more consistent and much less strained now than they ever were.

Did Mellencamp really have the same band lineup for nearly as long or as many albums as Petty? Aside from Kenny and, for that brief bit, Lisa Germano, they just didn't have much personality, imo. That's why I can name every Heartbreaker but only those two Mellenheads.

GEORGE HARRISON covering a previously unknown Bob Dylan song from the '60s?!?! What the hell are they doing on a Porky's soundtrack???

yeah! this is crazy haha so weird...unfortunately george had such poor taste in 80s production

Nah, there were lots of changes in personnel, but I thought he navigated those well. I would never knock them for lack of personality though. They were knocked for being too derivative of the Stones in the early '80s - that reminded me of similar charges that Petty was too derivative of the Byrds and possibly the Stones as well - but I never listened to Scarecrow thinking it was a Stones copy, and The Lonesome Jubilee certainly had a lot of personality which Springsteen may have liked enough to get his own Appalachian fiddle.

(To be clear, I don't think consistent personnel is a requisite for assessing someone's stature as a bandleader. Changing personnel took nothing away from Duke Ellington, that's for sure.)

I'm sure they're fine or good, but mostly I mean that I can't name any of the players because I would never necessarily want a player that played like Mellencamp's guitarist or keyboardist or bassist, whoever they are. But Benmont, Mike, Stan et al. were and remain first-call players for others I think because they have personality, as hard to pin down a trait as that may be. Ergo, there's not much of a band for Mellenhead to lead, per se, because there's not only no real band, there's no real distinguishing characteristic of the players he picks. I could say the same thing of someone like, for example, John Hiatt, whose albums (as much as I know them) only perk up depending on who is playing on them. (Though he generally remains a good songwriter no matter what.)

But Benmont, Mike, Stan et al. were and remain first-call players for others I think because they have personality, as hard to pin down a trait as that may be.

here are kenny aronoff's credits, scroll through them...then after your finger falls off and you have it surgically re-attached, come on back and tell me how he wasn't as much of a "first call" session guy than stan lynch.

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/kenny-aronoff-mn0000081149/credits

huh i didn't know this guy had been w/mellencamp the whole time

https://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/34229/