does tom petty have any redeeming qualities?

ugh, i think he's abt as bad as it gets. whenever i hear his voice i feel the life force seeping out of me.

so then what is a rocker touring with a giant rebel flag the ilm equivalent of? i mean, i love tom petty, but i'm not defending that.

That's pretty much indefensible. I remember at the time (1985? 1986? Southern Accents tour) he tried to defend it along the lines of "I'm proud to be from the south." R.E.M. said something like, "Hey, so are we, but you don't see us with a fucking confederate flag."

I like Tom Petty a lot, but the rebel flag's gotta go.

petty is a bro hands-down

poor j0hn d upthread feels like he has to apologize for defending petty's guitar playing!

if bryan adams kissed ass he'd be tom petty

his mistake was to make nice with tina turner rather than bob dylan

wtf @ bryan adams comparisons

like he wouldn't have killed to write "Summer Of '69."

except petty wrote tons of songs that great and adams only wrote one

I'm trying to think of a second-tier Wilburys: Bryan Adams, Ted Nugent, Frankie Valli, Mickey Dolenz, and Bill Wyman.

petty's definitely better at writing bryan adams songs than bryan adams is, but they're in the same fuckin genre of mewly radio-single guitar-pop. one guy just settled into AC ballad retirement while Petty kept it "real," got pally with Ringo.

I'd pick John Entswhistle over Wyman.

that documentary of petty that was just out blew my mind cuz i didn't know that mike campbell wrote BOYS OF SUMMER which sort of took away my one thing i always defended don henley with.

one guy just settled into AC ballad retirement while Petty kept it "real," got pally with Ringo.

petty was having hits with actual good songs like mary jane and you don't know how it feels, hits w/ppl that couldn't have given 2 fucks about the wilbury shit....

I like the Heartbreakers fine! Howie Epstein produced two excellent John Prine records; Stan Lynch co-wrote the only other Henley song I can give a damn about ("The Last Worthless Evening").

...around the same time Bryan was having bigger hits with have you ever loved a woman and please forgive me. its the wilbury/down with jann wenner shit that just kept him getting to put out non-hit crap like The Last DJ while Adams was stuck in a less classy-by-acclamation context.

if Bryan Adams, Donovan, John Entswhistle, Frankie Valli and Barry Gibb made an album I'd be all over that shit.

x-post, obv

Barry Gibb would be an EXCELLENT sub for Jeff Lynne – he's even got a better beard!

also a better songwriter

Tom's <i>Greatest Hits</i> >>>>> Bryan's <i>So Far So Good</i> but I always find it ridiculous when TP's treated like some revered icon of class solidarity because he grouses about his pretensions now rather than singing with barbara streisand.

Gotta love Petty for playing the bat mitzvah of a defense contractor's daughter, though.

I think 99% of songwriters would have killed to have written "Summer of '69"

bryan adams tina turner bob dylan Ringo Wyman jann wenner Donovan John Entswhistle Frankie Valli Barry Gibb barbara streisand

i like some of those guys

shoulda stuck Colin Meloy in there to see if we're paying attention

I might take Reckless over Damn the Torpedoes myself (and "Cuts Like A Knife" is up there with all but the very best Petty songs).

Either way, people who like Tom Petty's and Bryan Adams's hits really ought to check out This Is It, the country album last year by Jack Ingram, a better Tom Petty album and a better Bryan Adams album than either of them have made in eons.

it's too bad tom petty didn't write more soul-destroyingly normalized MOR region-free white-bread pop songs about the high school and post-high school experience

"EVEN THE LOSERS" DUDE

anyway tom petty was really boring last night but i barely paid attention after the guitar raped the heart at the beginning. i like his greatest hits album and wildflowers a lot. i like him about as much as JCM.

You could debate whether Kenny Aaronoff makes JC better or if the staggering depth of the Coog's need to be taken seriously makes him worse, but at this point they both need to stfu and play the song they wrote twenty years ago about fighting authority.

as a friend said last night, "If Coog had been asked to play you can bet your ass he'd have done `Jack & Diane' as a bluegrass number."

aw, I saw him play some turkey day football game a few years ago and he just did one pretentious new "What Price Sweet America's Freedom" song, ROCK In The USA and some other oldie

So many of Petty's songs (actually, more "hits") are so bitter and corrosive, you'd have thought that Jess would have been more of a fan.

you mean "whiny."

give him the right night, the right drink and "Don't Come Around Here No More" and otm.

x-post

though alfred otm too

I like lots of them despite his singing. I said on the other Petty thread that I wish George Harrison had sung "Don't Come Around Here..."

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/060511/135612__king_l.jpg

For a minute I thought that was from The Simpson's "Rock Camp" episode.

Bryan Adams' has a bad voice and is a shitty songwriter.

^^^

^^^

^^^

he got to sing with BABS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXuQJX30Vuc

I don't care, even if he had sung with POPS, he's still a drag.

"Girl on LSD" is an amusing song.

this has probably been said elsewhere in the thread, maybe even by me, but i just don't get the "normalized MOR region-free white-bread" tag on petty, apart from him being white. his reference points are way more specific than whatever "MOR region-free" means. to me he sounds like a north florida pothead who learned his riffs from dylan, the byrds and the stones, and who for years (and maybe still now) wrote about the kind of guys from gainesville who didn't become rock stars. the tom petty narrator is a really specific and identifiable character. (and hardly region-free, even without the rebel flag.)

i wasn't talking about petty, bro

^^^^

(xpost)