YOU RANK ME BABY, YEAH YOU RATE ME 1-2 - ILM Artist Poll #71 - Tom Petty (results)

I picked up LAD for this poll and I'm not quite getting the love.

Petty's description pretty otm..."good".

This Rolling Stone interview with Jimmy Iovine is a must-read. His stories of working with John Lennon, Springsteen and Tom Petty are guaranteed to please anyone visiting this thread.

I think some of the love is related to the record's perception as a failure, which it's not. It's a solid record with (imho!) a not-great lead single and some exceptional tracks that headz may see as overlooked.

On the one hand it's much less of a mess than Let Me Up, but it's so tight that it can sound a bit samey, like a band that knows what it does so well and is so locked in on that that there's not a lot of room to breathe. In a weird way it's like their "rattle and hum" -- they've taken the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers thing as far as it can go and it's either change or die.

Enter Dave Stewart! Tho maybe it would have turned out better if they'd all gone to Berlin...

dun dun DUH

1. Damn the Torpedoes – 110 points (14 votes, nine #1 votes)

http://i.imgur.com/r0HrAAn.jpg

Iovine: "It's the best-sounding album I ever did. And there wasn't one fucking thing on my mind the entire time we made it. Just that. I was totally single-minded. I've never been the same way in anything I've ever done after."

very interesting bit from the Iovine interview:

"Tom Petty has a voice that sounds like a guitar. If you don't create an environment for it, it sounds small. It's like building the right set for a movie, where you move everything around him, through layers of echo. And in those days, there was no digital delay. It was tapes and 12 hands on the console, mixing."

I had Long After Dark #1 as well?

ugh that's on me - point total is correct and the spreadsheet captures #1 votes - it was a cut/paste error :(

some dude that bit is extra-interesting given that petty went dry for full moon fever (lynne's preference) and has stayed with it since

Petty's voice really is a temperamental thing. there are a lot of songs that i came across that were musically/lyrically strong but his voice had an annoying tone on the chorus or something and i just couldn't get into it.

lol that reminds me that rob sheffield had petty second worst singer all time - http://www.villagevoice.com/music/nobody-can-touch-him-6397466

I know there are raps on Petty as a singer, but his singing is one of my favorite things about him, so I guess I just don't hear whatever the detractors do.

Like I said in the noms thread, if like me you discovered Petty after 1987 the way he sounds on those early singles takes...getting used to.

Wow @ Long After Dark charting this high.

Iovine thought they'd topped Damn the Torpedoes. "I'll be honest with you," he says. "That album changed me. I thought 'The Waiting' was bigger than 'Refugee.' So when it wasn't a hit, a real hit, it killed me. It was devastating. I felt it was as good as anything I'd ever been near."

Mike Campbell said in the doc that "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" killed the momentum for "A Woman in Love" and the album.

f like me you discovered Petty after 1987 the way he sounds on those early singles takes...getting used to.

I can kind of understand, it's just hard for me to hear it in that order. To me the later voice is just a natural extension of the earlier voice. And I really love the raw yelp on, like, "I Need to Know." It's almost punky.

I probably would have said Hard Promises going into this, but I really found Long After Dark to be one of his more consistent releases when putting my ballot together.

or Damn The Torpedoe's rather. ugh posting in the am.

Re: "Punky"--That reminds me of another thing I learned from the Petty "Behind The Music": In '77, Shelter tried to break him in the UK as a 'Punk/New Wave' guy, which kind of makes sense as he lined up well with the Pub Rock guys (Graham Parker, Edmunds-Lowe*-Rockpile, even Costello).

*Either of whom might have been better producer picks than Stewart.

yeah he did very well on early kroq, which ok he was doing well on pretty much any rock station circa 81, but he was still getting airplay from them even after they'd completely made the transition to modern rock and ac/dc and seger were way in the past. i can kinda see it and wonder if that aspect of him helps explain why he thrived when alt-rock hit while mellencamp and esp springsteen suffered (or for that matter why he kinda dips when those two hit their commercial peak).

Wow, yeah. I hadn't made the corollary between Petty's mid eighties slump and Mellencamp and Springteen's commercial peaks.

No one has asked him what might've happened if he hadn't hooked up with Lynne?

His move through producers post-Iovine is interesting. He was obviously looking for new ways of doing things. I think Rick Rubin was the best match, but Lynne was weirdly in tune with the late '80s pop market. (I say weirdly because it's not like anyone would have predicted in 1983 that the ELO guy would be a major presence five years on.)

Wonder if his Dave Edmunds album would've been a bigger hit in 1989.

TOM PETTY POLL RESULTS PART ONE: THE TRACKS

• 22 ballots
• 113 tracks receiving votes

um, PART TWO dammit

counting down top 40 tracks, with ties sharing a slot in the interest of inclusiveness

i got a poll at the top of the world tonight

Even POLLS Count Down

Here comes my POLL

http://i.imgur.com/OuB8elM.png

40. Casa Dega - 60 points (4 votes)
http://youtu.be/U6wAR1rVbLs

kickin' off with a b-side, i like it!

Petty: Cassadaga is this really odd place in Florida that is filled with fortune-tellers. There are all kinds of psychics and fortune-tellers in the whole town. It's this really small place. And I wrote that by putting myself in the mind of someone who went to Cassadaga. Though I spelled it wrong..."

Dunno if it still exists tbh

xpost w/Today I Learned on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassadaga,_Florida

Cassadaga (a Seneca Indian word meaning "Water beneath the rocks") is a small unincorporated community located in Volusia County, Florida, just north of Deltona. It is especially known for having a large number of psychics and mediums, and has consequently been named the "Psychic Capital of the World". [sic]

http://i.imgur.com/gUYh1Vp.jpg

39 (TIE). A One Story Town - 63 points (3 votes)
http://youtu.be/T9dZSFX5Z8M

yeah!

love the hooky lead guitar wail on the chorus

nice! love em both

re: that wailing guitar, I really really wonder what petty's career might have looked like if he'd gone solo (as the label wanted) rather than stick with the gainesville guys who became the Heartbreakers. impossible to say, but i suspect it would have been much smaller. campbell's leads really function as a second vocal, to the extent that most of the tracks are nearly impossible to hum without including his fills.

http://i.imgur.com/tzbfP6z.jpg

39 (TIE). Kings Highway - 63 points (4 votes)
http://youtu.be/OdqDeBzqlP0

back from rio > into the great wide open

zuh i don't know why i thought jeff lynne was involved in the former

well tom and the heartbreakers are on it, anyways

great ending on "Kings Highway," those guys know how to end a song

kings highway's a good'un. couldn't quite make my ballot but i'm really happy to see it place. seems like it would have a lot of potential if anyone still made mixtapes lol

http://i.imgur.com/FUuirUi.jpg

38. A Thing About You - 70 points (4 votes)
http://youtu.be/hDRQ1glcEcs

another one i really like that didn't quite fit onto my ballot

fucking love "Kings Highway." Got lots of airplay fall '91. I'm sorry ITGWO didn't make the album shortlist.

i don't recall ever hearing it on the radio in NYC or LA. just "learning to fly" and "into the great wide open" over and over. if they'd played "kings highway" i might have bought that one!

http://i.imgur.com/XwuH1zw.jpg

37. A Face in the Crowd - 71 points (3 votes)
http://youtu.be/z_umeMtV4QU

I mentioned it, yeah. One time I saw Petty he left the stage for a bit and let Mike lead a surf medley for a long while.

Wow, this unveil was really fun. Loads of welcome surprises, deep cuts and minor hits. You can tell that many of the participants were familiar with a large fraction of his discography, as opposed to a few of the more recent results threads (like Nirvana and Queen).

Also I can't believe I wasn't the only vote for "Asshole" (my #6).

I voted for it!

heard "Jammin' Me" on the local classic rock station for the first time today. they're having a 'No L weekend' with no song titles with the letter L in them (dad rock x dad jokes!), so maybe eliminating "American Girl"/"Don't Do Me Like That"/etc. made them dig deeper with their Petty selections. the next song was "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" so it was kind of a weird Dylan twofer as well.

You could have a real strong Tom Petty rock block of songs without L

The Waiting
Refugee
Breakdown
Straight Into Darkness
I Need To Know
Stop Draggin' My Heart Around

Into the Great Wide Open
Change of Heart
Don't Come Around Here No More
I Won't Back Down
Runnin' Down a Dream

INSIDER

How are y'all still sleeping on this?

i mean hey, it ranked. it was in the top 10 of non-hits!

(and contains no Ls)

Guitar nerd stuff: I brought "Straight Into Darkness" in to my guitar teacher, and we were weirdly thrown off by what is largely a simple song. At first we thought it was tuned down a half-step, which Mike Campbell likes ("Boys of Summer"), but it still wasn't right. Turns out that to the best of our collective observation, the recording is totally out of tune! Guitar, piano, organ ... all off, together, like it was slowed down (or even fucked up) in the mastering.

Josh-interesting! I grabbed my guitar last night to see if I could reproduce it, but at least rhythm wise, I was able to play along with the recording tuned down a half-step (which is how I usually keep my guitar tuned).

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CYtH66jVAAEDqMk.jpg:large

xpost We totally did try tuning down a half-step, and for a minute it sounded OK, but then we noticed it was out of tune with the piano and organ, too, and we realized that there was no way they tuned those down (on purpose). Then we listened to the live version, and the guitars are in standard!

yeah I found the same thing on the live, I had to capo to match that.

varispeed is an awesome thing.

But isn't that usually used for more conspicuous effects? The Petty track sounds pretty straight forward, except for being pitched down to some mysterious key.

a lot of bands used to use varispeed just 'cause they liked the sound of instruments and/or voices sped up or slowed down a tiny bit. i don't know if petty used it that way, but it wouldn't have been unusual if he did.

Zanes' Petty book is excellent, one of the best accounts of how bands work I have ever read.

I wanted 40 pages about Let Me Up though.

Eh, I got enough.

This has been a good resource for me this morning.

4 years…

if I had this one back, I would have rated “room at the top” a lot higher. I guess when it came out I didn’t know enough about the world or about Petty to pick up what it was putting down, but at the moment I can’t think of another song by anyone that captures the moment of knowingly choosing to escape into a high any better, self-pity and all. plus campbell straight rips on it.

I wish Amos Lee’s take was available anywhere. I only saw it the one time but it felt like the only cover I’ve heard that really nailed it, Jason Isbell included.

RIP

this set by Mike & Benmont at Tom’s 70th birthday special was so good, made me miss him all over again

but also: I still marvel that these incredible folks were part of his ~band~ for crying out loud. Like Elvis, yknow? he was so good that THESE are the guys who make their career backing him up when they can set any stage on fire in their own right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URr83yI-tQM

Peter Bogdanovich's four-hour documentary is on Kanopy, and I've been watching the whole thing sporadically today. I was a little skeptical that it needed to be four-hours because the band's existence was never eventful the way Dylan, the VU, the Beatles, etc. were culturally or just as news, but it's highly entertaining so far. Petty himself is just a naturally good storyteller and these are good small anecdotes, one after another.

Anyway, I missed this poll, but if I had to rate the albums, using Rolling Stone's 5-star scale:

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (1976) ****
You're Gonna Get It! (1978) ***
Damn the Torpedoes (1979) *****
Hard Promises (1981) ****1/2
Long After Dark (1982) ***1/2
Southern Accents (1985) ****
Let Me Up (I've Had Enough) (1987) ***
Full Moon Fever (1989) *****
Into the Great Wide Open (1991) ***
Wildflowers (1994) ****

can't rate the rest as I don't know them as well

Upon revisiting, I'd actually downgrade Hard Promises and Full Moon Fever to 4 stars apiece. Very uneven albums, they're like half great and half forgettable.

Anyway, after seeing that Petty doc, I got curious and dug deep into all things Tom Petty. Besides listening to the albums, I started digging for articles and found this harrowing, angry one on Howie Epstein's death, published in his hometown magazine. This could've been a documentary on its own, but I think it gets 10 or 15 minutes in the doc (which to be fair is not an insubstantial chunk compared to other topics covered by the same film - but it still means losing most of the details): https://www.milwaukeemag.com/HeartBreaker/

Aw, that's a sad story. Poor Howie. Super talented guy.