3 Songs By Tom Petty
I can talk about a bunch of Tom Petty songs (32, in fact) for which I have immense affection. In fact, I’ll put all of them in a playlist below. But I’m going to concentrate on three, because they’re three of my favorite thirty or so songs of all time. One’s in my top ten.
“You Don’t Know How It Feels”
Two guys in a car. One of them has sort of invited himself to ride along. They don’t say where they’re going. They’ve got enough marijuana for at least a couple of joints.
Two guys in a car. One of them has sort of invited himself to ride along. They don’t say where they’re going. They’ve got enough marijuana for at least a couple of joints.
The self-invitee settles into the shotgun seat. What’s his immediate reason for wanting to tag along? “There’s someone I used to see, she don’t give a damn for me.” She’s not mentioned again.
As they go forward a lot of this guy’s musings are almost mockable in their dullness. “People come, people go, some grow young, some grow cold.” This is yearbook-signing sentiment. Its lack of depth or follow-up is… quite honestly, I don’t even know how to explain it, because it’s barely there.
(I hope you get where I’m going with this.)
“My old man was born to rock,” he sums up, “he’s still tryin’ to beat the clock.” Every day. He was raised idolizing this guy, as most men do with their fathers, even if they don’t deserve it. He was able to extract the potential this man had. It defines his own code right now. But as great as this man was/could be, in the end he was only in service to a schedule, probably not even his own. He shot for milestones but only wound up with sequences.
The last thing Tom says before the final chorus is “There’s somewhere I gotta go.”
There are three verses to “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” They are evenly split between Tom’s terse lyrics and, in the structure of pop music anyway, near silence. Just a drum crack and an acoustic guitar. A summary statement by a harmonica the second time. Towards the end they throw in an electric piano, but not much. And again, it’s almost comically simple. It’s a moment of suspense; its bareness is an echo of the brief thoughts you’ve just heard.
They keep riding. It’s a “moonlight ride.” But for a moving vehicle, there’s sure a lot of stillness around it. Every once in awhile a harmonica passes by the passenger window. That's about it. It's night. I guess you can't see much anyway.
I haven’t even mentioned the scariest line in the song, which comes before the first chorus: “I’m too alone to be proud.”
I have a specific memory of hearing “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” I don’t want to get too much into it because it’s a memory that confuses me. I was in a temporary state of vulnerability, kind of weightless. It was in a pool hall with someone I was almost close to, and a total stranger. We shot pool. At one point this song came over the jukebox. All three of us were mouthing the words to this song and not saying much of anything else.
Even the title and chorus of this song are throwing you off: What Tom Petty is really saying is that everyone knows how it feels. But the last thing we’re going to do is admit it to each other.
If any other classic* rock song this defiantly basic said more with less, I haven’t heard it.
“The Waiting”
I always liked “The Waiting,” but it took more than 20 years for it to become one of my favorite songs of all time (which I suppose adds another layer of depth to the song, doesn’t it). It came from the album Hard Promises, which contained the first Tom Petty recording I ever paid for with my own (parents’) money: the 45 of “A Woman In Love (It’s Not Me).”
When I talk about loving this record, though, I’m talking about the live version from Petty’s concert album Pack Up the Plantation! It's the most obvious way to cut this song: only Petty and his electric guitar for the first two-thirds, with the rest of the Heartbreakers biding their time. Everyone in the crowd predictably joins in the "yeah, yeah!" right before each chorus. Then he gets to the bridge, the rest of the Heartbreakers trickle in, and at the start of the instrumental section they all fall in as Mike Campbell takes off on the guitar solo.
I mean, come on -- how else is a live performance of "The Waiting" supposed to unfold? It's practically the IKEA instructions on how to play it. But goddamn it if it doesn't give me chills every time I hear it.
But for 20 years it had been a familiar song to me and not much more. I don't know how to explain how it worked its way into becoming something more without being mawkish and overly self-revealing, and you already got that from me last February and March. I'm not a confessional machine, for Christ's sakes. This isn't a Panic! At the Disco tribute.
I will say this: There was a certain point -- a point you fire-breathing guardians of pseudo-divine brutality would call a "snowflake" moment -- when I became frustrated that I didn't have everything I felt I deserved, and I realized this was because I was kind of a jerk. More accurately, that I had probably lost a lot of chances and gifts through my own impatience, and the expectation that I'd get something through skillful personal manipulation and cocktail-assisted karma. Believe it or not, this game plan proved to be flawed.
So the way I saw it I had to start completely over. I had to consciously make changes to the way I thought, my reasons for doing things, my expectations for what I'd get. Actually, I just had to remove that last part altogether. I was going to have to be a few things I needed to actually practice being. Most of the people I knew didn't have to do these things with such deliberation and focus (or so I thought), but I was the one who did.
All I will say is, it worked. And that's exactly when "The Waiting" became a huge, recurring favorite that I played far more frequently than I ever did, or have since Spotify started counting and making those things public. I think it's self-explanatory.
I mean, come on -- how else is a live performance of "The Waiting" supposed to unfold? It's practically the IKEA instructions on how to play it. But goddamn it if it doesn't give me chills every time I hear it.
But for 20 years it had been a familiar song to me and not much more. I don't know how to explain how it worked its way into becoming something more without being mawkish and overly self-revealing, and you already got that from me last February and March. I'm not a confessional machine, for Christ's sakes. This isn't a Panic! At the Disco tribute.
I will say this: There was a certain point -- a point you fire-breathing guardians of pseudo-divine brutality would call a "snowflake" moment -- when I became frustrated that I didn't have everything I felt I deserved, and I realized this was because I was kind of a jerk. More accurately, that I had probably lost a lot of chances and gifts through my own impatience, and the expectation that I'd get something through skillful personal manipulation and cocktail-assisted karma. Believe it or not, this game plan proved to be flawed.
So the way I saw it I had to start completely over. I had to consciously make changes to the way I thought, my reasons for doing things, my expectations for what I'd get. Actually, I just had to remove that last part altogether. I was going to have to be a few things I needed to actually practice being. Most of the people I knew didn't have to do these things with such deliberation and focus (or so I thought), but I was the one who did.
All I will say is, it worked. And that's exactly when "The Waiting" became a huge, recurring favorite that I played far more frequently than I ever did, or have since Spotify started counting and making those things public. I think it's self-explanatory.
“Free Fallin’”
It might come as a surprise that someone like me, who spends inordinate amounts of time looking for obscure music to fall in love with, feels that Tom Petty’s biggest hit single (without Stevie Nicks) is one of my ten favorite songs of all time.
It’s even more surprising considering that, all things considered, it pretty much sprung from nothing. Petty in a 2006 Billboard interview:
“Jeff Lynne and I were sitting around with the idea of writing a song and I was playing the keyboard and I just happened to hit on that main riff, the intro of the song, and I think Jeff said something like, ‘That’s a really good riff but there’s one chord too many,’ so I think I cut it back a chord and then, really just to amuse Jeff, honestly, I just sang that first verse. Then he starts laughing. Honestly, I thought I was just amusing Jeff but then I got to the chorus of the song and he leaned over to me and said the word, ‘freefalling.’ And I went to sing that and he said, ‘No, take your voice up and see how that feels.’ So I took my voice up an octave or two, but I couldn’t get the whole word in. So I sang ‘freeee,’ then ‘free falling.’ And we both knew at that moment that I’d hit on something pretty good. It was that fast. He had to go somewhere, and I wrote the last verse and kind of just polished the rest of the song and when I saw him the next day I played him the song and he was like, ‘Wow, you did that last night?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And he said. ‘We’ve got to go cut this,’ and we just took off to Mike Campbell’s studio where we knew we could get in and get it done that day. So we went in and made the record that day.”
See, this is why I gave up songwriting. I was clearly intended to do something else. Whereas Tom Petty could write something compact and in quick order that captured something I’d spend months trying to get down.
With the Heartbreakers, Petty’s songs about double-edged masculine heroes were sometimes obstinate, and frequently in character. Like "Breakdown," the song that kicked his career off. The main character in “You Got Lucky” is clearly trying to bulldoze himself out of a threatening situation. He’s in outright denial. So are seemingly half the guys on Southern Accents. The men you couldn't censure up front were confused ("Shadow of a Doubt [A Complex Kid]"), principled in conflict ("Listen to Her Heart"), or guardedly optimistic ("Here Comes My Girl").
"Free Fallin'" was something new. There were other forces guiding the narrative. Tom paints a suitably cheese-cloth version of another American Girl. She meets all the requirements on the most basic checklist of middle America symbology ever introduced in a 4/4 song: loves mama, Jesus, Elvis, horses. We're only missing baseball and ice cream socials.
And that's great in most of the flyover states, but unfortunately Tom's in Reseda. That's a district near the western end of the San Fernando Valley, which itself has a complicated legacy, on the other side of the Hollywood Hills from Los Angeles. I lived there for a year. Petty lived in Encino. When "Free Fallin'" came out the Valley was still recovering from what Frank & Moon Unit Zappa had done to it by cursing it with a teenage dialect.
While I lived in the L.A. area, I considered the Valley to be this weird cyclone of second-tier wealth, extreme convenience and the repository of most of the hard-luck B-stories from the rest of the L.A. basin. There were a lot of lovely folks I met who lived there and only a couple who tried to sell me drugs. Then they'd disappear forever. It's a bedroom community that never sleeps. Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, three hours of far-fetched Valley representational art, was not really that off-the-mark except for the raining frogs (and even then Van Nuys should still weatherproof its roofs).
The guy in Reseda doesn't miss his American Girl anymore, and it's turned him in to a "bad boy" (that phrase is sung like a child's nursery rhyme). He broke her heart because he figured his lot rested with the disaffected "vampires (moving) west down Ventura Boulevard." They're in a place that's a center of casual associations, frayed links and overnight memory lapses. And they're recalcitrant about their weightlessness -- even proud of it. That's the gang he figures he has to apply to.
But he can't, because he's nowhere close to the heels these guys are. He doesn't think he made a mistake in leaving the girl (at least for her it's probably a good thing), but he's broken his own heart as well. He's turned his back on something he knows has at least traditional value, and it took him being in a place with 24-hour croissant shops and convenient porn studios to realize he might have erred against a higher nature. He's refereeing a fight between what he craves and what he believes. He wants a way to ditch the tension. He wants to memorialize her as she deserves on a Hollywood level ("I wanna write her name in the sky") and find a nice quiet place to recenter, but he's so violently torn he doesn't know if he's going to be able to do it.
He's two things: He's "free," and he's "free fallin'."
And again, he's only that way because Tom didn't think he could hold the whole note. He wanted to say "freeeeeeeefallin'," but he couldn't. He had to bargain it out: "free, free fallin'."
It's almost unfair, isn't it?
What I kept hearing today during all the terrible confusion about Petty's final moments -- a scant 12 hours after another horrendous mass shooting, this time at a celebratory music event -- was that it's easy to forget just how consistent Petty's been. He's almost taken for granted. One friend of mine (we go back to junior high) said he didn't realize how many songs Petty had written that he really, really liked.
But Tom's place in American rock history is kind of strange. He was in the first wave of bar rock bands, playing in Florida dives, squeezing in some originals by telling the crowd they were "by Santana." The Heartbreakers got famous just as punk was getting started. Petty did not rush headlong to join that crowd, but neither did he brush them off. So he was relevant through the whole upheaval.
He didn't pursue the same mythology that Bruce did. He didn't try to solve as many problems as John Mellencamp did. He couldn't go the outright hedonistic route of Van Halen, and he couldn't be as severe or realistic as Lou Reed. None of his characters could spend much time in those extremities. None of us could.
That's what Tom Petty did that made him so solidly great: he stuck with us. We're who he wanted to sing about. Our decisions, our failings, our achievements. That was what he wanted to cover. He probably wouldn't have called it an ambitious crusade. But by the end of the '80s entire stadiums were singing his songs back to him and he was in a band with a Beatle, a Dylan and an Orbison.
Sometimes you get a lot more than what you were waiting for.
Rest in peace, Tom.
Love,
Paul
"Free Fallin'" was something new. There were other forces guiding the narrative. Tom paints a suitably cheese-cloth version of another American Girl. She meets all the requirements on the most basic checklist of middle America symbology ever introduced in a 4/4 song: loves mama, Jesus, Elvis, horses. We're only missing baseball and ice cream socials.
And that's great in most of the flyover states, but unfortunately Tom's in Reseda. That's a district near the western end of the San Fernando Valley, which itself has a complicated legacy, on the other side of the Hollywood Hills from Los Angeles. I lived there for a year. Petty lived in Encino. When "Free Fallin'" came out the Valley was still recovering from what Frank & Moon Unit Zappa had done to it by cursing it with a teenage dialect.
While I lived in the L.A. area, I considered the Valley to be this weird cyclone of second-tier wealth, extreme convenience and the repository of most of the hard-luck B-stories from the rest of the L.A. basin. There were a lot of lovely folks I met who lived there and only a couple who tried to sell me drugs. Then they'd disappear forever. It's a bedroom community that never sleeps. Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, three hours of far-fetched Valley representational art, was not really that off-the-mark except for the raining frogs (and even then Van Nuys should still weatherproof its roofs).
The guy in Reseda doesn't miss his American Girl anymore, and it's turned him in to a "bad boy" (that phrase is sung like a child's nursery rhyme). He broke her heart because he figured his lot rested with the disaffected "vampires (moving) west down Ventura Boulevard." They're in a place that's a center of casual associations, frayed links and overnight memory lapses. And they're recalcitrant about their weightlessness -- even proud of it. That's the gang he figures he has to apply to.
But he can't, because he's nowhere close to the heels these guys are. He doesn't think he made a mistake in leaving the girl (at least for her it's probably a good thing), but he's broken his own heart as well. He's turned his back on something he knows has at least traditional value, and it took him being in a place with 24-hour croissant shops and convenient porn studios to realize he might have erred against a higher nature. He's refereeing a fight between what he craves and what he believes. He wants a way to ditch the tension. He wants to memorialize her as she deserves on a Hollywood level ("I wanna write her name in the sky") and find a nice quiet place to recenter, but he's so violently torn he doesn't know if he's going to be able to do it.
He's two things: He's "free," and he's "free fallin'."
And again, he's only that way because Tom didn't think he could hold the whole note. He wanted to say "freeeeeeeefallin'," but he couldn't. He had to bargain it out: "free, free fallin'."
It's almost unfair, isn't it?
What I kept hearing today during all the terrible confusion about Petty's final moments -- a scant 12 hours after another horrendous mass shooting, this time at a celebratory music event -- was that it's easy to forget just how consistent Petty's been. He's almost taken for granted. One friend of mine (we go back to junior high) said he didn't realize how many songs Petty had written that he really, really liked.
But Tom's place in American rock history is kind of strange. He was in the first wave of bar rock bands, playing in Florida dives, squeezing in some originals by telling the crowd they were "by Santana." The Heartbreakers got famous just as punk was getting started. Petty did not rush headlong to join that crowd, but neither did he brush them off. So he was relevant through the whole upheaval.
He didn't pursue the same mythology that Bruce did. He didn't try to solve as many problems as John Mellencamp did. He couldn't go the outright hedonistic route of Van Halen, and he couldn't be as severe or realistic as Lou Reed. None of his characters could spend much time in those extremities. None of us could.
That's what Tom Petty did that made him so solidly great: he stuck with us. We're who he wanted to sing about. Our decisions, our failings, our achievements. That was what he wanted to cover. He probably wouldn't have called it an ambitious crusade. But by the end of the '80s entire stadiums were singing his songs back to him and he was in a band with a Beatle, a Dylan and an Orbison.
Sometimes you get a lot more than what you were waiting for.
Rest in peace, Tom.
Love,
Paul
Comments