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Tuesday, Oct 3 2017, 6AM
The "You Got Lucky" video was pioneering because the song didn't start until over a minute into the clip. Inspired by the Mad Max films, we see a desolate, futuristic landscape where Petty discovers and old boom box which plays the song. The band wrote the treatment themselves, and Jim Lenahan directed. Remembering rock legend Tom Petty: blog.kexp.org
You can see Pearl Jam covering Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down at the Gorge in 2006: www.youtube.com
Tom joined Johnny for this cover. Cash had just battled illness and imbues the song with added defiance.
In the video for this song, Tom & the Heartbreakers are playing inside a box... www.youtube.com
"Free Fallin'" is one of Petty's most famous tracks as well as his longest-charting. And yes, it certainly is ok to like it. Petty and The Heartbreakers performed the song at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1989, with Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin, and at the February 2008 Super Bowl XLII Halftime Show. Tom Petty made great videos as well: www.youtube.com
Roy Orbison died before the music video of this song was made, so in memory of him, when his verse comes on they show a picture of him on the train and his guitar on a rocking chair. www.youtube.com
Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others performed "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions. www.youtube.com
Eric Clapton played lead guitar on this song. He and George Harrison were good friends, but George had to convince him to come to the studio because Clapton was worried the other Beatles wouldn't want him there. Clapton's presence eased the mood in the studio at a tense time for The Beatles - they were at each other's throats during recording of The White Album, but they all relaxed when Clapton showed up.
The video used an Alice In Wonderland theme, which was Stewart's (Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics) idea - it reflected how he felt coming to Los Angeles. It was directed by Jeff Stein, who used a black-and-white tiled background and oversized, elaborate costumes starring Tom Petty as the Mad Hatter. Stewart appears in the beginning of the video playing the sitar on a giant mushroom. At the end, the girl becomes a cake and is eaten by the band, something that caused enough of a stir that MTV ordered a shot of a grinning Petty while Alice gets served edited out of the video before they would air it. "They said it was just too lascivious," Petty told Billboard. "They were like, 'Well, you can do it, but you can't enjoy it that much.'" www.youtube.com
MTV and many radio stations aired a censored version of "You Don't Know How It Feels," taking the word "roll" out of "let's roll another joint", as well as a version that distorted the word "joint" into inaudibility. A version replacing the word "roll" with "hit" was also made. Nevertheless, the music video won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Male Video in 1995. www.youtube.com
Petty explained to Mojo magazine January 2010 what it was like co-writing a song with Bob Dylan. Said Petty: "There's nobody I've ever met who knows more about the craft of how to put a song together than he does. I learned so much from just watching him work. He has an artist's mind and can find in a line the key word and think how to embellish it to bring the line out. I had never written more words than I needed, but he tended to write lots and lots of verses, then he'll say, this verse is better than that, or this line. Slowly this great picture emerges. He was very good in The Traveling Wilburys, when somebody had a line, he could make it a lot better in big ways."
At the time, rock artists didn't typically write songs about crying over a girl. Orbison wanted to show that crying was not weakness, but sensitivity. Other voices would have a hard time pulling this off, but Orbison could emote very naturally when he sang, which he did on many of his hits.
Eddie joined Tom at a 2006 gig in Denver for The Waiting but they performed many times over the years.
You can find that performance of The Waiting here: www.youtube.com
Live from the Gorge in 2006: www.youtube.com This was written from the perspective of a girl with dyslexia and her mother who doesn't understand the condition. Eddie Vedder explained in Pearl Jam - The Illustrated Story:
The child in that song obviously has a learning difficulty. And it's only in the last few years that they've actually been able to diagnose these learning disabilities that before were looked at as misbehavior, as just outright rebelliousness. But no one knew what it was. And these kids, because they seemed unable or reluctant to learn, they'd end up getting the shit beaten outta them. The song ends, you know, with this idea of the shades going down so that the neighbors can't see what happens next. What hurts about shit like that is that it ends up defining people's lives. They have to live with that abuse for the rest of their lives. Good, creative people are just fucking destroyed."
Live at Benaroya Hall in 2015 www.youtube.com You can purchase the download of the full show here bit.ly
Petty mentions his mother, Katherine, in this song. She died in 1980; Petty skipped the funeral because his presence in Gainsville would have raised a commotion, and he didn't want it to turn into a scene. Also, he hates funerals. "I made my own peace with my mother," he said.
Only certain songs were played on the band's tour that year. The album, Echo, was largely written during a period when Petty was going through a painful divorce and he cited that as the reason to not play any songs from the album in concert. However, "Room at the Top" appears in the concert film High Grass Dogs: Live at the Fillmore. There is also a video: www.youtube.com
Tom Petty said of this song: "This was a reaction to the pressures of the music business. I wound up in a huge row with the record company when ABC Records tried to sell our contract to MCA Records without us knowing about it, despite a clause in our contract that said they didn't have the right to do that. I was so angry with the whole system that I think that had a lot to do with the tone of the Damn the Torpedoes album. I was in this defiant mood. I wasn't so conscious of it then, but I can look back and see what was happening. I find that's true a lot. It takes some time usually before you fully understand what's going on in a song - or maybe what led up to it." Petty also said that Melissa Etheridge's version was the best cover of the song he ever heard. Etheridge's version was recorded for her 2005 compilation album, Greatest Hits: The Road Less Traveled.
Here are The Lumineers covering Tom Petty's "Walls" at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee Wisconsin on March 25th. bit.ly
Stevie Nicks joined Tom in Gatorville in 2006 for Learning to Fly: bit.ly
Tom Petty said of this song: "I wrote that in a little apartment I had in Encino. It was right next to the freeway and the cars sometimes sounded like waves from the ocean, which is why there's the line about the waves crashing on the beach. The words just came tumbling out very quickly - and it was the start of writing about people who are longing for something else in life, something better than they have."
This video has an animated Tom Petty being chased by giant rabbits, among other things: bit.ly
Tom recorded this version of You're Gonna Change (Or I'm Gonna Leave) to the 2001 Williams tribute album Timeless: Hank Williams Tribute.
"You're Gonna Change (Or I'm Gonna Leave)" was the fourth in a remarkable string of twenty top ten hits that Hank Williams had between 1949 and his death on New Year's Day 1953. The song was a prime example of the typical Hank Williams A-side: an up-tempo, honky tonk number that could be danced to.
Johnny is backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for the entire Unchained album. For Sea of Heartbreak he was also joined by Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood, of Fleetwood Mac
Sea of Heartbreak was written by Paul Hampton and Hal David and first recorded by Don Gibson in 1961
South African Jazz musician Hugh Masekela contributed the clarion trumpet solo. This song is a tongue-in-cheek treatise on fame and the pop music industry. Many interpreted it as a swipe at the success of manufactured rock bands like The Monkees, but Roger McGuinn has confirmed that he and Chris Hillman were not writing about about The Monkees, but instead the whole music business.
Petty met Nicks while he was recording his group's album Damn The Torpedoes. She asked him half-jokingly if he could write her a song that she could record for her first solo album. Petty didn't take her request seriously at first. Nicks reiterated her request a year later as Petty was putting together his Hard Promises album. Petty wrote a ballad called "Insider" at his home, played it to the Heartbreakers (to their approval), recorded a demo with his band, and sent the demo to Nicks. After listening to the demo of "Insider," Nicks visited Petty at his studio, taped the song with Petty and the Heartbreakers, then gave the tape to Petty, saying, "You love this so much... YOU take the song." He did, and included it on Hard Promises.
Shortly after "Insider" was finished, Petty and company recorded a song that he and guitarist Mike Campbell composed about a year earlier - "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" - and sent that demo to Nicks' producer, Jimmy Iovine. She loved it, saying, "That's what I wanted all along." Nicks and Petty ended up doing it as a duet.
Check out Sharon Van Etten and Shearwater performing Stop Draggin' My Heart Around at the AV Club in 2012 bit.ly
At some point before he began work on Wildflowers, Tom Petty's cousin sent him a book of great phrases. One really stuck in his mind: "Most things I worry about never happen anyway." He worked it into the brilliant "Crawling Back to You." Petty's marriage was falling apart around this time, and it's hard to not sense that in this song about a guy "tired of being tired."
Petty made some strange videos, and this was no exception. Tom played a mortician who takes home a corpse played by Kim Basinger. When he gets her home, he puts her in a wedding dress and dances with her. Then he puts her in a pickup truck and throws her into the ocean, and she opens her eyes as she sinks. It won Best Male Video at the MTV Video Music Awards.
bit.ly
No one covers Woodie Guthrie like Sharon Jones. blog.kexp.org
On a BBC Radio interview, Jeff Lynne talked about how he came up with this after he locked himself away in a Swiss chalet attempting to write ELO's follow-up to A New World Record. "It was dark and misty for two weeks, and I didn't come up with a thing. Suddenly the sun shone and it was, 'Wow, look at those beautiful Alps.' I wrote Mr. Blue Sky and 13 other songs in the next two weeks."
Mike Campbell, the Heartbreakers' guitarist, talked about working with Jeff Lynne: "When we did that first record with Jeff Lynne, Full Moon Fever, that was an amazing time for me because it was mostly just the three of us - me and Tom and Jeff - working at my house. Jeff Lynne is an amazing record-maker. It was so exciting for a lot of reasons. First of all, our band energy in the studio had gotten into kind of a rut, we were having some issues with our drummer and just kind of at the end of our rope in terms of inspiration - having a lot of trouble cutting tracks in the studio.
This project came along and really we were just doing it for fun at the beginning, but Jeff would come in and every day he would blow my mind. It was so exciting to have him and Tom come over and go, 'OK, here's this song,' and then Jeff would just go. I'd never seen this done before, he'd say, 'OK, here's what we're going to do: Put a drum machine down. Now put up a mic, we're going to do some acoustic guitars. Put up another mic, were going to do a keyboard. OK, here's an idea for the bass. Mike, let's try some guitar on this. I've got an idea for a background part here...'
Sure enough, within five or six hours, the record would be done, and we'd just sit back and go, 'How the f-ck did you do that?' We were used to being in the studio and like 'OK, here's how the song goes' and everybody would set up to play and just laboriously run the song into the ground, and it usually got worse and worse from trying to get the groove and the spirit and trying to get a performance out of five guys at once. This guy walked in and he knew exactly how to put the pieces together, and he always had little tricks, like with the background vocals how he would slide them in and layer them, and little melodies here and there. Tom and I were soaking it up. Pretty amazing, a very exciting time, like going to musical college or something."
This was featured in the 1978 movie FM. About a radio station in California, the movie was the basis for the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati.
Johnny is backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for this cover of one of their songs.
Here's another version - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers tearing it up acoustic style at the 1994 Bridge School Benefit in Mountain View, California. bit.ly
This is a commentary on the corporate takeover of radio stations and was banned by numerous stations around the country because of its content. It's very ironic that "the man" banned this because basically they're proving his point.
On March 20, 1979, two days after Lodger was released, Bowie took a turn on BBC Radio One as a guest DJ, playing some of his favorite songs for two hours. Among his selections: "21st Century Schizoid Man" by King Crimson and "96 Tears" by ? & The Mysterians. He played two Lodger tracks, "Boys Keep Swinging" and "Yassassin," but didn't play "DJ."
R.I.P., Tom Petty. Read his obituary from The New York Times: www.nytimes.com