The Press Box - Remembering Tom Petty (Ep. 359)

Episode Date: October 4, 2017

The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey, Chris Ryan, and Rob Harvilla remember the life and music of the late Tom Petty. Links: https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/3/16408994/tom-petty-best-songs https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/3/16407332/tom-petty-dies-obituary https://open.spotify.com/user/chrisryan77/playlist/18KnAbbz5xpTqHq9yGBTFV?si=oMFHvoWg Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Try and cheat Hello and welcome to a special Channel 33 podcast. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm joined by Sean Fennessee. And on the phone, driving around somewhere in Columbus, Ohio is Rob Harvilla. Say hi, Rob. Hello. Say hi, Sean.

It's me. We kind of wish we didn't have to do this podcast. This is a special appreciation for the music and life of Tom Petty, who we lost earlier this week to a hearty attack. And Petty was 66. You know, we've kind of in the last couple of years, lost some real, like, Rushmore faces in the pop music landscape. Bowie and Prince, and last month it was Walter Becker from Steely Dan. Yeah, Chuck Berry. Yeah, Chuck Barry.

But this one felt out of nowhere. It felt sudden, and it really, like, blindsided a couple of us. There's a couple of pieces on the ringer that you should check out when you get a chance. Most notably, Rob Harvilla is just absolutely beautiful. obituary for Tom Petty. Oh, geez. And Rob, I mean, you know, I don't want to get to into the gory details, but like, you know,

with Bowie, we knew Bowie was sick for a while. You know, that was like kind of in the air. Tom Petty was playing the Hollywood Bowl like two weeks ago, you know. I was there. A week ago, yeah. This was a real shock. And I think that has a lot to do with how we're processing it. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, it's sort of print-like in that way that you just had no indication. You know, he's, he's been super active, you know. He's put out records with the heartbreakers. He got his old pre-heartbreakers and mud crutch back together a couple times pretty recently. And, like, those are really good records. Like, you know, and he could play a show.

He could fill up the Hollywood Bowl. He could fill up arenas, you know, with two, two and a half hours of songs that you knew, like songs that you knew every single one. And it's, it really is shocking, you know, in a way that even, you know, Bowie wasn't. Yeah, Sean, I mean, I remember just not to pull the veil back too much, but like just the other day when there was that time period where I think his cardiac arrest was announced and then there was an initial report that he

had died, but then it sounded like he was on life support for a while. You were like, I mean he to go home. Yeah, that's an uncommon reaction for me. I just, part of it I think is because I had just seen him at the Hollywood Bowl until I had been spending the past 10 or 12 days just listening to his music nonstop. And, you know, he's just a kind of a fabric of your life entertainer. And Rob wrote about that, I thought, pretty precisely. He is a person that just feels like he is in your life at all times. And Rob, I think you said there's a difference between knowing something by heart and memorizing something. And there's just something notable about the persistence and the consistency of his songs.

So, yeah, I was pretty bummed out. And I think a lot of people who were 30 plus were, I was talking to Bill Simmons about this recently, and he was saying, like, I'm not sure if the millennials get this. Bill likes to talk about the millennials all the time now. But he was like, I'm not sure if the millennials really understand Tom Petty, but he does span a generation of fans. And you could see it at the Hollywood Bowl. It was like 30, 40, 50, 60, 70. Yeah. Like, there was a wide swath of people that were there to see him because he's had this series of generations of effect on popular music. And that's, like, really uncommon. We can talk maybe a little bit about that later. But, I was really, I was really struck by it when he got sick. Yeah, I mean, Rob, one of the things that, especially like Spotify and having streaming services now, because you have like this, you know, entire history of music at your fingertips at all times is that, you know, I'll happen into like, I'll listen to Super Chunk or whatever. And I'll just be like, oh, this takes me back to 1998 or this, this Cameron song takes me back

to 2006. and it's like these very specific sense memories. But Tom Petty, and I guess this is what timeless means, it's flat. It's like the songs sound to me the way they sounded in 1988, the way they sounded in 1996, the way they sound in 2017. There is like a, for lack of a better world, a timeless quality to his music. Yeah, I mean, a way I saw it described that really struck me

and was just like, he's a guy, a song of his comes on the radio and you don't turn it off. right you know you never turn it off even if you're not thinking about him even if you wouldn't have described yourself as like a tom petty diehard like you you don't turn that song off and you know that song you have some sort of sense memory to that song and I think that applies in the same way in the streaming era you know if you just sort of bump into him on a random playlist or just getting fired in that same way it's interesting at least for me like I came to him in his sort of 90s resurgent like wildflowers some of people Yeah, well, somebody pointed out, like, right in, I think it was 1993, he put out that best of that was all like the 70s stuff, you know, that takes you through Southern accents, maybe a couple records beyond that.

But, you know, it starts with American Girl, and it's got, like, all the early mega hits, you know, refugee. Don't come around here no more. It launched, like, right in that sweet spot. If you were a Columbia House customer in 1993 and you get 10 CD3. and you get 10 CDs for a penny and you wrote up on all the alt-rock like these old suspects or rap or whatever you're into like around about the eighth or ninth album

you have to pick like you start getting a little bored of like the presence in a way and I think I just feel like a lot of people got into Tom Petty that way that he was just he had a really succinct catalog of 15 fantastic songs you know that that fit well on the radio next to whatever next to Pearl Jam

next to smashing pumpkins like next to whatever was happening in the mid-90s. And just those records, wildflowers, full moon fever, you know, which had like maybe his biggest hits ever, you know, those records were huge. And it took me a long time to sort of grasp that he had had this full career, like this Hall of Fame career that entirely preceded that stuff. Yeah, there's something that is really unusual about the way that he got famous again. You know, he essentially had a huge run between 79.

through 85. Yeah. And then he has some hits in the late 80s, but then he comes back like a shot with full moon fever. And then he's sort of like subsumed slash valorized during the grunge era, which is a really unlikely thing. And there was a lot of conversation at that time and a lot of award season performance between Eddie Vedder and Neil Young.

And there seemed to be a real connection and a kinship between Pearl Jam and Neil Young. But just looking back at a lot of YouTube videos, there clearly was this huge kinship between Eddie Vedder and Tom Petty too. And, you know, they performed together. He talked about his songwriting and he talked about how, you know, he thought it was cool how girls like Tom Petty songs. And that was like a meaningful thing. There's not a lot of, you don't hear like a lot of girls in the cliched sense, loving Neil Young as much as maybe an American girl or I won't back down. Yeah.

But he has just kind of transcended time. Like he just kind of feels like he's been here for a hundred years. Yeah. So obviously I think all of us have gone down the YouTube rabbit hole over the last couple of days. and one of my favorite Tom Petty videos on YouTube is the S&L performance after Wildflowers where Dave Grohl is drumming for him. I was going to say, that was a big one for me too.

Yeah, and that's like a very famous story of like Grohl almost joined the heartbreakers after Kurt Cobain committed suicide and he was kind of like wandering in the wilderness and he wasn't sure what he was going to do and he basically had a choice between joining, like Tom Petty was like open invitation. If you want to be the drummer for the heartbreakers, like, cool.

And Grohl was like, ah, and then he made the way. the Food Fighters record. And it was like that it's a very interesting sliding doors anyway. But I bring up this story to say that one of the coolest things about Tom Petty that I don't think we talk enough about is him as a collaborator. Because I think you just think of Tom Petty and the heartbreakers and there's like a degree of any ego play in any band where it's like the person and the band.

But I'll remember him as like a really cool collaborator. Rob, you touched on this at the end of your piece. where you put the video up another, like, YouTube heat rock of Petty playing while my guitar gently weeps at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Prince just coming and, like, basically burning down the entire building. But that, you had a really interesting, like, take on that. Well, I, you know, I love that video from the start, and I really loved it. It's become, like, one of the iconic sort of live videos of the last decade or however long

it's been, you know, I think Tom Petty did a lot of that stuff, like, a lot of, like, rock hall of fame stuff, or, like, it's 12 people strumming acoustic guitars simultaneously on stage. It gets a little tiresome, like, over time, but, like, you know, that one from the beginning was just the sensation. And I think I made the mistake for a long time of thinking that, like, Petty wasn't fully in on it, or just that, said Prince, obviously just sort of came in there and knocked everybody over and just took the thing over and it sort of irritated petty like that wasn't the

plan you know and like i sort of saw this as a generational divide or something like that but i even even in recent years and then especially now unfortunately like i i watch it now and i sort of see like how masterful it is just to be the straight man in that situation just to be able to take a step back and to just play you know four chords or however many it is like sing your backing vocals and just let Prince like burn the place down. So like to be part of the scenery that gets burned down. Yeah. But to do it in a way that, you know, you keep your dignity and you just feed everything to him. Like it seems like an easy thing, but it's not, you know, and I just little like just a few little smiles I see from Petty. Like I just, I sort of got it finally how vital his role was and how

subtle it was and how he was totally a part of it and was just content to be a very small part of it. and how that made it so much better made Prince seem so much bigger. Yeah, he cracks a smile there in like the third guitar solo. And it's just like, you're just like, yeah. I mean, like you're basically sitting next to like the reincarnation of Jimmy Hendricks. You have to laugh. Yeah, I think you make a good point, too, about him being an unknown collaborator in a lot of senses too. Obviously, Travelling Willburys, he's arguably the fourth most iconic member of that band,

which is an amazing thing to say. And also, I listened to a conversation he had with Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 06 last night, which was fascinating here. And he just seems like kind of a gentle, thoughtful, interesting guy, which is unusual because he describes his upbringing as being this white trash kid. But in the conversation, he talks a bit about collaborating with Johnny Cash near the end of his life. And Johnny Cash covered, I won't back down shortly before he died as part of the American recordings. They had both worked with Rick Rubin.

Exactly. They brought together by Recruben. And I didn't realize that he and the heartbreakers backed him up. that performance and they were in the studio with him making that too. So, you know, he has this really fond and tactile relationship with a lot of his elders that is, I think, unique among people. You know, he was very quickly accepted by George Harrison, very quickly accepted by Bob Dylan by Johnny Cash. You know, he's very, he's calling Johnny Cash John in the interview. You know, he has that kind of a closeness to him. What's that Dylan double disc live, like the 30th anniversary

one? And I think like Booker T and the MGs were the house band for that, but there's a lot of songs on there of like the heartbreakers and then like a guy comes out and plays like they were like another house band for that show and it's like it's pretty it's pretty awesome to hear where like I think that they sometimes got knocked a little bit to for basically being like it's like Beatles tunefulness with stone swagger with you know like kind of some skinny tie stuff but they were you know the consensus band like you could just be like yeah if you like this kind of music there's no way you can dislike this band yeah I've been saying 100% approval rating the last couple of days, which like nothing has that now. And I don't even think anything had

that in 1984. But people just like that. Rob, there's one thing that happens with the greatest hits, like the one that Petty put out. And I think there was something like, I read something where it's like, it spent six years on the Billboard top 200 or some wild statistic. But one thing that happens when an artist is like a greatest hits artist is that the eras of their career get a little, they get a little less distinctive because we are so kind of like, yeah, man, these 25, these 30 songs, and you just don't even think about things in terms of early or mid-period or whatever. But you were alluding to that, but when you got into Tom Petty, he had some very distinctive, I mean, his career basically starts right around when Elvis Costello's career starts.

You know, he is a essentially pre, you know, post-post-punk pre-new wave kind of rocker who is drawing from a lot of classic rock influences. But I think one of the reasons why Eddie Vedder thinks, like, girls like Tom Petty is Tom Petty's songs like they had some shake to them. I mean, Power Pop, I think, is another thing that, I mean, he did a lot, especially in the early days. Like, even the losers, you know, it's, it works for me on that level, you know. It's like an earthier sort of version of the cars or whatever, and that was my first big band. And so I think that's part of why I gravitated back towards old Tom Petty eventually.

Collaborator-wise, I also need to shout out, stop dragging my heart around. Yes. my favorite you know 80s duets or however you're just sort of yelling at each other but that his chemistry with Stevie Nix on that is pretty fantastic and I

the ringer put up a really great post it was sort of everybody picking a song and talking about their memories both of you guys are involved in it and I'm sorry I can't remember the name of who put it up they put up a version of learning to fly which I think what is that like late 90s or early 2000

I think it's like there's Well, there's one from the Gatorville show that he played where Stevie Nix was just singing backing vocals in the heartbreakers on that tour. And they've do an acoustic learning to fly that she sings on, yeah. Yeah, and like the crowd, you know, he's collaborating with the crowd functionally. Like, they sing the chorus for a couple minutes. And, like, that's the one that really brought me up short, you know, in terms of the rabbit hole I've been down in the last couple days. I was just going to say that, you know, you talk about the power pop era with Dan the Torpedoes. he collaborated with Dave Stewart from the arrhythmics.

I just learned that he wrote Don't Do Me Like That for Jay Giles Band and that he decided at the last minute to keep it for himself. But I didn't even know that that was something he did. Yeah, and then it does sound like that. Yeah. And then like Sean said, there's that kind of late 80s into the Great Wide Open and sort of because it has learned to fly brings him back. But he starts working with Jeff Lynn from ELO

and it starts adding maybe a little more of an elaborate orchestral production sound and the song I wrote about for the Tom Petty Songs Post is this song Wals which is from his soundtrack album to this Edward Burns movie She's the One I love she's the one I just want to say that out loud on a podcast

One day you and I are going to do an Edward Burns pod Shout out to my Long Island brother Edward Burns Yeah but you know a lot of these songs had been leftovers from Wildflowers and then he kind of just had the heartbreakers come in and do a couple more but the one that I wrote about is this song called Walls, which is essentially like a four-cord,

pretty straightforward song. It's just a real Tom Petty song. But Rick Rubin puts all this like, you know, ELO white album production over it. And then they just get out of the paint for Lindsay Buckingham to do like nine different backing vocal tracks. And I was asking Greenwald about this the other day. I was like, am I imagining it? I think that out there on the internet somewhere is the ISO Buckingham vocal tracks and you can just hear him singing to himself. Yeah, Buckingham Hero Ball. But that's the thing that's so cool about Petty is he kind of knew what he couldn't, couldn't do.

And he would just like, he can't put together a personal Beach Boys choral backing vocal track, but Lindsay Buckingham sure can. And it was just so awesome. Every few years he would just do something like that. He actually performed walls at the bowl last week, which was unusual because he doesn't play it that much. and there was a funny moment where that's a song my wife and I really like a lot

and we were standing for the previous song which I'm sure was some massive hit and he started to play walls and people started to sit down and we looked at each other and we were like oh they're not real heads they don't know about she's the one yeah

Rob one of the things that I think what happens is as soon as an artist passes you know there is a little bit of a spit shining of their of their not their persona know necessarily, but like, you know, when Bowie died, he was just like the patron saint of creativity. And we, you know, a lot of the things that I thought were like amazing about Bowie, like Berlin

Coke Lord Bowie. You're just kind of like, well, that's inappropriate to really talk about. I don't have any like bad stories about Tom Petty, but I was watching this video of him in 1985 and he's playing, he's kind of like strumming his guitar on stage. Everybody's kind of, everybody was kind of cheering along. And he's like, yeah, man, you know, We were supposed to, I haven't been on tour in a couple years. We were supposed to be out last year, but I had a fit, and I punched the wall, and the doctor, you know, it's really embarrassing. It's taken to the emergency room, and the doctor's like, you're a guitar player, huh? Well, it doesn't look like you're ever going to play a guitar again.

And I said, fuck that. And so, and he's like, and then for a couple months, and I couldn't even play guitar. And then one day I picked up my guitar, and he just plays the opening riff of the waiting. And the crowd just loses it. He had swagger. Like that was a long way of saying that Tom Petty seems like such an unassuming guy. He was a rock star. Yeah, like he, somebody like Bowie can sort of use their dark side in like a really overt way

and like create a whole new persona out of it. And I don't think that was ever Tom Petty's way. Like it's not that he hit it necessarily, but it was never the point. You know, we didn't, we never got to see him at his worst or at his worst. ugliest or whatever, you know, like, I just go back to full moon fever, you know, which is the first, you know, the first one I really got into and probably the best still my favorite, you know, and like, collaborator-wise, as you said, like, it's him and Jeff Lynn, and it's like, it's technically a solo album, but like most, it's not all of the heartbreakers are playing on

it in some way, and it's just, it's this really fascinating mix of, as you say, like really, really ornate, and just the harmonies are really complex, but it's also really simple, you know, and I think it sort of unifies the different eras of him really well, and it also unifies, like, the darkness and, like, the brightness of him as well. Like, there's some really sort of gnarling, flagring stuff on there. Like, you think are running down a dream. Like, in high school, I took guitar lessons for, like, a really brief and terrible period. Tell us more.

To learn to play. Running down a dream, you know, and it must have been, like, the most painful. I love how you described that, Rob. You said, I think, like, the secret agent role or something, you know, that theme that's so 50s TV show. Yeah, it's like a film noir type thing. You know, and you put that up against, like, I say in my piece, and it's like a super emo thing, but I just,

when my first son was born and I was in the hospital and they handed me him for the first time, I was like, I had no plan. I hadn't thought about it's like, I should sing in something. Like, I should sing him a loew about it. He's fussing or whatever, and I couldn't think of anything. And I just, I came around to, all right for now, to a Tom Petty song on Full Moon Fever.

Like, it's not one of the best songs, but it was like the only legit lullaby I could think of. And it was just, it was the sweetest thing I could think of at that time. And for those two songs to coincide on that album, you know, it just brought the various phases of him as a musician and as a human together in this really amazing way. Yeah, the personnel listing, like the lineup card for Full Moon Fever is kind of unfuck withable, because it's Tom Petty, Mike Campbell, and Jeff Lynn, and George Harrison and Jim Keltner and Ben Montenie. mentioned Roy Orbison and Del Shannon.

Wow. That's not bad. Del Shannon? Is he singing on that album? Del Shannon has barnyard noises on the Hello CD listeners interlude. Del Shannon of Runaway fan? Yeah. Wow.

Yeah, because Tom Petty wrote a Del Shannon record. There's like a Del Shannon record that's basically like the heartbreakers backing up Del Shannon. I have to go find that. Yeah, it's really cool. I wanted to kind of go into maybe, I mean, not to put you guys in the spot and we've talked about some of our favorite songs and favorite moments, but why don't you guys give me each, the Tom Petty greatest hit song that like means the most to you and then give me

one kind of underrated Tom Petty Jam that doesn't get talked about enough because he's got 35 songs. Like I, Rob, I think you posted in your your Obit, you had the final set list and churlishly, I was like, I can't believe he didn't play walls. I was like, I was like, I was like, I think he doesn't, there's some song he didn't play and I was like, that's outrageous. How could he skip that? But do you have like, A greatest hit that you connect with and then like an underrated track that people should check out if they haven't heard it? As far as the greatest hit, you know, free-fallen American girl, like the obvious ones work really well for me. I think I say in my piece, like my favorite single thing he's ever done is it's good to be king.

Just for a while, be there in velvet, yeah, to give him a smile. Which is on wildflowers. And again, like, what I loved about Tom Petty was how well. his song fit into the alt-rock radio of the 90s, which is what unfortunately I was raised on, and just how well a song, like, you don't know how it feels fits. Like you said, like, I remember Grohl on Saturday Night Live playing that song and being struck by how simple the drumbeat is.

You know, it's just the same thing over and over for four minutes or whatever. And to have the guy from Nirvana being willing to sit there and play that song, like it told me a lot about the reverence in which Tom Petty is held. And I, you know, so those songs from that era work really well on me, but it's good to be king. It's like, it's a super emo thing, but just to fade out on that song, like, it's a really gentle and really lazy and sort of daze kind of song, and it just ends with this sort of piano and strings thing. It's just, it's a little more ornate and a little more flowery than, you know, in my experience, Patty was usually willing to get. But, you know, I think that that's what partly

made it really effective. But to just hear that on the radio, like, the midst of whatever, like bullets with butterfly wings or not the snails or something like that. Just the contrast between the rest of his catalog and the contrast, especially with what I was mostly into at the time that that song was popular, like, it just always really struck me. And like going back and listening to it on repeat now, like, that's the other thing that sort of really got me emotionally just in sort of trying to process this.

As far as like a deep cut, all right for now, I guess it would be it. Sean, isn't your favorite song of his You're So Bad? Yeah, though You're So Bad is also kind of a hit. You know, good to be king. Isn't it? Yeah, and you're so bad. They're both on the greatest, they're both on the second greatest hits album. Highway Companion or whatever.

Is that what that second one is? Oh, okay. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to pick Zombie Zoo then, which is I think it's either the last song and the second to last song, even as a dumb teenager.

It's like this song is very, very dumb. Like, it's sort of a silly throwaway thing. And like, I read a recent, I think Stephen Roderick hung around with Petty. Like, they did their 40th anniversary Heartbreakers tour. It was either, I guess it was, like, is this the tour that he was on now, actually? And he got to hang out with him for a few days. And like, Petty was complaining specifically about Zombie Zoo. He was like, I can't believe that that song made the album.

We had so much better stuff. Like, it's a near perfect album except for that song. And, like, even though it was objectively sort of much, much silly. earlier than the rest of the album. I think that the contrast worked really well. The dorkiness is an essential side of Tom Petty, I think, as well, that silliness. And I think that that song captures it really well. That must also be the song that Del Shannon provided barnyard dances for, right? I don't know. It's a CD interlude. I know what Chris is talking about. I had full moon fever on tape. And then when I listen to the CD version, like there is a thing in the middle

where Tom Petty comes on. He's like, hello, friends. You know, for CD listeners, we're going to do this interview. And there's like, there's barnyard noises in the background. Like, I remember that. Like, I would not have ID them as coming from Bell Shannon. But that makes a lot of sense to me now. What about you, Sean? I wrote about the waiting, which I think is like the most emblematic of what made Petty great. I wrote about the concept of phrasing in the way that he was able to kind of string together six words in a row that just kind of stuck to you. And that song is a great example of it. You know, Rob mentioned even the losers earlier. Like, even the losers get lucky sometimes. It's just one of those. You can't escape phrases like that. There's a bunch of Tom Petty lurks that are, you're like, wait, is that, was that a cliche

before he said that? Exactly. They're so perfectly little like fortune cookies, but you're just like, wait, that was 1985. Did anybody say even the losers get lucky sometimes before that? Yeah. My interpretation of the waiting, even as a teenager, was like a kid waiting to get laid, maybe because I was waiting to get laid.

And, like, I was reading about the song quite a bit, and his interpretation of it is, like, quite different. He describes first hearing the phrase when Janice Joplin talked about waiting to get on stage, but then he said, it was about waiting for your dreams and not knowing if they will come true. I always felt it was an optimistic song. I suppose dreams could be getting laid, but he's obviously interpreted it to be this broad, easily applied to anyone's life sort of phrase. And that's just an amazing skill that he had. I also just, that song just sounds good. There's like something about the production of almost all of his songs that are so timeless. I don't want to say timeless too many times in this conversation, but it's amazing how he's been able to do that.

Deep cut, I'll return to the conversation I had with Bill Simmons, and I'll rep for something that he wanted to talk about, which is he was proclaiming that Pack Up the Plantation Live, his 85 record, is like one of the all-time classic live albums that doesn't get talked about anymore, and that live albums are just not a thing anymore. And he specifically mentioned about halfway through the record, there's a version of Refugee where he's kind of hitting the second chorus,

and he just turns the microphone to the audience. And they sing. And they sing everything. And then they finish the song for him. And then when the song ends, he says, you guys are going to put me out of a job, man. In that petty stoner twang. And it's just like an iconic moment in him being everybody's friend.

And he had this galvanizing ability. And, you know, I saw it a couple weeks ago. When I saw him live, there's still the only other time people sat down during that show was during one of Rob's who were. songs, it's good to be king, which was sad. Yeah, I think his live records are good, too. Yeah, man. We also haven't even talked about Peter Bogdanovich's four and a half hour documentary.

Tom Petty movie. Yeah. Which is, I love Peter Bogdanovich, and as you can tell, I love Tom Petty, but that movie is a long sit. There's a lot of mud crunch in that movie, is there? A lot of origin. I'm going to go, this is funny, so the other night, Sam Donski texted me, and he was like, what are your five, what are your top, top, and,

Now, I'm already, like, this song wasn't in my five, but I feel like it's an example of why I thought he was kind of a genius, is that you take something that is essentially a very basic. You could teach Rob Harvilla how to play it on acoustic guitar in a couple of months, and you turn it into just a absolute diamond of a song, and that's don't come around here no more, just because that was this union of very simple, beautiful song with absolutely jaw-dropping production. Like when you listen to that and all the things that are going on in that with the backing vocals and the mandolin that is essentially being there. And I just watched, you can find it online. There is a 12 minute version of that song live that they do where like Mike Campbell loops guitar feedback and then picks and it's like a loop of that. And then he picks up a mandolin and starts playing that. And it's just like the band is like really locked in. So that's, I mean, I don't need to really talk about.

Don't come around here no more as if like nobody's heard it. That's probably my favorite greatest hit right the second. My favorite, like, out of nowhere cut is the apartment song. Just because it has that absolute, like, it sounds like it could be a guy to my voice's song. It's, you know, it's on full moon fever. And it's that straight up, like, the thing I love about his lyrics were that they were kind of like, shit's chill, man. You know, like, all of his songs are just like, stuff's bad, but it's okay. But I, you know, I miss you, but, like, let's not make a big deal about it.

And it's like the actual, like, most songs make such a huge deal about heartache or loneliness or relation. And it's just like, I used to live in a two-room apartment, neighbors knocking on my door. Times are hard, I don't want to knock it. I don't miss it much at all. And then it's like, oh, yeah, I'm all right. It's just such a perfect sentiment. And the song is bananas. It's so good.

So, yeah. Yeah, anything else you want to hit? I feel like there's two things that are notable about him, that he was able to do better than most people. One, he had amazing music videos, and that's been written about a little bit. And obviously, it's something that made him a popular figure in the 90s as a 45-year-old man, which imagine who is a 45-year-old man right now that could be on MTV or the, you know, who could be at the top of the Apple streaming charts that had records 25 years ago. I don't, does that, Rob, can you think of anyone?

I was trying to think of what the modern equivalent to this would be. It's like if the teens got really into Eddie Vedder, all of the sudden, you know, I don't think that person exists. How old is Jared Lido? I have no idea. That's a good point. He's kind of a cyborg, but maybe literally a cyborg and Blade Runner. But that to me is fascinating, and part of it is because he had such great videos, like the Free Fallen video, which stars a movie star, and Mary Jane's Last Dance, which stars Kim Basinger. He had this knack for creating, and you don't know how it feels video, which is like kind of, kind of, you don't know how it feels video, which is like kind of, kind of,

iconic and has a like rolling moving background. Yeah, that's the Phil Giluanu era. Yes, exactly. I feel like Wes Anderson just ripped off his whole style for you don't know how it feels video. So there's that. And then in addition to that, he's a great cameo in movies, either as a song or as a person. Oh, my God.

I mean, Silence of the Lamb. You just hit on Silence of the Lambs on the rewatchables a few weeks ago. Obviously, Free Fallen and Jerry McGuire is outrageous and ridiculous. There's been a lot of conversation about whether it's, In that performance, it's the first time Tom Cruise has ever heard free falling, which is the theory I enjoy. I don't know. Rob, do you think of any other movie moments with Petty? I'm trying to. I mean, silence of the lambs is always the one that I go back to.

All right, well, let's wrap it up there. We'll put out a playlist. I've got one going in. We'll attach that to the post and everything. Thank you so much for listening to this special channel 33 pod and appreciation of Tom Petty. For Rob Harvilla and Sean Fantasy, I'm Chris Ryan. Thank you.