Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Tom Petty

From America magazine: Elegy for a Heartbreaker: Tom Petty and the simple beauty of song

For the past 48 hours I have received numerous condolence calls, emails and text messages regarding the death of someone I had never met—some from people I haven’t heard from in years. It feels like being on the receiving end of a strange blessing. Tom Petty died on Monday at age 66, and anyone who knows me well understands that it is a personal loss ...

I will miss him too. I did see him once in person here at the state fair. Here's a bit from PBS NewsHour about him ...

One of his early songs ...

Here he is later with the Traveling Wilburys (George Harrison, et al) ...

And even later, he was part of a tribute to the songs of Bob Dylan, doing My Back Pages with Harrison, Dylan, Eric Clapton, Roger McGuinn, and Neil Young ...

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14 comments:

  1. Gene PalumboOctober 4, 2017 at 11:16 PM

    Thanks for gathering these clips for us, Crystal.

    Thanks, too, for the link to the piece in America. I liked it.

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  2. JeanOctober 5, 2017 at 8:56 AM

    Tom Petty was off my radar for the most part, but I liked some of the Wilbury's stuff. In that vein, here's Tom, Keef, and Bob doing "Shenandoah." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hJgWaqwZml4

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  3. crystalOctober 5, 2017 at 11:58 AM

    Thanks, Gene :)

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  4. crystalOctober 5, 2017 at 12:05 PM

    Jean - thanks, I've never heard that version of Shenandoah. There's a version by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds that I like ... http://ibiblio.org/jimmy/folkden/php/music/Shenandoah.mp3 ... banjo and 12 string :)

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  5. David NickolOctober 5, 2017 at 3:58 PM

    Two recordings of "Oh Shenandoah" that should not be missed—one by Harry Belafonte and the other by Marilyn Horne.

    I was totally unfamiliar with Tom Waits and was somewhat relieved to read the first line of his Wikipedia entry: "Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding as though 'it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car'."

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    Replies
    1. JeanOctober 5, 2017 at 5:58 PM

      This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. JeanOctober 5, 2017 at 6:10 PM

      "Totally unfamiliar with Tom Waits"? I don't think we can be friends anymore, David Nickol. :-(

      Here's a much younger Waits in a less Bourbon soaked mode: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BFTMWYna7kk

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    3. crystalOctober 5, 2017 at 7:13 PM

      I was kind of taken aback by Waits' voice too :)

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    4. David NickolOctober 6, 2017 at 12:24 AM

      I am totally unfamiliar with Tom Waits because my interest in popular music declined when I graduated from college (Winter 1969) and moved to New York. This coincided with the end of an era—the great music of the 1960s. When I look at the charts for the late 1950s and the entire 1960s, I am familiar with practically everything. When I look at the charts for the 1970s, I become less and less familiar as the years go by. I watched early MTV in the 1980s, so I am pretty familiar with the popular music from around then, but when I check out what was popular at the end of the 1980s, its mostly stuff I never heard of. I became increasingly interested in classical music and opera over that whole period.

      Part of the deal for me with music is that I can't have it on as background. I either listen to it and do nothing else, or I turn it off. In the office, especially after we all had computers, a lot of co-workers either listened to music turned very low or listened through headphones. I simply can't focus on another task if music is playing. Some people I know play music to help them fall asleep, but I can't sleep if there is music playing.

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    5. crystalOctober 6, 2017 at 12:38 PM

      Kind of the same for me. I pretty much stopped listening to contemporary music when I couldn't drive a car anymore - no longer listening to the radio - and that was the late 80s. What's great about the internet is that now we can go back and discover all the stuff we missed.

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    6. tom blackburnOctober 6, 2017 at 7:37 PM

      Yeah. My problem is pretty much like David Nickol's, except move it back 10 years. I know a lot of music from before my time -- like "Dardenalla" by Spelvin and his Novelty Orchestra or the original Carter Family discs -- and pretty much everything pop, jazz or country up to the moment the Jefferson Airplane, which I liked, became the Jefferson Starship, which I didn't understand. After that comes a great void. It could be a function of aging; after you have taken in a lot, you can't take in any more.

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    7. crystalOctober 6, 2017 at 11:00 PM

      Tom, I was pretty much the same until the internet. I started looking online for free MP3s of old songs I had liked, then YouTube happened - free music of almost everyone I had liked plus everyone I had missed.

      One newer group I hadn't known of before was Nickel Creek - I like their Lighthouse song

      The I looked up REM's Losing My Religion

      Then I looked up Nirvana :) They did a nice version of David Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World ... here

      Now I'm listening to The Cars, who are actually from our time but for some reason I didn't really listen to them then. This is my favorite one = here

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  6. JeanOctober 5, 2017 at 6:19 PM

    I really enjoyed "My Back Pages." Anyone else think George Harrison got better looking and sang better as he got older?

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  7. crystalOctober 5, 2017 at 7:11 PM

    I must admit I like the young George best - but he was my favorite Beatle when I was a teen.

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