tom petty and the heartbreakers damn the torpedoes

#Tom petty and the heartbreakers damn the torpedoes movie

Throughout, past rock modes are tuned-up, the album becoming reminiscent of a highly polished automobile with large fins. While Springsteen conjures the details of heartland America via an extensive libretto, Petty unshowily puts you right there.

#Tom petty and the heartbreakers damn the torpedoes movie

The opening lines of “Even The Losers” – “It was nearly summer/We sat on your roof…” creates a vignette of adolescent nostalgia so potent it seems to have been mined by every coming-of-age movie since. As cool and detached as his songwriting persona had been on the first two Heatbreakers albums, the revelation that the third offers is intimacy. But the results make the risks worth taking: the playing is raw, the emotion likewise, Petty’s first person songs starting to take on a classic universality. Songs like “Here Comes My Girl” or “Even The Losers” are boldly telegraphed rock songs, and even flirt with cliché. Whether your tastes run to black metal or sampled birdsong, there can’t be many whose pulse isn’t quickened by the opening riffs of “Refugee”, and the swelling Hammond B3 of Benmont Tench. Whatever, the original …Torpedoes, operates more on a gut level. This was a song that had recently been a hit for Sid Vicious – so what did that make Petty? Covert punk? Or curator of rock’n’roll heritage from the 1950s, to Dylan, Byrds and beyond? On the extra tracks in this 2CD reissue, you can almost hear the oddness of the band’s proposition, as to a general bemused delight Petty and band burst into Eddie Cochran’s “Something Else”, live in London in 1980. For boomers beginning to lose faith, Petty was in 1979 a refuge from synths and hairstyles, and equally a major hitmaker on the cusp, a songwriter finding his multi-platinum identity. Produced by Jimmy Iovine, it’s a bright, hooky and commercial FM rock record, but is also discernibly the work of a live band playing together in a room. Interestingly, though, Damn The Torpedoes, while sometimes perceived as a kind of “fuck you”, is nothing so simple as a hardening of musical position or outlook. The man who had won this legal battle was also the narrator of the previous year’s “ Listen To Your Heart”, deriding a love rival’s “money and cocaine…”. It also helped consolidate in the imagination the persona Petty had presented in his previous recordings: a wry commentator, a reliable barometer of right and wrong. Even if he wasn’t one quite yet, his display of intransigence was what one might expect from a major artist. His victory was legal and financial, and wasn’t perhaps “rock’n’roll”, but in terms of how Petty was perceived, it was a huge coup. Having signed, at the start of his career an onerous publishing contract, and having by 1979 come to learn the error of his ways, Petty that year took advantage of some prevailing corporate confusion at parent company MCA, declared himself bankrupt and won the right to renegotiate his contracts with his label. Petty seems to have approached his third LP, Damn The Torpedoes, in much the same way. Such was the laconic nature of the main interviewee, however, these major events and huge personalities were simply… taken in stride. This was a tale of arson, death, addiction, that featured Dylan and ex-Beatles members. In 2002, Petty was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.In Peter Bogdanovich’s recent four-hour doc on the career of Tom Petty, what was striking was not how much had happened to the man and his band in their nearly 40-year career, but how little. In his career, Petty has sold more than 80 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. His music has become popular among younger generations. His music has been classified as rock and roll, heartland rock, and even stoner rock. Petty has recorded a number of hit singles with the Heartbreakers and as a solo artist, many of which are mainstays on adult contemporary and classic rock radio.

And Muddy Wilbury), and his early band Mudcrutch. Tom Petty is best known as the lead singer of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but is also known as a member and co-founder of the late 1980s supergroup the Traveling Wilburys (under the pseudonyms of Charlie T. Featuring the singles 'Don't Do Me Like That', 'Refugee', and 'Here Comes My Girl'. It was released to critical acclaim in 1979, and was a breakthrough for the band reaching #2 on the Billboard album chart where it stayed for seven weeks. Damn The Torpedoes is the RIAA triple platinum-certified third album by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.