"Most Listenable Album"

Tom Petty's "Full Moon Fever" is hard to beat

As we’ve known for years and years, the Grammy Awards aren’t very practical. There are all sorts of categories, of course, for all sorts of esoteric recordings and extremely particular classifications that I’m quite sure most of the voters could not name without a ballot in front of them.

While it’s great to recognize all sorts of music, it seems to me that they are missing one very obvious and important categorization — Most Listenable Album.

I suppose you could raise a mighty argument over this one. Some will insist Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” is the nads, others will suggest “The Beatles’ Second Album” and we can’t forget the Swifties and, frankly, there are so many different types of music, maybe it would be too difficult to pull off. We aren’t going to get everyone to agree.

But if you asked record producer par excellence Rick Rubin, he’d have an automatic choice.

“When talking about working with Petty, Rubin recalled that Full Moon Fever never left his stereo. “I was never really a Tom Petty fan growing up. I was into more aggressive music like punk rock. It was just too melodic for me. Then “Full Moon Fever” came out. I bought it after hearing the third or fourth single. I listened to it, I would say, 10,000 times driving in my car. I had moved to Los Angeles from New York, and I would listen to that album over and over again”.

Rick Rubin is on to something. While I’ve followed the career of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers from their very first album and the wonderful “American Girl,” and have seen them in concert by themselves and with Bob Dylan and have almost all their albums, I don’t know that I’ve played any Petty and the Heartbreakers albums as much as I did “Full Moon Fever.” Just like Rick Rubin.

Does that mean it’s better? That’s an interesting question. If you read one book more than another, does that mean it’s a better book? Is “Full Moon Fever” better than any Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers album? Well, I don’t know that I’d say that, necessarily, but I probably did listen to it more.

Why the difference? What did Petty get right about this album? It might be, after a long career listening and debating and discussing what songs are going to go on the album and remember that Petty actually fractured the bejesus out of his left hand after one heated band session, for this record, maybe he got to do what the hell he wanted. Period. That may have had absolutely nothing to do with it, too.

It could be that he had a fabulous collection of songs in-between Heartbreakers’ albums and they sequenced the record perfectly — part of what makes it so listenable — and had a bunch of hit singles and it hit the record stores at just the right time, April of 1989.

We may not be able to explain it but we sure do enjoy listening to it. And to the one song that Petty explained seemed to bring him to the world.

As he told Paul Zollo in “Conversations With Tom Petty” (highly recommended!) it was the first song he wrote with former ELO mastermind Jeff Lynne.

“It was, I think, the first thing we wrote together, When we really got nose to nose and wrote a song. Jeff came over, and I had a little electric keyboard that Bugs had bought. I really gave him hell about buying it. I said, “Why would you waste money on this? I would never play something like this.”

He said, “Well, look, take it into the house. If you write one song on it, it will pay for itself.” And I started playing on it, and I hit this riff. This little chord pattern that we would know as “Free Fallin’” …and so I was just trying to make Jeff smile, as I was ad-libbing these words. You know, “She’s a good girl/loves her mama/loves Jesus and America, too” And Jeff smiled. I kept going. And I got right up to the chorus bit, and I didn’t know what to sing and he said, (in a British accent) “Free Fallin’”

“And it’s turned out to be probably the most famous song I ever wrote. And there’s not a day that goes by that somebody doesn’t hum “Free Fallin’” to me or I don’t hear it somewhere. It’s become synonymous with me, I guess. But it was really only thirty minutes of my life.”

Tom Petty’s music, the best of it, sounds exactly like it came directly out of his life, a guy walking around his living room, guitar on his shoulder, strumming chord after chord, finding new ways, clever patterns, varied chord sequences that would make a good record. If you go back through all of Petty’s music — and happily for us, there’s a lot of it — he had a marvelous ability to find creative, imaginative ways of presenting songs that instantly sound familiar, recognizable yet somehow fresh. Like nobody has done it quite this way — and why not? You almost always got the sense he was having fun, making this music. And he wanted you to have fun, too.

“Free Fallin’” uses simple chords yet nobody else thought to present them in precisely that imaginative, distinctive Petty way. Same for “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” or “The Waiting” or “Even The Losers” or any number of Petty songs, tunes you could play on your guitar with even marginal guitar skills (That’s me) Songs that somehow remain distinctly his.

“Full Moon Fever” has a bunch of ‘em — “Free Fallin’” or “The Apartment Song” or “I Won’t Back Down” or “A Heart With A Mind Of Her Own” (great cut!) or “Face In The Crowd” — songs that flow one right into the other. I’d never read Tom talking about album sequencing and that would be an interesting conversation because nobody ever did it better than this.

One of the great things about Sirius FM is Channel 31, the Tom Petty Channel is right next to Channel 32’s U2 music. So if you’re not digging what is on U2 — they mix in lots of U2’s favorite bands along with U2 music, which sometimes gets annoying (though I approve it in principle), a mere switch of the dial gives you Tom Petty and almost always something listenable. His “Buried Treasure” show is a hoot.

I remember Robert Christgau writing after Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant had died in a plane crash, that he had a lot more good music in him. I thought the very same thing a while back when we lost Tom Petty.