He duetted with Stevie Nicks. He’s pioneered stoner animation videos. He’s run the gamut of styles from pop to country rock to, well, just about everything. And he was a Wilbury. But, how well do we know the guy who wrote Mary Jane’s Last Dance, Refugee, American Girl, and countless other classic rock staples? Well, I don’t know him nearly at all. Hence the latest Listening Post. Let’s dive in.
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) – 1987 (Buy It)
Oh, the title says it all, doesn’t it? Slogging my way through the TP back catalog makes me wish that I had listened to all of these albums 20 years ago so I wouldn’t have to listen to them now and I could just say, “Wow, Tom Petty really made some boring music, didn’t he?” and I could have left it at that and been done with it, moved on to better things, played with my child more, enjoyed a little bit of life.
Instead, I’m mired ears deep in a morass of listless music by a band that really doesn’t seem to care anymore, if they ever did.
Leading off is “Jammin’ Me”, a song so uninterested in itself that it just sort of gives up at the end as if even it knows that there’s no point continuing. Another track, The Damage is Done, continues this aimlessness and makes me wonder just what they were on when they submitted this to the label. And what the label was on when they put it out.
If I hadn’t already listened to two horrible Petty records back to back (Long After Dark & Southern Accents) I might have been slightly more forgiving, but this is three turds in a row and my ears are on the verge of giving out on me.
Reading up on this record while listening I was reminded that, around this time, The Heartbreakers had been touring as Bob Dylan’s backing band. Now, Petty has always flirted with a Dylan-esque sound, but that always informed the music rather than dictated it. The result here, with the recent psychedelic flirtations on Southern Accents and the Dylan and the sounds of the times results, at times, in some weird roots rock-Peter Gabriel hybrid that should be more interesting than it is but just leaves me cold.
The album picks up a little steam in the back half, kind of like the desperation in “All Mixed Up” and I’m always down for some roots rockin like “Self Made Man”, but the album is so ill conceived and boring that nothing, especially not these half-assed attempts, can salvage it.
Grade: D
A Side: Jammin’ Me
BlindSide: All Mixed Up, Self Made Man
DownSide: The Damage is Done, Ain’t Love Strange
