#420: Tom Petty, "Don't Come Around Here No More" (1985)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0JvF9vpqx8

I call my list "favorite songs", but technically it's "favorite *recordings* of songs", and those can be quite different. To make the case for Tom Petty as one of our great mainstream rock songwriters, I have a decent array of options. Few hit songs have ever sketched a character as efficiently and wittily as "She's a good girl: loves her mama, loves Jesus and America too. She's a good girl, crazy about Elvis; loves horses, and her boyfriend too". "Into the Great Wide Open" needs just two verses of AAABCCCD rhyme to tell an entire VH-1 Behind the Music biography ("His leather jacket had chains that would jingle/ They both met movie stars, partied and mingled/ Their A+R man said 'I don't hear a single'/ Their future was wide open"). "She was an American girl/ raised on promises" summarizes a person and a country in eight words.

"Here Comes My Girl" reads like a completely artless working class stream-of-consciousness, but makes itself convincingly romantic; "It's Good to be King" dreams of grandeur with a sheepishly off-hand "It's good to be king and have your own world/ It helps to make friends, it's good to meet girls", and the tossed-off cynicism of "A sweet little queen, who can't run away". All of these songs have pretty guitars, resonant chords, solid rhythms, and I quite like all of them.

So as my favorite Tom Petty song, I'm picking one built on lazily-sung rhymes that appear to have been written in five seconds. Did he actually select "I don't feel you anymore/ You darken my door/ Whatever you're looking for/ Hey! Don't come around here no more" over the available options (e.g. "You smell bad and you snore/ My friends say you're a bore/ You misquote Tipper Gore/ Hey! Stop whacking me with that oar")? Was there a whittling-down process that led to "I've given up/ on waiting any longer/ I've given up/ on our love getting stronger" over "I've given up/ I can't stand you one more hour/ Before you leave/ Can you order me a sweet'n'sour"? Did he rhyme "emotions" with "over" because it scanned better than, say, "anguish" and "finished", or "upset" and "kaput"? I do not think so. I do not get a feeling of conviction when he sings this song.

I don't need to, because the music is 1980s production (by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics) at its most beautiful and inventive. The drum machine's echoes are spiraling and resonant; the sitar is a catchy yet dreamy touch; the vocal harmonies and counter-melodies are varied, each introduced and dispelled for maximum impact; the synthesizer is shiny and used only when it's time to call attention to its own new melodies. Later, as Petty's pleas grow more repetitive, the synthetic sounds are a little wearier; then, a guitar solo and what I believe are real drums carry everything off in a final surge of energy. The music tells the story Petty fails to.

Also, the music video is one of the all-time greats, perfectly understanding Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for both the whimsy and the deeply unsettling undertones, and also calling attention to well-placed musical details. If it wasn't so compelling to watch, maybe those details wouldn't have fixed themselves as deeply in my being. Bu it is, and they did, and in my mind the Caterpillar will be Dave Stewart forever.