http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSpAWVa4Jak

From Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary concert. I love the song and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers just completely rock out on one of my two favorite renditions of it ever. My other is Bob Dylan’s own from April 16, 1996. That one ends with some unbelievable merging of harmonica with jamming guitars. But anyway, there’s likely not a video for that one so this will have to do

This video is amazing. I’ve long loved the performance of this classic George Harrison song. It’s a symptom of my Pettycentric view of music that this is the version I actually am most familiar with. Anyway, I’d never seen the video and although I knew Prince was a part of the recording, I never quite figured out where he was in the song. Little did I know it was he who was shredding the guitar and who could have guessed he was doing so with such virtuoso flair!

Click to be blown away….

I have a weakness for women who know how to sing with some personality, even if they’re singing really poppy stuff. I don’t know if there is a word for the way she sings the words “heart” and “fall” in this song but it makes my heart flutter it’s so beautiful and cool.

In reply to my review of Peter Bogdanovich’s film about Tom Petty Running Down a Dream , “Lizzie B” over at the Tom Petty message board points out an oversight in my review. She astutely observes:

Something you didn’t touch on that really stood out to me in the film is Tom Petty’s shrewd sense of what it took to become the long-running established band they are today. It only makes sense that anyone in Tom’s position has to have a special ability for spotting great musicians. But then to acquire them by any means necessary was almost shocking to me. This was especially true in the story of how they got Howie in the band. The way Tom laughed it off was a little eerie.

I loved the way Bogdonvich highlighted the crazed drive Tom had from the very earliest days of his musical career. That angry, perfectionistic drive explains so many of the choices in his life. Tom is portrayed as strong, opinionated, almost manipulative. But he stops short of making him look like a despot. Just short, in my opinion.

I don’t think Bogdonovich could have made him look any more human.

I agree completely. Recently in one of my lectures I was referring to the oppressively controlling streak that great artists have and I cited some aspects of Tom’s attitudes there. Even to this day, as far as I understand, the band has no input in what goes in the setlist. Tom is an extremely controlling guy.

I think there’s a sort of justification to it in that, as long as he doesn’t stifle the rest of the band, what his method does is to establish firmly a clarity of artistic vision. The goal with Tom’s kind of approach is to get the most out of his band for making his music. These world class musicians become themselves the instruments for making [B]his[/B] music. Individually, Benmont is a talented songwriter and a virtuoso on the piano and Mike is as good a jam guitarist as any one could hope for. But none of that gets showcased on TPATH albums because these extremely talented musicians are willing to subordinate their musical goals to Tom’s and to channel them to serve his music. They go off and do other projects to stretch their wings but in Tom’s band, they are restrained.

In concerts, Tom lets the jamming take place and after 26 years in the band, Mike finally got some serious jamming tracks on the Last DJ album, and finally, after decades of loyal support, Benmont finally got to write and sing a song on the new Mudcrutch album. But for the most part, it’s Tom’s band and Mike and Benmont let themselves fall in line because they trust him as a worthy leader.

Interestingly this image of the band with a strong leader who can get the most out of talented band members who flourish through their subordination serves as a powerful illustration of how Nietzsche views the healthy soul to function. For Nietzsche we do not have unified selves but essentially are the sum of a multiplicity of competing drives. He says that the “great man” is “great owing to the free play and scope of his desires and to the yet greater power that knows how to press these magnificent monsters into service.” He writes,

In contrast with the animals, man has cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses within himself, thanks to this synthesis he is master of the earth.—Moralities are the expression of locally limited orders of rank in his multifarious world of drives, so man should not perish through their contradictions. Thus a drive as master, its opposite weakened, refined, as the impulse that provides the stimulus for the activity of the chief drive. The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant “man” shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g., in Shakespeare), but are controlled. (WP 966)

The ideal here is an ever stronger dominating will over the self that makes possible more desires and each more intense as the stronger the dominating will that can harness more variegated and intense passions, the more use can be made of their being present. Another element of this is that the tension between the opposites within great men, the conflict between their great virtues and their “opposites” is actually the generative tension that develops the great man as such. He is a “bow with the great tension.” (WP 967) Nietzsche characterizes moralities as essentially the hierarchy forming disciplines that create internal cohesion by which a dominant drive (transformed into a dominant virtue) controls and channels the other energies within. Moralities are localized in that they represent the particular ordering of powers a specific individual (or group, through an analogous macro-level hierarchy forming process) finds most conducive to its needs.

So, a morality is like Tom’s principles and rules for his band. The songs remain short (like Mike says in the documentary, “don’t bore us, get to the chorus”), the guitar solos make their point quickly and end, etc. Because Tom is a strong leader, his band can flourish and produce their best work without it spinning off into becoming a mess.

This is how Nietzsche sees the value of a morality. He is famously suspicious of morality for its possibility for complete stifling of desires (and at worst, even its desire to extirpate desires completely.) Nietzsche’s ideal is a strong will that through its strength can orchestrate great music out of competing strengths of talent and keeping their competition from creating mere cacophony.

To further elaborate for those for whom the above has been too densely written:
The point is that a stronger dominant will within the self makes it possible that one can have stronger and more intense desires without being ruined by them. So, a weak willed person cannot handle strong desires because they would overwhelm him or her. But if you have a strong will, you can experience intensity of desire because you can control it. You can experience contrary emotions and passions and perspectives without letting them dominate you and make you lose control of yourself.

Nietzsche is arguing that the ability to see things from multiple perspectives that even conflict with each other, to feel things with intense passions and desires that conflict with each other—-you need a strong dominating drive that doesn’t let all this conflict within you derail you or pull you apart at the seams. But if you can feel and think from with such tension and conflict within yourself, without letting it destroy you but by harnessing all that tension and conflict into a more intense and deeper way of seeing the world and feeling it—-then you can both experience life and live it more powerfully.

The idea about moralities being “localized” is that in individuals it can be different dominating drives that give cohesion to someone, based on his or her needs. Tom is a strong willed nature who is dominated by different drives that keep himself and his band together than, say, Nietzsche’s example of Shakespeare. Nietzsche doesn’t recommend an ethics that is universal for everyone. Rather he encourages those strong enough to develop their own rule by which they can master themselves in this way that embraces and maximizes the utility of conflicts within.

And on a “macro-level” moral communities represent the domination of a particular principle or two over the people in that community. This is how moralities dominate communities. All the resources of the community are marshalled in service of these overriding values. So, in an individual soul, the dominant will marshalls all the resources of competing passions, emotions, and perspectives to generate a more profound depth of personality. In a band, this becomes the strong leader allowing increased creativity of his band without that spinning off into incoherent chaos. In a culture, this becomes a dominant virtue being the one that overrides all the others and marshalls all their value in its service.

All of this represents the streak of Nietzsche that sees value in the power of moral discipline to harness conflicting energies to put them to unified purpose. Of course, the danger of these themes is that if they are not counterbalanced with Nietzschean suspicion of values stagnation and the stifling of individual expression—they risk being read as justifications of authoritarianism.

Overall, I think the important way to read these remarks about a soul or a community dominated by a strong will is Nietzsche’s highlighting the valuable role of disciplines in a way that needs always to be balanced by his suspicion of the drive to treat our disciplines as absolute, inflexible, and a justification for completely stifling others.

Michel Gondry’s masterpiece The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, following Charlie Kaufman’s masterpiece script, is one of the most top to bottom brilliant achievements in film I have ever seen.

Taken as a science fiction film, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ranks as a model for the genre. The film takes a fascinating concept—the ability to erase one’s painful memories—and rather than using it only as a pretext for exploring its other thematic concerns, the film explores the fascinating what if incredibly thoroughly, exploring the technological ins and outs of the procedure and, much more importantly, exploring in depth the direct psychological implications for those who would undergo the procedure. We see the effects of such a procedure both through the perspectives of one character as the procedure is unfolding and another character who is dealing with the effects several days after having received the procedure. The film also roots itself in, incorporates, and brings to life a wide range of scientific insights into dream psychology, keeping a wildly surreal and fantastic dream storyline feeling simultaneously realistic.

The film also explores a huge host of insights into memory and perspective. As we learn about Joel’s life through his dreams and watch as he actively shapes his memories and watch them change and emphasize various things right before our eyes. We hear the Clementine of his dream world inauspiciously say things that echo what we know to be his own thoughts about her or those of other characters rather than exactly her own words or perspectives—-the subtlest of reminders that the Clementine we’re seeing in his dream is not actually the real Clementine. There is a fascinating interplay of memory and dream creation as the Clementine we experience in the dream world is a mixture of idealization, villainization, authentic memory and new dream actor.

Looked at in terms of narrative structure, the film is a masterpiece of coherent, non-linear chronology. Like a great Tarantino film, we see various sequences not in the order off their occurence but rather in the order best for their experiential and narrative value. The film jumps back and forth in time and then, tells a relationship in reverse, capturing the feelings and frustrations of an end of a relationship in which everything looks just terrible and there’s little conscious awareness of how things fell apart as only the end is fresh in the mind.

The journey backwards through Joel and Clem’s relationship in his mind gives a great journey through a relationship with the romantic beginnings being the climax of a long relationship instead of simply the ignorant infatuated starting point that is lost as time goes on. By the time we reach the beginning of their relationship in his dream, we see characters who have traversed a whole relationship of ups and downs and who have traversed the trip back through it in the dream world and have all this connection. And we see them reenacting in dream form their initial meeting in such a way that retains its freshness and romance and wonder of two people meeting for the first time while commenting on what’s ahead. It’s an amazing combination of perspectives loaded into one scene before yet another time jump forward in time outside of the dream world.

(Don’t watch if you’ve not seen the film)

What makes the narrative structure so staggering and amazing is that it manages to play tricks on you, not letting you know exactly what’s going on for a solid half an hour into the film—-not even making clear when you have entered the dream world until Joel himself becomes aware of it despite confusing and bizarre scene transitions that precede the awareness—-but then sorts itself out and becomes completely intelligible. The film, without resorting to talky explanations, manages to utterly confuse and disorient for experiential effect and then to explain itself in such a way that having had the disorienting experience you can follow things out the rest of the way and not stay lost for the sake of the writer’s ego. The structure is disorienting when that’s best for the experience and then clear and masterfully ordered and balanced so that the surreality does not lose the audience or dwarf the emotional narrative that is of the primary importance.

And let’s not forget the narrative structure of the story running outside of Joel’s head that keeps returning the film to reality and giving a parallel commentary on the same themes running in the dream world. It also gives information insightful for interpreting the meanings and inspirations of Joel’s dreams. Even the subplot, involving the wonderfully underrated performances of Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, and Mark Ruffalo, wonderfully leads to a narratively perfect and poignant heartbreaking twist. Dunst is perfect as the young woman with a crush on her boss, while screwing around with Ruffalo. Wilkinson perfectly plays an ostensibly caring and level headed doctor with questionable ethics and disappointingly passive justification for them. Elijah Wood also gives one of his best performances as a clueless, unscrupulous loser exploiting illicitly gained information to get a woman way out of his league. It’s hysterical to listen to his pathetic cliches as he refers to his brand new “girlfriend” as “the old lady” and tells her on her answering machine that he “loves her so much.” He’s written as a scathingly comic and pathetic satirical character.

He’s one of many great comedic elements not to be lost in the film, including a great comic variation on the classic existentialist anxiety of seeing God as an “absentee landlord” as Joel cries out to the heavens in his dream, “Is there anybody out there? Can anybody hear me?!” and we cut to those responsible for him dancing stoned in their underwear on his bed to goofy music. It’s God as absentee partiers. While not an overall comedy, the script is sprinkled with great one liners, great irony, black comedy, sight gags, romantic silliness, and scenes that are simultaneously eerie and funny.

Of course, though, as good as these performances and characters are, it’s not their movie—-Kate Winslet was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Clementine Kruczynski with her mixture of impetuous free-spiritedness, anxious vulnerability, hot temper, alcoholism, and earnest openness. She is written and performed to be so authentically, realistically charming and so authentically, realistically flawed that the romance around which this high concept science fiction film actually revolves works. Winslet is amazing, exuding magnetism, energy, geeky hipsterness, and yearning insecurity.

Jim Carrey as Joel Barish completely loses himself in the role. I’m a huge Jim Carrey fan and I don’t even think of him when I think of this, my favorite movie. I just think of Joel Barish, a man subdued, introspectively thoughtful, and pessimistic, desperately fighting his dreams to keep his memories. His dramatic prowess betters even that which he showed in his superb performances in The Truman Show and Man on the Moon.

As a romance the film is one of my favorites. Carrey and Winslet have a special chemistry as a genuine pair of opposites attracting. Normally films with opposites attracting play off of less particularly and skillfully drawn characters. This film is like a romance within a character study within a sci fi movie. The romance is incredibly real. The dialogue doesn’t sound written by some geniusly witty playwright—-the flirting is not witty and snappy but awkward and earnest, the acrimonious arguments are raw, the lovers’ affirmations of each other are sweet in their banal sincerity. They capture perfectly the powerful chemistry that leads to explosions rather than peace. They’re people who can’t let go of each other even as much as they drive each other crazy to be together. Not since Sam and Diane have I seen authentic portrayal of lovers who are together out of a visceral need for each other, completely in defiance of their thorough personality clash.

The romance is explored then from an innovative number of angles—-we see a sequence of their meeting and flirting awkwardly SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
though, we do not know at the time that this is not really their first meeting END OF SPOILER END OF SPOILER END OF SPOILER
, we see the major events of their relationship in reverse, and we see them take the journey together of fighting the erasure process, following them as a team that we root for, establishing them as people who get along, work together, care about the relationship, and, so, a couple we want to see “make it.”

HEAVY SPOILER SECTION

HEAVY SPOILER SECTION

In the end, the film gives a completely unique paradox, [spoiler]people who, in their immediate experience feel like they have just met and yet, subconsciously feel completely bound to one another, and they are given tapes in which, in their own words they hear exactly how they miserably they will feel towards each other. Two characters, in the throes of both infatuation and the bonds that take years to create, are given information about how much they would hate each other and need to choose whether or not to go forward or to get out and not risk ruining everything again. This creates a fascinating and unique variation on the whole romance genre. It infuses knowledge from the end of a relationship into the euphoria of the beginning and asks whether the characters will respond prudently or romantically. It also serves as a beautiful metaphor of the romantic challenge of monogamy with the need to make decisions ever anew to start it all over with ever increased knowledge of what’s ahead.

In the end, the question is whether or not Joel and Clementine will make it, whether they can learn from mistakes having erased them. They embody a paradox of human nature in which moving on from mistakes means being able to forget them and not be trapped in the past (Nietzsche’s real meaning in the quote misused in the movie) while at the same time, we need our memories as warnings to keep us from rehearsing the same mistakes all over again. Can Clementine and Joel benefit from the immediate forgetfulness of their mistakes that repairs their feelings towards one another? Or will forgetting their mistakes only doom them to repeat them again? The metaphor for, and commentary on, our own struggles to both put the past behind us with optimism and to learn how not to repeat it, is simply perfect. And all is left ambiguous, with no easy answers on silver platters, just a great conversation starter.

END OF HEAVY SPOILER SECTION

END OF HEAVY SPOILER SECTION

The romance is also beautifully evolved in numerous nonverbal ways as these characters connect not through words but through play and through sharing intimate memories. In the dream, their journey to Joel’s childhood is one of the most romantic sequences I’ve ever seen. One sequence oscillates between ugliness and comedy, and romantic poignancy as we see Clementine and Joel as little kids together sharing an ugly, traumatizing moment from his childhood. The vision of a romantic couple who met as adults sharing the intimacy of being able to be kids together, to be able to know each other in ages that they didn’t get to have together in actuality, is as romantic a picture as I’ve ever seen. The way she supports him in that scene, the way the music tracks the scene, the way she cheers him up through playfulness and the scene transitions back to their adult playfulness—-one of the ways they actually played out their child selves with each other as adults—-it’s all so brilliant and heartbreakingly beautiful. And the fun, playful moments of their playing as adults that end with Clementine vanishing—-sucking you into the romance of their enjoyment and then pulling it away hauntingly and suddenly, a reminder of the ominous threat to their relationship.

And on the subject of the scene transitions—-this film is the best edited film I’ve ever seen. The transitions through the dream world are so fluid. Constantly scenes transition with several props or people staying the same and the settings transforming around them, objects vanish from rooms, a car falls out of the sky, hallways connect radically different rooms, the background objects of the world blur and vanish as memory loses them. Changes in lighting, changes in foci, changes in the way the sound connects to the image, film reels played backwards, film reels sped up—-the number of inventive “in-camera” tricks used to create a dream world out of real world elements instead of animation are amazing and endlessly exciting. It is believable but surreal as a result. The lo-fi special effects are simply as good as they get. The dream world is made to feel like the real world, as it feels when you’re dreaming, while exploring all the incoherency and surreality of what dreams are like. Unlike Gondry’s Science of Sleep that for portions makes the dream world patently false with claymation, here he makes it both as real and surreal as it really is.

Like a dream, the film follows an emotional thread around Joel’s mind, switching between times and places and events with a perfect emulation of the dream world’s logic. The visual flourishes are too many to enumerate or list with any justice but they are spectacular. This is the only film outside of a Star Wars or Spider-Man film that I went to the theater six times to see and each time I got more out of it and found new things to marvel at visually. It was simply that mesmerizing. It captures the feel of so many things—-that feeling as a kid of riding in the back seat of a car at night, tired from a long day at a family gathering and watching the street lights and store lights fly by with the memories of the day and the week, etc. zooming by—even that life experience is captured.

And the climax of his dream, a house crumbling around him, the seashore running up under his feet, the wind howling—-the fantastic of a dream, the thematic and emotional resonance of depicting what he’s feeling (the collapse of a relationship, the overwhelming of the tide of circumstance) in symbolic form, the dialogue expressing regret and longing, despair and nostalgia. It’s the end of the relationship through a revisit of the first meeting.

And the musical scoring by Jon Brion is brilliantly resonant. The emotions are underscored perfectly, the zaniness is matched with zany music that’s not obnoxious but perfectly pitched to the scenes. The main themes are haunting and beautiful. Even the erasures of memories are signaled through great musical cues. The movie is unimaginable without its thoroughly unique and perfectly attuned musical signatures. And it’s all not much more than maybe 30 minutes of musical writing, a lot of which repeats but it feels just right rather than like a cop out. The repetition of musical cues signals parallel times, emotions, themes being explored. It serves as a thematic aid more than just an underscore for scenes.

And finally the cinematography is wonderful. Grainy and dark (at Gondry’s insistence over that of the cinematographer herself) when it needs to be, the bright room with Clementine going crazy at the end, there’s just so much thought into the look of so many scenes.

And the credits don’t happen until 17 minutes into the film and Beck’s melancholy cover for the closing credits ends the film with a perfect musical finish, seamlessly fitting with the musical and narrative themes of the entire film. On a personal note, as a native Long Islander, I love the comfortable familiarity of the unmistakable interiors of the Long Island Railroad train cars and seeing them immortalized in an all-time masterpiece like this.

Bah, I can write all these paragraphs and still leave so much out. Oh well, that should suffice to at least give an idea as to why this is my favorite movie of all time. Just watch the this video of the film to a Bob Dylan song I love:

Mike Monelscachi is Tom Petty’s biggest teenaged fan.  Over on Tom’s messageboard (and in his high school he says) he’s known affectionately as “Petty Kid” (which, incidentally, I think would make an awesome band name for him).  He’s cutting a record and here are three of his songs.  I’m seriously impressed after all this time talking about his band to find out that he’s actually pretty talented!

http://www.myspace.com/mikemonomusic

[written October 24, 2007]

One of the reasons that great art means so much to us is because we find ourselves reflected and expressed in it, even when it is other people’s creations. For a long while now, I have figured out the formula to really understanding my mind and my heart for anyone interested. If you can understand Friedrich Nietzsche, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the New York Mets, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, you’ll have as good a window into my soul as any I myself could create. I have already resolved that if I ever find a woman whose heart beats to these things the way mine does, I’d might as well just go ahead and propose right off.

And so, it was a big, huge deal for me to see the most important and comprehensive documentary of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ unbelievable career. So, obviously, what follows will be the review from a total fan. Dismiss it on that basis if you will, but I honestly think you’ll be missing out on an important recommendation for film and music lovers alike.

Review upcoming in a series of short posts.

The Music, Not “Behind” It
The first thing worth praising about this amazing documentary is that it’s about the men and the music. It’s not about lurid details, it’s not a manipulation of material to tell an artificial story of rise to glory, burn out, redemption, and new beginnings. Tom’s story is filled with highs and lows that could be generically forced into this boilerplate, formulaic mythos in terms of which VH1 manages to characterize every freaking rock band. But refreshingly, Bogdanovich doesn’t reduce these great artists’ story into a childish and convenient morality tale. These are real lives. There are ups and downs, periods of euphoria and those of despair, friends made and friends lost, and that’s it. No overplaying sentiment or drawing morals needed.

While I liked Walk The Line, for example, very much, I didn’t like the way it told such an incomplete story of such a great artist’s life. I know that he liked to see his life as a Christian redemption story like was made in the film. But it did a disservice to the richness of a great man’s life to skip those 30 years after he married June and overcame his addictions. I found it degrading in a way to say the only thing worth really focusing on was his addicted period. Many, many people get addicted. The tiniest handful get to be Johnny Cash. Show some more of what it was to be Johnny Cash.

And along these lines, this documentary of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers covers the private addictions of the band, even when they lead to death, and the infamous conflicts that led Stan Lynch to leave the band, without sensationalizing anything. As Benmont Tench, the amazing keys man of The Heartbreakers mentions in the documentary (and I paraphrase), it used to be that you were interested in learning an artist’s take on the world, now it’s who they’re sleeping with.

This film is about the artists’ takes on the world and about the most important thing about them, the incredible music they have ceaselessly produced for 30 years of rarely paralleled commitment to musical integrity and consistent production.

A Whole Life and Career on Film

It’s been reported that Bogdanovich went through over 300 hours of footage in putting together this film, and that was after countless more hours of available footage were whittled down for him by archivists who categorized the material.

I have numerous dvds and videos of live Tom Petty concerts, documentaries, collections of Tom’s videos and those of the Travelling Wilburys. I pretty much have everything released and many things that only appeared on TV. And I’ve seen my fair share of what’s on youtube, etc. And I have to say that there is a remarkable representation of the available footage. A truly judicious and admirable sampling of what’s there. A couple really sweet moments were when they found little moments that were favorites of mine and included them. It’s not exhaustive of course by any means at all. There are of course many omissions. But overall, this is an incredible 4 hour distillation of what one finds through amassing a larger collection.

There’s Ron Blair’s prescient 1993 joke about being scheduled to rejoin the band in 2001 long before Howie Epstein’s tragic death in 2002 led to his actual return. There’s wonderful footage of The Travelling Wilburys writing rehearsing, recording. Any fan of the Beatles, Roy Orbison, or Bob Dylan just can’t miss this stuff. (At least youtube it people!!) There’s Stan’s last performance with the band in a living room, playing Mary Jane’s Last Dance, the last song he recorded before leaving the band for good. And, as they say “much much more.”

But, beyond just reproducing previously released footage from prior documentaries and live concerts, Bogdanovich was able to incorporate an incredible amount of home video footage and stills of numerous moments along their way to the top, including plenty of material Tom and the band reportedly didn’t really know about before this project. It’s as thorough a capturing of every phase of an artist’s entire life on film as you could manage.

Scoring a Story in Songs

It’s greatly satisfying how close to completely Bogdanovich represents the scope and power of Petty’s music without ever deviating from the primary task of telling the story of his life. Few songs recur as Bogdanovich shows 1:30 minute clips of most songs almost always linking closely the music and live performances of a given time to the images of that time. And often, there are extremely happy coordinations between song lyric and the storyline. So the pauses to watch Tom and the gang perform at a given period of life don’t interrupt the storyline so much as often comment on it artistically, through lyrics. There are just beautiful and ingenious combinations of emotions and musical expressions of them that all follow a great chronological progression.

And while the full breadth and depth of Tom’s incredible catalogue is inexhaustible in under 4 hours, so many songs that really deserved representation got it.

The only sad snub (though an expected one) was any incorporation of the wonderful music Tom put on the soundtrack of She’s the One. I love that album and was sad to see it omitted entirely. Long After Dark got an odd sort of snubbing too. As has been chronicled before, Jimmy Iovine’s insistence that Tom not include the wonderful songs “Keeping Me Alive” and “Trailer” on the album was the symbolic creative difference that represents the rift between Tom and Jimmy that had grown by the time they finished that record, which had been their third together. Tom bashes the album often as one where he had gotten stagnant. I really love the album but understand his thought process. Anyway, ironically, the song here to represent the album is the song omitted from the album, “Keeping Me Alive” and then an explanation from both Tom and Jimmy about how such a great song didn’t make the cut. As wonderful as “Keeping Me Alive” was and as big a treat as it was to see the band perform it, the songs “Deliver Me,” “Straight Into Darkness,” “Change of Heart,” and “Magnolia” are too special to me to see them all snubbed.

Echo gets limited exposure too but they do a wonderful job of demonstrating Howie’s contribution to the band with that album and Benmont has a wonderful moment reflecting on Howie and what he meant to the band and his contribution even during his most heroin ruined time with the band. Bogdanovich here and elsewhere does a marvelous job of highlighting a piece of the music to say something about what makes it work in a way that makes it completely obvious to the listening viewer.

There are also subtle touches like the way that after the opening performance from 2006, you never see Scott Thurston until he is introduced in the story. Watching, I perked up and thought, “Hey, there’s Scott” unassumingly in just a third of the screen when the camera pulls back. And then, sure enough, he’s introduced. It’s a suble but welcome touch the way Bogdanovich keeps the story so basically chronological, capturing the sense of how things unfold through time rather than lumping the images and music of a life together in a deceptive whole.

A Story About Integrity

I always wanted the documentary to be named I Won’t Back Down but can respect the choice to frame it as Runnin’ Down A Dream, a less combative and more upbeat, classic American framing for a band that Bogdanovich has claimed epitomizes the American Dream.

Nonetheless, Tom’s integrity is as defining a feature as anything. Through reading and seeing tons of stuff about Tom’s various legal battles with corrupt music companies, the story had never been articulated so clearly in its details as here. Tom isn’t heroized out of proportion but the facts speak for themselves. He fought for the rights to his own music against unjust record contracts and then he fought for fair prices for his fans when he refused to let them raise the price of records by starting with his own. Later on we see an incredible piece of candid footage in which Tom stands up for his musical influence and long time friend The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn by insisting that the execs and producers trying to get him to record commercialistic crap go to hell. He insists that McGuinn is a great artist deserving better and goes to the mat when McGuinn himself was willing not to fight for his own integrity.

These sorts of moments are consistent throughout Tom’s entire career. The next evidence of selling out I see from the man will be the first.

The Interview Subjects

They could have interviewed more people, that’s for sure. But I doubt it would have made the documentary much better. What’s important is that they have plenty of interview footage with the people who matter most, the band members themselves who tell the story themselves. It was an elegant and appreciated choice to forego narration. In addition to the band though there are some wonderful commentators on the bands history including the five most important producers of their career, Denny Cordell, Jimmy Iovine, Dave Stewart, Jeff Lynne, and Rick Rubin. You get a wonderful sense from the narrative of the significance that each producer brought to Tom’s career. Each producer represents extremely specific developments in his music and his career and it’s nice to see their views sufficiently represented.

And a special touch for me was to see Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder, replete with great footage of their respective famous performances with the band. In 1994, no non-Christian bands besides Metallica and “Weird Al” meant any more to me than Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam. So it was really sweet to me to hear Grohl and Vedder express what Tom means to them.

Also a neat little treat is to see Johnny Depp who famously was in Petty’s Into The Great Wide Open video in 1991. Tim Burton’s my favorite director, his and my favorite living actor is obviously Mr. Depp. It’s nice to also tightly connect that dot over to Tom Petty. It reinforces the sense to me that there is a consistency to my sensibility that even the artists I admire share among themselves. I really dig that. Though of course I can’t take that too far—-Petty loves westerns immensely and I hate them. But Petty encapsulates everything great about westerns and old school country music. That is country music before it became what Petty characterizes its present form as—-bad rock bands with a fiddle.

The biggest surprise though was the wonderful, passionate, insightful commentary from, of all people, an MTV executive. He reappears periodically throughout the documentary and some of his thoughts were just great.

I laughed, I cried

Tom’s trademark droll sense of humor that conistently comprises a good bit of what makes his lyrics so remarkable also comes through in interviews. And Bogdanovich’s droll editing gives the whole film Tom’s sense of humor. Comedy is about timing and so is editing and Bogdanovich edits some good laughs into the proceedings.

You probably won’t cry because Tom and his songs probably don’t mean to you what they mean to me. But three or four times, I really teared up. And not at the moments you’d guess even. Just certain songs and certain moments in their story that struck me as especially special. The presentation of the great song “The Waiting” was just so celebratory that it made me surprisingly emotional, for example. Again, as I said before, this film does so much tribute to the music.

Don’t Do Me Like That

There are a few problems worth noting. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers live are a whole different, equally special thing to what they are on records. The film shows ample live footage but doesn’t really show enough of the musical innovation that they bring to live interpretations of their songs. Also, there’s not an adequate demonstration of how much their live shows incorporate an unbelievable range of covers that express their bottomless knowledge of their forerunners from rock and roll artists to bluegrass artists to country artists to surf rock artists to psychedelics, etc. Even a ten minute montage of this would have sufficed to highlight more explicitly their range. And additionally, their classic live reinterpretation of “Don’t Come Around Here No More” that was a huge highlight of their late ’80s/early ’90s shows deserved some attention.

The film relied in the end (literally, at the end of the film) too heavily on the 2006 Gainesville homecoming concert. That tour is extremely special to me as it was the first tour I saw the band live and the tour that sparked an all-consuming obsession with collecting every live performance, video, studio release, etc. that I could get my hands on. But even as important as it is to me, it’s too much attention on one concert here at the end when some more time could have been spent on some other aspects of their concerts from along the way.

What makes this choice especially unfortunate is that the movie is sold with that full Gainesville concert as another disc in the boxset. So, it’s redundant to include so much of it in the film at the expense of other vital pieces of that 300+ hours worth of material that was available.

Ultimately it’s not a big deal to me as I own more than I could have ever ask by way of live recordings and videos from the band anyway. But it would have been nice for the official record to give a more representative look at what the band offers by way of transformation of their own songs and by way of infectious tribute to their forerunners live.

The Bonus CD!

Okay, finally getting around to checking out the bonus CD. I stress again, I have somewhere over 90 discs of live music. But I don’t have any of this. They did a bang up job of finding neat rare live recordings. Two that are particularly special are a cover an awesomely old school country song “Lost Highway” which they perform in a rehearsal in the film but which I have never heard them do live otherwise and “Honey Bee” from the Saturday Night Live with Dave Grohl playing a mean set of drums.

I love the intros to the versions of “Breakdown” and “Fooled Again” here as they are unique (and again, I’ve heard plenty of versions)

The sound quality on all these live recordings is just spectacular, something one is not quite used to when trading in bootlegs The “Keeping Me Alive” here is especially sweet as previously I’d only heard the studio version on Playback, the collection of greatest hits and rarities, and the one really rough bootleg available of it. I love that bootleg to death but this is a super-sweet, high quality version of it. And I might have never heard so good a live take of “Shadow of a Doubt.” These are really great recordings.

Another neat aspect for the pettyphile and the pettynewbie alike

An article from the Desert Sun reports that Tom Petty bashed his album Echo, one of my favorites of his, with the following comment,

He’s less enamored with 1999’s “Echo,” which opens with the grim “Room at the Top,” “one of the most depressing songs in rock history,” Petty says, grinning. “If anything will make you want to kill yourself …” He trails off, then adds glumly, “I was in a rough place when I did that record.”

Now, in talking with other Tom Petty fans, I have learned that I’m not alone in being puzzled that Tom would describe the song “Room At The Top” as one of the most depressing songs in rock history because it can easily be interpreted as a rousing song of affirmation in the face of adversity that takes stock of what is good at a time that is otherwise bleak. And even if one does not see it that way, Tom flatters himself with his hyperbole in calling his song one of the most depressing songs in rock history. He wishes! I don’t think he has any song that really vies anywhere near that distinction. He is irrepressibly hopeful even in his darkest songs, even against his own intention or awareness. Room At The Top couldn’t be interpreted as a song of affirmation like it is if it was really so depressing.

But more important than Tom’s ability to assess the degree of depressiveness of his song is the question of what difference a different title might make. Before I advance my theory of why Tom sees as so depressing a song that others find so affirmative, you must hear the song or know its lyrics, so either watch the video or read the lyrics below before reading my theory as to what makes the difference between the song being affirmative or bleak.

Room At The Top (by Tom Petty)
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I can see everything tonight
I got a room where everyone
Can have a drink and forget those things
That went wrong in their life

I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
And I ain’t comin’ down, I ain’t comin’ down

I got someone who loves me tonight
I got over a thousand dollars in the bank
And I’m all right
Look deep in the eyes of love
Look deep in the eyes of love
And find out what you were looking for

I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
And I ain’t comin’ down,
no I ain’t comin’ down

I wish I could feel you tonight,
little one You’re so far away
I wanna reach out and touch your heart
Yeah like they do in those things on TV,
I love you Please love me, I’m not so bad
And I love you so

I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
And I ain’t comin’ down,
no I ain’t comin’ down I ain’t comin’ down

Now, Tom introduces the song during his 1999 VH1 Storytellers episode around the time of its release as a song about “Escapism.” He also introduces the song only after a very humorous bit where he, tongue in cheek, marvels at the apparently unanimous popularity of Titanic and explains that since Titanic was so popular he figured he would write a song about it. He then sings a goofy, funny song that ends with the punchline that Celine Dion should have been on the Titanic. And it’s at this point that he introduces the song whose lyrics I just reproduced as “Room At The Top” (pause) “of the Titanic.” The audience laughs and then he claims in a tone that is hard to decipher, that the song was originally called “Room At The Top of the Titanic” but that he decided to shorten the title to “Room At The Top.” It’s hard to tell if he was serious about the original title of the song or whether he was just keeping his jokes about the Titanic running. If he’s not joking, then the title, combined with his description of the song as being about “escapism” makes an enormous difference to the meaning of the song.

If you reread the song with the Titanic title, this is a song not about “polishing the brass on the Titanic” but rather throwing a party on it. Not trying to get things in order on an already sinking ship but a different kind of denial—throwing a party. All the affirmation of the song becomes not the escapism of some one retreating from his troubles to affirm his life via a party with friends, but rather it becomes a song about the escapism of throwing a party on the eve of disaster, wherein all your affirmation is really a vain attempt to spin an irredemiably disastrous situation as one that’s going to be okay after all. And as the mockery of affirmation, this becomes, while still not the most depressing song in rock history, a distinctly cynical one, comparable to the harsh juxtaposition of bitter, disillusioned verse lyrics and rousing patriotic chorus lyrics in Springsteen’s “Born In The USA.”

But the question is: can a song’s title, especially one that is not explicitly mentioned in the song itself (and in this case is not even retained in tact) actually play such a pivotal role in its interpretation? This is an interesting question. In written media and in films, we (or at least I) regularly allow the title, while often not a material aspect of the work, to be an integral hermeneutical guide to understanding the work itself. Yet, with a song, it feels so counterintuitive to allow the title to affect the meaning as we very often hear and learn songs without ever seeing their titles and a great majority of the time the title is simply a key line, usually straight from the chorus. It’s a fascinating question to me what would happen if a musician consciously titled his or her songs in a way that drastically altered the meanings of the songs when heard in ignorance of the title. Maybe to call some completely earnest sounding love song about eternal commitment, “The Lie I Tell My Wife” or some earnest sounding song about the pain of heartbreak, “What I Bet You’d Like To Imagine I’m Feeling Right Now” where such songs give no indication of irony in their lyrics or musical arrangement. I’m far from a music expert but I doubt it’s ever been done in music history, or at least in the history of rock and roll. And maybe in that way Tom came really, really close to making a landmark rock and roll song after all—before he changed its name.