Tom Petty Videos Were Creepy

I just found out that Tom Petty had a music video for the song Make It Better from the album Southern Accents, which surprised me, since I thought the only hit from that album was Don't Come Around Here No More. The other thing that surprised me was that the music video for Make It Better is that it's almost as shit your pants scary with a side of tripping balls as Don't Come Around Here No More's video. Thankfully in this one, The Heartbreakers don't turn a woman into a cake and eat her. They just climb into a woman's brain and play a song. Then the woman attacks the tiny ear booger Tom Petty with a Q-Tip.

I've been trying to understand why people consider Southern Accents to be one of his weakest albums. I really like it. It's one of my favorites to be honest. But I think I found a reason: those god damn music videos probably gave a bunch of people nightmares.

I'm sort of glad that Rebels didn't have a video now. That's one of my favorite Petty songs ever, but the live performance works just fine. The other option probably would've been a bunch of giant Land of Confusion puppets wearing trucker hats and overalls driving in a truck with Tom Petty in the back in a silly hat with stupid sunglasses.

Maybe there can be a sequel video for Mary's New Car where they have a female puppet like that driving around inside an acid trip hellscape. Or for Spike, they can have a half dog, half man in a spiked collar chasing Tom Petty around an apartment building like it's Scooby Doo or something. For The Best of Everything, they can have Mike Campbell dressed up as Satan showing up and taking a shit inside of a human brain, and at the end, they can play American Girl backwards while Satan slow dances with Tom Petty in the Mad Hatter outfit..

But it still wouldn't be as terrifying as the video for Mary Jane's Last Dance, because that video had strongly implied necrophilia. Or Yer So Bad, because that had a guy hanging out with a blow up doll and pregnant men. That's not as terrifying as necrophilia, but it's somehow almost as creepy.

Song Showcase - Walk Away by Del Shannon

To say Del Shannon was underrated is like saying The Beatles had a few good songs. It doesn't even begin to cover it. Shannon had one of the greatest voices in popular music, right up there with Freddie Mercury and Roy Orbison. But he had a bigger range than either of them. Although he was strongest in a falsetto, he could go quite a bit deeper as well, and fairly effectively, which is rare for a singer.

It's also worth noting that Shannon was apparently a big deal in Liverpool during the early days of the Merseybeat movement that gave us The Beatles, who he was a fairly big influence on. He was also the first American to cover a Beatles song - From Me to You, making it the first time a Lennon/McCartney song charted in the US, although it only went to #77.

And yet, to most people, he's just the guy that sang Little Runaway. His career went in the toilet during the mid sixties, and it never really recovered. His recordings after that were fairly few and far between, but they were generally of a very high quality. He tagged for replacing Roy Orbison in the Travelling Willburies before he committed suicide in 1990. His posthumous album, Rock On, had all the elements of Orbison's Mystery Girl, which introduced him to a new generation. It was produced by Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty's Heartbreakers were more or less his backing band on the album, and it had some of the strongest material of his career, and then of course, there's the fact that he died around the time of it's release. And yet, it went nowhere.

Anyway, here's one of the better songs off of that album, Walk Away, which was also one of the album's hits. It went to #99 in Australia and nowhere else. It's like the last depressing footnote of the sad life and career of a great, underappreciated talent.