S3E11 Louisiana Rain

Transcript

(* Note - the transcript is as-written before recording. I usually change a few sentences or words here and there on the hoof as I'm speaking.)

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, my fine friends. Welcome the eleventh episode of season three of the Tom Petty Project Podcast! I am your host, Kevin Brown. This is the podcast that digs into the entire Tom Petty catalog song by song, album by album and includes conversations with musicians, fans, and people connected with Tom along the way. 

If my speech is a little off tonight, I manage to bite my tongue quite hard earlier today, so it feels somewhat like a half-dead turbot, flapping about in my mouth! Today we’re wrapping up the track listing for Damn The Torpedoes and will be looking at the last song on side two: Louisiana Rain. I don’t embed the songs in the episode itself due to licensing issues, but if you want to listen to the song before we get started check out the link in the episode notes and then come back to join me for an in-depth dig into the song.

Louisiana Rain was original recorded during the sessions for the pre-cursor to the Heartbreakers first album, when Denny Cordell was still trying to push Tom towards being a solo artist, working with session players. That version, recorded in 1975 and included on the Playback box set features the legendary talents of Al Kooper, Emory Gordy, and Jim Gordon. Tom tells Paul Zollo, in Conversations with Tom Petty that the song was recorded remarkably quickly, especially compared to the other songs from Damn the Torpedoes which almost always took a lot of takes. The song features different lyrics and alternate version on An American Treasure that strips off the long intro. I’ll add a link to the latter in the episode notes, but if you want to listen to the former, you’ll have to go out and pick up the CD boxset! The song was written while Tom was housesitting for Leon Russell while he was on tour. Jimmy Iovine heard the song after he’d pulled everything from Tom’s early catalog. Tom also tells Paul that “I was less than keen on it, because I felt like I had already been down that road, but he did wind up making a great record out of it.” 

The song opens with an extended instrumental intro that doesn’t follow the structure or tone of the song at all. It’s almost a hidden song within a song and is essentially Benmont laying down a very futuristic synth pad chord progression with some additional, heavily processed keyboard noodling. It has a Rick-Wakeman-esque indulgence to it that is so jarring after the full out rock n roll of What Are You Doin’ In My Life. This piece fades out completely at the 56 second mark before we hear an aborted count in and a little chuckle and an indistinct phrase that sounds like “As they say…. Something….” before Tom brings the song in on a four count. 

The first thing to comment is that you can sort of understand Tom’s hesitation about bringing this song into the mix for this album. It’s a fairly radical departure from tempo and the mood of the rest of the tracks on this album, but I think that’s what makes it a pretty perfect closer. After the band has rocked your socks off for the previous half an hour, Louisiana Rain lets you breathe and relax into the end of the album. It has a really loose, mellow country vibe throughout, punctuated by more excellent Mike Campell slide guitar. It also has a really sultry, low-slung vocal delivery, with Tom drawling his way through the verses and a nicely restrained organ and rhythm section. 

What I’ll call the intro-proper is a straight up country hook, with a nicely twangy slide part from Mike and an accompanying piano part which drops us into the cool half-time beat of the first verse after a short four bars.

One of the first things I noticed about this track is that Ron Blair’s bass tone is so clean and clear. Because there’s no rhythm guitar through those first nine bars of the first section of the verse, you can really hear those bottom end notes sitting on top of the bass pattern. Very simply played. We’re hearing Benmont’s organ mixed nice and low and some very simple, clean couplets of notes, which I suspect are Benmont again on electric piano or keyboard. It doesn’t quite sound like guitar in the way the attack comes across so I’m pretty sure it’s Benmont playing that part.  The organ then builds us into the second half of the verse by swelling a little into the G7 chord in the 9th bar. It then drops us into C rather than G to start that second half and is played an octave higher and I think likely on a synth pad again which gives it an almost church organ type of sound. Again I’d love to hear these tracks isolated! In that step up to G7, Ron also moves up an octave to give that 7th chord a little more melody. The second half of the verse hears Mike sliding from D to C onto the first beat of each odd numbered bar. On then even beats he slides the note off with no sustain to just bring that note to a conclusion. Yet another example of something so very simple giving a lot of character to the song. It’s an old country trick of course, but knowing when and where to use those little musical devices is part of the musician’s tool kit.

As the guitar fills in those midrange frequencies, with Benmonts keys moving into a different space, we can still hear Ron’s bass coming through and it’s so beautifully recorded and mixed that you can even still hear the attack as the strings are struck. As we head into that 9th bar again with the G7, Ron steps back up an octave and plays a nice little slide to take us back into C for the Chorus.

To this point. Stan has been keeping very, very simple beat with the Kick on the first beat and then the 2-and (remember we talked about that on the last album I think - the 1-and 2-and, the and being the space between two beats to a drummer) the snare on the fourth beat. He’s playing a straight time closed hi-hat almost imperceptibly quietly, but it provides a very subtle metronome behind that broken kick snare pattern that allows it to glide effortlessly through those verses. The hat opens very slightly and closes on the 4th measure and again, it’s all subtle and understated to really give lots of space to the vocal. We then get a wonderful, short fill into the chorus with those thunderous toms crashing us back into a beat which flips to straight time and a much more regular kick pattern, with some accompanying double time tambourine. In that build to the chorus, we also hear Benmont coming back in on the piano, to fill out that sound and really push the transition.

Ron throws in some juicy slides in the lowest register in the chorus, especially in the progression to the minor chord. The organ swells into the second half the chorus and is mixed into the right channel, with the Leslie speaker adding some great colour to that section. The rhythm guitar in the chorus definitely sounds acoustic, with Mike’s lead picking sparse moments to come and a lick or a fill to the end of a phrase, including immediately after the line “soaking through my shoes” and to finish that first chorus.

The second verse and chorus really follow the same pattern as the first with the only real change is the phrasing of the Mike’s guitar, as he’s sliding a little more through that second chorus. But we’re basically getting exactly the same structure of two 9 bar phrases in the verses and two eight bar phrases in the chorus, before heading into a super little 8 bar solo.

Alrighty, it’s time for some Petty Trivia! 

Your question last week was this: In which Country did Damn The Torpedoes achieve its highest position? The answer is New Zealand, where it peaked at #1 and was selected at #3 in the year-end chart. Tom and the band only played three gigs in New Zealand, on May 6th, 8th, and 9th of 1980, in the cities of Christchurch, Wellington, and Aukland. I’d be interested to know why the band didn’t tour too often outside the United States as this was definitely not the norm for most major acts.

Your question for this week is as follows; At which legendary San Francisco venue did the Heartbreakers enjoy a 20 night residency between January 10th and February 7th of 1997?

OK, back to the song. Let’s talk about this wonderful little understated solo.

The first four bars are pure country slide guitar, with a second slide guitar part sitting just underneath it. I’m not sure if that second part would have been Tom accompanying Mike live off the floor or whether it was a Mike overdub. I’d guess it was the latter. The solo itself is really simple, really clean, really melodic before giving way to the part of the song that really kicks Louisiana Rain over the edge for me. You’re just not expecting a harmonica here. It’s the first time the harp has come out on a Heartbreakers record and and it flows on from Mike’s solo so seamlessly that you cannot imagine any parallel universe in which that part doesn’t exist. The keyboards are backed out at this point so the spotlight can burn brightly on those twin solos. 

The solo comes back out into another iteration of the same verse-chorus pattern. There’s something about the lack of build verse on verse that works so well for this song, as it really hangs that change to C for the words “Louisiana Rain” to become the heavy hook of the song. It’s similar in that way to how that change to “What are you doin’ in my life” works, building a sense of tranquility before hitting you with the main line.

The song then repeats the chorus once more before ending on a big finish on the first measure of that last bar.

I love how the choruses are built in this one too. The follow the two-part nature of the verses and the second half of each chorus repeats each time, but the lines in the first half are different. The two different first halves are then used in the two iterations of the chorus in the outro.

The lyrics of this one are, again, quite ephemeral and vague. They’re intended to build an image, rather than a specific situation or person. There’s an analogous reference to a girl in the second half of the first verse that’s quite a clever comparison to a meteorological phenomenon! “She nearly drove me crazy with all those china toys” is really esoteric but the following line “she really didn’t mean a thing to those sailor boys” I interpret as meaning that while the Louisiana Rain is having some sort of profound emotional impact on the singer, to everyone else, it’s just something they deal with. That’s a pretty good metaphor to a lot of passions that people have that other people find mundane or uninteresting. I’m not sure that was deliberate and I might be reading too much into that lyric but it’s pretty damn cool nonetheless. There’s also the wonderful line in the second verse; “Thank god for a long neck bottle, the angels remedy”. Again those little details like saying a “long neck” bottle rather than a bourbon bottle, or a half full bottle or something along those lines. All you really need is a two-syllable adjective there, but long neck just feels so much more evocative. The entire third verse is fantastic. If the rest of the song is, as I say, quite broad and playing at emotions and imagery, then the last verse is pure Jagger in its description of an English Refugee, eating pills and chasing them with tea. So there we get a lyrical coda to the album which references the first song while leaving us with a wry smile and a wink. 

OK folks, that’s all for this week. 

The way the builds and fades between sections and between the first and second halves of both the verses and the chorus have a really ocean swell to them which adds to the feeling of water and coastal temperament. Tom croons his way effortlessly through those verses and really restrains his attack during the choruses. It’s all about setting that mood and pulling you into a version of Louisiana that’s cleansing and fresh. I’ve never been to Louisiana and it’s high on my list of places to visit in the US, and when I eventually do make it down there, should it rain, I don’t think I’ll be able to resist heading outside, looking up into the sky, and thinking about this song. I’m closing out the album with an 8 out of 10. It’s a super simple song with a simple lyric, a simple hook, and a wonderful feel. It also has that bright, shimmering harmonica part smack in the middle that I adore. However, I do have to dock a couple of marks for what I think is an odd choice to front the song with. That hidden track within a track is superfluous, overlong, and I think if it were not there, Louisiana Rain would jump to a 9 for me. I’ll add a link to that alternate version, which has a much more raw, live feel, as well as a link to the actual live version from Live Anthology, which is terrific.

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Petty Trivia

QUESTION: At which legendary San Francisco venue did the Heartbreakers enjoy a 20 night residency between January 10th and February 7th of 1997?

ANSWER: The answer, of course, is San Francisco's Fillmore. The anticipation among us fans for a rumoured box set of performances from this run is high following a recent interview with Mike Campbell in which he confirmed that the work has been done. No official announcement has yet been made and no date has been confirmed, but this is going to be a hugely popular package for harcore fans to dig into.

Lyrics

Well it was out in California
By the San Diego sea
That was when I was taken in
By an aging boardwalk queen
Yeah she nearly drove me crazy
With all those china toys, and I know
She really didn't mean a thing
To any of those sailor boys

Louisiana rain is falling at my feet
Baby I'm noticing a change
As I move down the street
Louisiana rain
Is soaking through my shoes
I may never be the same
When I reach Baton Rouge

South Carolina
Put out it's arms for me
Right up until everything went black
Somewhere on Baker Street
And it was just some mean old poison
That I took up my nose
Thank God for a love that follows
The angels and the whores

Louisiana rain
Is falling just like tears
Running down my face
Washing out the years
Louisiana rain
Is soaking through my shoes
I may never be the same
When I reach Baton Rouge

Well I never will get over this English refugee,
S inging to the Jukebox in the all night beanery
Yeah he was eating pills like candy
And chasing them with tea
You should have seen him lick his lips
That old black muddled beak

Louisiana rain is falling at my feet
Baby I'm noticing a change
As I move down the street
Louisiana rain
Is soaking through my shoes
I may never be the same
When I reach Baton Rouge

Louisiana rain
Is falling just like tears
Running down my face
Washing out the years
Louisiana rain
Is soaking through my shoes
I may never be the same
When I reach Baton Rouge

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