S5E8 We Stand a Chance

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 to the fourth episode of season five 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. I wanted to give you all another quick update on the merchandise situation in case you’re not on social media much! After rebranding all the merch as 8NINETY8 Authentic Rock n Roll, the estate was happy for me to continue selling those designs. I wanted to give a very quick shout out to all of your who contacted me voicing your support for what I’m doing with this merchandise. You know who you are and it means an awful lot. I will have more designs coming over the next weeks and months and I might even branch out to do other bands! Another quick shout out to my pal and co-host John Paulsen, who was featured as The Last DJ on SiriusXM’s Tom Petty Radio today. It’ll be available for the rest of the week airing at different times, so make sure you’re tuning in to check that out. I’ll post the airing times for you on my socials and also add a link to a playlist of the songs that John chose. But you should really go listen because he does a wonderful job of talking about why he feels a connection to each track he chose. One last note. I wanted to say thanks to all of you for the positive feedback you give me. Social media isn’t always a pleasant place but I’ve yet to have a troll or a snarky comment on anything I’ve posted, which is pretty unusual I think. My friends Corey and Mark over on the And the Podcast Will Rock Van Halen podcast were getting some grief on Twitter this week because they’re not quote unquote experts on Van Halen. Completely unfair criticism as they say that they aren’t right off the top. But what they are is a pair of truly top level podcasters who put their heart and soul into a project dedicated to a band that they love and have come up with a brilliantly engaging format. I know how much those guys put into their podcast and I feel fiercely defensive of them any time people start sniping. Thankfully it’s fairly rare, but it did make me incredibly grateful for all of you and your kindness and support. So, please accept my very genuine thanks and appreciation. 

Anyway, on with the podcast.. As always, go give the song a listen before we get started. You’ll find a link to the track in the episode notes. Once I’m done rambling on with my thoughts and opinions, maybe go back and check the song out again and see if anything resonates with you.

We Stand a Chance is one of two songs from Long After Dark that was recorded at the old RCA studios on Sunset Boulevard. The lot now houses the Los Angeles Film School but was the site where a lot of great records were made, including the Rolling Stones Satisfaction and Elvis classic, Always on My Mind. So a pretty heady pedigree.

The beginning of the intro to this one is a little unusual for the Heartbreakers to this point in that it doesn’t form part of the bridge or chorus, but instead plays in a two bar, single-note, ascending pair. Benmont plays a really low-octave piano note, Howie matches it on the bass, and Stan thumps the kick drum and cymbal, to give those 8 beats a really deep, menacing quality. No chords needed, just those root notes, F# and A. After that, the intro picks up the chord progression from the verse in a more typical fashion. We get a trademark Stan Lnych drum fill into that main lick but he plays it mainly on the floor tom before hitting a single snare to punch into that full verse progression. So it’s a little different to how he might usually bring us in, with a snare, tom, snare, or snare to tom fill. The other thing I noticed about that intro is, if you listen really carefully at the 14 to 15 second mark, there’s some spoken gibberish in the background. I’d LOVE to know what that heck that was and who it was! The other thing you immediately notice is the really greasy guitar tone. In Conversations With Tom Petty, Tom Tells Paul Zollo that “I’m playing through a very little ten-inch amp that was really-overdrive, so it had this particular distortion.” It’s that really harsh buzzsaw tone that gives this song its personality, along with those double time piano stabs. Tom actually tells Paul Zollo that he wrote this one on piano but played the only guitar part on the song, with Mike playing organ! So again, one guitar part is a pretty definite sonic change for the Heartbreakers. There is some additional percussion in the intro too, with some shakers that become really pronounced on Stan’s fill into the first verse.

Heading into that first verse you get another little thing I missed the first few dozen times I’ve listened to this song.On the one count of that first verse, there’s a loud distorted guitar note that’s sustained for four beats before the main biting guitar riff kicks in. The shakers are dropped back out too. There are only two chords, Bm and A, throughout the verses, for four bars each, with the minor section being those straight stabbed root-fifth chords and the major chord being fuller with the third being added and a little transition note added. During the minor chord section, you can hear Stan playing a kick snare pattern that’s basically the same one that would be used in Free Fallin’, just sped up. We also get those handclaps in the major key part of the verse on the and-four counts. Stan also switches to the bell of his ride cymbal on the count to add some melodic shine to that rhythm section. 

The chorus changes the mood of the song with the guitar being dropped back in the mix a little and Benmont playing broken piano chords over the progression and Mike’s organ part coming in. That part is really noticeable during the lead back into the second verse. For the second four bars of the chorus, Stan switches to a syncopated half time beat and then fills back out to the verse progression. Tom’s vocal in this one is like an inverted Refugee where he’s really torturing his vocal in the chorus but using that more crooning delivery in the verses. On this song, it’s the opposite, with him really pusing that edge to his voice in the verses before dropping into that cleaner mid-register delivery for the chorus. His delivery on that first line of the second verse. “Oh God” is a highlight of this song for me; really pushing an octave above the root of the melody followed by that sloppy, falling down the stairs descending run on “knows I love you”. It really adds emphasis to what he’s singing.

The guitar in the second verse is different from the first, with Tom straying from those straight stabs and playing around the octave a little more. Again, he aggressively pushes the song into the second chorus by opening up the chords and not muting them. This underpins the line “talk to you talk to you” which is again delivered with plenty of Petty sauce.The second chorus is basically a carbon copy of the first before we head back into that verse progression. But this one is a little bait and switch, as we only get two bars of that Bm, before the bridge changes the mood of the song to a real major key positivity. The bridge also sees those chunky chugged guitar stabs transform into a much airier open chord approach, Stan and Howie going to a straight backbeat time and Benmont dancing around the root and suspended chords in a higher octave. This middle eight is actually eight bars and is again just a very subtle structural difference. Where the verse stays on one chord for four bars then switches to the second for four bars, this section switches ever two bars, so you have a D major, G major pairing every four bars. And the lyrics are only sung on the first two bars of each four. We’ve talked about song structure before, so that typical rock ABABCB format is flipped here and we get ABABCBCBA. I love it.

You might be expecting a guitar solo next and that would fit the standard rock template and would also be congruent with where the Heartbreakers would often take a song leading out of the bridge (or into it). But We Stand a Chance goes straight back into that chorus. After that chorus, are we heading to another verse? A chorus to fade? Nope, instead Tom repeats the bridge and this time Stan gets really funky on the tubs, throwing in a ton of syncopated drumming just ever so slightly behind the beat in the second half. After this, we go back into the chorus again. The song then fades out around the verse progression with Tom adding in the refrain from the chorus with some additional lyrics thrown in. The hand claps and shakers are also added back much more fully into this section and we get Mike Campbell showing off on the organ. I’d be curious to hear what organ that is that he’s playing because it almost sounds like a Farfisa, but that isn’t listed in the liner notes! Tom also adds in some lead, which would have been fairly unusual at this point in the Heartbreaker’s career. 

Alright folks, it’s that time again. Yep, it’s time to put on your thinking caps and get ready for some Petty Trivia! 

Your question from last week was this;  During the Heartbreakers 1997 Fillmore Residency, they covered a James Bond theme song on 10 of the 20 nights. Can you tell me which Bond movie that song was from: Is is a) Moonraker, b) Goldfinger (Shirley Bassey), c) Live and Let Die, or d) The Spy Who Love Me?

The answer is b) Goldfinger. Recorded in 1964 by Dame Shirley Bassey, the track was produced by George Martin, with music by John Barry (who wrote the James Bond theme tune) and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The track is included on the upcoming Fillmore 1997 boxset, in the 4CD or 6LP editions and was played ten times during the famous residency. The Heartbreakers covered over a hundred bands during their shows through the years and as Dan Spiess remarked during last week’s episode, you could make a strong argument that they’re the greatest cover band of all time, as well as one of the greatest original bands of all time. Not many can lay claim to that sort of repertoire, that’s for sure!

Your question for this week is this: Which of the following facts about Gainesville, Florida is not true. a) It is home to the University of Florida, which is the fourth largest public university in the US by enrollment, b) Tech company Shazam was founded in Gainesville in 2006 by resident Josh Greenberg c) the Town’s population has more than quadrupled in size since Tom was born there, or d) Gainesville’s record temperature has, ironically, never hit 105 degrees

OK, back to the song. I’ve talked about Tom’s delivery in this one and that it sounds like an inversion of Refugee to me. It’s also a good example of how Tom’s intonation and phrasing is basically uncopyable. This one was actually a misheard lyric for me for a while. I thought that the first time he sings “We Stand a Chance” he was singing “We Stand in the Shadows”. And this is because he throws in what I can only really describe as grace syllables to the phrasing. Grace notes are notes that aren’t played fully, but are just lightly touched on and are often used on guitar, piano, and especially drums. It’s so difficult to emulate Tom’s delivery because of his attention to that sort of detail and his chameleon-like vocal dexterity. I didn’t talk much, or really at all, about what Howie is doing on this track and that’s not because it’s not important. But this is a really straight bass part. Sitting on the root notes on top of the kick drum and adding in some broken chords transitions between bars. It’s a solid part that sites behind that twin guitar and vocal attack and doesn’t need to do any of the heavy lifting in the song.

We Stand a Chance was never played live, from what I can find online and maybe this is because of the unusual arrangement of having Tom play the sole guitar, Mike on organ and Benmont playing the piano part. Tom tells Paul Zollo that “Jimmy Iovine was really keen on that song and we thought it might be the one that people focused on, but it turned out to be You Got Lucky instead.”  I think the two songs definitely dovetail somewhat in terms of the moody, ominous tone that they employ and there is the juxtaposition of the lyrics. Where You Got Lucky is Tom playing a character who deems himself to be above his target, this song is very much more hopeful, if slightly forlorn. And as always, it has a killer Tom Petty line in it that no-one else would have written. “My whole world is a fountain of flame”. That’s a hell of a way to describe someone in the throes of passion! 

OK folks, that’s all for this week. We Stand a Chance is a fantastic way to open the second side of an album. Tom and the boys had a knack for starting side two strong. I Need to Know, Don’t Do Me Like That were side two openers and hey, those are pretty great songs! There’s more than enough going on here to make me really curious why this was never dusted off for a few outings on tour and as I said, maybe it’s because of who played what on the song. Maybe it’s the guitar tone that Tom got through that amp that they couldn’t reproduce, or maybe it was just another victim of a burgeoning catalogue of incredible songs coupled with an insane library of covers to pull from. Regardless, this is a really tight, well-written album track and I’m going to give it a 7/10. It never really blows your socks off but sonically, it’s different enough again from other tracks on the album and I do love that bait and switch with the bridge-chorus-bridge-chorus. 

I found a pretty cool cover of the song done by Darlene Love, who many of you will know as the original singer of Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) and as the wife of Danny Glover’s character in the Lethal Weapon film series. I’ll leave a link to that in the episode notes as it’s always interesting to hear female artists interpret Tom’s work and I think she does a good job with it!

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Petty Trivia

QUESTION: Which of the following facts about Gainesville, Florida is not true. a) It is home to the University of Florida, which is the fourth largest public university in the US by enrollment, b) Tech company Shazam was founded in Gainesville in 2006 by resident Josh Greenberg c) the Town’s population has more than quadrupled in size since Tom was born there, or d) Gainesville’s record temperature has, ironically, never hit 105 degrees

ANSWER: Well, the maximum temperature recorded in Gainesville was 104, on June 27, 1952. On October 20th, 1950, the day Tom entered the world, it was a warm but not sweltering 85 degrees. The University of Florida ranks fourth in enrollment, behind Texas A&M in top spot, University of Central Florida, and Ohio State. When Tom was born, the population of Gainesville was approximately 27 thousand and has grown to over 140 thousand today. That means that the only fact that was untrue was Josh Greenberg founding Shazam in 2006. Greenberg was a Tech entrepreneur, but founded Grooveshark rather than Shazam, which was a service very similar to YouTube, but for music. After Grooveshark was taken offline due to a series of lawsuits from Universal, Sony, and Warner Music, Greenberg died unexpectedly of unknown causes in 2015 at the age of 28 and on April 18 of the following year, one year after his birthday, the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce staged the first Annual Josh Greenberg day in his honour.

Lyrics

Stand back from me, honey
Because I don't know what I might do next
No I'm surprised by this, frightened by this
Nothing ever got me so out of my head, baby

We stand a chance
Baby, we stand a chance
Yeah, and I could be wrong, but you never know
We could stand the chance of a real love

Oh, God knows I love you, God knows I do
Baby, will you let me just prove it to you?
Come here to me, baby, come here to me now
I wanna talk to you, talk to you and tell you somehow

That we stand a chance
Baby, we stand a chance
Yeah, and I could be wrong, but you never know
We could stand the chance of a real love

I'm so moved, I'm so changed
Baby, my whole world is a fountain of flame

Baby, we stand a chance
Baby, we stand a chance
Yeah, and I could be wrong, but you never know
We could stand a chance of a real love

I'm so moved, I'm so changed
Baby, my whole world is a fountain of flame

Baby, we stand a chance
Baby, we stand a chance
Yeah, and I could be wrong, but you never know
We could stand a chance of a real love

Oh!
Oh we stand a chance
We stand a chance
It's gonna take time but we stand a chance
Oh we stand a chance
We stand a chance
It's gonna take time but we stand a chance

We stand a chance
We stand a chance

Oh!

Ah!
Oh we stand a chance
We stand a chance
It's gonna take time but we stand a chance

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