S6E3 Don't Come Around Here No More

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 third episode of season six 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. 

Before we begin this week’s episode, I have to mention my friend, Gwen Jones, who very sadly passed away last Thursday. Gwen was on the podcast as a guest back in Season Two and at the end of every episode I mention the Tom Petty Fans Forever Facebook group that she founded, because it’s such a positive space not only in the Pettyverse, but on social media in general. I’m putting together a bonus tribute episode to her as she was a huge part of the Tom Petty community and one of life’s truly selfless and nurturing people.  

Today I’ll be talking about the mammoth third song from Southern Accents, Don’t Come Around Here No More. As a reminder, I won’t be playing the song itself in the episode, but I always leave a link in the episode notes so that you can go listen to the track before we start and afterwards too if you like!

The long and winding backstory of this song begins with a mad Englishman named Dave Stewart, who some of you may remember as the genius musical partner of Annie Lennox in the Eurythmics and most of you know as the Hookah-smoking cake pusher caterpillar in the video for Don’t Come Around Here No More. He is obviously the co-writer and co-producer of this track and would go on to co-write two other songs on Southern Accents, including last week’s It Ain’t Nothin’ To Me. More on Dave’s eccentricities later.

In his memoir, Sweet Dreams are made of this; a life in music, Stewart recalls that after a Eurythmics show in LA in 1984, which was attended by a huge array of musicians and record execs, he found Stevie Nicks in his dressing room doorway wearing a faux-fur coat. Stewart says “Underneath she wore a black lace dress and she had long, flowing hair. I didn’t know who she was, but there was something about her that I was instantly attracted to.” Nicks’ invited him back to her house for a party and once there, was left alone for quite a while as Nicks’ and her backing singers retired to the bathroom to indulge in a little “marching powder”. After a while and tired from the show, Stewart went to bed in one of the four bedrooms, waking at 5, to see Stevie in a long Victorian nightdress. He gallantly recalls, “There was a fair amount of what I’d call skirmishing that went on” before Nicks’ eventually woke him at 9:30am and told him he’d better head out because someone was coming over to collect their clothes and “things could get tricky”. 

The Eurythmics then played San Francisco, after which Dave decided to head back to LA to hook up with Stevie again. In the City of Angels, he ended up, serendipitously, staying at the home of Jimmy Iovine who, at the time, was producing Stevie’s album Rock a Little. Stewart played a demo of Don’t Come Around Here No More for Iovine, which the producer loved and suggested be given to Nicks for her album. Stewart jumped at the chance to work with Nicks, having no idea that Iovine and Nicks had formerly been a couple. The pair brought the music to Nicks who spent an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom frantically writing lyrics that Stewart describes as “Shakesperian and very odd”. Iovine wasn’t a fan and when arguing about them with the singer, said “Can you stop arguing with me in front of my friend David? You don’t really know him.” To which Nicks replied “Your friend? What are you talking about? We slept together the other night.” Slightly awkward I think you’ll all agree. Anyway, Nicks stormed out of the studio and Iovine decides that the person they need to draft in to help finish the lyrics is Tom Petty. Of course, the last album. Long After Dark, hadn’t been a particularly happy collaboration, with Petty feeling pigeon-holed and restricted by Iovine’s vision. Ironically, he is the very man Tom would turn to to help rescue Rebels and finish up the rest of Southern Accents. Tom comes in, loves the song and the three men put together a demo and call Stevie to come and listen to it. In Warren Zanes biography, she says “When I got back the next day, at something like 3 p.m., the whole song was written. And not only was it written, it was spectacular. Dave was standing there saying to me, ‘Well, it’s terrific, and now you can go out…and you can sing it.’ Tom had done a great vocal, a great vocal. I just looked at them and said, ‘I’m going to top that? Really? I got up, thanked Dave, thanked Tom, fired Jimmy and left.”

So if the song itself sounds strange and unique, it possibly owes a little of it to its wild origins. Tom recalls that he added in the change to double time and that he and Stewart worked on the song for around a month overall. He also recounts how he and Stewart would party regularly in those days and that the pair went to buy matching rhinestone cowboy suits with embroidered skulls. In Conversations with Tom Petty, he says to Paul Zollo, “”He was a madman, but a really sweet one. Really a sweetheart, but loony as they come.”

There’s more about Dave later, but let’s get into the song.

The song opens with that unmistakable drum machine loop, which is mechanical but somehow still manages to have an almost drunken stagger to it. Now, I’ve heard this song about a couple hundred times at least, but I don’t think I’d ever noticed that little bit of fret noise right at the beginning. Like right at about the 2 second mark. And this would be expanded on to tumultuous effect when it was played live on 1991’s Into The Great Wide Open, which I’ll be talking about near the end of the episode. We also get that wonderful, incongruous bass lick before the sitar lick comes in. This was played by English bass player Dean Garcia who Dave Stewart had worked lots with. Stewart apparently sent the tape to him in England and then when the tape came back, as Tom tells Paul Zollo, “it was just this really weird jazzy bass playing that was kinda useless, but I did keep that one lick that starts the song”. And when you think about that bass lick and the tone, it doesn’t appear anywhere else in the song. So yet another disarming, adventurous musical choice, which the song ended up full of.

Onto that sitar sound. I’m not sure exactly how this was recorded because when you listen to it under headphones, it almost sounds like there are two parts in the left and right channels, or perhaps even a synth in the right channel. But when Paul Zollo asks Tom whether it’s a real sitar, Tom tells him “No, it’s a Coral sitar. It’s like a guitar but there’s an autoharp thing built into it under plexiglass on top.” And when you go to look at photos of them, they really are an unusual looking beast. So what I’m curious about is whether the channel for the sitar is separate from the feed for the guitar signal. Or whether you could some how mic that separately to get that really droney vibe. Either way, it’s spacey, trippy, and super, super cool. Once the main hook kicks in after four bars of that sitar intro, you definitely get that drone more consistently in the right channel so now I’m super curious about how it was recorded. And talk about impact with the first vocals. HEY! Every person in every karaoke bar in the world will sing-shout that word. 

There’s so much texture in this opening refrain. That big synth bass, the multilayered synths, the sitar, the drum machine, all underpinned by that droned E note in the right channel softly buzzing like a patient, but methodically intentful wasp. This is matched half way through this opening salvo by a high E note on the synth. And where I was critical about the mix of last week’s song, every instrument here is woven together extraordinarily well. It’s almost like this song must always have existed and didn’t even need to be recorded, that’s how perfectly everything fits together.

Paul Zollo asks Tom whether he’s ever intentionally tried to write a song specifically to be a single and Tom answers that he doesn’t do that usually, but this one was written with that in mind. He says he told Stewart, “Let’s write a hit song. And make a really interesting single.” Now when you bear that in mind, even for 1985, the intro to this track is long! It runs to just about 50 seconds before the first verse kicks in. When you think about how short and punchy some of those early singles were, this song wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near an album, let alone a single release. 

When those vocals do come in, it’s Tom Petty in full aggrieved character mode. Don’t Come Around Here No More. It’s such a powerful line. And I think some of the power of it comes from it sounding like a real exhortation, which obviously it was. The music underneath this verse section doesn’t move or shift and you have that EABA progression with that droned note and the synths padded out. So all the movement has to come from Tom’s vocal and boy does he deliver. You can really see what Stevie Nicks was talking about! There’s also another little curveball in this with female vocal harmonies coming in on “Whatever you’re looking for”. This inclusion also owed a lot to serendipity and again to Stevie Nicks. She was recording at Sunset Sound at the same time Petty and Stewart were laying down the tracks for this but hadn’t shown up for her session, so her backing singers were hanging around with nothing to do. And according to Tom, “Dave said, let’s get them out here and see what they can do.”

I recall talking about the inversion of the typical song structure in a previous episode but can’t remember for the life of me which song it was! So this one feels like it starts with the chorus, but it’s the verse, then you get a bridge, or elongated pre-chorus in which we hear that fantastic cello part that comes in with only the drums and vocals. The synths and sitar just fall away from the limelight on that big STOP! And of course, there has to be a story behind every part of this song and so there is with the cellist. Tom recalls saying to Stewart, “A cello would be good” and the Eurythmic responding, “Don’t worry, I’ll get a cello player” before scuttling off to find one. The guy he finds is Daniel Rothmuller, a cellist with the LA Philharmonic, who has never once played with a rock band or even played without music in front of him. You can feel Tom’s amazement coming through the pages as he tells Paul Zollo, “He’d never played anything that wasn’t written down. And Dave said, “You’re going to have a lot of fun tonight.” He goes on to say “We just got the guy just to start to jam and he was elated by it. He was amazed by it. That he could just start to play something and it would sound good”. Another meeting of worlds as bizarre and unlikely as the entire song. In this verse section we also get those beautiful aah aah aah ooh ooh harmonies from Nicks’ backing singers. There aren’t a whole lot of words in this section and they’re punched out with an anguished howl by Tom’s pinched, pained vocal delivery.

As we head back into the chorus, we now get those big full harmonies on Don’t Come Around Here No More and the song feels fully alive. The call of those harmonized vocals are met with that wonderfully upbeat synth lead part. Call in the left channel, response in the right. And the busy wasp is back, weaving his way through the shimmering wheat field of those synth pads. It’s just sonically spectacular.  The second pre-chorus/bridge section features some fantastic backing vocals behind Tom’s lead. We also get that heartbreaking line, “STOP! You tangled my emotions”. That’s a phenomenal way to describe the hurt and pain you can feel in a relationship that’s gone south. The knot in your stomach, the conflict in your brain. Tangled is the exact word that describes it. The lead into the second chorus hangs on that root E for four bars and you if you listen closely in that last bar, you get this vocal or synth swell, possibly both and a really low growling synth note. So while it doesn’t seem like there’s much going on, the musical textures are shifting subtly to build to the frenetic conclusion that we all know is coming. Another little twist is the lead vocal in the left channel on the second “Don’t come around here no more” in this second chorus, it steps up to a harmony note instead of a root note before falling back in line.

The last verse starts with the word Stop, which is such a clever way to loop back to that big cry in the pre-choruses. The song has one more trick up it’s sleeve though and it’s a doozy. Instead of going into the pre-chorus and chorus, the song swings up into double time with Mike Campbell’s guitar cueing us in. Every time I hear that guitar start, and I mean, every, single, time, it’s a hairs-on-end moment. It’s so incredibly theatrical. This is also where we hear Stan Lynch blow the doors off on drums and Howie Epstein pounding a bass line out. Mike is playing some super tasty wha-pedal heavy licks and the cymbals are mixed really high, washing over the cacophony, kinda like waves crashing on the beach.... We’re also treated to that extraordinary high note from Stephanie Spruill. And of course, there’s one last story associated with this! Tom tells Paul Zollo that “She was having a little trouble finding her thing. And Dave actually ran into the room in his underpants as she was singing that bit. And that actually worked and she went up into that register and hit that note.” Who would ever have thought that Dave Stewart’s underwear would be responsible for one of the highlights of one of the most iconic songs of the 80s?!

Alright folks, It’s time for some Petty Trivia! 

Your question from last week was this; How many #1 singles did Tom enjoy, both solo and with the Heartbreakers, on the US Rock chart? IS it a) zero, b) 6, c) 10, or d) 15. I guess this was a very slightly trick question in that you had to pay attention to the word “Rock” in US Rock Chart. Unfathomably, Tom never had a Billboard #1 either solo or with the Heartbreakers. However, the Tom did enjoy ten #1 singles on the US Rock chart; The Waiting, You Got Lucky, Jammin’ Me, I Won’t Back Down, Runnin’ Down a Dream, Free Fallin’, Learning to Fly, Out in the Cold, Mary Jane’s Last Dance, and You Don’t Know How It Feels. Don’t Come Around Here No More peaked at #2, as did You Wreck Me. 

Your question for this week is this: Tom Petty’s adopted son is named after one of his fellow Wilburys’ bandmates, but which one? Is it a) Roy, b) Dylan, c) Jeff, or d) Harrison

OK, back to the song. The title actually comes from something that Dave Stewart overheard Stevie Nicks say to her ex, the legendary James Gang and Eagles rock n roll party animal Joe Walsh as he was heading out the door to avoid things getting tricky. I also talked earlier in the episode about how long the intro is and we know that it’s a very unique quirky song. It’s hardly a surprise that the record company had serious misgivings about putting it out as a single, let alone the lead single. Tom tells Paul Zollo that he used Prince’s single When Doves Cry to show the company that you could do something interesting and different and still have it be a hit. The song went on to become the Heartbreakers’ second biggest hit to date, after Don’t Do Me Like That, peaking at #13 on the billboard chart and, as previously mentioned, #2 on the US Rock chart.  It would also, of course, become one of the most memorable music videos of all time. In the Going Home documentary, Tom says "There you have it, you know. You can write the song, and do your best, and in the end the video is probably going to leave the biggest mark on the listener's mind." I was listening to this song about 6 or 7 years ago and my wife piped up, “I love this song! Who’s it by?” When I told her it was Tom Petty she looked shocked and said “Man, there are so many songs I like that I didn’t know were by him.” I then asked her “You’ve seen the video right?” to which she surprised me with “No. I don’t think so”. After viewing it, she was both amused, confused, and more than anything left with that indelible mark that anyone who has seen the music video with. A permanent and unshakeable association between Tom Petty, Alice, and the Mad Hatter. As with all the Heartbreakers’ videos, Tom had a major creative say in how the thing was scripted and presented. When Paul Zollo asks him “Were they your concepts for videos”, Tom responds that “I think more often than not. Actually I think they were always my concept in some degree. That’s the way we are. We wouldn’t want to be put in a situation that we had no control over.” He goes on to ponder whether the very clear imagery of Alice in Wonderland left less space for listeners and viewers to create their own narrative around the song and says “I don’t think you can hear Don’t Come Around Here No More and not think of that video. It’s impossible. And that wasn’t so good. I think it would have been better to be a little more ambiguous”. But, he goes on to say that “the other side of the coin was that it was like a new kind of art form and it was exciting to be involved in it.”

The video of course starts with Alice wandering through a giant mushroom patch, the largest of which seats Dave Stewart as a hookah smoking caterpillar playing sitar. He feeds her a piece of cake which tumblers her down into a psychedelic checkerboard nightmare, with Tom assuming the role of the Mad Hatter, top hat, cup of tea and all. The lighting is very bleach and the closeups really make things more disconcerting. Other members of the heartbreakers come into the scene to ply Alice with an oversize chair and an even more oversize cup of tea. We then see checkerboard harlequins playing the cello parts with flamingos as bows. All very trippy and Lewis Caroll-esque. Toms’s suit and glasses change size, the tea cup gets bigger, and Tom sings directly to Alice as the Heartbreakers come in and out of shot before joining the meal. I wonder who was the dormouse? My guess is Benmont! There’s a wonderful nod to the scene in the book as the diners ALL CHANGE! Before things take a very surreal turn for the worse with an incrementally more piggish baby in a stroller. Size shifts take place again with Alice now being immersed in Tom’s tea cup, at which point the song shifts to double time and Alice’s body becomes a cake, which Tom starts to serve up to the other Heartbreakers and the Harlequins. The video ends with Alice’s face disappearing down Tom’s gullet before he burps into the camera and the video ends. This closes the song out about 35 or so seconds earlier than the fade out ends on the studio version and caps a hallucinogenic whirlwind of a music video. But here’s the weird thing. Even though there’s so much going on and visually it’s chaotic and you could easily forget there’s a song going on, the music matches the tone and menacing edge of the song perfectly. It’s a really dark, nihilistic lyric set to that shiny pop sonic bubble bath. “I don’t feel you any more. You darken my door.” “Stop walking down my street.” I’ve given up on waiting any longer. That line where Tom sings  I’ve given up. You tangle my emotions.” Then the next line “Honey please, admit it’s over.” This is a tortured soul who wants to be released from his misery. And the video echos that thematically, using Alice’s inability to escape the tea party as the replacement metaphor. No wonder it’s still one of the most popular music videos ever made and was on constant repeat on MTV and, up here in Canada, VH1 for so many years.

I know this is a long episode and I promise I’ll let you wonderful people get back to your lives soon, but I did want to talk about the live version of the song from the 1991 Into The Great Wide Open tour as it’s one of the truly exceptional all-time arrangements and presentations of a song. My good pal Pete Nestor commented on my preview post that he saw this one live in ‘92. His comment was this; “Will always and forever be one of, if not the, best songs I have ever seen performed live.” So there you go Pete, you have your hattrick of namechecks. Ha ha. In all seriousness though, as I say, I can only imagine how unbelievable this one must have been to see live. I’ll include a version of the performance in the episode notes. It opens with about three and a half minutes of inventive virtuosity from Mike Campbell, in which he uses a big delay effect on one guitar, setting up a repeating lick before setting the guitar down on a stand and strapping up another one and playing around the lick. To me, this part invokes imagery of the Scottish Highlands and I think they might even have cribbed some of chord progression from Where The Streets Have No Name. We then get drums and bass and Mike wailing on that second guitar before he lays down a second delayed progression and sets that guitar down to move onto the third instrument; an electric bouzouki (yeh I had to look this up too!), which he plays more like a thrash guitar. Stan is now pounding out the toms and kick with big fat drum mallets and you can hear the crowd whipping into a frenzy as Mike turns and looks up to the back of the stage and Tom appears at the top of a flight of steps. We’re around three and half minutes into this cavalcade of sound at this point and it doesn’t look like it’s letting up until Tom gives the arm signal to cut the music. Cur dramatic pause. As the camera comes back though, you get the tail end of Mike bowing to Tom, which feels half deferential in the context of the acting performance and half, “you’re welcome” because he just melted the faces of tens of thousands of people using nothing but ten fingers and a life time of playing the guitar until he could make it do his bidding at will. After another 6 or 7 seconds, the music comes back in and the faders come back up on those delayed guitars (as an aside, I’d love to know how that was choreographed) and Tom walks down, holsters his guitar and stumbles across the stage, sitting down on a large chest as the instrumentation drops back to a more subdued level. Benmont’s piano and Stan’s tribal drums give this section a really ominous tone as Tom realizes he’s sitting on a chest and turns to look in mock  awe before signaling for silence. This is Benmont’s cue, or maybe Scott Thurston’s cue, to sit on a deep synth fifth as Tom opens the chest to reveal a blinding light, from which he pulls a top hat, as Stan starts that iconic drum beat. The crowd goes absolutely bananas at this, Tom puts on the top hat, and the song starts. I’m a huge fan of theatrics at shows. I love Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Iron Maiden, Alice Cooper etc. but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better intro to a song than this. It’s like a mini opera and the smile on Tom’s face when the house lights lift to reveal the band more fully is wide and genuine. The sitar part is actually being played by Mike on, I’m pretty sure, his red Gibson SG.  I won’t go over the entire song other than to say, it’s hard to imagine a band being able to play a song like this live and do it real justice. But this is the Heartbreakers and Howie’s harmonies, Stan’s willingness to sit in the pocket, and the combination of Stan, Howie, and Scott (and I think Benmont probably) on the harmonies is just unbelievably beautiful. Watching Howie sing this one actually brings a tear to my eye quite often. The other last thing I’ll mention musically is the way Benmont brilliantly subs in piano for the synths. Talk about how to take a magnificent, original song, and make it even better. The STOPs are provided by the audience and I can only imagine how hair-raising that must have been to actually see live. 

We also get an audience participation section in the middle, with Tom bringing the crowd into clapping out the beat. MIke is using that phased Wah wah tone as the band drops the tempo and makes the chorus way more sultry. How do we come out of this section? Of course with a change to double time. Cue more wah guitar and Tom strutting around like the rock god he is. But again, this song has twists. It has turns. And live why would hat be different. A strobe light kicks in and men in ex president masks chase Tom around the stage. Regan, Nixon, can’t quite see the third. But the Heartbreakers are just playing for fun now and making way more glorious noise than any band has the right to be able to do live. Tom disappears. Then reappears holding a big red Peace sign, repelling the masked intruders. It’s all so gloriously theatrical and chaotic and fits the song so well. The song then closes with a huge rock ending as Tom staggers back to the chest, removes the top hat, and places it back inside, as a way of saying. Almost implying that the energy comes from that top hat. As he slams the chest shut, We get the final drum crash and the audience, drunk on adrenaline roars out their final approval. 

Alright folks, that’s all for this week. Tom tells Paul Zollo, "It's so unusual; it's not like anything I've ever heard before." And I’ve talked before about hard left turns that the band took - including on last week’s song It Ain’t Nothin To Me. But this isn’t just a hard left turn for the Heartbreakers, this is just one of rock music’s most unique and least imitable tracks ever. It’s up there with Eleanor Rigby or We Will Rock you in that nothing else had ever really been done that sounded like that song. At all. One of my regular listeners Bob Reidy mentioned that this song is great, if a little overplayed, but it’s a song I find new ways to love so often and going through it for this episode and digging into the history of it has breathed renewed life into my love for this song. It’s a remarkable sonic and creative achievement and though it’s one of the “Greatest hits” in brackets. It’s also kind of one of those deep cut songs that bands record that are so outside the norm that they don’t really fit anywhere. John Paulsen  and I will definitely talk about that on the season wrap for this album, but taken on musical, lyrical, and compositional merit alone, this is as strong a ten as I can ever give. It’s perfect in every detail. Yes it doesn’t really “fit” Southern Accents in the original concept that Tom had, but it soars as a piece of music, is elevated in video form, and perfected in one of the most brilliant live arrangements of all time. 10 out of 10 and if you disagree, you’re just damn crazy.

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Petty Trivia

QUESTION: Tom Petty’s adopted son is named after one of his fellow Wilburys’ bandmates, but which one? Is it a) Roy, b) Dylan, c) Jeff, or d) Harrison

ANSWER: Each answer received at least one vote on the Twitter poll, but almost half of you correctly identified that Dylan was the correct answer. Dylan is the son of Tom’s second wife and soulmate, Dana. Tom also had two daughters with his first wife Jane, Annakim, and Adria, the latter of whom has gone on to play a significant role in running her father’s estate as well as having a career as a director in her own right.

Lyrics

Don't come around here no more
Don't come around here no more
Whatever you're looking for,
Hey!
Don't come around here no more
Don't come around here no more
Don't come around here no more
Whatever you're looking for,
Hey!
Don't come around here no more

I've given up Stop
I've given up Stop
Ah, ah, ah, oooh, oooh
I've given up (Stop) on waiting any longer
I've given up on it's love getting stronger

Don't come around here no more
Don't come around here no more
Don't come around here no more
Don't come around here no more

I don't feel you anymore
You darken my door
(Oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh)
Whatever you're looking for,
Hey!
Don't come around here no more

I've given up Stop
(Ahhh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh)
I've given up Stop
Ah, ah, ah, oooh, oooh
I've given up Stop
You tangled my emotions (Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah)
I've given up
Honey, please admit it's over
Hey!

Don't come around here no more
Don't come around here no more
Don't come around here no more
(Oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh) Hey, yeah!
Don't come around here no more

Stop walking down my street
Don't come around here no more
Who do you expect to meet (Oooh, oooh, oooh)
Don't come around here no more
Whatever you're looking for
Hey!
Don't come around here no more (Oooh, oooh, oooh)
Hey!

Ahhhhhh, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah
Honey, please (Honey, please) don't come around here no more
Whatever you're looking for Oh
Ay, oh, ay Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah
(Ahhhhhh) Don't come around here no more
(Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah Honey, please)
Oh, oh Oh, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah
Don't come around here no more

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