S9E3 Kings Highway

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 the ninth season of the Tom Petty Project Podcast! I am your host, Kevin Brown. This is the weekly 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. 

First of all, thanks for bearing with me last week. I coach my daughter’s youth soccer team and our season is starting to get going in earnest now, so my schedule has been a little frazzled. 

Today’s episode looks at the second track from Into The Great Wide Open, the upbeat, up tempo, King’s Highway. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, I don’t play the song, or clips from the song, in the episode itself in order to avoid things like copyright issues or getting on the wrong side of the Petty estate. If you want to give the song a listen before we dig into it, there’s a link in the episode notes!

When author Paul Zollo describes Kings Highway as “an optimistic song” in Conversations With Tom Petty, Tom replies “That one we’ve performed quite a bit. I like that one too.” Indeed the song has been played 112 times in concert including on 2010’s Mojo tour, four times during hte ‘97 Fillmore run, and sporadically on other tours throughout the band’s career. On the Into The Great Wide Open tour in 1991/92 the song was the main set opener and there’s a bootleg version of the band playing the song for the second ever time live in Cincinnati on the ninth of September, 1991. I think that because this version has never been officially released, I can add a little snippet of it here for you so you can get a sense of how it sounded live in its early days. 

Like Learning To Fly, it’s a song that the band would change the arrangement of and when Paul Zollo mentions the acoustic version on the Playback boxset, Tom responds that “It’ll work just about any way you want to play it.” He also goes on to say “It was a tricky one to record. We went through a few changes trying to get the track to sound the way we wanted.” Like any Pettyhead, I’d love to hear what other versions of this song might sound like and if there are any outtakes or alternate takes laying around on tape somewhere, it would be amazing to hear them! Though Jeff Lynne is so precise and particular about final mixes, I’m guessing we likely won’t be hearing any of those in the immediate future! 

There’s no prolonged intro into this one. The whole band comes in cooking from the first beat of the first bar. At 3 minutes and 8 seconds, it’s the shortest song on the album (by one second!) so it’s no surprise that it wastes no time heading into the first verse. 

We do get four bars of intro, with that main lick, which is just G major followed by D with the suspended fourth, and natural fourth alternating. It’s a really simple little lick. But again, so hummable and memorable. On the second and fourth bars, when you get that drop to that suspended D pattern you also hear Stan Lynch thudding his floor toms in time with that guitar. This really punches the back half of that guitar phrase and adds some meat to it. The drums again sound more like Full Moon Fever than they do Damn The Torpedoes but it still sounds like Stan Lynch rathe rather than Phil Jones, as Stan is adding in that little extra sauce with those tom hits. In live versions, Benmont Tench would double that guitar lead on piano and make that part even thicker and livelier sounding.

After that very short intro, we drop into the verse progression, which picks up the pattern from the intro. The main jangling guitar lead is dropped out and we just have a simple muted chugging rhythm guitar along with that lead guitar just picking that single D note, or maybe it’s playing the fifth, I can’t quite make that out. Each verse is two sets of four bars, which I’ll call the front half and the back half of the verse. So the first four bars, or front half, is that alternating G/D and then we switch to the back half (where Tom sings “And take you far away”) to a C / Csus4 or maybe A C/D pattern. The neat thing too is that Tom sings mainly on the 2rd and 4th bars of each set of four, rather than straight through. So that G major and C major act as a lead into Tom singing off the root chord, which is a cool little thing I’m not sure I’d ever consciously picked up on.

In that back half, in the C major/ C sus pattern, we then get that bright lead guitar tone - and I’ll go out on a limb and guess that that’s Mike playing a Rickenbacker to get that sound - as well as some vocal oos and I’d be willing to bet that those are provided by Howie Epstein and Jeff Lynne.There’s also some acoustic guitar in there, just accenting the change back to G major at the end of the fourth bar. So as always with Jeff Lynne, there’s plenty of guitar on this record and thankfully, by the time the Heartbreakers would take this song on tour, Scott Thurston had already been added as a touring third guitarist, so some of these parts could be fleshed out live. In fact, in most live versions I’ve seen online, it’s Howie Epstein playing the acoustic guitar and Scott Thurston taking over on bass. Which makes me wonder if Jeff Lynne actually played bass on this track. He is credited as playing bass on the album, but the individual songs aren’t broken out. But Howie and Jeff are really tight pocket players so it’s harder to tell whether it’s one or the other because their styles are so similar. 

The second verse follows the first in terms of progression but that bright jangly guitar is kept in, playing some open ringing chords to flesh out the sound a little. As with the first verse. We also get those double snare hits from Stan in the 2nd and 4th bars of the back half. And the crash cymbal coming in on the first beat of each of those bars. And listen for a cool little bit of production here. Stan hits that crash four times on each first beat of the bar, but the sound gets increasingly quieter. So either Stan is hitting the cymbal with decreasing velocity each time or that’s been done deliberately in the mix. Either way, it’s an interesting decision and one I’ve missed every time I’ve listened to this song! It’s also a massive music nerd thing that no-one else likely cares about so I’m sorry to have brought it up! Ha ha. Just kidding - that’s why I love doing this show - noticing little things like that!

At the end of the back half of this second verse, we get a trademark Heartbreakers extra bar to build us into the chorus, so the back half here is 5 bars instead of 4. This is where Benmont Tench’s organ finally comes into the mix. And boy is it simple. All he does is hold a G note - probably two G notes an octave apart I think - all through the chord progression in the chorus. The chords here are CDG / CDG in the front half of the chorus and EmDC / DG. So the back half here is actually only two bars. But with Benmont holding that G note over that progression, over the C, it’s the fifth, over the D it’s a suspended 4th, and over the G its the root. Over the E minor it becomes the minor third. It’s a trick that musicians use all the time to provide movement that comes from the interplay between a held note and the chords that are happening underneath it. The Beatles used that little trick all the time in their harmonies. If you think about Love Love Me Do for example. The harmony vocal is essentially one note while the lead vocal moves over top of it. So you get this effect of a single note taking on different roles within each chord.  In this chorus, we also get more percussion, with what sounds like a tambourine playing a 1-2-3 double time pattern (123… 123… 123…) as well as that acoustic guitar push at the end of each second bar. 

The song then reverts back to the intro pattern but with that keyboard slash organ sound and the double time tambourine  filling out the palate a little. 

We head into the next two verse sections with that lead guitar tone playing those open chords and mixed higher now as well as a low organ tone that’s mixed quite low. So the song is building up now. In back half of the verse sections here, after the double snare hit, Stan adds in a pretty tasty long tom fill. So again, it’s a stylistic difference between Stan and other players who likely wouldn’t add that in. And the toms aren’t mixed with a ton of reverb and kept fairly low in the mix so that, even though it’s a fairly long fill, it’s not distracting and doesn’t muddy the song in any way. There’s one more little change that we get heading into the second chorus. In the fourth and fifth bars leading into it, Benmont plays a synth part that mimics that main two note guitar lead. Again a very subtle, very small change just to keep the song moving and keep it interesting. I love too how, rather than singing “Oh I’ll await the day” on the first line of this chorus, Tom instead sings “Lover, I’ll await the day”. There’s something about how that extra syllable just changes the way the chorus comes in in a very satisfying way. It changes the way that verse flows into the chorus where in the first iteration it was almost a harder change. This chorus sees the acoustic guitar brought forward a little more and also a fantastic full harmony on the “and we’ll ride down the king’s highway line” - which is definitely the three voices  (Tom, Howie, and Jeff Lynne) multitracked. Again, I’d guess that each vocal part is double-tracked to give it that big choral effect. 

Coming out of this chorus, we hear that four bar intro progression but without the lead guitar and then we head into the instrumental break, which follows verse chord progression. This is such an understated masterclass of playing to me. The solo starts with really just a rhythm guitar playing the chord progression in double time over the front half, with the tambourine and keyboards dropped out. It sounds so Byrds-y and again I’d be willing to bet that it’s Mike playing a Rickenbacker, doubled by a second guitar to really fill out the sound. I the back half of this section we get arguably the mist simply “solo” that Mike ever plays. It’s four ascending slide guitar notes with just a little tremolo to make them sing. If ever there were an argument needed for Mike Campbell being one of rock n roll’s truly great soloists or writers of guitar parts, you might not initially think of this song as an example, but I think it’s so perfectly understated and joyfully triumphant that you simply couldn’t imagine anything else being played there once you’ve heard it. Tom says of that solo, “It’s really stirring, with a lot of emotion in it.” and when Paul Zollo comments that “there aren’t many songs you can point to in which his solos aren’t stirring. His playing is phenomenal”, Tom laughs responds “Yeah that’s probably true. He can really just raise the quality of something so fast. And those solos are really stirring. It’s almost like another voice.” And that’s the kicker with this solo and so many of Mike’s guitar parts. Yes they’re solos, but you can hum them. And they always fit melodically within the song. Not every guitar player can get that part of playing right. We’ve said a ton already but it bears repeating. Mike Campbell is in that top bracket of guitarists who listens carefully and plays for the song. Not over it. 

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

Your question from the Learning to Fly episode was this: Learning to Fly is the second song in the Heartbreakers catalogue to feature Mike Campbell on backing vocals, but what was the first? Was it a) Listen to Her Heart, b) Louisiana Rain, c) It Ain’t Nothin’ To Me, or d) All Mixed Up? 

Well, on You’re Gonna Get It, everyone but Mike is credited with providing backing vocals, so that rules out Listen to Her Heart. On Damn The Torpedoes, that list is whittled down to just Tom, Stan, and Benmont, so it isn’t Louisiana Rain. And on Let Me Up, I’ve Had Enough, we’re down to two vocalists, just Tom and Howie Epstein, so despite Mike co-writing the song, that also rules out All Mixed Up, which means that the answer is … c) It Ain’t Nothing To Me. I’m pretty that Southern Accents is the only Heartbreakers record which credits every member of the band as providing backing vocals. When you hear Mike sing with the Dirty Knobs you do sort of see why Tom didn’t need him to sing on the Heartbreakers songs. Not because he can’t sing, but because his voice is very similar to Tom’s. Howie, Stan, and Scott Thurston provide so much more width to those harmonies because they’re voices are very different to Tom’s. It’s the same with the Byrds, The Beatles, or Queen. The vocal harmonies are so distinctive and striking because of the balance of different tones and delivery of the singers. It’s the same with the Heartbreakers. 

Your question for this week is this: When The Heartbreakers played Kings Highway on SNL on October 12, 1991, who was the host? Was it a) Kirstie Allie, b) Christian Slater, c) Kiefer Sutherland, or d) Sharon Stone?

OK, back to the song. Coming out of the solo, we get a nice tom fill from Stan and we head back into the chorus. The keyboards come back in, along with the double tambourines, and those theatrical acoustic guitar flourishes. The chorus repeats twice before that gorgeous slide guitar comes back in and plays a second, even more transcendent ascending four note lick, leading into a big pu sh into the finale where the drums switch from straight time to match the down up down up down up down up guitar lick. The song ends on a big cymbal swell from Stan and the natural decay of the instruments before a final little drum fill and cymbal hit. You don’t here a big rock ending” on a studio take very often but again, it’s so utterly perfect for this song. 

OK. Let’s talk a little about the lyrics. The killer line in this one for me is held back until that fourth verse. “I don't want to end up In a room all alone. Don't want to end up someone that I don't even know.” That’s such an incredibly powerful line. And though this is another song I’d call a “little song” (thanks again to Ivan Anderson for that brilliant turn of phrase) that one line adds a depth and punch to it that I think takes it into a slightly different place than it’s been to this point. And again, in the very first line, Tom’s very specific way of selecting words comes into play. “When the time gets right”. Not “when the time is right”. Which reads far better on paper, but lacks that punch that the hard G syllable gives you when the words are sung. “Under a big old sky. Out in a field of green. There's gotta be something left for us to believe”. Thematically, this fits the title of the album perfectly, “Into the great wide open, under them skies of blue” and “Under a big old sky out in a field of green” are expressing the same sort of emotion; “There’s something else out there. There’s something better that we can find, but we have to move on. We have to take a chance.” The chorus then really cements this idea; “I await the day

Good fortune comes our way And we'll ride down the King's Highway” And I think that “the Kings Highway” here isn’t at all a reference to the road that runs through Brooklyn, New York. If I had to guess, that was just one of Tom’s little flashes of genius. I’d bet that he had “and we’ll ride down the …. Something… highway” and toyed with different words to slot in there. A lesser writer could have gone with wide, or long, or cold or some type of adjective, but using “King’s highway” reinforces that idea of better, or more, or grander. It’s a great little bit of writing. I also love the line “No you can't hide out In a six gun town”. And again, I wonder what the sequence the songs were written in, because this lyric almost ties together Two Gunslingers and Into The Great Wide Open in some ways. I looked up whether there was a place called Six Gun Town because in the wild west, it felt like it might be something that exists. Lo and behold, there was a place in Kentucky called Six Gun City, which was a sort amusement/them park very close to Tombstone Junction in McCreary County. But the obvious metaphor is that “You can’t disappear in small town because everyone knows your business”

It’s one of those Tom lyrics that sounds like he wrote it quickly and had a clear vision for it in his mind early on, with maybe just a few small edits here and there. Tom delivers the lines in his natural mid-range voice and again shows his vocal dexterity on the word “day” of  “I await the day…” which sounds easy to sing but takes good vocal control and attention to detail, which is something I always say Tom is underappreciated for. 

I think I may have said on the Learning To Fly episode that you can almost think of Into The Great Wide Open as a continuation of where Tom was at on Full Moon Fever and I think that Kings Highway is the song on this record that would most easily have suited the last. It’s simple, it’s short, and it’s packed with guitars and small, subtle sleights of hand that you don’t always notice on first, second, or third listening. 

King’s Highway was released as a single in the UK and Canada, failing to chart in the former and reaching #4 1 on the latter, as well as hitting #4 on the US rock chart, presumably from gaining radio play despite only being released as a promo single in America. Curiously, it was never released in a vinyl format, only as a CD single and a cassette single. Man, I still shake my head thinking about buying cassette singles! What an awful lot of work for two or three tracks!!! 

OK PettyHeads, that’s it for this week! I honestly didn’t think this episode would be very long because superficially, there doesn’t sound like there’s a ton going on in this song. How wrong can one man be! King’s Highway is just one of those perfect little pop songs that Tom could write in his sleep and that was elevated by an excellent arrangement and perfect production. Again, it’s a song I love and I can’t really put it at the very top table with the likes of Refugee, or The Waiting, but it’s pretty high up on that second tier of tracks that a non-Pettyhead would listen to and really enjoy. So after really debating this one more than I’ve had to for quite a while, I’m going to give Kings Highway a 8 out of 10!

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Petty Trivia

QUESTION: When The Heartbreakers played Kings Highway on SNL on October 12, 1991, who was the host? Was it a) Kirstie Allie, b) Christian Slater, c) Kiefer Sutherland, or d) Sharon Stone?

ANSWER: Well, all four people hosted during SNL’s seventeenth season. Christian Slater introduced Bonnie Raitt the week after the Heartbreakers’ appearance, with the legendary blues musician performing Something to Talk About and “I Can’t Make You Love Me”. The week after that, after being introduced by Kiefer Sutherland, hair metal turned hard rock band Skid Row appeared to promote their second album, Slave To The Grind. Petty fan Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam appeared toward the end of the season and performed Alive and Porch after being introduced by Sharon Stone. So your answer is a) Kirstie Allie. Allie, then starring as Rebecca in Cheers, appeared, hosted the third episode of that season and introduced the Heartbreakers, who played Into The Great Wide Open and, of course, Kings Highway.

Lyrics

When the time gets right
I'm gonna pick you up
And take you far way from
From trouble my love

Under a big ol' sky
Out in a field of green
There's gotta be something left for us to believe

Oh, I'll await the day
Good fortune comes our way
And we ride down Kings Highway, yeah, yeah

No you can't hide out
In a six gun town
We wanna hold our heads up
But we gotta stay down

I don't wanna end up
In a room all alone
Don't wanna end up someone
That I don't even know

Lover, I'll await the day
Good fortune comes our way
And we ride down Kings Highway, yeah yeah

Lover, I'll await the day
Good fortune comes our way
And we ride down Kings Highway, yeah yeah

I'll await the day
Good fortune comes our way
And we ride down Kings Highway, yeah yeah
Yeah yeah
Yeah yeah
Yeah

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