But I don't know, maybe had something to do with the song, like "I Won't Back Down" and things. It was a pretty horrific thing to happen. On writing the song "I Won't Back Down" in the years after an arsonist burned down his house And I was just one in thousands of little bands that started then in around '64, '65. This looks like a great, great job to me."Īnd apparently it did to lots of people, because very quickly after that, there were bands forming in garages all over town. You have your friends and you all learn an instrument, and you're a self-contained unit. So when I saw The Beatles, it sort of hit me like a lightning bolt to the brain that, "Oh I see.
#Tom petty something in the air movie#
I didn't see how it could happen, because you needed to be in a movie and have the music appear on the beach and stuff. I didn't think you could just become a rock and roll singer. On being inspired to form a band after seeing The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 And when I went home, I kind of scoured the neighborhood and came up with some old Elvis records, and I started listening to them, and they really took me over. I don't remember what he said really, but I was very impressed by it. A lot of, as you'd expect, mobs in the street, and he was just back from the Army. But we did indeed go there, and it was quite a circus. And I really didn't have much idea of who Elvis was. And I was invited there by my aunt, who drove me down to see Elvis. He used to film the college basketball practices and football practices, and when a movie came nearby - as a lot of them did around northern Florida - he would usually hire onto the set and work in some capacity.Īnd he was working on an Elvis Presley movie in 1961, I think, Follow That Dream, it was called. He was the guy in town that developed all the film and he had a movie camera. On meeting Elvis Presley on a movie set when he was 11 You didn't really think about it that much, but looking back on it, it was such a musical education. It was a friend and something that was there. It took us a good three hours to get that one written down. The hardest one was "Get Off My Cloud" by the Stones. You go for the second one." And then sometimes you'd wait an hour for it to come on again so you could finish it up.
When I was 15 or 16 playing in groups, we used to sit in the car and try to write the lyrics down as a song was playing, and we'd assign each person a verse, you know: "I'm going to do the first one. It was this amazing thing, and I miss it in a way because music has become so compartmentalized now, but in those days, it was all right in one spot. You could hear Frank Sinatra, right into the Yardbirds. In the mid-'60s, AM radio, pop radio, was just this incredible thing that played all kinds of music. I didn't have the money to have a vast record collection, so I learned everything, really, from the radio. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through. They were more of just your "white trash" kind of family. My family wasn't involved in the college.
#Tom petty something in the air drivers#
But it's really surrounded by this kind of very rural kind of people that are - you know, they're farmers or tractor drivers or just all kinds of - game wardens, you name it. I wasn't part of the academic circle, but it's an interesting place because you can meet almost any kind of person from many walks of life because of the university. On growing up in the college town of Gainesville, Fla. Petty and the Heartbreakers were, among many other things, a great covers band.įor more oddities, one-offs or songs with an interesting backstory check the massive back-catalogue at From the Vaults. but the song has lived on in movies, television shows and wherever a good covers band plays. Subsequent singles and the band's sole album didn't do well, despite the latter being critically acclaimed. It was a band with an age gap, the pianist Andrew Newman (known as Thunderclap) was 27. The other guitarist was 15-year old Jimmy McCulloch who later ended up in McCartney's Wings and died of an overdose 10 years after Something in the Air. Written by the band's drummer/guitarist John “Speedy” Kean who had been the Who's chauffeur and with producer Pete Townshend on bass, it topped the UK charts Which is why on the four CD Live Anthology released in 2009 we find covers of I'm a Man, Diddy Wah Diddy, I Just Want to Make Love to You, Grateful Dead's Friend of the Devil, Green Onions, Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well and the theme to Goldfinger.Īnd this very straight cover of Thunderclap Newman's sole hit in '69. The late Tom Petty knew a lot of rock history, having been inspired by the blues and the British Invasion in addition to Southern rock.
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