“Don’t Come Around Here No More” performed live, 2006Ī filterable, searchable & sortable somewhat up to date database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written. “Don’t Come Around Here No More” performed acoustically, 1988 “Don’t Come Around Here No More” performed live, 1985 One of the things I’ve realized in the past week or as I’ve been doing these posts just how much I loved Tom Petty as a singer, and “Don’t Come Around Here No More” is one of his greatest performances, giving what is obviously and proudly a totally artificial construct a human center.Īlso helping: the rave-up at the end, one last surprising twist, but also the Heartbreakers reminding you that they are a rock and roll band, with Mike Campbell soaring towards the paisley stratosphere with his wah-wah pedal as the song speeds toward the fade-out.įueled by a somewhat disturbing and slightly problematic Alice in Wonderland themed video - the entire direction of which consisted of “hey, can you make a ‘surprised’ face?” - “Don’t Come Around Here No More” made #13 on the Billboard charts, not so much despite, but because it was weird and unexpected and stood out on the radio no matter what the format. There’s also the contrast between the perfectly smoothing backing vocals and Petty’s utter rawness when he sings things like “Yuh tangle mhigh amoooohSHUNS!” and “Who you axpect a meeeee?” The cool thing about “Don’t Come Around Here No More” is that it twists and turns, seemingly starting and stopping ( “Stop!”) at will, voices and synths and that coral sitar coming and going as they please. But it was Tom Petty’s sad, resigned vocals that emotionally centered the song. Of course, unlike Prince, who made his reputation genre-busting, Tom Petty was savvy enough to do it just this one time, kinda like somebody who dropped acid, had a great time and figured he’d quit while he was ahead.Ĭredit, of course, goes to David A Stewart of Eurythmics, who copped the title from something that Stevie Nicks said to the non-evil Joe Walsh, and then provided the both the synth hook and the coral sitar hook that brought you into the song even before Petty opened his mouth. In fact, Petty even defended “Don’t Come Around Here No More” to his record company by citing “ When Doves Cry” as something weird but popular. Well, maybe Prince, who was riding high on the cross-pollination of Purple Rain and was just about to release two consecutive albums adding psychedelia to his stew. Especially when we made the video, they thought it was really going to go, and it did.”Īll great artists take creative risks at pivotal points in their career, ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ is a perfect example of Petty stepping out of his comfort zone and him forcing his label to make it the lead single from Southern Accents is proof of how proud The Heartbreakers man is of the record.Unlike the pedestrian “You Got Lucky,” which wed unconvincing synths on the verses to an admittedly anthemic (and yeah, OK, catchy) chorus, the genre-busting “Don’t Come Around Here No More” somehow wed synth-pop, psychedelia, soul and garage rock into something that none of us had ever heard before. That’s really far out too, but it’s really popular. He then made this instruction to his label: “Listen to this Prince record. But I thought, at the time, Prince had come out with ‘When Doves Cry’ I saw it as kind of going for the same kind of thing in a different way.” I think they were a little concerned that it was a little too far off the map. The Heartbreakers leader continued: “I think when we brought it to the record company, they were very mystified by it – because it wasn’t like anything I had ever done. The late Petty told Paul Zollo this in the 2020 book Conversations With Tom Petty: “I wanted it to be a single,” before adding: “And we worked probably two or three weeks on it. Petty would, of course, end up keeping the song all to himself with it resulting in the lead single from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Southern Accents album in 1985.
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