I've Made 1600 Episodes On This Channel-This Was The TOUGHEST One I've EVER Done!--Professor of Rock

So the other day I was doing some organizing and I found a buried treasure. A Paper I wrote back in Jr High about My Late Father. The Assignment back then was do a report on something your father is passionate about. My Dad passed away almost 7 years ago so it was a really precious memory to read this paper. My dad and I always connected on music, he’s the reason I do what I do. I did the Paper on his favorite songs of all time. So coming next I’m going to count down my dad’s top 10 and tell you the stories..from both the history of the song and his own stories behind them. It’s a very personal episode and so I’m going to get right into it.

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Brandon Fugal

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Kelly Moan, Curtis Stoddard, Paul Duenas, Robert Hickerty, rondell m

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#classicrock #60smusic #vinylstory #60srock

So At #10 is One of my Dad’s all-time favorites…Tom Petty. His zeal for the music of Tom & the Heartbreakers really rubbed off on me. We both loved “Free Fallin” with equal enthusiasm: I remember him picking up from football practice and he had just bought Full Moon Fever and was playing it in his truck. When this song came on it was a no brainer and we couldn’t help but sing to the top of our lungs. A little-known story about Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” is that the lyrics started as an off-the-cuff joke to crack up his collaborator, the great Jeff Lynne from ELO. They were in the studio, Petty was at the keyboard playing the main riff, when Lynne suggested cutting a chord to simplify it. Petty, just trying to be funny for his friend, riffed the opening line: “She’s a good girl, loves her mama, loves Jesus and America too. She’s a good girl, crazy about Elvis.” Lynne couldn’t stop laughing and said, “That’s really good, let’s use that.”

Petty was surprised that he just pulled that out of thin air, but he rolled with it: When they got to the part of their ‘song in progress’ where they needed a chorus, Petty wasn’t sure what to sing. Lynne leaned over and suggested the title “Free Fallin’.” Petty then improvised the vocal melody for the chorus, taking his voice up an octave to fit the phrase, and the song basically sprang from that casual studio joke and became his biggest solo hit. The two of them wrote and recorded the whole track in just two days. Petty finished the rest of the lyrics that night, drawing inspiration from the scenes he passed on daily drives along the bustling Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles: “Free Fallin” was a biggie for my Dad and me, and it was one of 10 Tom Petty songs to reach #1 on the Mainstream Rock chart. It rose to #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #5 in Canada in ’89.

“My dad’s pick at #9 was one that he told me bought the 45 record for the day it was first released in stores. It’s Tommy James and the Shondells with Crimson and Clover. My dad always told me that he felt Tommy James was one of the most underrated artists of the rock era. I was raised on all of his hits. So when I got a chance to interview Tommy In las Vegas when my dad was still alive I set up a little phone call for the two of them to talk. It was one of my most favorite moments. Tommy was so gracious he and my dad hit it off and had a great conversation about music.

Tommy James woke up with the phrase “Crimson and Clover” stuck in his head. He found it poetic and visually striking, even if he wasn’t sure what the heck it meant at first. Tommy has his own take on the inspiration—he connected it to his favorite color and flower—while Shondells drummer Peter Lucia, Jr. suggested the title came from a high school football thing (The Crimson) playing Hopatcong, whose name means “green place” or clover. In the end, the exact origin of the idea isn’t as important as what the song did sonically.

The way vibrato and tremolo was incorporated into the recording of “Crimson & Clover” created a sound that sounded almost otherworldly. Released in 1968 by Tommy James and the Shondells,
The stories of The Beatles I Wanna Hold you Hand, Golden Slumbers Carry That Weight and the End, Paul McCartney Maybe I'm Amazed, Simon and Garfunkel Scarborough Fair, Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven, Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan and more.