I like Tom Petty.<\/p>\n
So when I heard that he was chosen to be the halftime entertainment at the Super Bowl, I was instantly intrigued.<\/p>\n
The game? Didn’t really care about. Football’s not my sport. But Tom Petty? Yeah, I’d tune in for that.<\/p>\n
The morning DJs I listen to on the morning commute had been mocking the choice of Tom Petty for weeks. “He’d be a great choice for Super Bowl Twenty-Two<\/i>, not Super Bowl Forty-Two.”<\/p>\n
But Tom Petty is one of the classic rock gods. A Tom Petty song is distinctive. It’s catchy. You know, right from the first guitar chords, that this is a Tom Petty song.<\/p>\n
And that voice!<\/p>\n
It’s a half-mumble, a half-whisper. And it carries with it such<\/i> gravitas. And it’s so… nasal<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I’ve sometimes described Tom Petty as having the voice Bob Dylan would have if he didn’t sound like he’s on death’s door all the time.<\/p>\n
Some people don’t like Tom Petty.<\/p>\n
My sister, for instance. She just doesn’t like Tom Petty. Suffice it to say, she probably wasn’t looking forward to the Super Bowl halftime show.<\/p>\n
But I was.<\/p>\n
And at long last, the Super Bowl halftime show!<\/p>\n
Petty’s set started off with “American Girl.” For some reason, this upbeat, up-tempo song was played as a kind of funereal dirge.<\/p>\n
Then “I Won’t Back Down.” Again, this upbeat song, played with a funereal dirge to it.<\/p>\n
Then, “Free Fallin’,” as the hold-up-the-lighters ballad. What? “Free Fallin'”? A song about slacker skateboarders? A hold-up-the-lighters ballad? What?<\/p>\n
Finally, the set came to a close with “Running Down A Dream.”<\/p>\n
And I was disappointed.<\/p>\n
Because the morning DJs were right. Tom Petty’s set list would have been perfect<\/i>. Twenty years ago.<\/p>\n
He played nothing he’d written since I graduated from high school.<\/p>\n
“Free Fallin'” was the perfect high school song.<\/p>\n
Maybe the DJs were right.<\/p>\n
Tom Petty let me down.<\/p>\n
Or maybe I let myself<\/i> down. Maybe I was expecting Tom Petty to be sheer genius. Maybe I was expecting a show that rocked<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Only… the show didn’t rock. It was amiable. It was inoffensive. The songs were played well. Petty conveyed them well. But when I listen to my Tom Petty CDs, there’s a drive and energy there that was wholly lacking from his Super Bowl concert.<\/p>\n
But you know what?<\/p>\n
Tom Petty had the biggest venue of his life<\/i>. That’s not a shabby thing.<\/p>\n
Yes, he may not have played the songs to my satisfaction, but there’s a hundred million people out there who thought they were fantastic<\/i>.<\/p>\n
And that’s what really matters, isn’t it? That someone, somewhere, thought Tom Petty was fantastic. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I like Tom Petty. So when I heard that he was chosen to be the halftime entertainment at the Super Bowl, I was instantly intrigued. The game? Didn’t really care about. Football’s not my sport. But Tom Petty? Yeah, I’d tune in for that. The morning DJs I listen to on the morning commute hadContinue reading “On Tom Petty’s Super Bowl Show”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[532],"class_list":["post-1682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-tom-petty","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}