American Girl

from the LP Tom Petty & the Heart- breakers, Shelter Records, 1976



Truly one of the greatest singer songwriters in this modern era, Tom Petty epitomizes everything which is “rock-n-roll”, and his tunes serve as the soundtrack to more than one generation’s lives; I’m not kidding people, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single fan of rock music between the ages of 25 – 50 that doesn’t have at least one concrete memory attached to a Petty song. I’ve grown an aversion to the phrase “Americana”, due to its incessant use by douchebag journalists and its ever-broadening mantle including ever-crappier bands, but if anyone deserves the sole-title of that word, it’s Tom Petty; Dylan might have had it, but he went way too far up his own ass for a while…and Neil Young is from Canada…does that make him “Canadacana”? Anyways, the songs that Petty writes are tales of America in the modern age: love & lust, cars & highways, post modern disillusionment---oh, and lots of smoking joints! This particular song has been picked apart more than most, and its etiology has spawned an unswerving myth about it being inspired by the suicide of a young girl at the University of Florida (Petty grew up in Gainesville); in Paul Zollo’s book Conversations With Tom Petty, the singer himself denounces that as bullshit, and tells Zollo that he actually wrote the track while living in the suburbs of L.A. at Leon Russell’s pad, “…I was right by the freeway…and I remember thinking that that sounded like the ocean to me…that was my ocean…where I heard the waves crash it was just the cars going by…it was in the bicentennial, when there were a lot of ‘American’ things going on…we actually made the record on the 4^th of July, 1976…” His story rings much truer to the vibe found within this track, in my opinion anyways; the notion of someone striving for something better than what they see around them is relatable to virtually every strata of American life, that feeling of hitting the pavement, two feet on the ground but still dreaming of the American dream. When he sings, “…god it’s so painful, something that’s so close, and still so far out of reach…” he wasn’t just being creative: after being convinced to move with his former band Mudcrutch from Florida to California, Petty found himself without a record deal or part of the band by the time he wrote this song. There’s one small effect at the beginning of the track that I’ve never seen anyone ask him about: right after he delivers the first line, “…well she was an American girl, raised on promises…”, someone inhales a fast breath (plays out of the right speaker) which sounds an awful lot like somebody taking a hit on a joint, and I’d love to know if that was intentionally done that way, or perhaps someone really getting high in the studio when they recorded it. One thing is for sure, this song rocks!! Whether you are listening to it in the car, at a bar, or while smoking black tar (which I don’t endorse or recommend), this song just feels right, and it will deservedly remain a staple of FM rock radio long after we are all dead and gone.