It’s was such a Tom Petty of Tom Petty to, 13 years into his career, make his first solo album.
Full Moon Fever is one of the greatest pop-rock albums of all time, one of the most prolific writers of any generation making such a good piece the entirety of side one charted in one way or another… it’s difficult to deny the power of Petty at this time. Full Moon Fever was out a mere 7 months after The Traveling Wilburys debuted [a fact that earned Petty two album of the year nominations at the Grammys that year] and proved better than anything else that Tom Petty was not to be written off as just a bandleader.
Full Moon Fever was produced by renaissance man Jeff Lynne, and featured Phil Jones on drums, and Mike Campbell on guitar [all the Heartbreakers, with the exception of Stan Lynch, make an apperence on the album despite the status as a solo album], with guesting spots from a who’s who of rock’s greatest including George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Del Shannon, and Jim Keltner. The whole album is a full of some of the most famous stuff the man ever recorded, Free Fallin, Won’t Back Down, Runnin Down a Dream - to name a few - but I think the most Petty-esque song on the whole album was actually one of it’s minor hits, Yer So Bad.
Yer So Bad is so quintessentially Tom Petty it’s hard to even make sense of the fact it was ever written and recorded in earnest. It’s his typical humor, tongue and cheek and darkly hilarious, critiquing just about everything while displaying his disapproval in the most outrageous ways possible. My sister got lucky, married a yuppie / Took him for all he was worth / Now she’s a swinger, dating a singer / I can’t decide which is worse are some of the most deeply sadistic and sarcastic lyrics one can open a song, or quite frankly ANY story with. It’s almost childlike with it’s rhymes, how simple and constant they are, and it opens up the world of the narrator and the narrator himself, who further expands out in the chorus with: But not me baby, I’ve got you to save me / Oh, yer so bad, best thing I ever had / In a world gone mad, yer so bad. This use of the homonym of “bad” could, in itself, be seen as another critique by Petty, this time about the evolution of language in common vernacular - how silly some of it sounds. How both things the narrator speaks of he can describe as bad, yet based around context only one is truly bad. My sisters ex-husband, can’t get no lovin’ / Walks around dog-faced and hurt / Now he’s got nothing, head in the oven / I can’t decide which is worse is verse two, which is quickly followed again by the repetition of the chorus. This verse highlights the absurdity of just about everything Petty is saying, the simple I can’t decide which is worse sums up just about how genius the satire of the piece is.
Petty, through his life, was no stranger to humor despite the tough exterior he tried to display, but that part of him never shined through his work until Full Moon Fever. You had one-offs like Jammin’ Me or Century City which leaned a bit more into humor whilst still maintaining a serious drive but 1988 is when Petty became a satirist in the best sense of the word. This can really be seen with the first Traveling Wilburys record, as everything about the Wilburys was in some way a joke [except their friendship and adoration of music]. Fake names, stupid videos, a Bruce Springsteen parody, Bob Dylan singing a song with the words Cahuenga Langa-Langa Shoe Box Soup, or Roy Orbison singing in his angelic voice Your money or your life? - the whole thing boiled down to being one of the goofiest things any of the members would do their whole career. Full Moon Fever was Petty’s first release after the Wilburys introduction, and Lynne [fellow Wilbury] collaborated heavily on the project, maintaining more of that spirit first captured with the band. The first track of the album, maybe the song most synonymous with Petty in general, Free Fallin’ was only created out of an attempt to make Lynne laugh. I’m a bad boy ‘cause I don’t even miss her / I’m a bad boy for breaking her heart is utterly ridiculous coming from a 32 year old man, as is I’ve slept in your treehouse / My middle name is Earl from A Mind with a Heart of Its Own, all without mentioning CD releases of the album containing an interlude after Runnin’ Down A Dream that included Petty asking of the listeners to hold a moment of silence as other formats had to flip to the second side now, OR Roy Orbison singing on a song called Zombie Zoo - Full Moon Fever was divorced from anything Petty did before as it was so outrageous and light it was hard to believe it came from the same guy whose image was built upon fighting authority and leading a band like it was the navy.
This sort of sarcastic and absurdist humor would follow the rest of Petty’s music. Songs like It’s Good To Be King are steeped in a backhanded retorts that can only be seen as cynically comical, or even a song as poignant as Rhino Skin from 1999’s Echo carries the line You need elephant balls if you don’t want to crawl / On your hands and knees through this world. But with Yer So Bad Petty spits out a love letter that boils down, in it’s truly simplest form: “My sister is a bitch, her ex-husband is a loser, but that will never happen to us because we’re above that.”, in other words: “in a world gone mad, yer so bad.”, something that cannot be said in any other way, any less hilarious. Typical Tom Petty, in other words.
The equally absurd music video for Yer So Bad:
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