More Tom Petty

More of Our Favorite Titles from 1978

• A vintage Shelter pressing that was doing just about everything right, earning excellent Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides – fairly quiet vinyl too
• Rich and open with a killer bottom end, musically it’s surely the best record Tom Petty ever made – a late ’70s Rock Classic
• Three of Petty’s best songs are here – “Restless,” “I Need To Know,” and “Listen To Her Heart” – and on this early pressing they sound amazing
• “Overall, the current LP boasts an impressive stylistic cohesiveness with its predecessor, but what makes the album exciting are the fresh hints of openness and expansion just beneath the surface. The rhythms are a bit looser, and there’s a new emphasis on Petty’s rough, driving, rock & roll guitar in the mix.” – Rolling Stone
• If you’re a Tom Petty fan, his sophomore effort, released in 1978, surely belongs in your collection
• This is a Personal Favorite of yours truly, and a Must Own Rock and Pop album from 1978, which, in hindsight, turned out to be a surprisingly good year for music

Sweetly textured guitars, breathy vocals — all the subtleties of a High Quality Recording are here, along with prodigious amounts of bass and powerful dynamics. Check out that drum sound! If you can play this one at the levels it demands, you might just be shocked at how good it sounds.

This vintage Shelter pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of You’re Gonna Get It! Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1978
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Petty’s Most Essential Album

This is the band’s Masterpiece, with four or five of their best and Hardest Rockin’ songs. Both sides come flyin’ out of the gate with uptempo straight ahead rockers that have the Big Sound we go crazy for here at Better Records.

Of course the sound is punchy and alive — with Hot Stampers, what else would they be? — but where did all that studio ambience come from? Simple: the better copies have the resolution that’s missing from the average pressing. You know the kind of run-of-the-mill LP I’m talking about: punchy but crude and just a bit too aggressive to really enjoy.

Most copies are harsh and gritty, but when you get one with some real richness and a fully extended top end, the sound makes sense and the edge disappears.

If you’re a fan of this music this copy is going to blow you away. If you’re not a fan yet this copy may just make you one.

The first three tracks on side one are As Good As It Gets for rock music — we love ’em! Tracks one and two on side two are equally good, and Restless is a knockout too.

What We’re Listening For On You’re Gonna Get It!

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Best Practices

Recently we did one of our regular shootouts for You’re Gonna Get It!, using pressings we know from experience have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them as carefully as we always do, but this time we threw the new 180 gram pressing into our cleaning pile. Then we unplugged everything in the house we could get away with, carefully warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next couple hours playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the others do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces those passages.

The process is simple enough. First you go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don’t have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful originals.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that’s certainly your prerogative, but we can’t imagine losing what’s good about this music — the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight — just to hear it with less background noise.

A Must Own Rock Record

We consider this album the band’s Masterpiece. It’s a recording that belongs in any serious Rock Collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found here.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

When the Time Comes 
You’re Gonna Get It 
Hurt 
Magnolia 
Too Much Ain’t Enough

Side Two

I Need to Know
Listen to Her Heart 
No Second Thoughts
Restless
Baby’s a Rock ‘N’ Roller

Rolling Stone Review

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, released last year, was a debut album that declared almost nothing, but intimated all over the place. The music was intricate and deft, with spooky hints of everyone from J.J. Cale to the Guess Who, all played very close to the vest. Petty himself lived up to the “Mystery Man” title of one of the songs, practicing a terse and elliptical romanticism, always just out of reach. Anything more explicit might have made him banal: his very elusiveness was what gave the record most of its tantalizing, unsettling charm.

On You’re Gonna Get It!, Petty has shed some — but not all — of his cloaks. “Magnolia,” the most straightforward love song he’s yet done, maintains the mystique: “Then she kissed me and told me her name/I never did tell her mine.” But by the song’s end, it’s the girl who’s forgotten the singer, while he’s left remembering her. Everything’s open-ended enough to make you want more.

Overall, the current LP boasts an impressive stylistic cohesiveness with its predecessor, but what makes the album exciting are the fresh hints of openness and expansion just beneath the surface. The rhythms are a bit looser, and there’s a new emphasis on Petty’s rough, driving, rock & roll guitar in the mix. Some of the cuts have a Latinized swing, and you can hear bits and pieces of outlaw grit, urban blues and Los Angeles harmonies everywhere.

The slippery, layered textures of sound that occasionally seemed mannered on the first record are completely under control here. The new material is, if anything, stronger, and only “Baby’s a Rock ‘n’ Roller” falls short. Like the earlier “Anything That’s Rock ‘N’ Roll,” the number’s too self-conscious a celebration to be entirely convincing: the Heartbreakers are clearly on better terms with ambiguity than with joy.

Petty omits all narrative signposts from his lyrics, depending instead on cryptic, repeated catch phrases and the doomy shifts of the music to flesh out his images. On “You’re Gonna Get It,” the story is left mostly untold. Instead, a stray piano vamp here, a drumbeat there, and jagged guitars slipping in and out of focus build to create a brooding; violent tension, while the singer sneaks through the cracks in the music. Even during the LP’s most upbeat interludes, the aura of undefined menace — coolly accepted as a fact of modern life — is always palpable in the background.

Tom Petty’s achievement is all the more remarkable because, for all his eclecticism, he’s basically working in a mainstream style, mining the obsessions and quirks beneath the sentimental conventions of Seventies pop. He’s got too much determination and integrity to be contained within a cult, and You’re Gonna Get It! is a bid to break him loose. You can’t exactly dance to the album, but it’s still great highway music. And for a restless mystery man like Petty, who’s always impatient for the next step, there’s no doubt which matters more.