Tom Petty - Hard Promises
#207
By Chris Roberts
May 5 1981
Tom petty
Hard Promises
Allen’s Rating: 4 out of 5
Chris’ Rating: 5 out of 5
Highlights:
The Waiting
A Woman In Love
The Nightwatchman
The Insider
On Hard Promise’s inner sleeve, there’s a photo of the band in front of an open door. It’s backstage. The Heartbreakers are ready to go on, but the only one smiling at the camera is Tom Petty. It’s an honest, sincere smile—maybe even a little nervous. Damn The Torpedoes had been a huge commercial and critical success, and now he’s headlining at the Cow Palace. In just a few seconds, he’ll be playing his music in front of thousands of fans, screaming for “Refugee,” “Breakdown,” and “American Girl.” But seconds can feel like hours while you’re waiting to get back on that stage. And as we all know (I’m writing this on October 13, 2020) … the waiting is the hardest part.
The Waiting. What a song! What a riff! Petty never aspired to move beyond the sounds of his heroes; instead, he sweated the details trying to perfect it. “The Waiting” paved the way to TP becoming the junior-most member of the Wilburys. “The Waiting” is a song so Byrdsy that Roger McGwinn swears he wrote it (twas Janis Joplin who inspired the song). Like Petty, I’m not patient, I’m punctual—I hate the waiting! But THIS waiting is the anticipation for something wonderful, like that day before you go to Disneyland as a kid, that is captured here.
The rest of Hard Promises is how it all falls apart.
Take the next song, the blistering “A Woman In Love.” That crying, opening guitar kills me, the sound of a Heartbreaker’s heartbreak. The realization, that she’s in love, but not with you. With that guy who’s so wrong for her.
Hard Promises is so chock full of misdemeanors and yearning losers (by way of Florida), it plays like an Elmore Leonard novel. Take “The Nightwatchman.” The groove here makes me dance, every damn time. Springsteen channels John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy—he has his acoustic, lonesome sad sacks of law enforcement, “Highway Patrolman” and “State Trooper.” But Petty puts some local drawl and fine boogie in Nightwatchman’s beat. He may carry a .38, but his life’s worth more than minimum wage. “Something Big” and “The Criminal Kind” feature more shady characters from the same side of town, where folks with speed balls get killed robbing the liquor store. And on “Kings Road,” Petty is a real gone gator in the UK, like Mater in Cars 2, confused by all the funny-looking-I don’t-knows in und-er-way-er. Maybe a little un-PC, but, hey—he gives a shout out to West L.A.
Side B kicks off with the lovely, but plaintive pop shuffle of “Letting You Go,” then kicks into obsessive hoedown mode on “A Thing About You,” before we reach Petty’s crushing masterpiece: The Insider. Here’s where the album title comes from:
I’m an insider.
I’ve been burned by the fire.
Oh and I’ve had to live with some hard promises.
I’ve crawled through the briars
I’m an insider.
It’s not about the fire that would burn down his Hollywood HIlls home, but it feels like it. But Petty wrote “The Insider” for Stevie Nicks (she duets). Nicks intimidated TP at first, with her Fleetwood Mac fame and bustling entourage she was larger than life. But Petty was so proud of the results, he couldn’t let her have Insider—instead, she got “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.”
Hard Promises closes with “You Can Still Change Your Mind,” where TP revisits the opening track and tells his darling, that while it gets harder every day, she doesn’t have to wait. If she’d just change her mind, everything would be alright…
XXX
I’m an art guy by trade, so I want to talk about the album cover. I originally had Hard Promises on cassette, and I never thought much about it—just a picture of Petty. Nothing special. Now, I have a pretty nice vinyl copy, and at twelve full inches, I realize just how awesome it is.
Tom Petty is not posing. He’s just looking at records. Having fun, living his dream. Something’s got his eye, maybe some Del Shannon LP in the cutout bin. Behind him, there’s one of those old 45 turnstiles just overflowing with plain wrapped singles. There are blurry records in the background, and I cannot identify any of them. In the bottom right, there’s some kind of label that says CALIFORNIA in big red curved letters. I find bits of Spanish. If I had to guess, it’s a record store specializing in Mexican music. (I notice that his hand looks weird. Like it’s dead. I wonder… was this some kind of photo composite? It can’t be. It’s a B &W photo that was hand colored. The photographer is Bay Area’s own Joel Bernstein. He also shot the cover of “After The Gold Rush,” and his portfolio is insane. The Boss. Dylan, Joni, CSN. Prince. His work inspired the look of Almost Famous. His work feels pure and essential.
XXX
Hard Promises is the first album I’ve reviewed that I specifically requested. It was much harder to write this than the blind reviews of Uriah Heep or Gino Vanelli, and I struggled to listen objectively. I guess I’m a fan. I saw TP live a few times, including one night at the Forum where both Dylan and the Boss came out for the encore, “Traveling Band.” I met my wife the year Full Moon Fever came out. The cassette never left my pickup’s dash, except to travel with me to Paris. I sang “Alright For Now” to my son to get him to sleep when he was baby. And in 2020, Hard Promises helped me get through the hardest part.
https://open.spotify.com/album/5OO8oMupaMhIZhMrEM8ja3?si=WpX0JXhvS5aLwf5p2kUoQg
