S3E8 Don't Do Me Like That

               
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Length: 16:38 - Release Date: March 30, 2022 - US Chart #10

Hey folks! Today's episode covers the superb, Don't Do Me Like That, which is the first track from side two of Damn the Torpedoes. If you want to check out the song before we dig into it, you can find it here: https://youtu.be/EFkJ_BOz88E

I start the episode by paying tribute to Taylor hawkins, one of the most brilliant and charismatic rock drummers of the past two decades, who we sadly lost this past week. Check out this fantastic video of him talking drums and music here: https://youtu.be/PwjEc8S0PRo

You can find the 1974 Mudcrutch version of the song here: https://youtu.be/vuEdZVX4B-8

If you want to hear what a leslie sounds like and see how it works, check out this really short video here: https://youtu.be/F4XSZ1haPk4

And if you want to go deep on the recording process, including what types of mics were used for different instruments etc. check out the superb "Produce Like a Pro" episode featuring Damn the Torpedoes engineer Shelley Yakus here: https://youtu.be/5zoCsq-oBjA

Transcript

(* Note - the transcript is as-written before recording. I usually change a few sentences or words here and there on the hoof as I'm speaking.)

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, my fine friends. Welcome to the eighth episode of season three of the Tom Petty Project Podcast! I am your host, Kevin Brown.Today’s episode covers the opening track from side two of Damn The Torpedoes, Don’t Do Me Like That. If you wanna listen to the song before we get started, I don’t embed the songs in the episode itself due to licensing issues, so there’s a link in the episode notes, for you to check the song out ahead of listening to me ramble on about it! 

Before we dig into the episode though, I wanted to send my heartfelt condolences to Taylor Hawkins’ family, friends, and bandmates. The news of his death on Friday really knocked me sideways. I’ve been a huge Foo Fighters fan since my brother in law Mike scored me a free ticket to see them live in Saskatoon on the Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace tour in 2008. I knew a very small handful of songs before the gig; Everlong, Monkey Wrench, Learn to Fly, and The Pretender, the latter of which was recommended by my mom and was the song that really made me sit up and pay attention to them. After seeing them play live, Taylor was a very big part of me falling in love with them as a band. He was so charismatic and wild, yet at the same time, deadly accurate behind a kit. You never heard him drop the beat, miss a fill, or throw the timing off and it was obvious that he lived to play. He became easily one of my favourite rock n roll drummers and one of the very best I’ve seen live. Both my daughters also loved him and are fans of the band. The break a leg tour was my eldest girl’s first ever rock show and my youngest daughter came with me on the last tour and after the gig, said to me “The drummer is kinda like animal from the muppets” and that’s how I always imagined him after that. A wild, crazy, drum-obsessed animal who was also so warm and personable that you’d love to give him a big hug. Thanks for all the music and the memories Taylor. Your music and the impact it and you had on people will live on forever. 

OK, let’s get into Don’t Do Me Like That.

Don’t Do Me Like That was originally recorded as a Mudcrutch song in1974 when Denny Cordell had sent that band down to Tulsa to record. That version was released as part of 1995’s Playback compilation. That early version was most definitely a little rough around the edges, with some of the transitions between sections being a little half-cooked. There’s also the signature Mike Campbel guitar lick missing and the lyrics are slightly different from the version that was recorded for Torpedoes, including the line “hurt you down to size” rather than “cut you down to size”. It also features a way funkier ending with a pretty damn cool breakbeat through the outro that I actually think wouldn’t have been out of place in the re-recording. Tom tells Paul Zollo, in “Conversations with Tom Petty” that “it was kind of an R&B idea. I was trying to do an R&B song” and that drum break at the end definitely fits with that idea. It’s also possibly why it was removed in favour of a straighter-time approach when Jimmy Iovine convinced Tom to re-record it, so that it would fit the overall aesthetic of the album.  

The song opens with the full band coming in together with those thunderous drums, Ron’s bass, and the guitars stabbing the same beats as the kick drum. We have those wonderful, simple fills that are brilliantly panned as they come down. If you listen under headphones, you’ll notice that tom rolls start on the left side and roll over to the right. I hadn’t actually noticed this specifically until I heard the drums isolated during an interview that Shelly Yakus gives on the Produce Like a Pro YouTube channel. Shelley was the sound engineer on Damn The Torpedoes and talks about how the drums were so very specifically tuned and recorded to get that big sound that doesn’t drown out everything else in the mix. After four bars of an intro, the drums drop into a straighter groove and Benmont’s organ takes over and provides most of the melodic accompaniment to the vocal track throughout the rest of the song. The first four bars also really highlight how clever that piano part is. It’s a G major chord followed by an A minor chord that becomes suspended by the bass line, which plays F, C, D underneath it. It just repeats and provides a metronomic hi-hat-like percussiveness to that higher end melodic register.

Throughout the song, Stan never comes off beat. So that breakbeat ending we get on the Mudrutch version is replaced by again a much straighter rock groove. That Boom cha-boom cha boom cha-boom cha is the shape the rest of the song is structured around. It’s fairly simple through the verses and the chorus, with some tight fills stitching the two sections together neatly. During the bridge however, we get a more urgent four on the floor type of feel coming in and one of the best drum fills on the album leading back out of that middle eight. For my money, this is one of the best played and best recorded drum tracks of the 70s. Every part of it is utterly perfect and if you listen to the isolated drum track there are actually a couple of very light grace notes here and there that get a little lost in the mix but show how superb Stan was at reading the feel of a song.

The verse and chorus is one of the simplest and most understated guitar parts of any song Tom ever wrote and yet, again, it’s perfect in every way. All that’s happening through the verses is that Tom and Mike are playing those guitar stabs on the kick and bass drum hits, to give that chord progression a really percussive element that isn’t really adding any melody into the mix, in the same way that Benmont’s piano is doing. When we get to the choruses, we get that genius three note phrase that Mike throws in as a response to the “Don’t do me like that” call line. So very simple, but again, so memorable and intrinsically one of the things that makes this song so good. When we get to the bridge, we hear a wonderfully funky guitar and bass lick when the drums drop out slightly. Mike walks down the scale (1:24 to 1:26) as Ron Blair comes down and then back up. So again, offsetting melodic directions that provide a ton of width to that single bar breaking up that driving kick. It you want to really focus on that, listen to 1:24 to 1:26, which that groove comes in. It’s almost a disco beat that they drop into for that bar, and it changes the entire dynamic of the bridge and subsequently of the entire song. We also get some very cool guitar work added into the outro with a double time lick played in the left channel and some triplets being played in the right. Again, this just gives the song a little movement and something to build to. Those riffs, or one of the other, would have been played by plenty of bands in each chorus, but this leaves the song nowhere to go and with the very simple structure of the song, you need those types of dynamic elements to really push the song to a conclusion. We saw the same thing done in the frenetic crescendo of Century City where the song builds to a real climax. It’s the same principle here, but it’s done much more subtly. So again, listen from about the 2:13 mark for an increase in tempo in what those guitars are doing.

Let’s talk about Benmont Tench shall we. We had an abundance of keyboards on side one of the record, but this song is where Benmont really shines. As well as playing that percussive piano part, he plays some delicious sweeping organ in the intro, before backing off for the verses. He then backs that rhythmic piano out of the chorus and adds the organ back in, as well as some crisp, chiming piano progressions heading up the scales through the last chords of that section.  Again, these parts are expertly balanced by Shelly Yakus and Jimmy Iovine and never clash with either the vocals or anything the guitars or drums are doing. Through the bridge, all Benmont has to do is allow the organ to provide texture as the drums and the guitars are providing all the movement needed underneath the vocals. The volume is brought up very slightly to lead back out of that bridge into the last verse and is more prominent through that verse to lead us back into the final chorus and the outro, where again it fills that high frequency range and just adds some width and some colour to the sound. 

There’s a really cool little back story to this organ part too which some of you might know and I think might have been discussed in Runnin Down a Dream? Anyway, during recording the organ take that ended up being used, Benmont forgot to turn on the leslie for the first chorus and rather than stopping the take, or turning it on for the subsequent choruses, just left it off. A leslie is an amp that has a rotating drum in front of the speaker, the speed of which can be controlled, and which gives a distinctive trippy, spacy tremolo feel to. I’ll maybe add a link into the episode notes so you can hear the effect it provides. So, Benmont forgets to turn it on during the first chorus, absolutely nails the take and plays a sensational part that you have to keep. But, they want that leslie sound on those chorus sections but have no real way of getting them back. So, Shelley Yakus comes up with a DIY solution. He sends the organ part through a two track tape machine that he’s modified by adding tape to the capstan (which is the spindle which the tape is driven around by). This makes the tape flutter and as the signal is fed back into the board, you get something that sounds approximately like a Leslie speaker, but also kinda like a fairbground Calliope. This was then mixed back in with the original organ take where that effect was needed to give it that effect of having some tremolo on the part. Incredibly cool and totally unique as, to the best of my knowledge, that technique was never used again and exists only on this one song.

Alrighty, it’s time for some Petty Trivia! 

Last week, I asked you: What was the original title of Mary Jane’s Last Dance. Most Pettyheads would have remembered this one pretty quickly I think. The answer is, Indiana girl. The original line for the chorus was “Hey Indiana Girl, go out and find the world”. The story goes that after playing the song through during recording, Tom just couldn’t get behind and according to Mike Campbell, came back a week later and said “I’ve got a better idea”, which was “Last Dance with Mary Jane”. We’ll dig into the interpretation of those lyrics once we get to that song, in around fall of next year if my calculations are correct. 

Your question for this week is this: Who played drums on Tom’s third and final solo album, Highway Companion?

OK, back to the song. 

Vocally, I think this is one of those songs that Tom just absolutely knocks into orbit. The phrasing and delivery is perfect and he adds in just enough rasp to give you that sense of whisky and cigarettes without it being so raspy that it thins out. And those Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t lines are so urgent and honest that they really punch a hole through the hurt he’s talking about. I love songs that have darkness to the lyrics but on top of a really major key upbeat feel and this song is a perfect example of that. So it’s a conversation between two people and the singer lays out how his friend has been mistreated before imploring the person he’s talking to not to do the same to him. And it’s not hugely confrontational in the same that say, Fooled Again, or You’re Gonna Get It. This is a much more vulnerable protestation, almost beseeching the antagonist to do the right thing. “What if I love you baby, don’t do my like that” “I just might need you honey…” these aren’t cocky lines, they’re defensive ones. So I love that vulnerability and doubt that creeps into this song. He obviously became much more comfortable with bringing his own insecurity and self-doubt into his later work, but it wasn’t ever as predominant on the early albums. 

The title from the song comes from an old saying that Tom’s Dad used to use. As he tells Paul Zollo in Conversations With Tom Petty, “I always thought it was a humorous thing he said.” Tom also tells Paul that because he didn’t own a piano, but had that rhythm in his head, he rented a little recording studio called “The Alley”, in North Hollywood, for eight bucks an hour and went in there, stayed for an hour, and wrote the song pretty much in that session, before heading back home to finish up the lyrics. He says “It wasn’t much money to rent the studio, but it was the loneliest feeling walking in there by myself, sitting there, and playing the piano”. Not an environment you’d necessarily equate with writing a classic rock n roll tune. 

OK folks, that’s all for this week. 

Don’t Do Me Like That is went on to become the band’s first top ten single, peaking at 10 on the US chart as well as hitting #3 north of the border in Canada. I always knew we had good taste up here! I could make a strong argument for this being the best song on an incredibly good album because for me, every single element collides into the perfect end product. The simplicity of the structure is tempered by those vulnerable lyrics. The production is so perfect I’m sure it’s used as a case study in recording schools. The balance between every single part is on the money and the separation of the instruments and way that they’re organized sonically is mesmerizing. On top of all that technical and creative brilliance, you also end up with one of the most instantly recognizable and hummable songs to come out of the entire decade. So I have to make Don’t Do Me Like that the fourth 10 out of 10 from the album and I’d be more than happy to discuss any places where people feel they may dock a point or two. If you want to nerd out to even greater levels of music geekery, I’ve left a link to the episode of Produce Like a Pro that I was watching as part of my research as you can hear a lot of the tracks isolated and listen to engineer Shelley Yakus get into real detail about elements of the song’s recording.

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Petty Trivia

QUESTION: Who played drums on Tom’s third and final solo album, Highway Companion?

ANSWER: The answer, which a few of you got, but a few more didn’t, is Tom Petty himself. The album was truly a three-man effort, with Tom playing guitars, drums, harmonic, piano, and keyboards; Mike Campbell playing guitars and vibraphone; and Jeff Lynne taking on guitar, bass, keyboards, and autoharp responsibilities. All three men co-produced the 2006 release, which is the only Tom Petty release to include no co-written songs.

Lyrics

I was talking with a friend of mine, said a woman had hurt his pride.
Told him that she loved him so and turned around and let him go.
Then he said, "You better watch your step, or your gonna get hurt
Yourself.
Someone's gonna tell you lies, cut you down to size."

Don't do me like that.
Don't do me like that.
What if I love you baby?
Don't do me like that.
Don't do me like that.
Don't do me like that.
Someday I might need you baby.
Don't do me like that.

Listen honey, can you see? Baby, you would bury me
If you were in the public eye givin' someone else a try.
And you know you better watch your step or you're gonna get hurt
Yourself.
Someone's gonna tell you lies, cut you down to size.

Don't do me like that.
Don't' do me like that.
What if I love you baby?
Don't, don't, don't, don't...
Don't do me like that.
Don't do me like that.
What if I need you baby?
Don't do me like that.

'Cause somewhere deep down inside
Someone is saying, "Love doesn't last that long."
I got this feelin' inside night and day
And now I can't take it no more.
Listen honey, can you see? Baby, you would bury me

If you were in the public eye givin' someone else a try.
And you know you better watch your step or you're gonna get hurt
Yourself.
Someone's gonna tell you lies, cut you down to size.

Don't do me like that.
Don't do me like that.
What if I love you baby?
Don't, don't, don't, don't...

Don't do me like that.
Don't do me like that.
I just might need you honey.
Don't do me like that.
Wait!

Don't do me like that.
Don't do me like that.
Baby, baby, baby,
Don't, don't, don't...
No!

Don't do me like that.
Don't do me like that.
Baby, baby, baby...
Oh, oh, oh...

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