You can make a big impression or go through life unseen. You might wind up restricted and over Seventeen. It’s so hard to be careful, so easy to be lead. Somewhere beyond the pavement you’ll find the living dead.-Tom Petty
April 25, 1989
To put it mildly…I was awkward. The spring of 1989 found me to be a 6ft, 190lb Twelve year old with a lot of time on my hands. With my older siblings away at college, this summer promised to be a Twelve year old boy’s dream, most of my days being spent alternating between consuming copious amounts of Mountain Dew, playing my Nintendo and “noticing girls”. Musically speaking, my choices were just as awkward and weird as I was at the time. A strange concoction of late seventies country mixed with a few AC/DC songs from the Maximum Overdrive soundtrack capped off usually by samplings of Weird Al. Oh the weirdness….
To combat some of this weird and awkward behavior, my dad began giving me chores to do around the house during the day while my mother and he were at work. One of the chores I was instructed to do involved manually sanding down our huge oak front door. As I started this days sanding, I decided to turn on my dads shop radio to help me pass the time. My brother (an avid Winger fan) had left the station on 98.3 KFMZ the local rock radio station out of Columbia Missouri. I almost never listened to rock stations but I didn’t really care as long as it had a rhythm I could sand to.
Just before lunch, the radio DJ came out of a commercial break with the following announcement: “Ok we going to start your lunch break off right by playing a cut off of Tom Petty’s new album Full Moon Fever….It’s just released today, here it is. Zombie Zoo”. I was hooked.
From the intro, to the first verse, to the chorus, to the amazing bridge, the understated guitars (there is no solo) and the backing vocals all culminate in one of the greatest songs written in this time period. Each verse gives you so much imagery, so tightly packed that while listening, you can visualize the girl with the white lipstick, her drop out friends and each and every move they make throughout the song. More still, you feel the melancholy spirit the song and lyrics evoke. Tom Petty knows girls like this, has seen where they end up and knows where they come from.
Even more important than the significance this song has to me personally, is the demarcation point the Full Moon Fever album represents to the music industry as a whole. This album was not flashy, it wasn’t sexy and it wasn’t loud. There’s almost an unease and grittiness to this album that runs contrary to other music found on the radio at the time. In just a few short years, the hair metal and stadium “good time” rock would be completely off the airwaves having given way to more personal and authentic music from bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden who even at this time had already formed. At this same point in time but unknown to me, the new school punk bands in New York and Southern California were just starting to start small but dedicated scenes and venues playing a new faster mix of Punk, Ska and Thrash that I would later come to love.
April 25, 1989
To put it mildly…I was awkward. The spring of 1989 found me to be a 6ft, 190lb Twelve year old with a lot of time on my hands. With my older siblings away at college, this summer promised to be a Twelve year old boy’s dream, most of my days being spent alternating between consuming copious amounts of Mountain Dew, playing my Nintendo and “noticing girls”. Musically speaking, my choices were just as awkward and weird as I was at the time. A strange concoction of late seventies country mixed with a few AC/DC songs from the Maximum Overdrive soundtrack capped off usually by samplings of Weird Al. Oh the weirdness….
To combat some of this weird and awkward behavior, my dad began giving me chores to do around the house during the day while my mother and he were at work. One of the chores I was instructed to do involved manually sanding down our huge oak front door. As I started this days sanding, I decided to turn on my dads shop radio to help me pass the time. My brother (an avid Winger fan) had left the station on 98.3 KFMZ the local rock radio station out of Columbia Missouri. I almost never listened to rock stations but I didn’t really care as long as it had a rhythm I could sand to.
Just before lunch, the radio DJ came out of a commercial break with the following announcement: “Ok we going to start your lunch break off right by playing a cut off of Tom Petty’s new album Full Moon Fever….It’s just released today, here it is. Zombie Zoo”. I was hooked.
From the intro, to the first verse, to the chorus, to the amazing bridge, the understated guitars (there is no solo) and the backing vocals all culminate in one of the greatest songs written in this time period. Each verse gives you so much imagery, so tightly packed that while listening, you can visualize the girl with the white lipstick, her drop out friends and each and every move they make throughout the song. More still, you feel the melancholy spirit the song and lyrics evoke. Tom Petty knows girls like this, has seen where they end up and knows where they come from.
Even more important than the significance this song has to me personally, is the demarcation point the Full Moon Fever album represents to the music industry as a whole. This album was not flashy, it wasn’t sexy and it wasn’t loud. There’s almost an unease and grittiness to this album that runs contrary to other music found on the radio at the time. In just a few short years, the hair metal and stadium “good time” rock would be completely off the airwaves having given way to more personal and authentic music from bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden who even at this time had already formed. At this same point in time but unknown to me, the new school punk bands in New York and Southern California were just starting to start small but dedicated scenes and venues playing a new faster mix of Punk, Ska and Thrash that I would later come to love.
For three days I hummed this song and regurgitated the lyrics I could remember. I continually called into the radio station pleading for them to play Zombie Zoo again but they always refused. You see, the first track to be released was supposed to be Free Fallin (another great song). The playing of Zombie Zoo was a mistake and wasn’t ever scheduled for radio release. This frustrated me so badly I did something I had never done before in my Twelve years on earth. I searched my room for every available quarter and dime I could find (I was Twelve) and took off on my first of many trips to Cornerstone Music down the street. This started my undeniable love affair with music and all things audio. After listening to the tape over and over that summer, I didn’t want to just be in a band, I wanted to be a song writer.
That’s why this song matters.
