Living in Southern California, which features prominently in so many pop songs, it’s hard not to develop a soundtrack that reverberates through your head. For me, sweet and melancholy Tom Petty songs are a big part of that. I can’t drive along Mullholland, or on the 101 through the Valley, for example, without hearing “Free Fallin” ("I wanna glide down over Mulholland") or those lines about the “long day living in Reseda,” with the “freeway running through the yard.” In fact, passing through Reseda, against my better judgment, I always find myself keeping my eye out for that sad house by the freeway. 

So I was jazzed to come across today’s LA Weekly story, Tom Petty’s Los Angeles,” which maps 38 Tom Petty-related places, from a Travelodge on Vermont where Petty lived while recording his first album to Le Seur, the restaurant where Petty met George Harrison, an encounter that, writes Daphne Carr, was “another step in the formation of the Traveling Wilburys.”

Writes Carr in the introduction:

There exists in sound a map of Los Angeles, filled with song-lyric street names, neighborhoods, beaches, bars, empty spaces and spaces between spaces. It’s a chart that follows more than 30 years in the life and work of Tom Petty, a longtime resident of the city and an undercelebrated rock & roll icon who finally appears to be getting his due.

Carr makes some intriguing associations, including this one involving the 101 freeway, which Petty was apparently looking out on from a house in Encino while writing “American Girl”:

In “American Girl,” Petty imagined it as the highway of his hometown, the 441 in Gainesville, and placed a woman as the urban poet: “It was kind of cold that night/She stood alone on her balcony/She could hear the cars roll by out on 441 like waves crashin’ in the beach.” One of the band’s best songs, it contains the perfect Petty formula of Americana nostalgia, narrative, the open road and a bittersweet realization sung against a great pop hook.

Carr’s piece is accompanied by a terrific map that can be downloaded in a PDF file.

Related on World Hum:
* New Road Music: Tom Petty’s ‘Highway Companion’
* Jackson on my Mind
* Love Letter to a Joni Mitchell Road Song

Photo by SykoSam via Flickr, (Creative Commons).