“She’s forgotten me but I remember her…”

The pages are turning, and a few back my friend Barb and some of her Freehold homies all put together compilation CD’s they shared with each other called “Music that matters to me,” based on the Starbucks “Artists Choice” collections. The “Music that matters to Barb” included, Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, the Kinks, the Clash and the Cure. Bruce is in there (natch), but so are the Strokes and Madness… It’s a “Mad Hatter’s Tea Cup” of a sonic soundtrack to her life.

Back then I began to fill “Blog Ideas” with a list of my own, and it’s been sitting there since April of 2005. Scanning down to a random spot on the list I come to:

• Ultra Violet (Light My Way)
• Petty
• When Doves Cry

Not coincidentally, I somehow flowcharted myself to this cute diagram at 5:30am, but it’s a recent rediscovery of the Mudcrutch frontman that got me writing.

Yeah, my sub-list above contains U2 and Prince songs, and Tom Petty.

And now a word from my morning commercial experience…

Doctor my eyes have seen one sweet LCD HDTV in the Panasonic Viera Series. My aunt needed a new TV and wanted HD, but she knew nothing about them so she asked for help from her tech-geek nephew. Auntie Bev has limited space, so my online and brick/mortar research turned up the 26” Panny TC-26LX85. It has a crisp HD picture and a superior imaging of “regular” TV channels. This is a very important consideration as most HDTV’s make regular TV look awful. Oh, and I had another great buying experience with Chris Majoros at Cleveland Plasma. Yeah, they’re in Cleveland…

Now, back to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers…

The Boston Phoenix calls their July 15, 1978 shared bill at the Cape Cod Coliseum with the J Geils Band the 29th greatest show in Boston concert history. Yours truly missed it, but best bud Dillard did not, and my introduction to TP began. My first Fall in Tucson, Arizona was dominated by Petty’s first two records, but mostly the sophomore effort “You’re Gonna Get It!” Man, I lived the words of that record and when it was followed up with 1979’s “Damn The Torpedoes,” Tom Petty became a star. I hung in there through “Hard Promises” in 1981, but once I moved back East things changed. Around 1985 I went to see the band with a girlfriend at the Worcester Centrum. A teenage girl next to me screamed through the entire show like she was seeing the Beatles in 1966. It was a nightmare and we left. Since then 23 years passed and I kinda left Petty back there. Yeah, I heard the radio hits over the years, but didn’t purchase any records with the exception of 1999’s “Echo,” a dark brooding record made during his painful divorce. I listened to that tape endlessly while running away from life that year.

Last week I spent $40 in iTunes gifts on his first two remastered records, Echo and “Wildflowers,” a record I need to listen to with headphones late at night with a Maker’s Mark and a cigar.

Tuesday was a tough day at work. For the commute home, a newly loaded iPod fatty accompanied me and I queued up “You’re Gonna Get It.” I was immediately transported 2677 miles into my old apartment at “Casa Del Oro.” I anticipated every chord and the evergreen with orange highlights shag rug still looked sweet. Tom Petty was on the turntable. Yeah, music can do that.

“How deeply these songs affect people in such a way that when you hear the song you know like where you were and even the feeling in your gut when you were fourteen hearing that song.” – Eddie Vedder in the Petty documentary “Runnin’ Down a Dream”