Plague Journal, Wide Open?
You will like this Tom Petty video. Into the Great Wide Open was the title song on the album by the same name released in 1991. It is a story song, the lyric “tells itself.” The music video for the single, directed by Julien Temple, starred Johnny Depp as the protagonist, Eddie Rebel, as well as Gabrielle Anwar as Eddie’s girlfriend and Faye Dunaway as his manager. The video is magnificent, a term I’ve never used before to describe a video. Eddie just off the farm, goes to Hollywood. Eddie finds sympatico with a girl who happens to have an identical tattoo. She teaches him to play guitar and the story goes from there. The visual clue to the apogee of Eddie’s success, this suspension in midair if you will before the arc of descent to earth, a scene with Eddie seated with admirers, hitting the bottle of Jack Daniels. Many memorable scenes in the video are worth mindfully considering, from which to draw life-insights.
Petty later commented that it was “one of the only times I’ve ever felt fulfilled by a video. I even had people coming to me wanting to make it into a movie.” – wikipedia
Into The Great Wide Open
By Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Eddie waited til he finished high school
He went to Hollywood, got a tattoo
He met a girl out there with a tattoo too
The future was wide open
They moved into a place they both could afford
He found a night club he could work at the door
She had a guitar and she taught him some chords
The sky was the limit
Into the great wide open
Under them skies of blue
Out in the great wide open
A rebel without a clue
The papers said Ed always played from the heart
He got an agent and a roadie named Bart
They made a record and it went in the charts
The sky was the limit
His leather jacket had chains that would jingle
They both met movie stars, partied and mingled
Their A&R man said, “I don’t hear a single”
The future was wide open
Into the great wide open
Under them skies of blue
Out in the great wide open
A rebel without a clue
Into the great wide open
Under them skies of blue
Out in the great wide open
A rebel without a clue
Into the great wide open
Under them skies of blue
Out in the great wide open
A rebel without a clue
Into the great wide open
Under them skies of blue
Out in the great wide open
A rebel without a clue
Tom Petty took the line “a rebel without a clue” from the 1989 single “I’ll Be You” by Minneapolis rock band The Replacements with whom he toured. The term was coined by Jim Steinman, who wrote “Rebel Without a Clue” for Bonnie Tyler on her 1986 release Secret Dreams and Forbidden Fire. – wikipedia
I cannot help but think this tune is a parable of our country. An apt re-presentation of the rise and fall of the mythos of American Exceptionalism. Will we put down our bottle of Jack?
