*yay!* New Year, new Music Monday logo!
What do y’all think? It’s about time I updated it, isn’t it? Annnd if you are interested, it’s a stock image I manipulated from Deviant Art’s Angie Stock.
Now on to the fabulousness that is Pink Book’s Music Monday!
This is one of my favourite songs and when I was studying abroad I used to listen to it ALL THE TIME because it made me feel closer to home interestingly enough — American Girl by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
I always knew this song, but I never knew who sang it or really what it was called until I enrolled at the University of Florida in the fall of 2003. Tom Petty is sort of a local legend and hero so to speak over there.
He’s from Gainesville (where the University of Florida is located) and this particular song has an urban legend attached to it:-
Beaty Towers, dorm, at the University of Florida by Dana John Hill via FlickR
Basically, in getting acquainted to campus in my first week someone pointed to Beaty Towers and told me, “There those twin buildings, well this girl in the 60s or 70s, she jumped off and committed suicide. Tom Petty sang about her.” Petty was living in Gainesville in the 1970s, so he would have been around when it happened.
Rumor has it that it did, in fact happen, but that Tom Petty didn’t know about it or sing about it.
That song is supposedly American Girl.
This is because in the song, part of the lyrics go something like this:-
It was kind of cold that night
She stood alone on her balcony
She could the cars roll by
Out on 441
Like waves crashin’ in the beach
And for one desperate moment there
He crept back in her memory.
441 is actually 13th Street on UF’s campus and it’s not too far from Beaty Towers. Whether you can ‘hear’ the cars rolling by from there is debatable, but depending on which apartment/room you have you could see it.
However, the thing is Beaty Towers doesn’t have balconies and it’s rather hard to get access to the roof. But then again, things were much different on UF’s campus in the 1970s than they are now.
Anyway, there is another rumor online saying that in an interview called Coversations with Tom Petty he dispels all the rumors behind the Beaty Towers story. The only thing is that the entire interview is no where to be found from a reputable source, so I’m skeptical about any of that … at least until I can find it to read that Petty dispelled it properly.
On a similar note, while I was at UF an article was published in the local paper, the Independent Florida Alligator, called Myths and Legends at UF where the story of American Girl was discussed. As I remember, it basically said Petty couldn’t be reached or didn’t want to reach out when asked about it, which is a complete contradiction to what is said to be written in Conversations with Tom Petty.
So that’s just more fuel to the fire.
Crazy, this tune is as old as I am — whoa.
Copyright © 2009-2010 Sasha H. Muradali. All Rights Reserved.
