This time the Mad Hatter was an omniscient narrator of the song’s music-biz blues. Petty wore another ridiculous hat and wire-rimmed glasses. By the time of “Into the Great Wide Open,” from 1991, Mr. It took a long time to remember that when his career in music videos started - with “Refugee,” to pick one hypnotically shabby-looking performance - he looked like the average girl’s prom date: cuter than you thought. The hat and the shades seemed to keep him in disguise. Who knows why? But some of it is the dark-magician he’d styled himself as. Before the guitars start to cry and chug, there’s a natural studio silence that always terrified me. Petty and a band playing the song on a stark, black set. “I Won’t Back Down” kicks off with him, still outfitted like the Mad Hatter, lifting the lid of a gift box. His sense of frivolity came with a coating of stranger-danger. Petty’s approach to being on MTV was not to take it more seriously than he had to. You’d watch these videos and wonder how such a pleasingly distinctive sound could come out of a mouth that never seemed to open. I always found that funny given how little his face appeared to do. If “Don’t Come Around Here” is your second or third Tom Petty music-video experience, it may have been formative. He wears the same bemused expression the entire time and, courtesy of his sunglasses, never lets you see his eyes. In the final shot, the camera pans from a screaming Alice to a close-up of Mr. Eventually, she’s trapped in the teacup and her body turns into a cake that the band and the Hatter all find good enough to eat.
0 kommentar(er)
