SPELLBOX: Media

You have to suspend disbelief to think Tom Petty's hit "American Girl" is really about Gainesville.

Despite the pervasive urban legend about the song's origins, Beaty Towers has no balconies, and Petty has repeatedly denied that the song is about his hometown.

Gainesville and its environs have inspired plenty of songs, however, from ska tunes to spoofs.

Muddy Waters came down Newberry way on his song "Deep Down in Florida." Randy Newman chose Gainesville as the hometown of Faust's girlfriend in his musical reworking of Goethe's classic tale. And Petty doesn't totally ignore his roots: Gainesville haunts appear in the wistful "Dreamville" from the album "The Last DJ." In a 2002 concert in Los Angeles, Petty said the song was about "back when times were good, whenever that was." In it, he remembers dips in Glen Springs and "goin' down to Lillian's Music Store" in the place "where I was born/Light years from here/And the air smelled good."

You'd have to know a bit about Gainesville to catch those references — likewise with the bonus track "Thanks" on Sublime's "40 Oz. to Freedom" where Brad Nowell gives a shout out to the bygone Hardback Café, well remembered for its gritty punk shows by local and touring acts. (The Hardback closed in 1999.)

We can thank hometown boy Drew Copeland of Sister Hazel (the band name itself is, of course, a Gainesville reference) for his homage to Gainesville on his solo album "No Regrets." The track "A Little Like Heaven" reads like a highlight reel of beloved Gainesville places: "Well it was out on Paynes Prairie where I got my first kiss/There's the school yard where we would play as kids/We pulled arrowheads out of Hogtown Creek/And when the cops came around we'd all hide our drinks."

On the national scene

Not all of Gainesville's appearances in rock are veiled: Take Less Than Jake's anthemic "Gainesville Rock City" from the ska-punk band's 2002 "Borders and Boundaries" album. Check out the video on YouTube: You'll recognize places both current and bygone, from the Sun Center and Gator Beverage to Hyde & Zeke and the old Plaza Theater.

You might not know that San Francisco indie rocker John Vanderslice was born here, but the plaintive, piano-laced track "Gainesville, Fla." on his 2001 album "Time Travel is Lonely" tells us so.

While bluesman McKinley Morganfield — better known as Muddy Waters — isn't a Gainesville native, he did marry a local woman, and mentions the area in his song "Deep Down in Florida." He sings, "Yeah, well I think I'll go down in Gainesville/Just to see an old friend of mine/Well, I believe I'll cut down in Gainesville/Oh, just to see an' old buddy of mine/Well, you know if we're not too busy/I believe that I'm gonna drop over in Newberry sometime."

Those who heard the song on the "Muddy 'Mississippi' Waters Live" album, released in 1979, might think Waters was referring to Bo Diddley — who had moved to Archer a year earlier and had been a label-mate with Waters on Chicago's Chess Records in the 1950s.

In the liner notes of the 2003 Deluxe Edition of "Muddy 'Mississippi' Waters Live," however, guitarist Bob Margolin recalls that the "old friend" was harmonica player Joe Berson. And Margolin remembers bursting into Waters' Gainesville hotel room to find him drinking champagne with the hotel maid who would later became his third wife.

The soundtrack from Randy Newman's musical update of "Faust" has Linda Ronstadt singing the song "Gainesville," which begins "I was born in Gainesville, Florida/And my father was a tailor/And my mother ran a café/By the university." The town was equally memorable for the Los Angeles band Streetwalkin' Cheetahs, who named their 2002 album "Gainesville" after a tour took them through here. It wasn't fond memories of the place so much as the fact that one of their band members suffered a nervous breakdown here and had to be institutionalized, scrapping the rest of the tour.

Then there's Dan Carlin and Skip Hahn's country-tinged 1997 album "Gainesville," which sports photos of Lillian's, the Swamp, the Hippodrome, even the bat house on the University of Florida campus. The title track is a torch song for "A small-town girl with a love so real/Her home was over the Eighth Avenue hill/Out in a town called Gainesville."

Local bands

It takes a local band to capture the essence of a local character, which the 1990s band Radon did with "Rasta Guy," about Gainesville's omnipresent dreadlocked jogger. If you've ever seen the man in question, no further explanation is needed. If you haven't, here's Radon's description:

"There's a middle-aged rasta guy joggin' around Gainesville/Don't know where he comes from/He's kinda like Pac-man/Running through the streets of Babylon.../Middle-aged rasta jogger guy/Holding his hands high/Run run, rasta guy."

Less Than Jake's Gainesville references abound, from living at Park 16th Apartments to various streets and intersections around town. A------ Parade, a challenging band to write about in a family newspaper, has the 44-second thrash "Typical Gainesville Clique" on the album "Student Ghetto Violence," while the Archer Road Band, a '70s staple, had a local hit with "The Gainesville Musketeers."

Some current local bands with songs about Gainesville include The Beat Buttons ("Red," subtitled "Gainesville is Full of Excuses"), SNM ("Gainesville Rock,") Spellbox ("Gainesville Star") and As Friends Rust ("Half Friend Town"). Longtime Gainesville band Hot Water Music — now on Epitaph Records — recorded "Free Radio Gainesville" on the 1999 album "No Division." And those who can recall lyrics from the '80s punk scene remember the Mutley Chix tunes "Small Town, Big Hell" and "Hangin' Out."



Further afield

Micanopy has its share of song references: On Petty's "A Mind with a Heart of Its Own" from the album "Full Moon Fever," he sings, "I been to Brooker and I been to Micanopy." On the title track to country strummer John Anderson's 1992 album "Seminole Wind," the breeze in question blows "From the Okeechobee/All the way up to Micanopy."

If we're willing to stretch the geographical bounds of this concept a bit, we can include "Honeymoon in Palatka" by folk singer Mark Smith, which garnered plenty of attention when it came out in 1999. Smith's song makes the unlikely claim "Honeymoon in Palatka/Don't want no Waikiki/The Holiday Inn at the foot of the bridge is good enough for me." As it turns out, Palatka was good enough for President Grover Cleveland, who honeymooned there with his 21-year-old wife, Frances, in 1886. The song even mentions Gainesville: "Between Gainesville and Hastings/Were gonna find our love retreat/We're gonna spend our weddin' evening/In the Putnam County seat."


Random references

Plenty of readers suggested The Indigo Girls' "Shame on You," a bouncy diatribe against immigration hypocrisy where the girls "go road block trippin' in the middle of the night/Up in Gainesville town." However, the Girls grew up not far from Gainesville, Ga., and given the rarity of midnight searches for illegal immigrants in Hogtown (not to mention the lack of the "Chicano city park" mentioned in the song), we suspect it's the other Gainesville that they have in mind. It's also possible that the incomparable Taj Mahal is singing about a different Gainesville in "Truck Driver's Two-Step," which goes "Going down to Durham/Going down to Gainesville/Feel like I'm rolling into view."

There's the shape-note hymn entitled "Gainesville" in the Sacred Harp songbook, credited to William Hammond and W.D. Jones, which dates back to 1869. It's hard to tell which Gainesville that might refer to, as ten states boast towns by the same name. The same is true for Bob Seger's "Lonely Man," in which he sings, "I'm a lonely man from Gainesville/Got nowhere to go."

The proven misconception that refuses to die is "American Girl." The myth that the song stems from a suicide leap off of Beaty Towers is so pervasive, it even merited a page in the Urban Legends section of debunking site snopes.com. Evidence supporting the Gainesville link was tenuous at best, based on the line where the American Girl stands on a balcony listening to traffic "on 441/Like waves crashing on the beach." In the book "Conversations with Tom Petty" by Paul Zollo, Petty steadfastly maintains that he's talking about a freeway in southern California, not SW 13th Street.

Now that Gainesville has dozens of other appearances in song, maybe it's time for that legend to take a flying leap off Beaty Towers.

If we're willing to stretch the geographical bounds of this concept a bit, we can include "Honeymoon in Palatka" by folk singer Mark Smith, which garnered plenty of attention when it came out in 1999.


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