Songoftheday 9/18/14 - I saw her today I saw her face, it was the face I loved and I knew I had to run away...

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers with Stevie Nicks - "Needles And Pins [Live]"
from the album Pack Up The Plantation: Live! (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #37 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 2

Today's Song of the Day comes from two of the biggest rock stars of the 80's, Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks, who had already scored a top-10 hit together with "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" from Nicks' first solo album Bella Donna. In 1985, Petty was touring behind his big album Southern Accents, which garnered him a top-20 pop hit with "Don't Come Around Here No More". Petty and his band the Heartbreakers then released a live album, Pack Up The Plantation: Live!, and while most of the record was from that preceding tour, there were a couple of nuggets from concerts past, including a live date in 1981 which had Tom duetting with Stevie on the 60s hit "Needles and Pins". The song, co-written by Sonny Bono with Jack Nitzsche, was first released in 1963 by one of the female pop singers of that decade, Jackie DeShannon. Though it stalled out at #84 on the Hot 100 in the U.S., it topped the chart in Canada...

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


A year later, the "British Invasion" band the Searchers covered the song, and it reached the top-40 for the first time in the U.S., peaking at #13, while going all the way to #1 in their native Britain. It would remain the "definitive" version of the song (though I personally prefer Jackie's take)..

Over a decade later, the British power-pop band Smokie released a version of "Needles and Pins", and reached the top-10 in the UK and #68 in America in 1977...

Punk stars The Ramones even put out a cover of the song in 1978...

Now fast forward to Petty, Nicks, and the Heartbreakers, for their live single version from 1981 released in '85...

"Needles And Pins" reached the top-40 on the American pop chart in March of 1986 (one of three top-40 "live" hit singles in that year). The record also climbed to #17 on the Mainstream Rock radio chart in Billboard magazine, and nicked the Canadian pop chart at #85.

It's remained a easily-forgotten but still sweet nugget in the catalog of the pair.

Up tomorrow: A Bayonne songwriter fights his way through a difficulty to a top-40 hit.