I think we made the most of not knowing what the hell we were doing.
—TOM PETTY
Denny Cordell was sending Petty and his band into studios that were costing them both a lot of money, though Petty wouldn’t feel it (or know it) until later. On top of that, Petty was in a transitional phase, only recently a solo artist, now in a band. Cordell still had session players coming in, including the ones who played on “Strangered in the Night,” a track that would make the Heartbreakers’ debut. It became clear to Cordell, who was beginning to see Petty’s vision, that it was time to let the band be the band and to stop spending money on outsiders. So, with the Heartbreakers coming together and his relationship with Leon Russell coming apart, Cordell decided to set up a Los Angeles recording studio with gear from Tulsa, a move that would cut back expenses considerably. He hired two engineers to go out to the Church Studio, get what was needed, and come back to build and manage an in-house recording studio, right there in the building next to the Shelter offices. The engineers’ names were Noah Shark and Max. No one was quite sure where they came from or when they’d leave. But for the making of the first two Heartbreakers records, they played a critical role in helping the Heartbreakers get to know the recording studio and its possibilities.
On the trip to get the equipment in Tulsa, Petty and Stan Lynch tagged along. It was Noah Shark’s idea. “We were already rehearsing in the space where they were going to build a studio,” Petty says. “Noah said to me, ‘Hey, nobody’s gonna be in the Church Studio when we’re out there. Why not come out and cut something before we pull the gear out?’ So Stan and I flew out and did a session. We talked our way into a couple of tickets, and we cut ‘Luna.’ I did it on the Hammond organ that was there. Stan played drums and did the stuff on the Arp string ensemble, playing with that pitch knob. We cut a basic track and brought it back with us. Once we were home, it seemed like the studio went up instantly. And we were under way.”
“That was fun,” remembers Lynch. “That was a cool trip. But what the fuck was I doing there? Tom and I weren’t really tight, didn’t know each other that well yet. I had an old girlfriend come up. I remember it was very awkward because we were all sharing a room. That’s how stupid I was—I was nineteen years old and figured, ‘Well, if she comes up, you know…’ Tom was like, ‘Okay, Stanley. I don’t care.’ I mean, that’s how I did it in Road Turkey.”
Mudcrutch had been egalitarian in terms of splitting the rewards and the money passed on to them from the record company, and that spirit remained unchanged. “He was making a solo record,” explains Benmont Tench. “Then he got us for his band. But the agreement was that it was all for one and one for all. But the strength lay with Tom and Mike, because even when Mudcrutch broke up, Tom and Mike stayed together to make Tom’s solo record. Tom was in charge.” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers could never be a democracy, but Petty was trying to give everyone a reason to stick around. He just didn’t know how hard it was going to be to manage that. Trouble is where bands begin. The Heartbreakers were no different. The question is where a band goes after that. With the Heartbreakers, there would be levels of power, and they would begin to reveal themselves.
“I remember Denny urging Mike to write,” says Ron Blair. “And he got a little four track. Early on, he was making these great demos. Amazing stuff. I remember him telling me that when he was younger and got the stereo Beatles records, he had to listen to them on some crappy player that could only do one channel at a time. So he’d listen in parts. Right side of the record, then the left. He learned to take in music the way it’s constructed. He had a sophisticated kind of mental division in his mind from early on.” Campbell, almost painfully shy by most accounts, had a partnership with Petty that informed the band’s creative life. Once the new Shelter studio was up, with Noah and Max there to keep it running, the two of them only expanded on that bond, whether they had assurance that it would last or not. But there was some kind of unspoken deal. Some things don’t ever get put down on paper.
Campbell still thinks of the Shelter studio as a place he picked up recording’s fundamentals. It was an incubation period. “Cordell realized that we were green,” says Campbell. “We were lucky, because we were open and learning. We made the first two records there. You can hear some of the excitement. I mean, you can tell we’re discovering things, that we’re happy to be there, you know? It’s frenetic. Tom and I were probably more curious about the recording studio than the other guys. We wanted to figure out how to make records. The rest of the band would play their best and then go home and get drunk or whatever. But we were always like, ‘I’m gonna watch this guy for a few hours, figure out what the hell he’s doing.’ So we became more involved. And we had Noah Shark, who wasn’t technical but had a brilliance. He’d say things like, ‘Look, you see those speakers there? The bass notes are elephants, and the treble notes are mice, okay? And the mice and the elephants need to get through the speakers at the same time.’ Wacky stuff, but it made a kind of sense. He talked in terms of space, color, breath. And he had arrangement ideas, he was a cheerleader, he got us believing in what we were up to. He was the right guy in a lot of ways. And they were on acid the whole time. We’d have a cup of coffee, they’d have a hit of acid.”
The next person to join the Heartbreakers’ team was Alan “Bugs” Weidel. He’d been a roadie for a few different bands, loading gear and collecting thirty dollars a week unemployment, the lingering effects of an actual day job. One of the bands Weidel worked for, made up primarily of Texans, was called Slip of the Wrist. Stan Lynch had been the drummer. Not long after the Heartbreakers formed, Lynch called Weidel with a job offer. But Lynch hadn’t told the Heartbreakers that the Heartbreakers offered Bugs a job. “It ended up being me, Tom, and Stanley, the three of us in this kitchen,” Weidel says. “And Stanley’s giving the hard sell on me, like, ‘This guy, Alan, man, we can’t let Alan go. We need somebody like this.’ I was confused. I thought I’d already been offered the job. And Petty’s going, ‘I don’t really know…’ And Stanley just keeps at it, with ‘Alan this, Alan that.’ Finally, Petty goes, ‘Who’s Alan?’ And Stanley goes, ‘Him!’ pointing at me. Petty and I look at each other, and it was the first recognition moment we had, you know, where we didn’t have to speak. It was like we realized exactly where we both fit into this scheme, like, ‘We’re both chumps here, huh? I’m thinking I’ve been offered a job, and you’re being set up, with the pressure on to hire me, with me right in front of you.’ Nothing was resolved. I just walked away embarrassed. I was surprised when he called offering me thirty bucks a week, what I got on unemployment.”
The plan was that each band member would give Weidel six dollars a week out of his pay. By that time, however, Petty and Campbell were both husbands and parents. Mike Campbell met Marcie Weiss in the first year after arriving in Los Angeles and married her the following year. Their first child, a daughter named Brie, was born not long after. With Jane and Adria Petty now back from Florida, the Heartbreakers weren’t just another young band milling around Los Angeles after dark. Weidel would be taking his collection from young families. “My parents had a big utilities spool in the living room,” Adria Petty remembers, “like a wooden spool that was a coffee table. The band would come over, and they’d smoke joints and hang out and talk. We’d all sit on pillows on the floor. Everybody had long hair. They wore baseball shirts and the long, flowy, seventies kind of hippie things. In their appearance and behavior they were not LA—they were very Gainesville, just enjoying California as a new experience. Brie was born a year after me, so there were two little kids crawling around on the floor.”
“I remember having to go over to Campbell’s house,” Weidel recalls, “and there’s Mike with Marcie, and the baby she’d just had, and he’s just gotten his hundred dollars of pay for the week … and I’m collecting for the previous three weeks. Eighteen dollars. Here’s another example of why I’m a lucky guy in the music business: none of those guys ever stiffed me. I was getting six percent. Man, if I could’ve carried on with that…” Weidel would become integral quickly and would work as closely with Petty over the years as anyone, getting to know his mind, his sense of humor, his anger, his troubles. But when it came to moving up in management, Weidel wasn’t interested. He chose to take care of guitars and one of the guys who played them. He’d be on every tour the band ever booked. You still see him up there, handing off Fenders and Gibsons and Rickenbackers. And cigarettes.
One of Weidel’s first opportunities to see the band in the studio came as they were putting Petty’s “Breakdown” on tape. Working with Noah Shark, getting occasional input from Denny, the Heartbreakers had pared the song back to its elements. Phil Seymour from the Dwight Twilley Band had provided an idea for background vocals and done some of the singing himself. Dwight Twilley had zeroed in on a riff Campbell played on the outro of an early take and insisted that that was the riff that should be heard throughout. Petty agreed. When Weidel heard the band playing the song, he got it right away. “This was timeless shit. But probably the biggest difference between them and the Slip of the Wrist guys that I had worked with before,” Weidel says, “was the sense of urgency. You look back years later, and it’s like, obviously, these guys were family men. Tom and Mike were supporting wives and kids. They have a whole different mind-set, not like, ‘Let’s see what this music business is like. How many chicks can we fuck tonight?’ They were a lot more focused. I heard ‘Breakdown,’ and I knew something was going on there. There was never a doubt in my mind. I was impressed immediately. And they were really funny, and there was that camaraderie. You could tell they were a band. But, also, that it was Tom’s band. But that was one of the best parts about it as well. ’Cause I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a band where that [leadership] part’s not clear … but that can get stupid.”
Bits and pieces were already in the can: “Hometown Blues,” with Duck Dunn on bass, Charlie Souza on saxophone, and Randall Marsh playing some drums, “Strangered in the Night,” with Jim Gordon on drums and Emory Gordy on bass, and the basics for “Luna,” which Petty and Lynch brought back from Tulsa. But as new tracks like “Breakdown” came together, there was a feeling that some kind of new energy was carrying them. Noah and Max had educated Campbell and Petty in how to make tape loops, something that would prove meaningful, particularly to Campbell’s writing. The first album would open with a track, cowritten by Campbell, that bursts out of the speakers, a drum loop pushing it forward: “Rockin’ Around with You.” It’s hard to say where the track comes from. It’s not the first song because it’s a single but because it throws off a reckless energy that signals where things are headed. You can hear the band experimenting, hear them learning their way, not sure where they’re taking things, realizing that the studio and the stage are two very different places to make music. If Campbell describes the sessions as “frenetic,” likely it’s because, no matter the band’s years together in other contexts and incarnations, they were still coming into being. Anything that worked was allowed. There’s an eccentricity to the first album. “It doesn’t sound like anything else from the time,” says Petty.
If the album defies easy categorization, the Heartbreakers nonetheless arrived at an inadvertently cohesive collection of sounds and songs from straight rock and roll to more eclectic ballads, with layered background vocal parts coming in and out, textures and feels too odd to be the result of know-how or a specific plan. You could hear the Beach Boys in the instrumental sections of “Luna,” just as you could hear the Faces and Stones in “Hometown Blues.” But it was too strange to feel derivative. Not knowing any better, they weren’t refusing any option presented to them. Cordell had shut them away in the Shelter studio. He’d taught them just enough to leave them alone in there. “Mystery Man,” “Anything That’s Rock ’n’ Roll,” “American Girl,” “The Wild One, Forever”—each cut sounded like it came from a slightly different world, with the band’s aesthetic a thread through it all.
Among their many decisions, they chose to include the sound of the process in the record itself. You can feel the recording studio, hear the room and the background talk, the ambient sounds—they leave it all in there rather than tidy it up. If the demo from two years earlier had showed promise, this was the delivery. “Well she was an American girl, raised on promises.” Petty had become a writer who could set up a story in a couple words. “She couldn’t help thinking that there was a little more to life somewhere else.” With “American Girl,” he brought home an anthem, without having to dress it up in anthemic trappings. “I think everyone knew,” Stan Lynch says, “that there was a little lightning in the bottle on that one.”
After trouble of all kinds, his late nights with rock and roll’s lost men, elevation and disappointment, Tom Petty made one of rock and roll’s great debuts with his new/old band. It was fresh, and it kicked against the door like rock and roll was supposed to. Now it was time to see if they could get anyone to listen to it. It was time for another kind of trouble, the kind they’d need a manager for.
* * *
Tony Dimitriades was born into a Greek Cypriot family that had transplanted to London. As a young man, he’d gone to see The Girl Can’t Help It, in order to “get a look at Jayne Mansfield’s boobs.” Despite his intentions, what stopped him in the film was Little Richard, “this guy at the piano, this primal thing that blew me away.” Those who are converted to rock and roll often have their epiphanies; this was Dimitriades’s. Years later, when Little Richard was officiating at Tom Petty’s marriage to Dana York, the student was able to share the story with the teacher, who was quick to tell him, “Jayne Mansfield’s boobs are the only reason I did that movie.”
As a young man, Dimitriades’s plan was to be an English solicitor. Prior to his exams, he aligned himself with an office he describes as a “proper English firm,” Leman, Harrison, and Flegg. As one employee informed the young Dimitriades early on, this was a firm that had enough of a connection to the past that Leman’s father, an original partner, would occasionally come to work on horseback. There was a hint of Dickens to the scene. But what the situation afforded him was was a firm foundation in law, along with a sense that he wanted to be at least a few steps into the modern world.
After passing his exams, Dimitriades came across a job posting, the phrasing of which stuck with him: “Young solicitor required. Interesting practice. Show business and politics.” He applied for the position at Bernard Sheridan and Co. and got it. As described, the job took him into those two worlds, politics and show business. Sheridan was involved in a number of international human rights causes that would give him a reputation, as he simultaneously represented the Hollies, Pink Floyd, Cleo Laine, and others. Dimitriades was drawn to the show business part of things, where it appeared that he could experience politics in abundance, without ever having to go to the other side of Sheridan’s practice.
“In those days,” Dimitriades explains, “many of the managers were scoundrels, and the record companies were even more blatant in screwing the artists. So Bernard Sheridan and Co. became known for helping artists get out of their contracts. For instance, Fleetwood Mac, the early Fleetwood Mac, was on Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records, which was going bankrupt, and they needed us to get them off the label. There was a group called the Herd, with Peter Frampton. Pink Floyd was another client. I was loving it. I was underqualified, but he threw me into the deep end.” The culture of the English music business was at that time more formal. The interaction between the lawyers at Bernard Sheridan and Co. and the artist roster was not social. An air of professionalism dictated that it be so. Given that, Dimitriades did not know the artists as friends. One particular British Invasion superstar was the only marginal exception, inviting the young lawyer to a show. It fostered enough of a relationship that the artist felt comfortable asking for Dimitriades’s help when he needed it.
“He came into the office and said, ‘Where’s Bernard?’” recalls Dimitriades. “I explained that Bernard was on vacation. ‘Well, I’ve got to get a divorce,’ he tells me. When I ask him what he means, he says, ‘My wife is in Portugal fucking this other musician. I need a divorce.’ I explain that he needs evidence of some kind, of cruelty or adultery, without which nothing can be done. So he tells me to go to Portugal and get some. He gives me the name of the club the fellow is playing in. So I get a ticket to Portugal.” Not a great success as a detective, Dimitriades sat outside the adulterous wife’s house, waiting, eventually getting enough information to work with, only to return and find that his client was over it. No need to pursue this, the artist told Dimitriades, explaining that he spoke with his wife and they figured it all out. It was a lesson in several things, among them the always urgent yet often fleeting nature of an artist’s needs. “I was beginning to see,” Dimitriades says, “that they all needed help, of one kind or another.”
Rock and roll was an industry of boom and bust, of people hitting the jackpot, hoping to repeat that, and generally failing. It often happened too fast to keep the files in order. Dimitriades made the move to management, where he’d do his best to help the sometimes desperate individuals living in that unforgiving machine. Among his first clients were Terry Reid and Claire Hamill, who got Chris Blackwell’s attention early on. There was no schooling for what he would do as a manager, the law background being as good as anything but not exactly what was needed. Elvis’s manager, Colonel Parker, came out of the circus, which may have been one step closer to artist management than was the law. “The thing about management,” Dimitriades says, “is that you don’t grasp the nuances until you’ve done it. I wasn’t very good. I didn’t know how to find a producer, how to understand the artist’s needs and so forth.” But now it was under his skin. Ray Davies approached him about working together, and they launched the Konk label. Dimitriades brought Claire Hamill with him, and Davies produced her second release.
While sharing a flat with session drummer Alan White, Dimitriades helped his roommate negotiate full membership in Yes. And then he heard that Ace needed management. The band had “How Long” in the can, and Dimitriades helped them as they grappled with the reality of having that record go to number one on the US charts. He came to the States, got Ace into rehearsals (they already had a second album completed), and then watched the band fall apart. In a relatively short time, he was in Los Angeles, a manager with no act. He was approached by a fellow Brit named Reggie Locke about forming a partnership. Locke, too, had no clients, having just been fired by Joe Cocker. Dimitriades signed on, each man bringing nothing to the partnership.
In the first week after joining forces, Locke took Dimitriades to the Malibu home of Denny Cordell. Given LA’s fuzzy boundary between work and pleasure, no one knew if anything would come of the meeting. Locke was in his element when the cocaine came out, so they stayed awhile. The next day, Dimitriades heard “I’m on Fire” by the Dwight Twilley Band on the radio. The deejay mentioned the label—Shelter Records. “I call Reggie,” Dimitriades says, “and I tell him to call Denny right away, to see if the Dwight Twilley Band has management. About an hour later, Reggie calls me back, says, ‘Well, they’ve got a manager, but Denny says he’s got this other band that’s even better.’
“About a week later we went to the Shelter office there on Hollywood Boulevard to hear the album. It hadn’t been released, had just been finished. And I’m really liking it. Now I can’t tell you that I knew it right then, that I saw the whole picture. But I knew this was good. I asked a few questions Reggie never would have. And, really, I find out that Shelter Records is suffering. This had been an important label, with twenty or thirty employees in the office, and now they were down to five or six. It was like a little skeleton.” No matter, Locke and Dimitriades left the office with a band to manage—Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
The idea was to split things up between the two managers. Locke would go out on the road with the group. Dimitriades would stay home, running the business. It was Locke’s idea to send the Heartbreakers back to Florida to play some shows there before the record came out. Once an agent was on board, they could launch a tour from Gainesville. “But before Reggie even left to join up with the band,” explains Dimitriades, “we had several meetings with agents, and everyone passed. At ICM, the guy came in, heard the album, left, and we never heard from him again. That’s what was happening. I also played it for Frank Barsalona at Premier [Talent], but they couldn’t commit because they were so busy.” No agent, no tour. Then Cordell played the album for Al Kooper, who had played on some of Petty’s solo recordings. Kooper, just heading out on an East Coast run, offered the band an opening slot. Then a stand-alone date, opening for KISS, came through Reggie’s connection at Joe Cocker’s agency. It would be the Heartbreakers’ first tour as a band with a record out.
Denny Cordell groaned when Dimitriades came around for tour support. Projections suggested that the band would need fifteen thousand dollars. Dimitriades succeeded, leaving Shelter with a check, most of which went to Florida with Reggie. “They’re there a week, maybe a week and a half,” Dimitriades explains, “and I get a call from Reggie saying, ‘I need more money.’” All of the tour support money, meant to carry them from beginning to end, was gone. And the tour hadn’t started. But the worst news was yet to come. “Two weeks later, same thing,” Dimitriades says. “He tells me they can’t do the tour because they have no money. So I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck is Reg doing?’ He’s my partner, and this is happening. And then I get a call from Benmont, who says to me, ‘Tony, you’ve got to come out with us. We’re having so much fun. Last night, there was blow from one end of my piano to the other!’ I suppose it should have been obvious. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe it could be so. But now I couldn’t avoid grasping the situation, whether I wanted to or not.”
Technically, it could be categorized as embezzlement, no matter how commonplace such a misallocation of funds was in that line of work. A manager could be sued for this kind of thing, even if his comanager was responsible. And for Dimitriades, there wouldn’t be a lot of work in Los Angeles if he got hung up in that kind of legal tangle. He considered quitting while he still could, a move that might protect him. “I really thought about getting out. I didn’t see other options. But—and I’ll never forget this—I was living with a girl who said to me, ‘You can’t do that. Do you know how good this band is? You have to find a way.’ She really made her point, strongly. So I thought, ‘Okay, I have to talk to Tom.’ I start thinking what I’m going to say to him. I’m planning the conversation in my head, and the phone rings. It’s Tom. He tells me he needs to talk to me. I say, ‘That’s funny. I need to talk to you.’ To which he says, ‘You go first.’ And I say, ‘You go first.’ So Tom says, ‘Well, Reggie can’t be a manager. He needs his own manager.’”
* * *
For a young band on the eve of its first release, the feeling is often that of a dream coming true. The Heartbreakers were no different. They had a label, some tour support, a roadie named Bugs. They’d waited a long time for this. The anticipation had been building for so long it was like another member of the band. Now something was finally happening. They were even doing blow, thanks to their road manager, who seemed pretty good at coming up with more when it was needed. When they stopped at truck stops for gas, they didn’t just look like a rock-and-roll band. They felt like one. They’d been living in two apartments in Gainesville, rehearsing every day in a warehouse in town, and now they were getting out on the road.
When they opened for KISS in South Carolina, they were introduced to the issues that came with playing the arenas. No sound check, limited stage depth because of the headliner’s gear. Once up there, in front of a full house, not everyone could hear themselves or one another. Petty recalls having side wedges for the first time, monitors that allowed him to hear better than he could in many clubs, but Lynch says it was a struggle with sound issues back behind the band. It was clear that the KISS audience wasn’t there to catch the opener, so the Heartbreakers had something to prove. “We’re up there trying to do our thing,” says Stan Lynch, “play our album, doing what we do. And all of sudden the crowd erupts in a fucking frenzy. It’s almost like they’d just turned the P.A. on or something. I’m thinking, ‘Wow, they love us now!’ Like something has happened, the tide has turned. I can see Tom out there, feel him getting a little peppy behind it. He turns around, looks at the drums, and then he gives me this look, like there’s something to see. I turn around, and there’s this giant KISS sign that had been turned on, flashing, ‘KISS! KISS! KISS!’ Fuck.”
The early shows were a source of humility as much as an opportunity to figure out new ways to work an audience. “Nobody had a clue who Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were,” says Jim Lenahan. “But they went out there and played like they were the headliners. They would demand that people pay attention. Eventually, it worked.” The Al Kooper shows couldn’t have been more different from the KISS experience. The tour was named after Kooper’s latest record, Act Like Nothing’s Wrong. The venues were close to empty, with fewer than ten paying audience members in some rooms. The money was terrible. Radio showed little interest. WBCN in Boston, an exception, picked up on the Heartbreakers record and did a live broadcast of the Paul’s Mall show. The bootleg of that night circulates still. Listen to it and you’ll hear how few people came out that night. Just like you’ll hear the Heartbreakers play as if the room were sold out. But Boston and San Francisco aside, most towns didn’t register that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were out there. In the first three weeks of the debut’s release, sixty-five hundred records were sold. These were numbers that suggested that tour support from the label might soon stop coming. It felt like the end just as much as it felt like the beginning.
* * *
“The first album was released to little or no fanfare,” Tony Dimitriades explains. “But just before I went back to spend Christmas in London at the end of 1976, I saw a great review of the album in Sounds, the UK music magazine. It gave me something to work with. So while I was in London, I made an appointment to see the music agent Barry Dickins. I knew him from my time in London, because of the Hollies, I think, and I wanted to play him the album, see if I could get something going in the UK. I showed him the Sounds review and played him the record. He was excited enough to bring in a young agent named Ian Wright, who was booking a European tour for Nils Lofgren. They offered us the opening spot on that tour.
“I remember everyone at Shelter Records being very excited when I returned to LA and told them the news. I also recall that someone at the label told some of the guys in the Heartbreakers that they’d better rehearse because Nils was really good. When Tom heard this, he took exception to the fact that they would think he needed to raise his game to come across well as an opener for Nils. He wasn’t putting Nils down. Tom just had a belief and confidence in himself and the band. That attitude never changed. We were able to play the European tour despite a lack of financial support from the record companies. Shelter was having financial problems at the time, and ABC, the distributor, was not willing to give us tour support.”
England was God’s gift to the Gainesville band, a reprieve from the challenge of getting America’s attention. “Anything That’s Rock n’ Roll,” never released as a single in the States, was climbing the UK charts in 1977 as the Heartbreakers went on the Lofgren tour. “From the moment we got off the plane,” Petty says, “there were journalists there to meet us, photographers wanting to take our pictures. We were on Top of the Pops and on the cover of Melody Maker.” It was a stark contrast to what was happening back home. “It was tight,” Dimitriades says, “but we managed to make the money work. Chris Blackwell’s Island Records was Shelter’s distributor in the UK, and they did a great job. From the very first gig in Cardiff, it was obvious that something was happening. Halfway through the tour, we were asked to stay on after the Lofgren dates to play our own headline tour of the UK. Word got back to the US, and ABC sent an emissary to come with us on the road. She arrived with a check to ‘help us and show their support.’ Tom tore up the check. We’d gotten that far without them. By the time our headline dates were done, we’d been on the cover of all three UK music magazines, NME, Melody Maker, and Sounds.”
They did more television after Top of the Pops, including The Old Grey Whistle Test. Everything was going exactly as the band and management hoped. “Don’t idealize the lifestyle, though,” Stan Lynch insists. “It was fucking rough. When we were the opening band, we didn’t even get dressing rooms. You’d be out in the snow putting on your clothes, the wet ones from the night before. I suppose it was still a far cry from Boston, when the rat fell on us from above the stage. It was England, so it was cool, at least.” The other band members don’t remember being without dressing rooms, but every man seems to remember the wet clothes. Mostly, though, it all comes back as their first, sweet taste of recognition. And there will only ever be one of those.
Amid the emerging acclaim for the debut, there were questions in the press regarding what exactly the band was, what musical frontier they’d ridden in from. Playing Holland, Petty ran into a promo record that had the Ramones on one side, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on the other. If in hindsight the idea seems ludicrous, Petty’s leather jacket on the cover of the first album, worn with bullets strapped across it, was all the evidence some people needed. Obviously, this was a punk band. No matter the category into which they’d be thrown, the Heartbreakers soaked up all the British glory they could. But through it all, they were also learning, for the first time, how to be out on the road and to still be a band, unified, enough so that they could get to the next show.
“I remember,” Petty says, “being over there, walking down some hotel hallway, and Ron Blair just jumped on Stan, started pounding on him. I mean, they’re going at it. And then, pulled off of one another, they get up, and we all keep walking to the gig or wherever we were going. Not a word gets said. Like it never happened.” From the first tour, Stan Lynch emerged as the most complicated character in the Heartbreakers story, in part because he was the lone extrovert in a tribe of introverts. Lynch might have been the one most willing to step up and say what was on his mind. But, as he admits, he sometimes did that without thinking. “We needed him,” says Mike Campbell. “Sorely. He was a great energy to be around. He was the one saying, ‘Come on, gang!’ He had all that, God bless him. I remember doing an interview once, and the interviewer asked each of us what we think about when we’re playing. Ben said something esoteric, maybe about Beethoven. I said I was thinking about how to string the next few notes together. They get to Stan, and he says, ‘Money. Money and pussy. But mostly money. I did the math and figured out that each time I hit the snare drum I’m getting five hundred dollars. So I put a lot of extra fills in.’”
Stan Lynch could be the band member most ready to go out there and kill it, or the most divisive, or the most enthusiastic supporter of what Tom Petty was trying to pull off, or the most bitter. The problem for Petty came in figuring out when Lynch was going to be which of these things. And what Lynch was saying to whom. And what, exactly, he was after, aside from women. “He was really good onstage,” says Petty. “He could read me really well and make a show really exciting. He could also work sex into anything. I mean, we were all as young and horny as he was, I suppose. But I never saw myself as Mr. Love Man. We thought it was great that we could get attention from women because we’d become rock-and-roll stars. But it wasn’t my quest. It was Stan’s quest.”
“I’m a good dog,” says Lynch. “Woof, woof! I had fun. I did exactly what you’d expect a young fucking buck to do when he’s off the leash. He fucking runs, shits everywhere, and has a ball. You’re supposed to go, ‘Get ’em, Bosco!’ You’re not supposed to train him.” For the moment, however, this wasn’t an issue, and Stan Lynch wasn’t the Heartbreakers’ biggest problem. America was.
When Denny Cordell and Leon Russell finally parted company, Cordell getting the record label, Shelter needed a new distributer. Previously with MCA, Shelter was saved from stagnation when Cordell made the deal with ABC. In a parallel move, a promotion man by the name of Jon Scott, once a deejay at the powerful FM 100 in Memphis, had left radio to work for MCA before going over to ABC himself in 1977. Fate must have been at work as Scott shadowed the Heartbreakers’ move from MCA to ABC distribution, because the band would need him, as much as they would ever need anyone.
On Scott’s first road trip for MCA, in 1974, he’d been handed a cassette sampler of upcoming MCA releases to listen to as he drove the highways of the mid-South. Among the songs, a mix of the good and the atrocious, was “Depot Street” by Mudcrutch. If it didn’t fill him with the kind of missionary zeal that promo men hope for, he liked the song and managed to get it played in New Orleans and Nashville, though nowhere else. Moving over to ABC, now a VP of album promotion, Scott was relocated to Los Angeles, in a new office, and, as he describes, “twiddling my thumbs.”
It was a quiet time in the new position, between waves of releases. Scott had been raised in the wonder years of FM radio, a time when a regional deejay could break an act. “To break acts was the goal,” he says. It was the work, and it was the high, the way he could leave an imprint that said he’d had been there, his initials in rock and roll’s tree trunk. Staring across his office, his life still half in boxes, he saw the Heartbreakers’ album. He put it on, listened for a few minutes, and then told his assistant to hold his calls so that he could listen to the whole thing on headphones. Which he did and then did again.
Scott knew not to trumpet his “find” until he first understood its situation. And the situation was not perfect. ABC had tried with this record, but they were done. It had been out eight months, which was already the time span covering birth to bed rest for most records. Only twelve thousand copies had been sold. The success overseas hadn’t helped things in the States. It was dead product. ABC, ready to help months earlier when things were happening in England, now wasn’t interested in spending more on something that was, by industry measure, over. “That album had come out with thirty-five other albums,” explains Scott. “And some of them were very big albums. But it was more than that. Most people in America didn’t really know what had happened in Europe. And as much as anything else, Petty was passed over because of the bullets around his neck, because he was perceived to be punk. That jacket.” For various reasons, because he was a new VP and because of his persuasive abilities, ABC gave Scott six weeks to “get action on the record.” But no money. It was the summer of 1977.
“We came back from England, from that experience, to be unknowns again,” Petty says. “And as jarring as the England experience was, coming home was just a bit more jarring. And not in the way we wanted.” Even the stations in their hot spots, Boston and San Francisco, would need to be convinced that there was good reason to go back and do more on a record that had already been serviced. Scott called a friend at KWST in Los Angeles, deejay Charlie Kendall, and made him listen to the record. Really listen, with headphones. It worked, and Scott then corralled the deejay into going to the Whisky to see the Heartbreakers open for Blondie. “Charlie told me,” explains Scott, “that if the live show was as good as the record, he’d add ‘Breakdown’ on Monday. After one song at the Whisky, he gave me a firm commitment.” Feeling that rush promo men get when they secure an add at radio, Scott made his way backstage to introduce himself to the band, to share the good news, to get to know the group he was working for. “I get to Petty, and I tell him I’m gonna break his record. He looks at me and Charlie and says, ‘Bugs, escort these children out of here.’”
On the way out of the dressing room, Scott told Petty that every time the Heartbreakers heard ‘Breakdown’ on the radio they were going to have to think about him. It may not have been the most original line to come from a promo man’s mouth, but within a few weeks Scott got a call from Tony Dimitriades, then an apology from Petty. That might have offered Scott a satisfaction of some kind, but it was not what he was after. He wanted that bigger rush. There was no label president urging him on, no budget to sponsor his passions—Scott was working from instinct alone. He’d fallen for a rock-and-roll record. He wanted to break it.
Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn came into the story from another angle. After writing an initial, tempered review, he went to San Francisco to see the Heartbreakers open for Bob Seger, sensing that there was something more going on with this Florida band than he’d first caught. More time with the record and a live experience caused him to go public with a revised opinion, a second review. He met up with Petty for an interview at a Los Angeles IHOP. It wasn’t the kind of behavior you saw in major critics. Hilburn had come around to seeing that this was an important band in the bigger story of rock and roll. He later framed his thinking about that period in music in his theory of “active and passive bands”:
Passive bands can do enticing work (Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”), but the artistic heartbeat of rock rests with the more challenging Active outfits: Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, the Cars, Devo and the Clash. While they welcome sales, the primary intent of Active rockers is to say something, and to say it with the individuality that is at the base of all worthwhile art.
The trouble with most Active bands from a commercial standpoint is that you have to pay attention to the music to fully appreciate what’s going on. The surfaces can be noisy and intense. You may even have to strain to understand the words. And there isn’t always just one interpretation. The aim is to make you feel and consider: get involved.
This involvement was once prized in rock. During the key ’50s and ’60s periods, Elvis, Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Hendrix, the Kinks, Joplin all teased imaginations. They stepped away from the pop norm in a way that invited you to weigh your own attitudes. But adventure has become a commercial liability in the 1970s. The emphasis is on groups that do all the work for you, thereby taking true involvement out of pop. The God of AM radio is Accessibility. Anything challenging is shunned by program directors. The technique of Passive outfits like Toto, Boston, Foreigner, Kansas and Styx is to reduce all challenge and mystery so that a listener can absorb the music as easily as the handsome photos in a glossy coffee-table book.
In Hilburn, the Heartbreakers had found a critic who grasped what they were doing. It fed the momentum.
Jon Scott went back to the band’s first advocates, KSAN in San Francisco and WBCN in Boston. The respective program directors, Bonnie Simmons at KSAN and Norm Winer at WBCN, had already put their muscle and intention behind the album when it came out many months earlier. But to build something real, Scott needed them, even if he recognized that convincing stations to add the Heartbreakers for the first time was a more straightforward task than asking stations that had initially championed the record to give this eight-month-old product a second go. “It was like going to church to ask permission,” Scott explains. He spoke with Winer by phone, got him on board, but went further with Simmons, flying to San Francisco to ask for her support. Both stations went along with the plan. “I remember feeling like maybe, just maybe,” Petty says, “a dream was starting to come true.”
KMET in Los Angeles hadn’t added the record the first time around. Scott needed the station to break the spine of the Los Angeles market. His idea was to set up a KWST live, recorded event with the band at Capitol Studios. He would give the recording to KSAN in San Francisco and WBCN in Boston, but he would also bring KMET by the studio to see the line that was bound to form around the building and down the street. A little material evidence. It did the trick. Hilburn, KMET, a string of shows at the Whisky: it all added up to a story about an album that demanded some attention. One and a half years after release, “Breakdown” went into the top forty. Justifiably elated by his triumph on their behalf, Scott was ready to do the same with “American Girl.” But two problems kept him from following through. One was the fact that his superiors at ABC expected him to spend a little time focusing on Steely Dan’s Aja. The second was that the Heartbreakers had a new record in the works. One afternoon at Petty’s house, Scott heard “Listen to Her Heart.” It helped him move on. Without ever getting the benefit of full promotion, “American Girl” would have a long and glorious life, but not as the Heartbreakers’ next top-forty single.