This is them when they were in love, see?
—ADRIA PETTY, HOLDING UP A PICTURE OF HER PARENTS
Just as Tom Petty hadn’t taken the class that teaches young American men from the working classes to deal with success, neither had Jane Petty been offered any training in how to be the wife of a rock-and-roll star. The shared adventure of moving to California, itself an exercise in adjusting their expectations, was disrupted when she went back to Florida with baby Adria. She was home at her mother’s house while her partner worked in Leon Russell’s carnival. But Jane was back in Los Angeles in time to see things building for her husband’s band. If cautiously, Tom and Jane held on to their belief that something could happen here. They were still together in their vision. But within a year, Jane would start to realize that it wasn’t actually her dream—it belonged to him. And she no longer had one.
For the moment, they didn’t think of it as his or hers. They just prepared themselves as the dream started changing their lives. The harvest came late, but it was a good one. The money doesn’t arrive when the Melody Maker cover story hits the stands. But to some degree, the excitement of a burgeoning career masked the disappointment that their material conditions had yet to improve. They were still driving that shitty Opel GT. Even though people were starting to recognize the driver.
Then the Opel—“It looked kind of like a sports car,” says Petty. “Like a tiny, bad Corvette, with the lights that flipped up in the front”—started to leak gas fumes into the passenger area. Petty had to drive with the window down and, when it got bad, with his head out the window. The royalty check that came in 1978, the first real check, was for just over seven thousand dollars. A Camaro was seven thousand dollars. He bought one. Not long after, the Pettys were able to rent a small house in Sherman Oaks for eight hundred dollars a month. The place had a grand piano. “There was probably no furniture in it,” Petty says, laughing, “but I thought I was doing great. I had a way to pay my rent, and shit, I had a house with a piano in it. The money wasn’t my goal. As long as I was comfortable, that was fine. I just didn’t want to be ripped off.”
For Jane, one thing did come faster than the royalty checks: the awareness of just how lonely this experience would be. A gray wall seemed to be pushing across the horizon line in her direction, just as her husband’s party was getting started. He was rarely home. There was more monotony and stillness than she’d ever imagined possible. However much she called on friends like Joyce Lenahan, Jane was often alone with Adria while her husband was out playing shows or recording. She got high, drank a little, cut some hours out of the day that way. But the feeling of being in it together was more and more difficult to maintain. And when she described the situation to someone, that person seemed only to hear the part about rock-and-roll success. People got lost in her husband’s story. Just as she had.
For his part, Tom Petty had to learn to live somewhere between the highs of his new experiences and the lows of opening the front door to find a wife struggling with a disappointment for which she had no name. At its best, the satisfaction of success gave him the energy to provide Jane with some of the support she needed, as she’d given it to him before the world gave a shit about Tom Petty. At its worst, it meant that everywhere he went someone needed to be taken care of, whether it was a label needing more of his time or a family needing more of his attention. Often, sitting alone in a room at home with his Gibson Dove seemed like as good a solution as any.
“It must have been tough for his wife,” reflects Tony Dimitriades. “I mean, she was definitely putting on a brave front, probably overcompensating for not being in charge by leading the way when she was able to do something with Tom. But he was getting so busy that I imagine he didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything when he did finally get home. And I’m guessing that’s probably when she was ready to get out for a while. This is not easy stuff on either side. I do remember that when I had a baby at home, Tom told me how I should take him out in the car, drive around until he fell asleep, that he used to do that all the time. I suppose only then did I realize what Tom was having to do when he got home from the studio or back home from the road. But I was the manager. I wasn’t focused on that. I was thinking about the tour, wondering where the new songs were. That was my job, right?”
* * *
In some ways, the making of the first album wasn’t entirely distinct from the slow unfolding of the Mudcrutch years, at least in Petty’s mind. The two experiences were part of life before “Breakdown” broke. The debut took a long time to make, just as it had taken over a year to enter the charts, and, of course, some songs on that album preexisted the Heartbreakers. Album number two was another matter altogether. The late success of the first record cramped the space in which a follow-up could be made. Jon Scott’s campaign, Robert Hilburn’s critical advocacy, the support at radio—it all happened when the Heartbreakers should have been working on a follow-up. Now it was as if they had two jobs, supporting the first record’s late success as they also made the second. Youth, adrenaline, and ambition made it all possible.
Their shows had gotten bigger, the dates more regular. Never again would the Heartbreakers see the double-digit audiences of the Al Kooper tour. But that didn’t mean that logic would govern the scene on the road. There would still be mismatched bills, like the Rush show in Philadelphia. “It was at the Tower Theater,” says Petty. “We didn’t know much about Rush at the time, but we were used to appearing on someone’s tour for a day or two and then going somewhere else. I remember that it seemed half the room was for us and the other half fervently against. I felt satisfied by the end, like we’d won over a lot of people otherwise set against us. That wasn’t the extreme—on another night we opened for Tom Scott and the L.A. Express. We’d never heard of them, but we knew this was not what we should be doing. And we did not win that night.”
Hiding away in the Shelter studio, turning knobs on Vox amps while their kids slept, trying to find out just who they were as a band in the studio, couldn’t have been more different from trying to find out who they were on the road. One was done in isolation, free of reference points, the other in public. And when they were out there, they were usually assessed in relation to the bands with whom they shared a stage or those with whom the critics grouped them, most of them high school dropouts or misfits of one kind or another. The Heartbreakers weren’t Rush or KISS. Neither were they the Ramones, even if they felt a connection. They certainly weren’t Tom Scott and the L.A. Express. But there were other acts toward whom they felt a deeper sympathy, bands that seemed to have spent time eating off the same menus at the same dirty lunch counters.
“Mink DeVille,” Petty says. “We played some shows with them, and they seemed, really seemed like the real deal. I felt like I knew where they were coming from and respected what they were doing.” Known for his struggles with heroin and trouble getting to the gig on time, Willy DeVille made two albums with Jack Nitzsche, recordings that seemed like messages from another time, with traces of the Phil Spector sound, and ballads that had all of the New York romanticism of the Brill Building’s best. DeVille wrote with Doc Pomus, one of the Brill Building’s songwriting legends. DeVille didn’t just know the history; he sat down next to it at the piano.
“I loved Willy’s stuff, but I’ll tell you another band that really astounded me—and when I first saw them I hadn’t even heard their stuff, didn’t know anything about them,” Petty says. “We were playing a club outside Chicago, in Schaumburg, Illinois, and we were going down pretty well at this point. But that night we just didn’t get much of a response. The place was packed, we were playing good, but we just weren’t getting much back. So I’m talking with this guy afterwards, saying how weird this seemed. And he says, ‘This is Cheap Trick’s audience, man.’ I said, ‘Cheap Trick’? ‘Wait until you see this,’ he tells me. They hit the stage, and it was fucking mind-bending. Robin Zander was one of the most powerful lead singers I’d seen, sang like one of the Beatles. The sheer energy of the thing on the stage was so great. I thought, ‘This band is going to be enormous.’”
Seeing Elvis Costello playing a solo show in England, hammering on his Fender Jazzmaster, seeing Bruce Springsteen play solo at the Roxy, Petty felt like there were others out there. And he was right. But the similarities between them all were always more pronounced when the point of contrast was Donna Summer. Otherwise, it was really just a loose collection of artists with a shared affection for guitars and Elvis, Chuck Berry, Van Morrison, the Zombies. But it was enough of a feeling of community to deepen the Heartbreakers’ sense of who they were and who they weren’t, where they fit, what the mission was, and what the moment was. “Things were happening then,” Petty recalls. “There was a changing of the guard. On that club tour, we could tell something was shifting. We’d been playing with Blondie at the Whisky, and suddenly they were getting all this attention. Talking Heads. The Ramones. When we came home from that tour, Cordell called me up and said, ‘We’ve got to go out tonight. You’re not going to believe it!’ It was like the overthrow we’d dreamed of was going to happen.
“I don’t know if I felt a kinship with all those people or some of them,” Petty says. “But you’d see stuff here and there that you thought was good. Certainly not all of it.” At a Los Angeles club, too drunk to be his own best adviser, Petty agreed to join the Knack onstage. Handed a guitar, he plugged into an amp, turning the volume all the way down on the guitar before he brought the volume on the amplifier all the way up. Then he waited for his moment, watching as the Knack kicked off the song. A minute or so in, Doug Feiger gave Petty the sign, letting him know it was time to solo. And that was when Petty turned the guitar volume to ten, filling the room with feedback before hitting one power chord that if not musical was nonetheless a message. He then stumbled out from the stage, his cord coming unplugged, onto a row of tabletops in front of the stage, kicking people’s drinks into their laps. Maybe this was how Petty chose to comment on his membership in the “new wave.” Maybe he was just drunk. No matter, the next day a review of the show featured the headline “Tom Petty Digs the Knack!”
Petty bought his red Camaro in cash. It was the kind of thing Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis had done before him. It was a rock-and-roll move. The Camaro had an eight-track player in it and quadraphonic speakers. Around the time he drove the car off the lot, he got a call from Bruce Springsteen. Petty had seen Springsteen at the Roxy, in the months before Born to Run was released, and liked what he saw, recognized a fellow traveler. Petty didn’t know the man, but Springsteen wasn’t shy in the way Petty was. The guy from New Jersey put in the call, just to hang out, one rock and roller to another. He asked Petty if he had a car.
Petty picked him up at the Sunset Marquis. They went down Sunset Boulevard to the water, stopping at Tower Records on the way, picking up half a dozen eight-tracks. They drove until they’d listened to every song on every one of them. The Stones’ 12 x 5 was among the tapes. When “Congratulations” came on, Springsteen raised his arms to the heavens and said, “You can take me now!” Petty loved that. He liked knowing another man out there who went to the same church. But, really, Springsteen was from the other side of the planet—he loved the music hillbillies made, but he sure didn’t know what it was like to be one.
* * *
Max and Noah Shark played the same role with You’re Gonna Get It! that they did with the debut album, with even a little more room for input, given Cordell’s increased distance. “We realized,” explains Mike Campbell, “that these guys had a lot to bring to what we were trying to do. We thought, ‘Wow, most of the ideas [Noah] comes up with seem to make things better.’ So we just starting listening to him more while we made the first record and relied on him when we did the second.” Unlike Denny Cordell, Max and Noah had no outside responsibilities. They could focus on the records, coming up with strategies for how to get the best performances out of the band. “They had a flash from a camera,” Stan Lynch remembers. “If you weren’t playing great, they come out and shoot this flash off in your eyes. It would make you see this white door, and they’d tell you to go through it. I never figured out who the fuck Noah Shark was. I think he was a shoe salesman or something.” Cordell, meanwhile, was busy working to keep his label solvent.
“Denny talked with us about the record, but it was more as a supervisor,” Petty says. “We were left to make the thing.” Some of the songs came very fast. “I Need to Know” was as fine a piece of power pop as the Heartbreakers would ever create. They thought they were cutting a song like “Land of a Thousand Dances,” but it came out as a short, tight, two-guitar blast of rock and roll. At two minutes and twenty-three seconds long, the recording didn’t linger unnecessarily. Perhaps Cheap Trick had made a dent on Petty’s consciousness. “Listen to Her Heart” sounded like a single to everyone but got in trouble with a reference to cocaine. The label wanted it changed to “champagne.” “That’s not expensive enough,” Petty told them. The executives were thinking about radio. Petty was thinking about a song.
“Listen to Her Heart” and “I Need to Know” were worked up on the road, however, before the band started recording. The other tracks happened in the studio, fast. Campbell cowrote “Hurt” and “Baby’s a Rock ’n’ Roller,” with some of his drum loops informing the final recordings. For “No Second Thoughts,” they made a loop of the band playing, recording vocals and overdubs on top of that. Everyone wanted to capitalize on the momentum of the first record, so they called it done when they had ten songs in the can, though an eleventh, “Parade of Loons,” would be recorded but left off because it had issues with tape distortion.
Going into the sessions, Petty knew he wanted the album to be different from the first. The only problem was that he didn’t have enough time to determine what “different” meant. For the most part, the deeper thinking couldn’t get done. But the freshness of the debut remained just that in the follow-up. It had the crackle. But not until the third record would Petty make the leap that he knew the band could and, in his mind, had to make. The first two records didn’t satisfy his ambitions so much as raise the temperature on those ambitions. Touring behind the second album, Petty was already grappling with this issue. One journalist caught Petty in mid-thought: “We might do some longer things [on the third album]—not rambling—just longer than two and half minutes,” he told the writer. “The new album will have a very different feel to it, just like the first two differ from one another. I’m going to try to make the third a double album that sells for a dollar more than a single LP. We’re going to record it with a mobile unit—not a live album as such but new songs recorded onstage in a lot of different locations, because there are these little places we really love to play in.” He was thinking out loud. All those ideas would go away. But like the best album makers, Petty had to circle in on what he was after.
Denny Cordell wanted to call the second album Terminal Romance. The band had done a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz, already a star in her field, and had something good to work with for the cover. But Noah Shark had Petty’s ear, and he was adamant. You’re Gonna Get It!, both album title and cover image, was as much Shark’s vision as anyone’s. For better or for worse—mostly the latter—Shark got his way. “I remember Tom saying, ‘Do you like this picture?’” Lynch recalls of the album artwork. “And I said, ‘I don’t really care.’ He goes, ‘Well, that’ll be the last fucking time I ask you.’ And he meant it. Like, ‘If you’ve got no opinion about it, fuck you.’ Not much of an attenuator in Tom. Pretty much a pulse switch.” Petty got help where it was available and moved on if it wasn’t. Cordell, absent as he was from the sessions, no longer held sway. Noah Shark had been in the room when the record was made and would even get a production credit this time around, along with Petty and Cordell. And ideas raised in the studio, by one like Shark who was deep in the process of creation, had a currency with which outsiders couldn’t easily compete. Cordell had become an outsider. As the years ahead would make clear, Petty collaborated best with those who were ready to work alongside him, not in the next building.
As the band moved quickly to finish the record, Tony Dimitriades knew he needed to get an agent who could help build the Heartbreakers’ touring operation. Because of his experience with Ace, he had worked with Frank Barsalona’s Premier Talent. It was the agency he respected the most. Barsalona was an innovator, a mensch, a principal architect of the touring business in the United States. His vision helped to create a network of promoters and venues and managers that became the backbone of rock era touring. Premier had passed on the Heartbreakers once already, but Dimitriades knew he had to go back again. The Heartbreakers’ current agent was pushing him to put them on a national tour opening for Wishbone Ash. Dimitriades couldn’t face the possibility of taking that proposal to Petty. Petty’s temper came and went, but Dimitriades had gotten a sense for what triggered it. It was things like opening for Wishbone Ash.
Petty refers to these issues as “the adventures of being a support act.” When those adventures were over, they were over. But as of the release of You’re Gonna Get It!, the Heartbreakers were still transitioning. Buses hadn’t yet replaced Winnebagos. The band members were sharing hotel rooms. Petty didn’t always know when he should exert the power he’d come into or, at other times, if he’d actually come into any power. The band wasn’t always sure whether they were rock-and-roll stars yet. Even three decades later, in 2006 during the thirtieth anniversary tour, Mike Campbell encouraged his bandmates to take a look at the dressing room of their opening band, Pearl Jam, only because it was so much better than their own. In some ways, the Heartbreakers were slow to learn what was within their rights as a major act. On a three-band bill at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Blondie opening and the Kinks closing, the Heartbreakers in the middle, Ray Davies helped Petty find his power. Waiting for sound check, Petty saw that the Kinks amps had been pushed so far to the front of the stage that the Heartbreakers could barely fit into the space. Ray Davies was sitting at the piano, playing “Tired of Waiting,” though his band had already finished sound check, and it was time for the Heartbreakers to get up there. “He just kept singing it over and over and over,” Petty says. “Time ticked by. He just kept at it, ‘So tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting…’ I finally just said, ‘We’re not playing. Let’s pack it up.’ And the crew started taking our amps down.”
When Mick Avory, the Kinks drummer, came from the backstage area and grasped what was happening on the stage, Ray Davies’s theater of misbehavior, he offered to push back his drums to make space for the Heartbreakers. “He got his roadie to start moving his drum riser,” Petty explains, “because there was tons of room to move behind them. That’s when Ray came off the piano and decked Mick Avory. A full-on fistfight, right out the back door of the Fox. The last thing I saw was them going out the loading door. Then, a few minutes later, someone comes in and says, ‘Okay, it’s all right. Move the gear back.’ Something got worked out in our favor.”
But those kinds of encounters were getting less interesting to deal with, even when they involved heroes from the British Invasion beating the shit out of one another. Midway through touring behind You’re Gonna Get It!, the album already gold, Petty started thinking a lot about a conversation he’d had with Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen had voiced his own frustrations with the opening slot. His band had faced much of the same trouble as the Heartbreakers, finally making a commitment to pull out of that opening act game altogether. “He told me he’d been through that,” Petty says, “and decided he wasn’t going to do it anymore, was only going to play to people who wanted to see him. And if he couldn’t fill the hall, so be it. His band could make an impression with a club audience, then come back and play a bigger room. I thought, ‘That’s a damn good idea.’ I was okay playing in smaller places if it meant playing to people who came to see us.” It wasn’t simply a matter of sharing a bill with the right act rather than the wrong act. “We were offered Rolling Stones shows, and we just loved them. But if you’re opening for that band, once their production kicks in and all those songs go by, no one’s going to remember you were even there. I always said no.” By the time of the third album’s release in 1979, with Premier their agency, the Heartbreakers would be headliners. The audiences they played for were their audiences. Their new road manager, Richard Fernandez, who had come on in 1978 and has never left, helped them make the road a better place to be. Something of a legend among those in the touring industry, Fernandez had been with the Faces and the Eagles, among others. He had the band’s respect. “From Richard,” Petty says, “we found out how isolated you could be from the bullshit. He showed us that. And we liked it.”
* * *
With the band’s first major victories not yet fully processed, either by the accountants or in their own minds, Petty was unknowingly headed toward a series of decisions that would be either the making of him as a bandleader or his undoing. If there was a catalyst, it was Elliot Roberts, manager of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, among others. Roberts had been with Neil Young since 1967, having started a management company with another kid from the lower ranks of the William Morris agency, David Geffen. “Around the time of the second album, work was picking up. We were really touring, had a lot of momentum,” Petty says. “That’s when Elliot Roberts came in. He’d known Tony for a long time, and they became partners in management. The first thing Elliot did was sit me down and say, ‘You can’t do this deal where you’re giving everybody in the band an equal cut of money, because there’s going to be a big problem at some point. You’re going to feel really bitter and used. I’ve been down this road with bands before. It explodes, and everybody walks away. It’s going to blow the whole deal. You gotta do it now.’ And what he said made sense to me.” Within the band, however, no one was going to like it. Some would understand it. Some would come to understand it. Some grumble still.
“It was Tom’s vision I was concerned with,” insists Elliot Roberts. “Not their vision. So I wanted to put all the power with Tom. Just like we did with Neil [Young]. I don’t believe in equal opinion. I believe in best opinion. The drummer and bass player never got called except to tour and record. And they’re getting an equal share? When he’s giving up his days and nights? All the responsibility of the band’s success on his shoulders?” Petty went with Elliot Roberts’s thinking: do it now, deal with a pissed-off band, and you may just have a band in ten years. Don’t act, and you may not have that band. Roberts called the band meeting to let the members know that things were about to change. Petty left it to him, staying home that night. It would be one of the most significant meetings in the group’s history, and Petty has no regrets regarding his absence. Some decisions were business decisions, and he felt they should be handled as such. He knew that the management office would be crowded with feelings, and he figured he’d leave space for them.
“The first thing out of Elliot’s mouth,” says Mike Campbell, “was, ‘We gotta get this corn cob out of Tom’s ass.’ Okay, but what the fuck does that mean? Elliot goes into it, and, yeah, it stung. ‘I’m going to make less, and he’s going to make more.’ But did it piss me off enough to leave the project? It took me a couple days, but I came to grips with it. I remember people were perturbed, though, like, ‘Oh, it’s the Elliot Roberts star machine. He did it with Neil Young, and now he’s doing it with us.’ But, look, I loved writing with this guy. That’s something I didn’t want to walk away from. I’m not that into money. And we’d still be partners, not just guys on salaries. I remember I went to Stan and said, ‘Look, we’ve got great managers, we’re right on the cusp of doing great things, and there’s going to be a lot of money. There’s going to be rich, richer, and richest. But we’re all going to be rich.”
There was one problem with the five-way split: there wasn’t any money there anyway. “There was nothing coming in!” Stan Lynch insists. “Nothing. I was broke off my ass, driving a Ford Granada. I’m living in a shithole but have a gold record on my wall. Five-way split? Of what?” For his part, Benmont Tench was just playing his first Bob Dylan session when he heard about the band meeting. He didn’t know what the meeting was about, but when Dylan came up to him, after saying nothing during the session, to ask if Tench could come back the next day, Tench told Dylan that he wouldn’t be able to attend because he had a band meeting. “We were told there was this meeting,” says Tench. “We get there, find out Tom’s not coming, and Elliot’s going to tell us how it is. I felt blindsided. I was furious. But you’re absolutely fucked, because these are the guys you want to play with. They told us we had to have a lawyer look this over—and the lawyer told us not to do it! But I knew what other bands were out there. I knew what other songwriters were out there. I didn’t want to be down at the Rainbow trying to find a band to play with. I wanted to play in the Heartbreakers. But it took years to accept.”
* * *
The band’s split wasn’t Elliot Roberts’s only issue, however. He and Tony Dimitriades saw problems with Petty’s Shelter contract. Given his legal background, Dimitriades had already identified its problems. The Shelter deal was something Dimitriades had inherited upon stepping in as manager, not a document he’d helped to draft. But up to that point, he’d put his focus on breaking the band. And at its core, Petty’s contract wasn’t that different from others signed by young artists long on aspiration and short on business acumen. It was the kind of legal document kids everywhere actually dreamed of signing. It meant you were going to make records. But also that you’re giving away the rights to your publishing, without really knowing what that means. Petty thought publishing meant songbooks. But, really, after working for years just to get the chance to be a part of a record label, would any young artist stop the machine because they’d have to give away their publishing? The music business had a kind of cunning. No one ever walked away. Record labels kept pens ready for the next kid coming through the door.
The man who signed Petty, however, also happened to be his producer, Denny Cordell. And that producer also happened to be Petty’s mentor. In going after the issue of the bad contract, Elliot Roberts and Tony Dimitriades would be forcing a break between Petty and Cordell. Things were going to get a little Shakespearean, with fathers and sons having to question their allegiances. This third album needed to be something special, but Petty also had to get his house in order, just in case it turned out that it was something special. Into that combustible situation walked a man with a can of kerosene: Jimmy Iovine.
* * *
However different Jimmy Iovine was from Petty, they were good partners. Iovine schemed, wasn’t sensitive, and wanted to move up in the world. If you were his focus, you were going to get all of him. And for a while there, Petty did. “Ambitious” isn’t exactly the right word to describe Jimmy Iovine. But neither is “desperate.” He was some potent mix of the two—and that happened to be right where Petty was at the time. They were neighbors in sentiment and sensibility.
Iovine was street. His backyard was Brooklyn, and his father a longshoreman. His story wouldn’t work as well if he told you he went to Harvard and summered in Hyannis Port. It does work when he says his first jobs included driving a delivery truck for the A&P and selling jazz records at Mays department store, when he says he couldn’t apply himself in school, that when he heard about “dyslexia, ADD, or whatever that shit is,” he was sure he must have had it. He got into the music business when he “pushed a broom around” some New York studios, including the legendary A&R Recording studios, which Phil Ramone called home and Quincy Jones used on a regular basis. He got a boost, twice, from a cousin’s friend, Ellie Greenwich, the great Brill Building writer who only a few years earlier had written “River Deep, Mountain High,” because she saw something in Iovine, even after he got fired from the first studio she got him into. On his second chance, he survived just long enough to secure the second engineer position on a John Lennon project. And Lennon liked him, which meant that Iovine then worked on the Rock ’n’ Roll record, with Phil Spector producing. After three projects with Lennon, he got put on a session with a relative unknown. It was a step down, but Iovine would play a bigger role, moving from second engineer to engineer. The artist was Bruce Springsteen, and he was cutting his third record, hoping it would make his career rather than end it.
The way Jimmy tells the story, destiny was in the air. When an American Idol contestant recently told Iovine that he, as the man behind Beats, was like the next Steve Jobs, Iovine was quick to say, “No. I’m not the next Steve Jobs. I’m Crazy Eddie.” The story is better that way. And it’s probably more accurate. Ron Blair puts it this way: “Jimmy was kinda scary.”
But it wasn’t any of this prehistory that brought together Iovine and Tom Petty. The link was Patti Smith, an unlikely, unknowing agent in it all. “Because the Night,” Smith’s only hit, had come as if from nowhere. But it had a romanticism and a sound. Iovine was the producer and the one responsible for getting the song from Bruce Springsteen’s hands into Patti Smith’s.
That third record of Springsteen’s, Born to Run, did for the artist what everyone involved hoped it would do. And it meant Iovine would be around for the follow-up. During the making of that next record, however, the sessions changed studios, relocating to the Record Plant, and Iovine was unable to reproduce a drum sound they’d gotten at Atlantic Studios. He tried, and though they gave him time, he couldn’t get it. In Iovine’s recollection, one band member finally suggested they try another engineer. Iovine went straight to Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, letting Landau know he was upset. “I told Jon, ‘Fuck this! I quit,’” Iovine recalls. “‘I’ve had it. I’m killing myself here, and this guy’s gonna bring some other asshole in?’ But Jon, who had a very good way of talking to people, says, ‘Listen, I’m going to try to teach you something that goes against everything you’ve ever learned in that neighborhood of yours. It’s going to go against every one of your instincts, but it will serve you well if you can possibly listen to me. I want you to look at the big picture. I want you to go in there and be humble and not make this about you. Make this about Bruce. Go in there and say you’re going to support him, whatever he wants to do. And see where this goes in your life.’ Weeks later, they get rid of this other engineer. Six weeks after that, Bruce gives me ‘Because the Night’ for Patti. And that song changed everything for me.”
“Because the Night” had a sound that was different from what was coming out of California, the echo underscoring the sense of longing that Smith brings to the song. It quickly became a hit on FM radio. On the industry side, no one was quite sure how Jimmy Iovine pulled this from Patti Smith and her band. It was one of those projects that made the producer look good. Denny Cordell heard it. Harvey Kubernik, an LA journalist and record man, heard it. Tom Petty and Tony Dimitriades heard it. What happened from there is a story they all tell differently. Dimitriades says, “Harvey Kubernik had the idea of putting the Heartbreakers together with Jimmy.” Iovine says, “A producer manager put us together, said, ‘Tom Petty’s looking for a producer for his album.’” Petty says, “It was Denny Cordell who suggested we consider Iovine.” Almost certainly, one of them is right.
“God bless Harvey,” says Petty, “because he was an early supporter, for sure, but I wonder if he had that much to do with it, unless he brought it to Denny’s attention. But that doesn’t sound likely to me. It was Cordell realizing he just didn’t have the time to cut the next record. Even on the second, he’d been less and less available. I remember going into his office one afternoon, as I often did, and he said, ‘Have you heard this new Patti Smith record?’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s good.’ He put it on and goes, ‘This guy Jimmy Iovine is very interested. He called and would really like to cut some records with you. I think this could be your man.’” But Petty had already met with Chris Kimsey, who made Some Girls with the Rolling Stones, and felt like that might be a way to go. When Iovine heard about Petty being in talks with another producer, he called Petty directly. “He gets me on the phone,” Petty recalls, “and says, ‘I’m a hundred Chris Kimseys—don’t do that.’
“It was when I played Jimmy a few songs on guitar,” says Petty, “that’s when we really linked up. It was ‘Refugee’ and ‘Here Comes My Girl.’ He was ecstatic. He went crazy. Just going, ‘Wow, wow, wow! This is gonna be incredible.’ I’d never seen such enthusiasm from a producer. And never would again. He was going to die to make this record. His thinking was even more grand than my own. He saw something I hadn’t.” It didn’t even matter that much to Petty that when they first agreed to work together, he thought he was hiring Iovine as an engineer. Iovine worked his way in and got what he wanted, the producer’s chair. “Iovine brought an engineer,” Petty says, “and found a way to make us pay for it.”
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The making of Damn the Torpedoes would be an unconventional affair. The sessions, which started soon after Iovine’s role was confirmed, would not be paid for by the record company. They would be paid for out of Elliot Roberts’s pocket. Tom Petty was preparing to sue his record company and readying himself to declare bankruptcy. The making of the third album began as a privately funded project.