The last time I talked to my mother, I remember I was restless.
—JAMES BALDWIN
There are homes in present-day Los Angeles that go out of their way to let you know you’re in them. They announce themselves. For Jimmy Iovine, producing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was an early music business victory. There would be many more, and those victories delivered him into one of those homes. From the foyer to the pool house, the private screening room to the expansive lawns, it’s a grandeur far removed from the outer Brooklyn that raised Iovine. Tom Petty’s place in Malibu speaks in a quieter voice. The layout of the property doesn’t allow for any sense of how large a parcel of land you’re on, and the rooms in the main house stop well short of mansion or estate scale. You come in through a gate, of course, and you see a couple of nice cars in the driveway. You know the Pacific isn’t far away but not because of vistas staged to impress. The house is tucked into the trees and bushes, gardens wild in the way Petty likes them. It’s on the intimate side as far as rock star homes are concerned.
Petty likes to meet in a small lounge area outside of his recording studio. It’s open to the air coming off the Pacific, and plants push against the windows. In that way, it’s different from most of the studios in which Petty willfully caged himself for much of his life, carpeted relics of the seventies. There are some images on the walls—a Shepard Fairey print of George Harrison, given him by Dhani Harrison, a Dylan painting, a photograph with Carl Perkins. The guitars that are hanging on the wall and standing in racks tend to get switched out. No doubt Norman’s Rare Guitars in Tarzana has gotten a piece of Petty’s paychecks for many years, and the store probably still does. There are no gold or platinum records hanging in the room.
When asked about his years living inside the album cycle, Petty drifts off into thought. He’s sixty-four and has seen more than his share of success and the trouble that comes with it. But it’s as important a topic as any. Petty arrived in the music business when the demands on a young artist with charting records were unambiguous: write the songs, go into the studio, make the record, mix it and master it, set up the release, do press, tour behind the record, write the songs, go into the studio, make the record … and thirty years later, if you’re lucky enough to get that many years, your kids are grown-ups. Petty has spent most of his life at work. “He was gone,” says Adria Petty.
No one, Petty himself included, challenges the idea that the work kept him from parenting as he would have liked to. He was always headed somewhere else, minding a movable shop, working closely with management. He’d pick the T-shirt designs and sign the Christmas cards, record the radio spots, and write songs his band could record. And yell a little. Sometimes when he needed to and sometimes when he didn’t. “Some days I miss it,” he says, “you know, getting up and being Tom Petty. At the time, I was probably complaining about it, but there are days now when my life is so orderly that I miss having to get out of bed with twenty things to do. We were busy for years and years, putting in a pretty good week every week. Bugs was there for all of that. The band wasn’t always there. They weren’t on that schedule all the time. I think Bugs was probably closer to it than they were. I’m sure he was closer to understanding … well, understanding my life, what I was living with. I even took Bugs into legal meetings. The lawyers would be arriving, opening their briefcases. They’d introduce themselves, and I’d go, ‘That’s Bugs.’ They’d all kind of have to accept it.”
* * *
Damn the Torpedoes was released in October 1979, just under half a year after Petty had filed for bankruptcy. By February 1980, he was on the cover of Rolling Stone. Every time Jimmy Iovine heard “Refugee” or “Don’t Do Me Like That” or “Here Comes My Girl” on the radio, he’d call Petty. Until he didn’t. Everyone got busy. The band settled into the realities of success and of the new financial split, which found Petty moving toward a life that would look somewhat different from the others’ lives. Of course, everyone was making more and working more than they ever had. And the more they worked, the bigger the band got. And the bigger they got, the more curious people became about Tom Petty. That was the more significant change for the Heartbreakers than any financial split. When fans heard “Even the Losers,” they often felt like the singer was looking into their worlds. Good songs have that power. They didn’t listen to “Even the Losers” and wonder what was on the bass player’s mind. Petty was the mystery, the crush, the mind to understand, the poster on the bedroom wall. The bass player was going to get laid in Baltimore, but, really, how much more? Identities were being renegotiated, in the spotlight and behind it. Some new walls were erected between the leader and his band, just as Elliot Roberts promised. The question was whether Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers would survive this and, if so, what would be lost. “He got exactly what he wanted,” says Stan Lynch. “Too bad. You know what I mean? Like, ‘You want this? Now it’s all on you.’ For me, the worm sort of started to turn a little in the whole tragicomedy of being in a band. I thought, ‘Hey, dude, you begged for this, actually took it from others to have all this. Accept your Elvis role.’” By most accounts, Petty did. Already had.
“I first heard them during the MUSE sessions,” Jackson Browne says, sitting in the living room of his Hollywood home. “I mean, I didn’t know them before that.” Browne, Bonnie Raitt, John Hall, and Graham Nash were the principal organizers behind the Musicians United for Safe Energy event, the No Nukes concert, as it came to be called. The show, stretched over five nights, included the organizers, but also Gil Scott-Heron, Chaka Khan, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the Doobie Brothers, James Taylor, Ry Cooder, and more. The Heartbreakers were in with the heavies, a “new act” but, with Damn the Torpedoes about to come out and a buzz in the air, not out of place. “They were a band. That was the first thing I picked up on,” Browne says. “There was an identity that went deep, kind of a primal thing. I may not have gotten that immediately. After I saw them and heard the record, though, for sure. But also when I met the crew, Bugs and all of them, because we were all staying at the Gramercy. They were hilarious. And they had the same kind of attitude, like, ‘We’ll see what this is all about, whether this is worthwhile for this band.’ So I always felt like there were several rings around Tom. The band was one of them. The crew was one of them. And he was this almost reclusive center.”
Browne pauses for a moment, as though searching for the bigger point. “He’s very mysterious, doesn’t encourage a lot of investigation of his personal circumstances. But because the songs affect us the way they do, because of the intimacy that happens in them, you’re looking for a trace … maybe that’s what he finds unnerving, the recognition that people are peering straight into him, wanting something. But, really, I don’t know. I mean, we’re friends, but I still can’t say I know him well.”
When the Heartbreakers came onstage at Madison Square Garden for the MUSE concerts, Jackson Browne was at the side of the stage and warned Petty and his band that they were in Bruce Springsteen’s backyard on Springsteen’s birthday, that they’d hear people yelling, “Bruuuuce!” But Browne assured the band that this sound wasn’t the audience booing the Heartbreakers, just people calling out for Springsteen. Petty looked up and said, “What’s the difference?” Stan Lynch, remembering the moment, says, “Without missing a beat! It was like Groucho Marx, that good. With a backdrop of fifteen thousand people screaming, he’s just this total presence, total Buddha. Like, motherfucker, he’s the coolest guy in the room.” Petty could earn his band’s admiration or its anger, depending on the hour.
The MUSE show worked out just fine, but what Jackson Browne refers to as the Heartbreakers’ “very independent attitude” was, to some degree, manifest as discomfort at being in a super-event setting like that of the No Nukes show. When it came time to approve content for the concert film, Petty passed on the chance to be a part of it. He didn’t believe his band’s performance was good enough that night. Good, but not good enough. He ran one of the tighter quality control departments, and it was unaffected by the company he was in. Not being in the film wasn’t an issue for him. When asked a few years later to be a headliner along with the Police and the Clash at the massive US Festival, a series of concerts sponsored by Steve Wozniak, Petty went along with it. But the million-dollar payday likely increased his comfort. He was a businessman among other things. But, mostly, Petty and his band weren’t joiners.
To Jackson Browne’s other point, however, there was an intimacy to Petty’s songs that was beginning to bring people around who were looking for that “trace.” The success of Damn the Torpedoes took the public’s curiosity to significantly higher levels. Stevie Nicks, perhaps because she was in the band that sold more records than most others in the world and, as a result, had a measure of access, was the most outspoken of those who wanted to know more about Petty. She’d already made a few calls to management, but Petty ignored them, not sure that he wanted the association with California superstars, not right then. “After I joined Fleetwood Mac, I started hearing Tom Petty on the radio,” Nicks says. “And I just fell in love with his music and his band. I would laughingly say to anyone that if I ever got to know Tom Petty and could worm my way into his good graces, if he were ever to ask me to leave Fleetwood Mac and join Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, I’d probably do it. And that was before I even met him.” As a member of Fleetwood Mac, Nicks filled whatever room she walked into, but at the rate of one Fleetwood Mac album every two or three years, with some four of her songs on each recording, she was a superstar with a backlog of material. Though it didn’t make the other members of Fleetwood Mac feel a whole lot better, she convinced her “freaked-out” band members that she wasn’t out to become a solo artist. She just needed another outlet for the songs accumulating on her shelf. “I’m not doing a solo record to turn into a solo artist,” she told them, arguably testing the limits of logic.
To the Eagles’ manager Irving Azoff, who was acting as her personal manager, Nicks said, “If I can’t be in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, I want to make a record that sounds as much like T.P.’s as possible.” They went to Petty first through Paul Fishkin, the president of Modern Records, a label Fishkin and Danny Goldberg had set up for Stevie’s solo work, asking if he’d produce Nicks. After some back-and-forth discussion, with Petty expressing his concern that he couldn’t take this on, Nicks and her reluctant producer went into a studio and cut “Outside the Rain.” But the situation confirmed to Petty that it was more than he could handle, no matter Nicks’s assurances that she’d adapt her schedule to suit his. “I realized I couldn’t do this,” Petty explains. “There were a lot of hangers-on, just too much to have to get through. When the Heartbreakers worked, we never had guests in the studio. I wasn’t used to it. So I recommended Jimmy.” Stevie Nicks went to New York late in 1979 and had dinner with Iovine. “We talked a lot about Tom Petty,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Really, you know, I want to be the girl Tom Petty.’” Two weeks later, Nicks was living with Iovine—as his girlfriend.
* * *
While Iovine’s career as a producer was getting busier, Petty was out on the road. “Refugee” and “Don’t Do Me Like That” were already major songs on the radio, the latter a top five hit. But the audiences that came out to see the band knew more than what radio brought to them—they came because of the album. And Damn the Torpedoes was an album, with studied sequencing and interstitial material between song matter that connects the whole experience into one event. “Louisiana Rain,” “Even the Losers,” and “Century City” all have bits of audio scrap leading into the actual recordings, and some of those scraps would become as well loved as the songs themselves. Mike Campbell’s wife, Marcie, can be heard shouting, “It’s just the normal noises in here!” right in the middle of side one. It was something Petty found in a Campbell demo. “I had a TEAC four-track recorder, and it was right around the corner from the washing machine in our little rental house,” explains Campbell. “I was trying to record something, and the washing machine was broken, making this loud noise. I yelled at Marcy, ‘You have to turn that off!’ And she goes, ‘It’s just the normal noises in here!’ Like, ‘Shut the fuck up! I’m living my life!’ Next thing you know, we’d be in the car, and there was Marcie on the radio.”
Petty pushed Iovine to get the audio snippets on the record. The producer didn’t want any of it. “Tom and Mike were Beatles freaks,” says Jimmy Iovine. “They wanted that stuff on there, not me. But, really, these guys were already brilliant record producers. The record’s perfect. It was number two to The Wall for nine weeks. We never went to number one. Talk about The Wall.” For the Heartbreakers, the problem was no longer about getting gigs and trying to stay busy. The issue now was the pace, the circus that never closed its tent flaps. Girls in the lobby, girls putting notes under their doors, all of it. They could have toured as long as they wanted. They only stopped because they knew, and their label and management concurred, that they needed a new record. They’d have to learn to say no, because the offers kept coming and getting better and better.
Relatively early in the touring, however, Petty came up against unexpected troubles. “We were in New York, doing a promo film for ‘Here Comes My Girl.’ This was before MTV. It was just a performance they were shooting, but they used those oil-based smoke machines. I was breathing it in all day, and up until that point, I’d never given a second thought to the condition of my voice. Singing was just something I did. It always worked fine, just came out when I needed it. But the next day in Philadelphia at the Tower Theater, midway through the show, my voice started to quit working, started to go. And seventy-five percent of the way in, it was gone. I couldn’t make a sound—there was nothing coming out.”
At the next night’s show, Petty got 90 percent of the way through the set, which wasn’t a lot of comfort, knowing as he did that Boston was the following night. In Boston, they’d be at the Orpheum Theatre and had the full support of WBCN, the station that had done so much to help break the first album. It was a night for the Heartbreakers to be on. But with the Boston audience in their seats, the band did a vocal warm-up backstage, and Petty opened his mouth to find that nothing would come out.
A local doctor said it was laryngitis and told Petty to take a few days off from singing. The tour schedule was shuffled around, with the Orpheum show rescheduled for two nights later. Petty stayed in his hotel room, not singing, not even talking, just watching TV and sleeping. Bill Flanagan, who would later be the editor of Musician magazine, was enlisted to interview Petty and write a review of the show for Boston’s Real Paper. “I was working in a record store in Providence, Rhode Island, when the first album came out,” says Flanagan. “It felt like there was hope, you know? The midseventies tended to favor people who had been around for a long time and were just now getting promoted to full rock stardom. Linda Ronstadt, Jefferson Starship, Steve Miller Band, Fleetwood Mac. Everyone who had been an opening act in the sixties was getting their moment. Like, ‘Okay, it’s Boz Scaggs’s turn.’ We were asking, ‘Isn’t there anybody new?’” The answer came with Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Graham Parker. When Elvis Costello and Tom Petty showed up, Flanagan says it confirmed that something new was happening, that “the good guys were making a stand.” When Flanagan arrived at the Orpheum, however, he found out the show had been postponed. “I didn’t get the message that the interview had been canceled, though,” explains Flanagan. “And it was a different time. Tom Petty was staying under his own name at the Holiday Inn. So I called the hotel, asked for his room, and woke him up. He’s really nice about it but tells me he can’t talk. A few hours later, the publicist calls, informs me that he’s got laryngitis. I say, ‘I know. I just talked to him.’ She’s like, ‘You what?!’”
Better after forty-eight hours of rest, feeling okay to sing, Petty went to the Orpheum with the band. The excitement was even higher. The audience was in, the lights dimming—and Petty’s voice was … gone. Bill Flanagan wrote something for the Real Paper without seeing a show. But with that second cancellation, Petty got something stuck in his head that would be there for years—uncertainty. It was a feeling of never being completely sure that he’d pull it off. Long after the matter was identified as tonsillitis, the mind part of the trouble remained. A tonsillectomy couldn’t fix what was beginning to happen in his head. But with a record on the charts and a lot of people looking to him for their livelihoods, Petty didn’t make his nerves anyone else’s problem. There was a calendar full of dates to play before they got back into the studio. He did what he’d learned to do as a kid: he kept it to himself.
Among those dates were shows that gave the band a chance to return to Florida as heroes. The band that got fired from Dub’s was coming back to enjoy their parade. There was some satisfaction in that, and in this case, it was evenly dispersed among the band members. There would be only one first trip back home after hitting the big time. This was it. No other tour stop would mean this much. Not since the Allman Brothers had Florida seen one of its own acts enjoying this kind of attention. And in the case of the Allmans, Georgia seemed to get a lot of the credit. Not so with the Heartbreakers—this one was for the Sunshine State. In Tampa, it felt like everyone was behind them, from the hotel staff and the gas station attendant to the kids smoking dope on the beach. It was a homecoming, and it was, without question, sweet. The day after the show, after only a few hours of sleep, Petty went to Gainesville to visit his mother, for what would be the last time. Bugs drove him while the rest of the band slept it off.
By that time in the Damn the Torpedoes touring, the fans would be waiting for them, in hotels, at gigs, after shows. The group’s daily itinerary may as well have been a public matter. It was a part of rock-and-roll success that, fun at first, got old faster than other aspects. So Petty was happy to see that the hospital grounds seemed relatively quiet as they pulled into the parking lot that morning. A few people looked their way as he came into the building, interested but giving him space. Petty and Weidel got onto an elevator without commotion. As they would see, Kitty Petty was all but gone from this world, little more than a body. But that wasn’t what Petty saw first. Arriving in her room, looking at his mother, Petty saw himself. Several of himself.
“Someone had laid all these magazines with pictures of me on my mother,” remembers Petty. “On her chest and across her body. She was just lying there, beneath these clippings from magazines and newspapers. I walk in and … it was the strangest thing. I thought, ‘Even this moment, even this someone had to corrupt with some reaction to fame, or whatever this was.’” A nurse had gotten it into her mind that this would please the famous son of the hospital’s dying patient. It was a misguided gesture, innocent but stupid, that left him hollow. Asking a nurse to clear the clippings off his mother, he then took time alone with her.
“I was just beginning to see that there’s just nobody that couldn’t be affected by fame in some way,” Petty explains, “like when I walk in some place and my music is playing, because they think I want to hear that. I was starting to see that that’s just part of the job. But I wasn’t prepared for that in my mother’s hospital room, you know? I needed to clear the room of that. I looked at her, and I talked to her. She couldn’t talk to me. But she had a kind look in her eyes. It was really hard. I left there thinking, ‘I don’t ever want to see this again. I don’t ever want to see her like this again. That’s it for me. She’s gone.’ My dad had come by, and he rode down the elevator with me. But as we were walking to the parking lot, he goes, ‘I want to go down and hit the tracks—do you have any cash?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I gave him a thousand bucks, whatever I had on me. But I remember making the clear decision in my mind that I wasn’t coming back to this again. There was no point, no way for us to communicate, and it just crippled me. I said to myself, ‘I’m not ever going to come around again.’ And I didn’t. I headed off to the next gig.”
Rejoining the band, Petty went to the back of the bus, as had become his practice. He made no effort to explain where he’d just been. The Heartbreakers didn’t do that kind of intimacy. “I remember [my father] being super happy when I was young,” Adria Petty says, “like he had this charisma and kindness and gentleness. I rarely saw him lose his temper or be anything but lighthearted and compassionate, until after Damn the Torpedoes, which is when his mother died, like right at the same time.”
Kitty Petty didn’t live much longer. She went quietly but not without notice. Gainesville did all it could to acknowledge the loss, likely more than was appropriate. Maybe the football team wasn’t doing well that year, and the town needed something to attach itself to, so they found a local story. For Petty, he saw it coming: his mother again buried beneath pictures of her son.
“After I saw her last, I went right back onto the road,” Petty remembers. “Then some months later, she died. And I didn’t go to the funeral. My brother told me, ‘You come here and it’s going to be a zoo. The whole town’s already gearing up for when you’re going to arrive. They all think you’re coming.’ So I said, ‘Well, then I’m not going. I’m not going to let this be about me. I can’t deal with that.’ But the truth is that I’ve always felt conflicted about whether I should have gone or not. I think it’s hard for anyone to understand, to see what an extreme position I would have been in. They were absolutely crazy in Gainesville.”
Kitty Petty made her way into her son’s sleep, waking him in one hotel room or another. She was a complicated ghost, all but lost to her children for so long but always remembered as the one who tried to bring some pure love into their lives. Tom Petty was still in his twenties, a kid with a kid of his own. Keeping it together was the goal. The tasks of a bandleader were lining up to meet him. The pressure to write was palpable, a weight that was always there but building in waves. Iovine was back in LA, expecting music. The mourning process was abbreviated. Petty’s secret was that he was glad of it.
* * *
“Jimmy didn’t even want to mention me to Tom,” says Stevie Nicks. “Because he thought Tom would think, ‘Oh great, now you’re all involved with Stevie Nicks, which means you’re not going to be focused on this new record we’re doing, which is not done yet!’ And Jimmy was right, knowing Tom, that is what he would think. So Jimmy had this house in Sherman Oaks, and I was pretty much living there, but whenever Tom would come over, just to hang with Jimmy and talk about where they were at and what they wanted to do next, I would hide in the bedroom downstairs.” Lying on the bed, reading magazines, Nicks would sometimes try to hear what they were saying, but she couldn’t pick up much one flight down.
Iovine, not what one might call a romantic when it comes to discussing relationships, attempted a strict division between work and home. He didn’t confer with Petty about Petty’s wife, and he expected it to cut both ways. “We’d talk about things, yeah, but never about Jane,” Iovine says. “I didn’t understand relationships. I couldn’t help him in that area if he set himself on fire. I had no idea. I was like, ‘What’s a girl got to do with this?’ That’s where I was coming from.” Of course, that wasn’t going to work with the “girl” down in the lower bedroom. Nicks held still as long as she could. Which wasn’t that long.
“I started feeling like I was a kept woman, locked down in a dungeon,” Nicks says. When Iovine, with Nicks’s prompting, finally said something to Petty, by that time in the midst of recording Hard Promises, he wasn’t entirely forthcoming. “I don’t think he said he’d been seeing me for three months!” Nicks says. The idea of collaboration wasn’t introduced. But, suddenly, Stevie Nicks was around much more. When she really started work on her solo record, with Iovine producing, Benmont Tench was in her band, Petty was weighing in on the tracks that Iovine played him, was a credited producer on two cuts, including “Outside the Rain,” and Mike Campbell was doing some overdubs. The woman from the dungeon was getting her needs met. “Stevie Nicks? Don’t even get me started,” says Stan Lynch.
Petty insists that the Heartbreakers didn’t give themselves over so easily. “We weren’t really welcoming to her when she first started coming around,” he says. “It wasn’t like she received a lot of warmth. We weren’t impressed by superstars. It just wasn’t our nature. Maybe if it had been Elvis.” The closed circle of the Heartbreakers, closed in part because the band was mostly very shy, didn’t organize welcome parties for outsiders. Nicks got suspicious looks and a cool Florida wind. But she wasn’t a stranger to band situations, and she didn’t run back home after failing to get their quick embrace. “She went and worked Jane,” Petty says.
Stevie Nicks still sees Petty’s marriage to Jane Benyo differently than Petty ever will. But however limited her perspective relative to what Petty experienced at home during the long, troubled marriage, it’s striking how different Nicks’s picture is. “Tom is a lucky man. He’s had two great loves,” Nicks insists. “And [Jane] was certainly the first. I was around to see it. If you’d met them at the beginning, when I met them, they were like the same person, you know? They even looked alike. She was very beautiful, tall and blond, had these lovely blue eyes that just shot through you. They’d been together since they were kids, really kids. And they were young parents. Then he got famous. But I think he was crazy about her.”
“Stevie really had Jane in her corner,” Petty says. “Because Stevie would indulge her, it took me a long time to realize how genuine and good Stevie was. She was doing a lot of drugs—and she’d be the first to tell you that—but we didn’t at the time. We weren’t Boy Scouts, but I was afraid of that. Jane embraced it in a big way when Stevie showed up.” If it began with mild suspicion, Petty’s friendship with Nicks would finally be one of the few human constants in his life outside of his band, management, and crew. She’d come in and out over decades. That first year, however, she got all the way in and planned to see what that meant and what she could make of it. Petty smiles at the thought. “She came into my life like a rocket, just refusing to go away.”
Iovine and Petty together arrived at what Nicks calls an “executive decision,” concluding that her solo record was missing a single. So Petty wrote “Insider” for her. It came fast. He scratched the words out in a matter of minutes and cut something on acoustic guitar, with just Benmont Tench playing along on organ. The band overdubbed their parts, keeping it spare. Nicks put down a vocal. As the track built, Petty found himself thinking it might be one of the best things he’d ever written. The song was a shade different from his earlier work. He’d managed to get inside the mind grappling with loss, and he created a character there, without a lot of exposition crowding the song. Whether there was some received understanding of what an “insider” was or not, Petty had written one of those songs that pins down some human truth. To have once been close. Who didn’t know that scene? He’d hit on the thing a songwriter is always after. You don’t give those tunes away. So Petty didn’t. He told Nicks she couldn’t have the song he’d written for her.
On record, there was a chemistry between Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks that made people wonder. He’d taken “Insider” back, but her vocal was still on it. And there was something, in phrasing and tone, about the way those two voices lay against each other. Some listeners couldn’t accept it as fiction, as something that passed between actors before the curtains closed. And there was truth to what they heard. There was a chemistry. Nicks called it “intense, fiery.” But the energy the collaboration threw off was going into the work. After cutting “Insider,” part of that work now revolved around Petty finding another song for Nicks. That’s when “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” came up as a possibility. The Heartbreakers had already cut the song, and there was no plan to give it away to another artist. Even when Iovine raised the idea, Petty thought it sounded too much like the Heartbreakers and that Nicks needed something that sounded more like the singer from Fleetwood Mac. But that wasn’t Nicks’s aim. It never had been. She wanted to be in the Heartbreakers. This was one way of doing it, to sing to a track they’d already cut as a band, that they’d intended for their own album. Iovine helped broker the deal.
“It was a classic moment,” Stan Lynch says. “It was going to be our song, a Petty song. It wasn’t a Stevie Nicks record. In my mind, when we were recording it, we were cutting a balls-to-the-wall, great song. I saw an arena. In my mind, it’s big. Like, ‘Fucking, let’s nail this!’” Duck Dunn was covering for Ron Blair on bass. By this time, Dunn was a friend to the whole band, a wise man from the South with a history everyone admired. On Damn the Torpedoes, he played bass on “You Tell Me,” just as he’d played on “Hometown Blues” on the debut. They needed him. Blair was already drifting away, discouraged by the way his friends changed when their dreams started coming true. Dunn calmed everyone down a bit. They were laying the song down as a band but finding their way to the right feel. “I’m farting around,” says Lynch, “making a fool of myself. But on take two something happened. I’m playing the Whitman Sampler, playing every part, changing the beat, and Duck’s just following along. We get to the end, and Duck puts a finger to his lips, like, ‘Don’t say anything. Let the tape roll.’ That’s always a good sign.”
In the control room, listening back to that second take, Dunn sat next to Lynch, close enough for Lynch to feel Dunn’s thigh pressing against his own. It was a message for the drummer to keep his head on, stay quiet. At the end of the playback, there was a silence, broken only by Dunn’s response. “He looks at the producers,” recalls Lynch, “and he says, ‘Well, you don’t like that, you don’t like pussy.’” Benmont Tench confirms the scene: “I think that’s a fucking great compliment from the man who played bass on so many astounding records. Duck was a wonder.” Lynch insists that if it hadn’t been for Dunn, “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” would have been subject to what he believes was the usual second-guessing that got in the way of making music. “Let me tell you what I learned from that,” Lynch insists. “A lot of takes that were pretty decent rhythm tracks probably got thrown under the rug. It was validating and beautiful. It made me realize, ‘Well, I ain’t the fucking problem in this room.’ Because, at that point, Jimmy had decided that every other drummer in the fucking country is better than Stan.”
The other Heartbreakers agree that Duck Dunn was right about the take. That was the one. But did it mean that other usable takes were being scrapped on a regular basis because Stan Lynch was being blamed for not holding down the groove? “No,” says Mike Campbell, without a lot of concern for Lynch’s theory, “nothing went past us. Maybe once, there might have been a track that we went back to after forty takes. There may be a few places where the generals were looking too far down the field. But, no, we’re not going to let something good go by. Nobody wanted to keep slugging away if we already had it.”
Talking to Melody Maker later that year, Petty describes Hard Promises and the shift away from the Damn the Torpedoes sessions, when the focus was so much on “the sound”: “With Damn the Torpedoes they had this incredible sound, with the drums and all that. We were just getting to know each other, so we pretty much said, ‘Okay, let’s get into whatever Jimmy’s got goin’ and do something interesting’—and it was. And this time, I think that Jimmy listened to me a little bit more, because to tell you the truth, when I played him the songs he didn’t quite understand what I was getting at.” Iovine saw the record as “dark.” “Even the Losers” typified the spirit of the whole rock-and-roll enterprise Iovine felt the Heartbreakers represented. “Insider” was another species of song. When Campbell brought in “You Can Still Change Your Mind,” and Petty wrote to it, they were closer to the Beach Boys than the Stones. “The Waiting,” however, did all that “Insider” did but in the opposite emotional direction—it was as complete, as euphoric a love song as Petty would ever write. That was where Iovine got excited.
Iovine came to believe in Hard Promises, to the point at which he felt he had even more on his hands this time around. He thought they’d topped Damn the Torpedoes. “I’ll be honest with you,” he says. “That album changed me. I thought ‘The Waiting’ was bigger than ‘Refugee.’ So when it wasn’t a hit, a real hit, it killed me. It was devastating. I felt it was as good as anything I’d ever been near. That song, I thought that was big. That’s why ‘Stop Dragging My Heart Around’ wasn’t important. Because we had ‘Woman in Love’ and ‘The Waiting.’” When asked about “Nightwatchman,” “Something Big,” and “Criminal Kind,” all songs that show Petty going deeper into his storytelling side, with characters moving through and scenes being developed with more detail and stronger internal structure, Iovine simply says, “That’s the Dylan thing,” and turns the conversation back to his primary concern, the singles.
Contrary to what Iovine wanted for Hard Promises, the biggest single he had from those sessions, coolly making its way to number one, was not “The Waiting” or “A Woman in Love (It’s Not Me).” It was “Stop Dragging My Heart Around.” Stevie Nicks’s Bella Donna was going to be the record that included the most successful Heartbreakers recording of that period. Radio went after “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” with such unabashed support that the community of FM programmers felt they couldn’t give their all to “A Woman in Love (It’s Not Me)” or the “The Waiting.” So they didn’t. The three recordings sounded like they were all from the same album. And at one time they had been.
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When it came time to prepare for the release of Hard Promises, MCA knew it had something very good on its hands and decided it was time to apply “superstar” pricing to Petty’s new long player, raising the price from the customary $8.98 to $9.98. But no matter his new life as a rock-and-roll star, some cord of sentiment connected him to the teenager who couldn’t afford to buy the records he wanted, however much he wanted them. Inadvertently, perhaps, the record company got another fight out of Petty. From his perspective, he’d do what he had to do to be sure it wasn’t his face that people saw when they started paying more for their music. His second Rolling Stone cover featured Tom Petty ripping a dollar bill in half. He wasn’t looking for his next battle when MCA tried to raise prices. He was tired and didn’t want another struggle.