LIFE BETWEEN THE BRANCHES BELOW
Much has been written about the teenager of today—but in every article we’ve seen, one important fact has been overlooked or ignored: namely, that the teenager of today is the parent of tomorrow!
MAD MAGAZINE, APRIL 1961
Just as Stevie Nicks insists that she saw something real, some deep sense of connection in Tom and Jane Petty’s marriage, Adria Petty, though a child at the time, is sure she saw it, too. “I feel like they had a really special partnership,” Adria says. “And a real love for the band. Maybe because their own families were so estranged from them, they created this support system, this mom-and-dad atmosphere. But I felt strangely sympathetic towards them when they had their difficulties or when they had failures as parents or in trying to navigate career, relationship, and all of that. I saw them as good people doing their best. And, really, I think my mother was an inspiration to him. She became something else. But she didn’t start there. She suffered from her own emotional problems. And maybe when the coke came around, it became a catalyst for a one-way ticket into the center of those problems.” Rock and roll provided a shaky foundation on which to build a family life. Drugs and alcohol made things more complicated still. But the darkness that lay ahead for Jane Petty didn’t come from the outside. The worst of it was within. At a certain point, it couldn’t all be explained with recourse to a story about her husband and the good fortune that had befallen them.
Annakim Petty was born in January 1982. She missed out on the years that Adria would later consider her parents’ best, when the couple seemed aligned in their view of the strange world they’d entered, when their ambitions for Petty’s career neatly overlapped their ambitions for the family. The Pettys were young, young enough to believe that it could all get better if his career achieved what they hoped it would. They’d come from twisted homes, and rock and roll seemed capable of delivering them into something more. For a long time, they were the faithful, holding on to that idea. But Annakim was born into the troubled side of that dream. Just prior to her birth, Petty arrived home from a Hard Promises night session to find his wife passed out cold in the hallway of the family’s home, with Adria sleeping down the hall. Initially unable to revive her, Petty managed to get Jane up and into the bedroom. But she wasn’t making any kind of sense. In a state, he called Alice Lenahan, who had been over earlier in the evening, to see if she knew anything. Alice just said that Jane had been drinking. But this wasn’t looking like the result of a few cocktails. It wasn’t the first scene of that kind and wouldn’t be the last. Tom Petty wasn’t even close to questioning his marriage. He was his mother’s son, ready to do what he needed to keep his family together. He bitched about it when he had to. More often, he went silent. If there was a plan, at that point, it wasn’t an escape plan. He thought maybe a second child was a chance to get things right again. He wouldn’t be the first man to believe in such a fantasy. There was some self-deception involved, but the alternative was fear.
If willing to discuss his first marriage, Petty isn’t comfortable doing it. “Jane had done a pretty good job with Adria, you know, of being a mom and being responsible,” he says. “So when she got pregnant, I said, ‘Let’s have this baby. I think it would be really good.’ I thought it would center her on something. But, yeah, I was probably in denial to a great degree. Because then, suddenly, I had two kids who needed their parents. I couldn’t run from that. But, at the same time, I still needed to be Tom Petty. I had a lot of shit going on. I really needed the help of my spouse. Our financial situation had changed, so I was able to do more for Annakim. She and Adria were what I wanted to go home to. We spent a lot of time together in my off time. But work often kept me away. That’s when Jane started hiring nannies, which I was against. I didn’t want nannies in the house. But I was gone so much, who was I to be saying how things should run when I wasn’t there? And so much of what was really going on I didn’t find out until later. Jane was surrounded by sycophants who were willing to keep me from knowing more, and other people just didn’t want to get in the middle of my stuff. I’d hear later from another parent that Annakim was on a playdate, with a stretch limo waiting for her. She didn’t get the ordinary concern a child would get. Am I guilty in this? I guess I am.” After stopping for a moment, Petty looks toward the open door in the room. “All of this is not easy to think about,” he says. “Annakim had a very hard childhood. It’s not the story I wanted for her, or for us. And I don’t like to have to tell it.” Success was going to keep the family from getting the help they could have used. They were behind a high wall.
* * *
Thirty-two years old when Annakim was born in a Santa Monica hospital, Tom Petty was also coming closer to the first personnel change within the Heartbreakers lineup, and he didn’t know how to manage it or what its effects might be. He would need to wait and watch to understand how it would affect the other Heartbreakers, his audience, and all the others who had invested in the idea of this band. His job, he felt, was to keep it all together. There was a parallel between home and work. And the success he was having was limited on both fronts. He blamed himself. He blamed himself, that is, when he wasn’t blaming someone else. And he couldn’t be faulted for either approach. There were grounds.
At home, Petty was dealing with the kind of broken love that most families hide from view, like little tombs of silence that gradually gain power over the inhabitants. In the Heartbreakers, however, the problem had a face. Oddly enough, it was Ron Blair’s. And the problem was talked about—mostly behind Blair’s back. The bass player had become the “outsider.” There’s generally one. It’s a basic tenet of group psychology that any band manager could confirm. Or you could turn to Sigmund Freud, who wasn’t in a band but must have known someone who was: “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”
In the case of the Heartbreakers and Ron Blair, the “manifestations of their aggressiveness” came at sound checks, in lounges at the front of the bus, in hotel lobbies. It was the cold shoulder as much as anything else. Sometimes Stan Lynch deflected the scrutiny he was under as a drummer, pointing a finger at Blair. Any rock-and-roll band that has lasted beyond its first year has had someone in Blair’s role. Often the band members alternate in that “outsider” position, with a group leader forming alliances within a band that shift one year to the next, one month to the next. But no one in or around the band denies that as of 1981 Ron Blair was drifting. He wasn’t behaving like a band member. He’d taken a stroll to the periphery, and it left him vulnerable.
“I don’t know if every band goes through it,” Ron Blair says, “but things had gotten tension filled. I remember early on, at something like our second gig, our road manager telling me never to wear my Levi’s shirt, like we shouldn’t appear to be southern. Wearing cowboy shirts with snaps or growing beards: these were a no-no. Later on, we were back in LA in the studio, and, hey, I was growing a beard! It wasn’t what we were supposed to be doing. Was I trying to be the sticky wheel? I don’t know what it was I was doing. Maybe I was trying to distance myself. It was just an odd period for the band. And I wasn’t digging it.” The Heartbreakers were still a young act, in what felt like heated competition with their peers. “The way we’d talk about other people and other bands,” recalls Blair. “You know, ‘Our gang is better than your gang.’ The competition and the gossip. It just rubbed me the wrong way, the way the game is played.” Blair wasn’t particularly good at it either. You had to get a little leathery to live through it. Blair thought there must be another way. Lynch, however, was a master of that game. And Petty was no slouch. It made for a climate in which you watched your ass, did what you could to make sure you didn’t have a target on your back. Blair, finally, couldn’t get his target off.
“I’ve told this story probably twelve different ways,” he says. “And it could go anywhere from If I was fired, I probably deserved it to My mind left planet Band to I needed a break. But there was a pivotal moment for me. The band had been touring all year, playing halls that sounded really bad, which made for a lot of tension. It was the kind of stuff that would make anyone sick of it. Month after month of that. Then we had a six-day break, or something like that, and the idea was, ‘Hey, let’s go back to Florida, to the beach house; let’s regroup.’ It was a friend’s place, where we’d all gone when we were waiting for the first record to come out. We’d bonded and everything, and so we were going to go there again. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.” The band members readied themselves to head off on the retreat, to renew their vows or whatever it was they needed to do to get connected. “I remember we were in some hotel in some Midwestern city,” Blair recalls, “and Stan came by my room. It was like twelve o’clock at night. And he says, ‘C’mon, Ron, come with us. It’s all gonna be good.’ And I just … it was a little bit childish, but I was like, ‘No, I’m not going. I’m going to go on to the next gig, meet you guys there. I gotta not be around you guys for a few days.’ I let the band go on to the beach house to do some kind of recentering trip. But if that caused a rift, I compounded it by showing up to the next gig with my wife, which was not a cool thing to do. Everyone else’s wives were like, ‘Why didn’t I get to do that? Why didn’t you invite me on the road?’ And we were at a really great resort, the Don CeSar in St. Petersburg, that pink-and-white Moroccan-style hotel. So I sort of set in motion a separation, like, ‘I’m kind of going this way, and I don’t care which way you guys are going.’” If the band needed something to talk about, Blair was giving them innumerable gifts.
And then there was the studio, where Duck Dunn played bass not just on “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” but on “A Woman in Love (It’s Not Me).” Campbell and Petty were also comfortable playing some bass, without a lot of thought as to what it meant for their bass player. Blair hadn’t done anything to make himself irreplaceable. Perhaps he couldn’t have if he wanted to. Maybe he was just dreaming of the possibility of having two lives rather than one—and that wasn’t the phase in which the band found themselves. For the time being, living as a Heartbreaker was all-in experience. Petty describes the Hard Promises era as the time in which it “became a job.” It wouldn’t be long before Blair didn’t have one. When asked very directly if he quit or he was fired, Blair says, “Is there something in between?” He got a call from Tony Dimitriades. It wasn’t the kind of call anyone would want to get, but it was the call that Blair was half expecting. The conversation was quiet. “Tony phoned me,” Blair recalls, “and he said, ‘Ron, you probably know this already, but you guys are kind of going in different directions.’ I went, ‘Yeah, I know.’ Then he said something like, ‘Should we just call it what it is?’” Dimitriades, not one for shouting across crowded restaurants, delivered it with a gentle hand. “It was kind of on a bro level,” Blair says, “not like, ‘Here’s your pink slip.’ And that was it. If I was looking for a change, I got it.”
But so many years after Ron Blair’s moment as the outsider in the Heartbreakers, no one has a lot to say about it. His is not the name that comes up when the early years of the Heartbreakers are the subject. It’s Stan Lynch who gets talked about. “Stan’s personality is more complicated than Ron’s,” says Mike Campbell. “He’s got more chips on his shoulder.” Blair, passive by nature, was no more than a surface on which tremors of discontent and fear could be projected. After he left, he opened a surf shop, tried to settle into another life, focused on his marriage, and then lost that marriage. In the press, the shorthand made good copy: man leaves internationally successful rock band to open a bikini shop. Really?
* * *
Petty had been in this spot too many times to be comfortable with it. He was in it before they found Mike Campbell. He was in it before they found Danny Roberts. A vacancy within the band was a problem with historical reverberations. It made Petty uneasy. Obviously, the process was going to be different this time. He wouldn’t have to put up a “bass player wanted” sign at Lipham’s. But more eyes would be watching. He needed a member who wouldn’t disrupt what had been built. At four albums in, the band had a momentum to consider and an aesthetic to honor. But it was only four albums; they were still building the brand. He’d called the wrong person before, and he knew what that got him. Petty didn’t rush to replace Blair, and in the meantime, he pocketed the extra share of band loot, provoking some internal chatter, mostly Stan Lynch’s, about “the Ron Blair money” and its whereabouts.
In 1983, a new bass player would be coming into a power structure very different from that of seven years earlier, when the first record was released. Mike Campbell’s deputy position within the band had become all but official. Though still a few records away from a production credit, Campbell was without question second in line to Petty. “When you get in the studio with Jimmy Iovine,” says Campbell, “you can’t have too many opinions. Me, Jimmy, and Tom were on the same wavelength in terms of production decisions, how records should be made. We didn’t always ask for other opinions. We had enough going on between the three of us. Ben was like a little brother that didn’t get much respect. He’s an amazing player, and he gets that respect now. But he was a little more all over the map then. We didn’t need two other guys going, ‘I think … I think…’ Democracy can be a curse.”
Though Campbell had been roommates with Stan Lynch, a situation the crew called “the Michael Stanley Band,” no doubt Lynch felt something tighten in his lower intestines as he watched Campbell establish himself as Petty’s right hand. Over the next several years, Lynch worked hard on Campbell, talking shit about the boss when the door appeared to be closed. By most accounts, from that time forward, virtually every internal “band situation” involved Lynch in some way. By nature, he was divide-and-conquer in his style, with an emphasis on dividing, when he wasn’t being a team player, which he often was. There were two Stans. But since the time he and Petty went to Tulsa, recording “Luna” together for the first record, Lynch’s role had become more circumscribed. No doubt it felt like his opportunities were shrinking. And with Blair gone, there was no band member Lynch could use to distract the others, and shield himself, from the painful attention he got in the studio as the drummer who wasn’t always giving the band what they wanted.
Who knows how the gods look down on all of this or if they do at all. But they seem to have taken a kind of favor in Ron Blair’s case. When the years are calculated, their respective time as Heartbreakers tallied, it’s Blair who has been in the band longer than Lynch. Maybe it’s how Blair handled things. Just three weeks after that last call with Dimitriades, something compelled him to call Petty. “It was hard,” he says. “When something like that happens, you tend to get angry, to start getting mad at life. But after a couple weeks, something in me just switched all around. I thought, ‘Man, how lucky was I to have the quality of friends that would stick with me through all that stuff? And Tom looked out for me all those years, with me having no sense about how to have a career.’ I just felt a shift. So I called Tom up, and I thanked him. I just had to let him know that we’d been brothers under the gun, and that I couldn’t see that except in the highest regard.” When asked about it some thirty years later, Petty remembers the call, presumably because you don’t get many of those in your life, not when you’re the bandleader.
The good sentiments and acceptance aside, Blair was now the-guy-who-used-to-be-in-the-Heartbreakers. He could tell when people were looking at him, wondering if it was painful and in what ways. As Blair would learn, more people can identify with what they think is a fallen man than can identify with a rock-and-roll star. But they don’t say much about it, and they definitely don’t ask for autographs. He would sometimes wake in the middle of the night from a dream in which he was back in the band, heading out onto the stage, unable to remember any of the songs. He kept it to himself. He played less. However difficult it was, he would go see the Heartbreakers play when they came to town.
“I remember sitting there at the Universal Amphitheatre,” Blair remembers, “back before it had a roof on it. Must have been a year or two later. I’m watching the band play, sitting next to Jimmy Iovine. And Jimmy’s going, ‘Ron, what’s it like, man?’ To me, his question felt like, ‘What’s it like, you being a loser now?’ I just wanted to hit him. Maybe it’s what I was hearing more than what he was saying. I was like, ‘Jimmy, it’s fine. These guys were my friends. These guys will still be my friends. Just let me enjoy the fucking show.’”
* * *
A little over a half year after Annakim Petty’s birth, Howie Epstein played his first gig as the Heartbreakers’ new bass player. Both the child and the man stepped into fast-moving vehicles. Epstein seemed to fit in, as much as any “new guy” could. He joined as a member rather than a sideman. Of course, there were now categories of membership, and his was entry level. He was a good bass player, even a great one, but more importantly he could sing the kind of high harmonies that Petty had always loved. The Everly Brothers were as well represented in the front man’s internal jukebox as Elvis and the Beatles. Southern boys, voices blended as one, born into a world where there was still a farm out back and a church out front. Those harmonies went back to an American past where hillbillies were something more than fuckups. Howie Epstein, a Wisconsin kid who’d gone from garage bands to John Hiatt’s, had a voice that gave the bandleader a connection to that musical history, no matter his Midwestern background.
For his part, Stan Lynch had been a steady, often remarkable harmony singer in performance. He could do unison vocals that lay so neatly over the top of Petty’s lead that you didn’t know they were there, until they weren’t. Petty and Lynch, for all their friction, sang like they knew each other as boys. They both remember it that way. But the new band member had a range and a natural gift for harmony that gave the Heartbreakers another melodic layer when a song called for that thickness and color. Petty never tired of hearing Epstein’s voice, even after the bass player’s death, which was years away and nothing anyone saw coming in the bright, open face of the new Heartbreaker. Epstein found his people with Tench and Lynch, the young guys in the band.
At the time of his hiring, Epstein was in another band, not just out for a stroll by himself when the Heartbreakers found him. That’s the way it often goes in rock and roll. The year 1981 was the time of Hard Promises and all that came and went with it, including Petty’s production role on Del Shannon’s Drop Down and Get Me, a long player that can be counted among the best Heartbreaker records that don’t show up in the official discography. And Del Shannon was the conduit through which Howie Epstein came into the band. Epstein had been Del Shannon’s touring bass player and was called in to do some singing on Drop Down and Get Me. He walked in the door, high pompadour and Cuban-heeled boots, with no idea that he was walking from one world to another. But the initial connection that set it all in motion, bringing Petty to Del Shannon and a new bass player to Petty was, again, Harvey Kubernik. “I knew what Del Shannon could do. Still. And I knew the stuff Petty loved,” Kubernik says. “I hoped Tom wouldn’t be able to say no.”
Petty may have been busy, too busy to get his own world in order—but Del Shannon was the man who sang “Runaway.” Some things were not easily sidestepped. Early rock and roll remained sacred territory for Petty. He knew where he came from and where old debts needed to be paid. Kubernik’s instinct was right. “Harvey gave me the call, said he thought I’d make a good producer for Del,” Petty recalls. “He’d been in contact with Dan [Bourgoise], who managed Del, and they thought it was worth having a meeting. Harvey knew I was a fan of that era. So we all met at Dan’s office in Hollywood. Del played me some demos, and I saw he was writing good stuff. I thought I was too young to be taking on the producer role, but I couldn’t not do this.” The Heartbreakers were Del Shannon’s band in the studio, making production easier for Petty. He knew what he was dealing with. Petty managed to take a small budget and put Del Shannon onto the charts once more, where Petty believed Del Shannon belonged.
By that time, Petty had a steady run of hits with the Heartbreakers, and he understood what it meant for Del Shannon to have him produce a “comeback.” He wasn’t thinking about what it meant to his own career. As a record maker, whether by intuition or not, he lived by something Denny Cordell had told him: “If you’re thinking about your career, you probably don’t have one.” What motivated Petty was simple: an awareness of the neglected, shabby pastures in which the first-generation rock and rollers were often left to graze. Brought out to play their early hits at oldies shows, nostalgia events with hot rods, costume parties of one kind or another, the greats of early rock and roll were imprisoned in a cartoon of poodle skirts and drive-ins, left to wander the set of Happy Days, no matter what the Stones and Eric Clapton said of their importance. The problem may even have gotten worse for Chuck Berry each time Keith Richards cited one of his early Chess records. From Little Richard to Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins, these guys may have been credited with influencing the Beatles, by the Beatles, but they weren’t asked to evolve. A new Carl Perkins record? No, thanks. New Roy Orbison? From the time Sha Na Na closed Woodstock, in the slot before Jimi Hendrix, early rock and roll was often little more than an occasion for theater. The collaboration with Del Shannon was something counter to all that and had a quiet but deep significance in the artistic life that Petty was cobbling together.
“I did the best job I could at the time,” Petty says. “I don’t think I had a vision of Del becoming a completely contemporary artist, but he got some contemporary interest, a song on the charts. And the fact was, I really respected his generation much more than the one I was in. There just weren’t that many of my peers that got my attention like the guys I grew up listening to. If one of those artists still had the goods, I was fascinated at the idea of working with them and bringing whatever I could to the table, seeing what happened. And it went both ways, it seems. It’s happened a number of times, like some of these guys were thinking, ‘I want to find this kid—let’s look him up.’
“Making that record really gave me a chance to see that I could do something good with my new position in life. There was a lot of bullshit that came with it. But here was something good.”
* * *
Petty generally kept the “bullshit that came with it” to himself. It’s a small audience that wants to hear about the challenges of stardom. But the fact is: the people around a star often change more quickly than the star himself. And Petty had been dealing with that since “Breakdown.” Former Mudcrutch guitarist Danny Roberts recalls an industry function at which Petty, in sunglasses, brushed past him in a crowded bowling alley, pretending to be unaware of Roberts’s presence, putting up his arm to shield himself from the photographers that Roberts insists weren’t there. It’s a story that fits neatly into the rock-star-as-horse’s-ass genre. One could read the scene from a number of angles. Maybe Petty didn’t think talking with a disgruntled former bandmate was going to be worth either man’s time. Or perhaps Petty’s head was somewhere very far away from where Roberts was standing. Or maybe Roberts is close to the truth: Petty was a rock star on the town, blowing off an old friend. Who knows? If the trial Roberts is after ever does take place, it will likely be a rather dull affair for everyone but Danny Roberts. The more significant point is that Roberts was only one among a group of people who had watched Petty go from being just another local musician to being the guy looking out at them from magazine covers. Not all of them felt comfortable with it. And some of the discomfort was in Petty’s band.
One can say that the change brought about in a person by success and fame is most conspicuous to those in closest proximity as that success and fame first hits. Petty’s good fortune could be regarded by some as an unequal distribution of the rewards. Among those who were teenagers hanging at Lipham’s Music, some argue that in Gainesville’s talent pool there were brighter lights than Tom Petty. But Petty got the job. And once he was up there doing it, even his band would be described as his faithful sidekicks. The spotlight is, obviously, an intrinsic component of the front man’s world. “My name, for years,” says Stan Lynch, “was ‘Drummer in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.’” Part of Petty’s job was dealing with the effect of his success on the people around him, those with whom he still lived and worked. His new position would sometimes even make him the outsider in his own group. All of Petty’s human interactions were touched by his good fortune: at home, at work, and on the street. Because the inner circle felt it most keenly, it could be a chilly place on some days. So he made it even smaller. And then there were the relatives.
Earl Petty saw his son’s success as a pretty straightforward benefit. All upsides. He was getting laid. That was right up there with fishing. If the past and the brutal relationship with his son had to be hidden beneath the floorboards, that was nothing new, just family business. No visitor would have thought for a moment that this old guy was anything but his son’s biggest fan. Earl wore his satin Heartbreakers jacket all over town. Petty could bite his tongue and let his old man do with local celebrity what he could. When Earl’s twin sister, Pearl, showed up, looking for her share, however, Petty came up against his limits.
“Pearl was a right pain in the ass,” Petty says. “My father’s side of the family didn’t handle my fame well. They didn’t know me, so I just became an object to them. I remember Pearl coming into a hotel room with my dad, throwing down a notebook, and saying, ‘Just sign until you can’t sign anymore.’ I looked at her like, ‘What?’ And she says, ‘Just sign each page until you get tired.’ I wouldn’t do it. I looked at my father, and he just kind of shrugged. What was hard though was that she wasn’t that far from my old man. He developed an identity from it. God knows how much pussy he got out of it. I mean, my god, it must have been great being him. His house was open to whatever fans rolled up there. You could come and spend as much time as you wanted. Stay for weeks.”
When Earl brought one of his new girlfriends backstage at a Florida show, Petty might have been more welcoming if she’d been a quieter presence. Or maybe, for him, his mother was still close by. It hadn’t been that long. Several band members recall the moment Earl’s friend got thrown out. They all sensed Earl would find another. And so did Earl. He didn’t make much of a fuss. “I threw her out,” Petty says. “I literally walked her out of the door. He didn’t really seem to care. I often think about my father and wonder if I’ve been too tough on him, but it always comes back to, ‘No, I don’t think I was.’ He was a hard man.” Mostly, though, the Earl problem was a Florida problem. He took the dignity out of a trip home. It would be some years before Petty softened toward his father, a result of aging as much as anything. But in that intersection of his own fame and its effect on old friends or family, the harder situation was still to come, as Petty watched his children get old enough to know that they couldn’t always trust the motives of the people who came into their lives. “They were both touched by it on a pretty regular basis,” Petty says. “They experienced friends who weren’t genuine. It took me a long time to really understand that they lived that way. They had to do what I did: put a little bit of a wall up.” Of course, not everyone deals with fame the same way. But that’s how Petty did it. And he was still a young man. He was becoming an emotional recluse.