Think we ought to throw old Spike a bone?
—TOM PETTY, “SPIKE”
“The touring is so seductive,” Tom Petty says. “Rock-and-roll musicians get something movie actors don’t, that instant feedback from the audience. The Heartbreakers absorbed a lot of that at a young age, in very large doses, when other people were out dealing with the DMV and the teacher conferences. You’re a visiting prince. That’s not the problem, though. The problem is that people get used to it.” Not everyone in the band moved easily between arena-wide adulation and a creative process that sometimes felt like a 2:00 a.m. struggle with a drunk. “A lot of people,” Petty insists, “not just in this band, are yearning to get back to the tour, so much so that they don’t put the work into the songs like they normally would. They just want to get back out there, be free of life, be in that world.”
When the Heartbreakers were in the studio making records, no one was clapping and no T-shirts were sold. Since 1976, the release schedule hadn’t allowed a moment to look up, to look around, and it was beginning to feel like emotional whiplash going between the tours and the recording studios. “I was looking for fun!” Lynch says. “I was looking for love! I was looking for everything. I was on the road, meeting girls, thinking they could be my wife. I was looking for all of that to be permanent. Really. I didn’t know that everyone was going to be there the next night for Journey. Here’s how fucked up I am: I’m like, ‘Why would you even want a recording? Why wouldn’t you just want to be a troubadour, show it off one night and move on?’ You know, you were either there at the show or you weren’t.”
Of course, the only reason the Heartbreakers were touring was because of the records they made. Even the best live band, without records, is local. And making records meant more to Petty than anything or, possibly, anyone. He was always readying himself for whatever studio time had been booked. The next record kept him awake at night, watched him from across the street when he tried to take a day off. But he knew that the next record wasn’t going to happen if his band wasn’t at his side, ready to push ahead to the next place they needed to go. Petty was a student of the Beatles, which meant he believed that every album needed to be different from the last. They didn’t make Rubber Soul twice.
“I think it was Paul Simon who said it,” says Bill Flanagan, reflecting on Petty’s situation. “Around the time when Simon and Garfunkel broke up, he said something like, ‘When you get in a position where you’re in control of everything in your life, like, that tree that’s blocking your view? Have someone move it. You want to go skiing out West instead of that trip to the Caribbean? Reschedule the private jet. And then you go into a recording studio, to do that thing you are the master of, that thing that brought you the control of everything else in your life, and you’ve got some guy sitting there going, “No, man, I don’t like it. Let’s do something else.” It’s really hard to handle.’ And I imagine he’s right. Everybody in the world is kissing your ass, and then you go back to the thing that made them kiss your ass—making music, writing songs—and some guy, just because you’ve known him since high school, is allowed to say, ‘No, it stinks.’ That could create some problems.”
Making Long After Dark was a matter of Petty wanting to avoid trouble that might come from the guys he’d known since high school, while recognizing that he’d been in that situation for years. He couldn’t have what he thought of as a real band and not find himself there. But the fatigue of that and the fatigue of the album cycle itself were both weighing on Petty. The Heartbreakers, too, were struggling with the relentlessness and its cumulative effects. “I think I was lucky,” Petty says, “that I was raising a family at that age, because it kept me grounded in a way I wouldn’t have been otherwise. I was gone so much, but I made sure I was there when we were off the road. I was home working. I wasn’t on the town a lot. I could sit down, put the blinders on, and make sure the songs were going to do the job. You’re not always going to have a song fall in your lap. You have to go after them.” By that time, Petty and his family had built their home in Encino, a five-bedroom marker of success. “I poured my heart into that place,” he says. “It was special.” But he still came home from the road, grabbed the Gibson Dove, and went to work. If a song was circling in the San Fernando Valley air, there was a man ready to pull it down. “When I heard Long After Dark,” Flanagan continues, “I thought it was tremendous. There are great songs on there. I really thought it might be his best. ‘Straight into Darkness’ hit me very powerfully. But looking back, knowing what we know about all that would come, it feels too much like they’re at risk of repeating the formula. They’re going to loosen up. But it happens after that album.”
Benmont Tench remembers the recording sessions as, among other things, another phase in the ongoing drummer conflict. “During Long After Dark, the same thing happened,” he says. “We brought in Terry Williams, from Rockpile, one of the best drummers you can name. It didn’t work. Stanley would come back, and we’d get the track. This dynamic went on for a long time. Like I said, Stan got an undue amount of attention, I think. I also believe we made a great album in the end.” Even more than Damn the Torpedoes, Long After Dark is thick with percussion. Shakers, tambourines, cow bells, wood blocks. Whether those percussion tracks are actually, as Jimmy Iovine suggests, “gluing” the performances together or not is impossible to tell from the final mixes, but there’s no question that the producers were putting percussion everywhere on the record. And as a final gesture, Petty got in the habit of speeding up the mixes, which made it all sound just a bit sweeter, the grooves a bit tighter. He may not have needed to. But he did. “They went through the rectum of the fourth dimension,” insists Stan Lynch, “and never came back. I say if you want to make a rock-and-roll record, you’ve got to let some feathers fly. The control issues at that point were way beyond reason.”
No matter the other band members’ memories, it’s Petty who is the record’s most unyielding critic. But not for the right reasons. He lost his objectivity somewhere in the middle of it all, before the record was close to finished. He says he doesn’t like Long After Dark. But what he doesn’t like is the world he was living in during that period of time. The songs tell the story of that place, more directly than the material on any previous recording. Hopelessness, loss, lust, the impossibility of love. A man who didn’t want to be in his marriage but didn’t know how to leave it allowed his feelings to leak onto a recording, without a lot of symbolism to hide behind. “There was a moment when I really loved her / Then one day, the feeling just died.” No bride and groom were going to make their way to the dance floor while the wedding band played these songs. “Straight into Darkness,” “We Stand a Chance,” “You Got Lucky,” “The Same Old You”: love’s splendor wasn’t the point. But, together, the songs comprise another of Petty’s beautiful collections. His aim wasn’t to write what he thought we wanted to hear. But the emptiness and the anger he brought to it somehow left a little more room for rock and roll. Among other things, it’s a true rock-and-roll guitar record.
Long After Dark would also be the last full album on which Jimmy Iovine would be credited as producer. “It was that album when I felt he’d betrayed me,” says Petty. “He failed to mention that he was working on a Bob Seger record. As I saw it, I’m a full-time job.” At one point during the recording, Iovine was making so many phone calls that someone in the band cut the cord on the studio phone. Jimmy, it seemed, needed to be somewhere else. But, no matter, the record went to stores, and people fell in love with it. “You Got Lucky” and “Change of Heart” made it to the radio. “You Got Lucky” also became the group’s first MTV hit, in part because the new network needed content, and Jim Lenahan had been making what the industry called “international films” some years before the dawn of the MTV era. It was all in motion, once again. The Heartbreakers got on a leased plane, a Phantom, with a line from Long After Dark’s “The Same Old You” painted on the side: “Let That Sucker Blast.” Off they went, into America to play those songs. And in his head, Petty was thinking about the next record.
* * *
After months of touring behind Long After Dark, the Heartbreakers were going to get a break, the first stillness after eight years of making records and supporting them. And it wouldn’t go well. Keith Richards isn’t the only man in a rock-and-roll band to note that the real trouble doesn’t come on the road—it comes when you get home and live like you’re on the road. That’s a paraphrase, but it’s an idea that gives some sense of what was coming for the Heartbreakers. Mike Campbell calls it “the dark period.” Petty says a little more: “We took a lot of shrapnel that year. It taught me a lot. We had never been allowed to grow up. We’d never been in a situation where it was even expected of us. You know, you’re bouncing everything off the same four or five people you’ve been around since school, and you have children, you’re married—most people would have been conducting themselves differently. We suddenly had to deal with maybe not being around much longer.” Whether that means as a band or as individuals isn’t clear. But mortality hovered in ways it hadn’t previously. The death of Katherine Petty came to her son almost as if it had been waiting for him to slow down. Mike Campbell went into the hospital with exhaustion. Petty went into the hospital for surgery on a broken hand, self-inflicted in a fit a rage. Benmont Tench worked his way toward recovery from drugs and alcohol, without getting all the way there until 1988. When asked about Southern Accents, the album that was released next, Petty says quietly, “When I hear that one, I can taste cocaine in the back of my mouth.”
* * *
Petty spent good parts of the Long After Dark tour looking out the windows of his bus, particularly during the southern swing. He was seeing places, people, and images that triggered thoughts of his southern upbringing. More depressed than other regions, the South couldn’t have moved on if it wanted to. The past was right there, in the rotting barns and peeling billboards. Apart from truck stops and strip malls, it looked to him like the South couldn’t afford to be the future, so it remained the past. And it was his past. Backward, beautiful, fucked up, often forgotten, sometimes violent. People who knew music seemed to be aware that most American song traditions came from down there, but they often didn’t know much more about the South than that. It was a place with an incomprehensible character, America’s dirty secret. Somewhere between Walker Evans’s photography and The Dukes of Hazzard, in the trailer parks Petty saw out the bus window, there was a place that he recognized as having a heartbeat of its own. He thought of Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys, a meditation on the South that is as much a book of short stories as it is a song cycle. Petty wondered how far he could go in Newman’s direction himself before losing his audience. That, he figured, was just about how far he needed to go.
It’s not easy to construct a chronology of the making of Southern Accents. Robbie Robertson had asked Petty for a song to include in Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy. That may have been where it started. Petty loved the Band recordings and Robertson’s part in them as much as the next man, so he did some digging and found a song from the Hard Promises sessions. He played “The Best of Everything” for a few people, Nick Lowe included, and felt good about passing it along. Robertson took the multitracks into Village Recorders and went to work. Far from asking for Petty’s input, however, Robertson requested that Petty stay away, even stopped him at the door when Petty happened to be at the studio one day.
“The Best of Everything” came back transformed. The spirit of the basic tracks remained—the difference was in the layers of horns and in the beautiful harmony vocal sung by Robertson’s former bandmate Richard Manuel. Listening along with Robertson, Petty didn’t say much. Manuel’s voice brought an emotion to the recording that drew out the song’s ache. If Petty had already been thinking about Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys, Manuel’s voice illuminated some deeper connection between “The Best of Everything” and the American South. The South haunted the early Band recordings. No doubt Manuel’s voice was triggering some association. Though Petty said nothing to Robertson, he felt he’d been given another sign. And horns? He’d never thought of brass as a thing that could emerge in such a central way, not on a Heartbreakers’ record. But to his ears, it worked. Regardless, it was a song for a movie, so there was no reason to worry that it didn’t fit directly enough with the Heartbreaker aesthetic. He approved the mix and sent it into the world, not knowing then that “The Best of Everything” would return to him when MCA refused to allow it in a film released by another company. Even before the song came back to him, however, the horns had already sent a signal into Petty’s creative unconscious.
If it started there, “Rebels” was the song that gave Petty permission to fully engage the idea of a concept album. It freed him from writing about his own life in Encino. He was going somewhere else for his material. “I think I was also trying to become a better writer,” says Petty. “I felt I had enough going for me that I could do that. I’d touched on it, but my focus had been on writing good rock-and-roll songs. This was the first time, I think, that I started to push beyond. And I found a way to do that.” The songs that were coming had particular characters, people who had far more to do with Earl Petty’s North Florida than they did his son’s Los Angeles. “Honey, don’t walk out, I’m too drunk to follow”—the opening line of “Rebels” tells you that things are going in a different direction than with Long After Dark. “The first time I heard ‘Rebels,’” says Mike Campbell, “it blew me away. I thought, ‘This is one of our best songs.’ Those lyrics and that imagery, only Tom could write that. You can’t write a better song than that.” Like Campbell, Petty quickly understood how important “Rebels” would be to the album, establishing its sense of place, bringing in the region’s lost people. They started thinking of it as an album opener before they even had a take that worked. But if “Rebels” initiated the story, it was “Southern Accents” that arrived as the album’s centerpiece.
“There’s a Southern accent where I come from / The young ’uns call it ‘country,’ the Yankees call it ‘dumb’ / I got my own way of talking, but everything is done / with a Southern accent where I come from.” The song came quietly, with Petty alone at the piano in his new home, his family asleep upstairs. It showed up almost complete. A middle-of-the-night encounter, “Southern Accents” went beyond “Rebels” as an example of what Petty could do as a writer capturing not just emotion but time and place. It was epic poetry in three and a half minutes, a reminder as to why he was laboring to chase this album in the way that he was. The recording features strings arranged by Jack Nitzsche, which are, apart from the vocal, the track’s fundamental texture, with a simple piano sitting just behind them. It’s a case of the material getting what it deserves. The production is as good as the song. “I had no desire to be on that,” says Stan Lynch. “I played a wood block, I think. That was one of those songs I was proud not to play on live. It’s so good, it isn’t even a song. You can just etch that in a piece of granite and walk by it. I felt like saying, ‘You don’t ever have to write another song again. You owe me no more good songs.’ It’s like it’s from a prayer book.” In the song’s bridge, as transcendent as anything Petty would ever write, is a visitation, a moment of pure beauty in which Petty’s mother, at that point years deceased, arrives to her son. “For just a minute there I was dreaming / For just a minute it was oh so real / For just a minute she was standing there, with me.” It’s the album’s moment of deepest longing. And as the song came to Petty, so, too, did a little peace, however fragile. Songs were the place he took his loss and turned it into something else. Which may not have been the same as grieving, but it was something.
* * *
At the outset of Southern Accents, Petty had installed the recording studio in his family’s Encino home, further damaging the already broken gate between work and home. Then, without giving it a lot of thought, he allowed himself to believe that the Heartbreakers could make this record without an outside producer, an idea most of the band liked. The inner sanctum of the Heartbreakers’ creative world was a place generally closed off to traffic, except for producers. Now it was entirely closed off. Or would have been, if there weren’t drugs on the table. And somebody had to sell them to the band.
The home studio became the scene of a party as much as it was the scene of a production. But it wasn’t always a particularly pleasant party. When Petty set out to cut “Rebels” with the band, he felt like the recording he heard in his head wasn’t coming back to him through the studio monitors. His response was to bear down, put in more time, record more takes, to keep trying—until it hurt. It was the Iovine school of record making without Iovine present. But the song deserved it, demanded it.
“It had gotten unpleasant,” Petty says. “The thing I loved the most, making this music, had become so difficult, more a fight than what it should have been. Something needed to give.” At the rate Petty was going, he’d kill the joy off in a matter of months and be left with nothing but a job. What saved the situation—and what also threw it off course—was the arrival of Dave Stewart, cofounder, songwriter, and producer of the Eurythmics. He was a dose of levity, a shot of positive energy and impulse. For the rock-and-roll fan, he was surely the enemy. The Human League, ABC, the Eurythmics—the British synthpop bands seemed to be everything the Heartbreakers weren’t. And Petty was responsible, if inadvertently, for Stewart’s arrival, no matter that he never intended to be the one to usher the Englishman through the door.
Some months before the trouble with “Rebels” had begun, Petty received a call from Jimmy Iovine, a request for material for a new Stevie Nicks album, which Iovine was getting ready to record. Petty didn’t have anything to offer. It may have been too soon after “Stop Dragging My Heart Around.” But he did have some advice for Iovine: find the guy from the Eurythmics. On the basis of hearing “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” on the radio, Petty knew this guy could write. No matter that the Eurythmics’ recordings were underpinned by drum machine and synthesizer, Petty knew good writing. If he was a slave to anything, it wasn’t a particular sound—it was the song. Iovine made the call and brought Dave Stewart in.
Aware that Tom Petty had gotten him the job with Iovine and Nicks, Dave Stewart phoned the Encino house to see if Petty would come down to the studio where he, Iovine, and Nicks were recording. Nicks and Iovine were no longer seeing each other, but they’d managed to keep making records together. Working on a song built around one of Stewart’s drum programs, they were at a standstill, not sure where to take the song lyrically. “I had no idea he was in town, that they were working, none of that,” Petty says. “But I was at the point where a field trip was always welcome. Just to get out of the house.” Nicks left not long after Petty arrived. It had been a long day already. Stewart and Iovine stayed, and the three men worked through the night, until they had something. Petty sang a lead vocal as a guide. They were ready to play it for Stevie, and then she could sing it.
“Tom had come down, and he liked what we were working on,” explains Nicks. “I was writing madly. I had my little book, and I was just writing, writing, writing. Tom, Jimmy, and Dave were sort of talking. But it was five in the morning, and I was really tired. So I said, ‘I’m going to go. I’m leaving you guys, and I’ll be back tomorrow.’ I left, and when I got back the next day, at something like three p.m., the whole song was written. And not only was it written; it was spectacular. Dave was standing there saying to me, ‘Well, there it is! It’s really, really good.’ And they go to me, ‘Well, it’s terrific, and now you can go out and … and you can sing it.’ Tom had done a great vocal, a great vocal. I just looked at them and said, ‘I’m going to top that? Really?’ I got up, thanked Dave, thanked Tom, fired Jimmy, and left. That went down in about five minutes.”
When Petty left that afternoon, it was with a basic recording of the new song in his pocket. It was his, not hers. The track was undeniable. It was as good as anything he’d done in the past several years—and altogether different. Petty had watched with admiration as Prince, in the midst of his Purple Rain years, moved around the musical landscape, no concern for the laws of migration that either the business or the Billboard charts imposed, and he wanted to keep moving himself. “I saw Prince doing what looked like an attempt at psychedelia,” Petty says. “And I loved it. It inspired me.” The recording in his pocket sounded like movement. It wasn’t clear what it all meant, where it fit. Petty had certainly let a stranger into the Heartbreakers’ midst. This wasn’t the Del Shannon collaboration. It wasn’t even having Duck Dunn come in to play bass. This was Petty slipping out in the night to create something great without any of the Heartbreakers involved or, really, even knowing. This was infidelity. And the drum machine on the track only made it worse. Petty was out sleeping with a tramp. And it felt good to him.
There was one Heartbreaker who knew something was going on. “I just happened to stop by Tom’s house that day,” recalls Mike Campbell, “and he’s packing up his bass to go to a session, kind of acting like he’s been caught with his pants down. He tells me, ‘I’m going with Dave Stewart.’ So I talked to Stevie, and she said I should just go down. I called the studio and said, ‘What’s going on? Can I come by?’ They tell me, ‘We have to ask Tom.’ I ended up going down, but this hurt my feelings a lot. I felt from his energy that he knew he should have told me. But he didn’t tell me, and he didn’t expect me to come down. It was awkward.” From there on out, Mike Campbell went everywhere Petty did. From a musical angle, it was always worth it. And Petty needed that collaborator and ally in the band.
The other Heartbreakers behaved like bands do. If “Don’t Come Around Here No More” was a victory, it wasn’t theirs. Feeling suspicious at least, betrayed at most, they took a few shots at Dave Stewart, his dandy-from-overseas flamboyance. The Heartbreakers knew how to laugh long and loud, but it was often at other people. They were skeptical of Stewart. Mike Campbell was the most immediately open to him—but even Campbell had his moments. And he told Petty as much. The others muttered behind Petty’s back—to no avail. Petty needed a break from the “band bullshit.” “Don’t Come Around Here No More” sounded more interesting to him each time he played it back. And the songs were the one allegiance that stood above that with his band.
As far as the infidelity went, it didn’t hurt that Stewart was a lot easier to be with than the Heartbreakers had been in some time. Petty and Stewart bought cowboy hats, had a tailor make custom suits with rhinestone skulls on them. Stewart drove around in a Cadillac with massive fins, went after the fun, never waiting for it to come to him. His working approach had as much to do with creating environments for songs as it did creating songs. Sometimes the material came a lot easier when a place was made for its arrival. The band would have to give in if they wanted to be a part of Stewart’s engaging madness and the new recording. He broke them down, grinning through it all. After Petty brought “Don’t Come Around Here No More” back to the Encino studio, the Heartbreakers came onto the recording. For two weeks Petty, Stewart, and the band worked on the track, feeling like they had a single. Benmont Tench’s string parts, played on a Yamaha DX-7 keyboard, heightened the theater of the whole musical scene. Campbell’s wah-wah guitar on the track’s outro brought back a sound that had fallen out of favor among guitar players. It felt bold, unguarded, a step in another direction. By the time the recording was done, Dave Stewart had made an impression on them all.
“Dave put on the best parties in the eighties,” Petty says. “Somehow, there were always midgets involved. At one, Timothy Leary reached out to me with a hit of acid, and when I declined, he said, ‘More for the rest of us,’ and put it on his tongue. I had to escape Dave’s house that night. I locked the bathroom door and went out through the window, since my house was only a block away. I knew Dave wouldn’t want me to leave. Dave could just keep going, and he wanted us all with him.”
* * *
Petty figured there were more songs waiting where “Don’t Come Around Here No More” came from. And he was right. They just weren’t as good. That first cowrite was the lucky one. And it worked in relation to the album’s conceptual theme. The singer of “Don’t Come Around Here No More” belonged among the characters of Southern Accents. It was the way Petty leaned into the lyric. “I don’t feel you anymore / You darken my door / Whatever you’re looking for / Hey! Don’t come around here no more!” The speaker may as well have been some southern misfit, stringing up barbed wire at the edge of his property line. “Beat it!” It showed just how wide Petty could go musically without losing the thickness of his identity. But the next two Stewart cowrites didn’t prove so successful. “Dave was a breath of fresh air,” says Mike Campbell. “And he was at the top of his game. We were like, ‘This Dave Stewart guy is great! Let’s do whatever he says.’ Then, after a couple more, ‘Okay, that’s enough.’ It was ‘Make It Better’ and whatever the other one was.”
Stewart distracted Petty from the concept album he’d set out to make, but Petty was a full collaborator in that distraction. “Make It Better (Forget About Me)” and “It Ain’t Nothing to Me,” the other two tracks born of the Petty-Stewart collaboration, pulled the project away from its origins. Stewart’s guitar playing, featured on both, had a seventies R&B feel that seemed closer to the spirit of Nile Rodgers than it did to the Rolling Stones. That wasn’t bad, but it was out of place. The songs would have gotten more affection as B-sides, but as album tracks they were scrutinized and, ultimately, blamed for the misdirection of Southern Accents. They felt like something else—fun afternoons at the studio that shouldn’t have been allowed to be more than that.
“The bigger picture there was we were all on a lot of coke,” Benmont Tench says. “On the Long After Dark tour, I discovered how much cocaine there was in the world. And then I came home and went straight on tour with Stevie Nicks, and, boy, did I discover how much cocaine there was in the world. Southern Accents was a great idea for a record. Tom started writing the record, from what I understand, by just writing words associated with the South. ‘Rebels,’ ‘Trailer,’ ‘Apartment.’ Then, somehow, out of those three words that become songs, two are left off the album. How the fuck do you leave ‘Trailer’ off Southern Accents? And ‘Make It Better’ and something else—I can’t remember—are on the album. It’d be like leaving ‘No Second Thoughts’ off You’re Gonna Get It! or ‘You Tell Me’ off Damn the Torpedoes. I think if it weren’t for the drugs, better music would have come out. Better decisions would have been made.” As the focus shifted from the original idea, there were songs that not even Tench knew much about, that didn’t get past Petty’s notebook. One of them was called “Sheets,” a stark look at the racism that so often structured life in the American South. “It was a really scary song,” Petty says, “but one that would have had to be included, if the original idea for the album had been carried through to its conclusion.”
Instead, Petty had begun to think of it as a double album. With “Rebels,” “Southern Accents,” “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” “Trailer,” “The Best of Everything,” and “It Ain’t Nothin’ to Me,” a collection, meandering, often beautiful, sometimes schizophrenic, was coming together. But it wasn’t done. “Rebels,” the song that started it all, was still a problem. Petty put horns on it. But the horns fought for space with the twelve-string guitar. He wanted the sound of more but without losing the sense of space that the song’s mood needed. He played with the panning, pulled instruments in and out, messed with the EQ and compression, mixing and remixing, never getting the results he wanted. The absence of a producer was conspicuous. There were no late-night calls with Iovine. In the midst of trying to mix “Rebels” one more time, Petty went back to his original demo of the song, looking for some kind of clue, and he heard something that made him crazy with frustration: the demo still beat the recording he’d been laboring on. Too angry to think, he expressed himself in the way he knew best. He went back where he came from, hitting a wall with his bare fist, pulverizing the bone. It would take eight months to heal. Would he call it rage? “I’d just call it stupid,” he says.
Though a doctor managed to re-create the bone structure that Petty had destroyed, he couldn’t help Petty finish the record. It was the first time Petty’s anger made the news. Up to that point, it had been a family secret. Tony Dimitriades knew it best, only because he caught it more than anyone else. But Petty went ahead and told the truth. He’d hit a wall. It wasn’t the most flattering story. He was beginning to see that things were out of control. Finally, he called Jimmy Iovine, asking for help.
Iovine demanded a few things of Petty. First, that he get out of that recording studio in his house as soon as possible. Second, that he forget the idea of a double album. It was the quick imposition of some structure. The double-album idea had crept in without a lot of scrutiny; it was the cheap way out of having to choose which tracks should stay. Iovine did what was asked of him and got things moving. But even Iovine missed the bigger point. Years later, he realizes this was so. “What happened with Southern Accents,” he says, “was Tom had an idea that he should have stuck with.” The concept album that had been Petty’s original vision was sacrificed. “Trailer” was relegated to a B-side. “The Apartment Song,” a loose, pre–Full Moon Fever version with Stevie Nicks singing harmony, was weeded out and cast aside. Covers of Nick Lowe’s “Cracking Up” and Conway Twitty’s “The Image of Me” went on the same pile. “Sheets” never got recorded. The point was to finish. So what if the album sounded like an identity crisis played out across two sides of a long player—why shouldn’t it? Even the Beatles made a few of those. And the fact is, Tom Petty was having an identity crisis. Those who were ready to lay flowers at the grave of a masterpiece that almost was weren’t factoring that in. Whatever else it was, Southern Accents was the necessary door into an experience of searching that would carry Petty through a few albums. It was the shaking of the tree—and he would be gathering the fruit for a number of years, not always sure what he should eat and what he shouldn’t.
* * *
Mike Campbell had four cowrites on Long After Dark. He had only one on Southern Accents, “Dogs on the Run.” During the making of the record, he’d given Petty a number of cassettes with music on them but, as Petty surmised, nothing that fit the project. No doubt Dave Stewart took up some of the space that might have been Campbell’s. But Campbell had a gift for watching what happened rather than stewing or confronting. His demos piled up. The ones he’d passed along to Petty were, as always, fully produced, minus the vocals. He’d always been a guy with something cooking in the closet, the garage, the living room, the bathroom. All he needed was a closed door and a little magnetic tape. He didn’t write songs so much as he wrote records, less a folkie than a Brian Wilson. He used loops and drum machines, mandolins and lap steels, synthesizers and sequencers—whatever got the idea across, and maybe a little extra.
Petty would listen through the Campbell demos, see if there was anything that made him sing. It was all done by feel. If Petty couldn’t make it his own, there was no point in chasing it. With Campbell, there was always more where that came from. “Mike once said to me, ‘I work in bulk,’” says Petty. “He’d send me twenty things on a cassette. More than enough for an album. I’d go through them, see if I could turn something into a song rather than a track.” When one of them struck him, Petty started to work with it, sometimes asking Campbell to pull everything out of a section but the drums so that he could write new chord changes. But he often took the demos as they were. It tended not to happen exactly the same way twice.
Among the demos Campbell brought to Petty around the time of Southern Accents, there was a track that seemed good but not all the way there. The chorus didn’t feel right to Petty. He worked on it a bit but finally set it aside without a lot of thought. They were in the middle of the album, and if a song wasn’t happening quickly enough, there were others demanding attention. Campbell waited for a verdict on the demo, but Petty’s mind was elsewhere. “I played that one for Tom and for Jimmy,” says Campbell. “But when it got to the chorus, instead of going major, I had some jazzy minor chord thing. Jimmy goes, ‘Jazz?’ Tom thought the chorus should go to a major key. I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, I can see their points. The chorus could be better.’ Then Jimmy called me and said, ‘I spoke to Don Henley, and he’s looking for a song.’ I figured I’d fix the chorus before I play it for Don. From there, it all happened fast. I played it for Don, and he wrote to it, put down a vocal, quick. We were in a Southern Accents session when I brought in the mix of ‘Boys of Summer.’ That was the day Tom broke his hand.”
After hearing Campbell’s demo, Don Henley had moved things quickly, getting to a finished recording in a matter of weeks. Campbell was out jogging shortly after that when he heard it on the radio. There were still artists who could turn things around that quickly, if they wanted to. Henley was one of them. Whether or not the song was right for Petty, only Petty would know. But after Henley worked on it and rush released the recording, you couldn’t escape the song. It was playing everywhere. What Petty heard was a demo he’d passed on. In the middle of trying to finish “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” he and Campbell went to check a mix in Campbell’s car. “We go out there,” Campbell says, “I turn the car on, the radio comes on, and it’s ‘Boys of Summer.’ It’s at the end, and the deejay starts going on about how it’s the best song and all this. Tom just sat there. You could tell he was bothered. I put our cassette in to check the mix, and it sounded like shit. You know, it wasn’t finished. But still. Big difference. At the end of it, Tom says to me, ‘You did really good on that. I wish I had had the presence of mind to not let that song get away.’ It was a moment. It felt good to me. It was good for my confidence. It was nice that he didn’t go and break his other hand.” Albums were coming and going, but Petty and Campbell kept finding ways to work together. Close but never too close. The same couldn’t be said for everyone in the band.
“My two best friends in the Heartbreakers,” Benmont Tench explains, “were Stan Lynch and Howie Epstein. Stan is like a year younger than me, and Howie was a year younger than Stanley. This band, we tended to let each other have our own emotional experiences. Me and Stanley, or me and Howie, may have gotten into that stuff. I’m not saying I want to go into therapy with these guys, but Tom and Mike … maybe it’s southern men of a certain age. In spite of growing up in the sixties, in spite of all the liberalism, it’s like there’s some very old-school southern thing in Tom. I don’t know if it comes from his father. I don’t know if it comes from working really, really hard to make it and being like, ‘Nobody’s taking this shit away from me.’ He’s created this thing. He’s created him. And he’s protective of it.”
“We learned to split into our own camps,” says Petty. “But Mike and I usually didn’t. We had to carry the flag. We were in the trenches, trying to prepare the music for the next project. But no one in the band knew what was going on at home for me. I thought it was all my fault. I’d turned into a rock-and-roll star and turned my family’s life upside down. But by ’84, around Southern Accents, I knew I was out of there. I knew I was gonna leave my marriage. I was just biding my time.” Petty’s life at home made the band more important to him than ever, and the fissures within the band more troubling. “When you’re in a creative relationship,” says Adria Petty, reflecting on the Heartbreakers of that era, “when it’s men, and they’re deriving their self-confidence and identity from that, that’s a very delicate thing. You really need to know that you’re bros, like you’re in ’Nam and you’re gonna have each other’s back. The Heartbreakers often say, ‘I wouldn’t send that guy out for ammo.’ That’s their joke. ‘I wouldn’t send him out for the ammo.’ But that’s the reality. You have to surround yourself with the best, and it’s hard to find them and harder to hold on to them.”
Shifts in power, trouble cutting rhythm tracks, and differences in income were the most difficult issues to get around. Stan Lynch felt like he was watching Jimmy Iovine and Tom Petty count money as a hobby. He recalls his discomfort when Iovine showed him a picture of a place on Long Island, saying, “That’s the house ‘Refugee’ built.” He got the same uneasy feeling upon entering Petty’s new place in Encino, though he didn’t end up there very often. “It wasn’t until 1984 that I made actual money,” says Lynch, “where I went, ‘That’s a nice check.’ And even then, it was only go-out-and-buy-a-car money.” True to Lynch’s nature, he couldn’t keep his thoughts to himself. He vented to his former roommate on the road, Campbell. Being so close to Petty in the work, Campbell was Lynch’s connection to power. But it often got back to Petty, who was more sensitive to the chatter than Lynch may have assumed. The effect was the opposite of what the drummer was after.
“I’m sorry Tom didn’t feel he could discuss what was going on at home,” says Lynch. “No man should have to feel that kind of pain at home.” But the younger Lynch wasn’t the one Petty would have turned to if indeed he was to turn to anyone. However cold it may have seemed, Petty didn’t take chances in relationships. And because of the chatter, he’d learned not to trust Lynch. “It was like Stan was always trying to figure out how to get more out of us than he was getting,” says Petty. “One day he came to me and said, ‘Cinderella’s drummer has a yacht.’ I said, ‘Cinderella’s drummer has a yacht? Wow. Who is Cinderella?’ It was this popular heavy metal band, hadn’t been around long. I said, ‘I don’t buy he’s got a yacht.’ Stan’s like, ‘We should have yachts. I should have the same kind of money that fucker’s making.’ I said, ‘You should join that band.’”