One could say that whenever one is in a group one has to hide one’s best nucleus, or very rarely let it come out. One has to draw a veil over a part of one’s personality …
—M. L. VON FRANZ
Jeff Lynne’s name is on a lot of hit records. You’re going to hear them when you leave your home in the morning, maybe at the supermarket, the bar, or laundromat, maybe as a sample on another record—“Strange Magic,” “Evil Woman,” “Don’t Bring Me Down,” “Mr. Blue Sky,” “Handle with Care,” “You Got It,” “Free Fallin’.” He seems to know what makes people reach for the volume knob. Born into pop. But for all that Lynne has done, he acknowledges that Full Moon Fever earned a special place. “It’s probably my favorite album I’ve ever worked on,” he says, after considering for a moment. “Yeah, I would say so. Every song feels spot-on for what it’s supposed to be.” A garage recording, the album has what Lynne calls a “sparkle.”
For whatever wasn’t right in his life at the time, Petty certainly felt some satisfaction as the album became the biggest of his career. In the year after it hit, describing how he felt about its success, the word Petty reached for more often than any other was “happy.” At the 1990 Grammy awards, Full Moon Fever was nominated for album of the year, up against the debut of Petty’s “other band,” the Traveling Wilburys. Of the other three records nominated, one was Don Henley’s End of the Innocence, an album with songs cowritten by both Mike Campbell and Stan Lynch. On the music side of life, abundance surrounded Petty and his band.
Petty never used the success of Full Moon Fever as an excuse to leave his band at home. He could have, of course. It was a solo record. But the idea never crossed his mind. Instead, he focused on how the touring for Full Moon Fever might require modifications to the band. It wouldn’t be the big band of the Southern Accents tour. No girl singers, no horn section. But neither could it be what it had been when the Heartbreakers supported their early releases. Musically, the group needed a little more onstage to cover the changing sound. The stacked acoustic guitars that Lynne favored, together with the layered background vocals that punctuated his records, meant that more hands and more voices were needed. And though the point was not to find another guy to put on album covers, Scott Thurston came in to help and never went away. He was a utility guy, could play anything— guitars, keyboards, bass, harmonica—and hit the high notes. Eventually, years later, some photographer mistook him for a band member, and everyone else went along with it. Or something like that. In the beginning, however, Thurston was a hired hand brought in from Jackson Browne’s band.
It was Stan Lynch who suggested Thurston. The sideman’s background was rich in strangeness. He’d played with Ike and Tina Turner, Iggy Pop, the Motels. It would be fair to say that Thurston was prepared for anything. If you couldn’t learn it from Ike or Iggy, it probably wasn’t worth learning, not if playing in a rock band was what you planned to do with your life. Indeed, the fit between Thurston and Petty indicated that Thurston’s education prepared him well. Exactly which among his earlier jobs had given him the tools he most needed to be a Heartbreaker is a question worth asking. Perhaps what he picked up as a musician on past gigs was second in importance to what he picked up regarding diplomacy. Or maybe Thurston was a quiet enough guy by nature and managed to stay that way long enough for the other Heartbreakers to realize he had no master plan, was no threat to their master plans. He just liked to play rock and roll. And he could play whatever was needed. “He had the skills,” says Stan Lynch. “And he had a totally laissez-faire attitude, like, ‘Who gives a shit? What’s the worst thing that can happen? You fire me?’”
Early on in Thurston’s tenure, Petty, a little lonely on the “star bus,” welcomed the new guy into riding with him. Petty had kept his doors open for the others, but no one in the band walked through them. This time it was Thurston’s idea, and it was an act that involved what Petty says was “the risk of being the teacher’s pet.” “I don’t know why it was like that,” Petty says. “And, really, it hurt my feelings. It went on for too long, me being pitted against my own band. But Scott called bullshit on that. And I think he even helped bring the band together, eventually, through that kind of freethinking.” Bugs Weidel points to Stan Lynch as the primary architect behind the walled cities within the Heartbreakers. “The dynamic with Stanley, for years,” Weidel insists, “was Stan against Tom. Tom was the boss, and Stan was like, ‘We gotta be united against the boss. We’re a band, we gotta watch this guy.’ The only power he had in the past was Campbell. He’d go, ‘Come on, Mike, you gotta look after your guys here. You got this advantage, Mike.’ It created this weird thing, this deep, lasting schism.”
With Thurston in the picture, the first signs of change arrived—and if Thurston’s entrance wasn’t the most dramatic harbinger of a new era, his choices as a band member were nonetheless beginning to register among the others. Petty and the new sideman would sit up for hours, analyzing the condition of planet Earth and its inhabitants. “Scott came up like I did, in garage bands,” Petty explains, “and he had a hundred million rock-and-roll stories.” Even when the bus pulled up to a hotel or venue, Thurston and Petty would often stay on the vehicle, as if still in transit. It couldn’t have been anyone but Thurston. There was too much time between Petty and the other Heartbreakers to make that kind of looseness possible.
“I considered him my best friend for a long time,” says Jackson Browne of Thurston. “He was my closest friend at the hardest time in my life. He was a very big part of what I did. Produced several albums. So Scott was in both bands for a while. Two years, I think. He was Tom’s best friend. There’s probably twenty of us out there, thinking we’re his best friends. You’d be surprised how many. But it came to the point where he couldn’t sustain doing both. The gig with Tom paid better. They traveled better. Played to more acclaim. But he didn’t want to leave my band. He was at a breaking point, though. So he says he’s going to retire. I ran into Tom at some thing, and he was like, ‘How about that Scott Thurston, retiring like that?’ Then I looked at Tom, and I got it. I was like, ‘Okay, I think he should … I think he should come out of retirement. He doesn’t have to do that.’”
Had there not been a series of hits to enjoy with Full Moon Fever, and Scott Thurston to bring a lighter mood, the Heartbreakers’ grumblings may have worn on Petty more than they did. Not that it was always easy to play with musicians willing to publicly dismiss some of the music they were performing. “Before the record came out, Stan went all over town telling people that the album sucked,” says Petty, “that what I was doing was terrible. I think the Heartbreakers were insecure because I did Full Moon Fever and then went into the Traveling Wilburys. They were pissed off. But I wasn’t quitting the band. I had no intention of quitting.” But it was hard to argue with the success of Full Moon Fever. The good results made the detractors look more like sore losers than anything else. Lynch bitched openly in Rolling Stone when asked about the tour, saying, “That was the first time a tour ever felt like work to me—I never want to feel like I’m in a cover band.” Of course, by that time Lynch, too, had cowritten songs with Don Henley and was feeling the satisfaction of being recognized for talents beyond those utilized in the Heartbreakers. “Tom’s never asked me to write with him,” Lynch said in the same interview. “And that’s one party you do not invite yourself into. He obviously doesn’t see me in that light.” Lynch wasn’t alone in expressing discontent. Howie Epstein, at first listen to “Free Fallin’,” let Petty know that he didn’t like the song. Benmont Tench showed up for some work that was offered, but grimacing. Insecurities and fears weren’t addressed openly—blaming the music was the masquerade that hid all that. Not well, of course. In the face of it, Petty let go of the idea of bringing the band in to play more. Only Mike Campbell took the full ride with Petty.
When it came to thinking about a follow-up, Petty showed himself to be a man who wanted it both ways. Traveling with a band that wavered in its support of the bandleader had its effects. He’d had a remarkable run with Jeff Lynne that included two Wilburys albums, Full Moon Fever, and cuts for Randy Newman, Del Shannon, and Roy Orbison, including the hit “You Got It,” written by Petty, Orbison, and Lynne. But Petty felt he had to try bringing his two worlds together, to make a Heartbreakers record with Jeff Lynne producing, however much Lynne’s approach was antithetical to the idea of recording a band in the studio. As Campbell says, “We felt bad for the other guys.” The truth Petty was perhaps not willing to confront, however, was that there was no going back. He wouldn’t really have a band again. Not that band.
Having Lynne produce the Heartbreakers was a puzzle Petty could deal with. The more abstract conundrum was the success of Full Moon Fever. Gone was the freedom of having nothing to lose. The object was to follow a smash with a smash. Al Teller at MCA was now a fully inculcated believer. There’s nothing like a multiplatinum record to make a man in the business your biggest champion. Very quickly, the fresh, direct, unencumbered character of the Full Moon Fever sessions, the looseness that allowed the producers to work quickly and effectively, was gone. The “sparkle” wouldn’t be as easy to find. They’d left the garage.
“Into the Great Wide Open maybe lost the simplicity that Full Moon Fever had,” says Jeff Lynne. “Full Moon Fever was a kind of blatant, this-is-what-it-is-so-take-it-or-leave-it feeling. The sound was so concise, just one sound that belonged to itself. The next one, Into the Great Wide Open, maybe it was just thought about too much. It wasn’t as simple or straightforward. Full Moon Fever songs were so clean, just moving along. When I did that, it was basically me, Tom, and Mike doing everything, including background vocals.” Lynne doesn’t point to the involvement of the band as the problem. Not directly. He went about things as he needed to. Any forked-tongue comments from the band were generally made behind his back. By the time they’d finished it up, however, fully absorbed in their creation, Lynne thought he might have a very big record on his hands. Al Teller at MCA was sure he had something that would double the sales of Full Moon Fever.
* * *
Rick Rubin knew Al Teller from the days when Teller was at Columbia and Rubin’s Def Jam had Columbia distribution. Already viewed as being among the most important record producers of his time, Rubin was fast becoming one of pop music’s great crossover acts. In metal and hip-hop, he was a star. Now he was setting out on a kind of expansion campaign that would release him from any genre-bound future. “The album [of Petty’s] that got me was the first Jeff Lynne album,” Rubin explains. “It wasn’t even one song that did it. I remember hearing, probably, three. And by the time I heard the third single, I thought, ‘This just sounds like it’s going to be an incredible album.’ That was my first Tom Petty album experience. And I listened to it a million times. It lived in my car. In those days, there were no CD changers. I had a one-disc slot, and Full Moon Fever was in there for at least a year. Every day, that’s what I listened to.”
Rubin sought out Al Teller at the time Into the Great Wide Open was being set for release, just to tell him about the record he’d fallen in love with. “I called him and said, ‘Al, there’s an act on your label, and I just want to put the word in that if there’s ever an opportunity to work with him, I want to do it. He made my favorite album, and nothing would please me more. And he’s like, ‘Oh, great. Who’s that?’ And I said, ‘Tom Petty.’ And he said, ‘I’m sorry, Tom Petty makes his records with Jeff Lynne, and that won’t be changing any time soon.’ And that was that.”
Tony Dimitriades describes Al Teller’s faith in the Full Moon Fever follow-up as unflappable. Perhaps Teller was even a bit drunk on the thing. “He thought it was going to be even bigger,” Dimitriades says. “I remember we had lunch with him, me and Tom, and he said, ‘This is going to sell six million albums.’ I couldn’t believe that he said that. I thought, ‘Why would you even go there? Why say that to your artist? Now if you sell four million, you’ve failed.’ He could have said that he’d do everything he could for the album, that he’s fully behind it. But, no, he said it’s going to sell six million. And it did well, but it didn’t do that. In relation to Full Moon Fever, it was a disappointment.” What Teller didn’t know was that his artist, his MCA artist, Tom Petty, had already signed that contract with Warner Bros. Petty had somewhere to take his disappointment.
Mo Ostin entered the music business as Frank Sinatra’s accountant. He then turned Sinatra’s Reprise Records into something legendary, bringing it together with Warner Bros. Records along the way. A look through his early desk calendar reveals a meeting with Sinatra for lunch, Jimi Hendrix in the evening. Ostin had the kind of pedigree reserved for the heavies of the industry, without the gas that some of them gave off. It suited Petty to have a Mo Ostin in his life. But it was on Dimitriades to figure out how he was going to get his artist from one label to the other—now that Petty had contracts with both. As Dimitriades says, in his gentle style, “I eventually had to take Al Teller to lunch. But it didn’t unfold exactly as any of us planned.”
In some respects, Teller knew that Tom Petty’s relationship with the record business as a whole was fragile. Perhaps the executive should have seen it coming. Back when Full Moon Fever was first getting notice, Teller had gotten a taste of Petty’s character. MCA had paid for the Heartbreakers to go to New York for a Saturday Night Live performance. “I Won’t Back Down” was the track the label was promoting. Petty, however, felt that the song wasn’t yet working as well as it needed to with the band. For the Saturday Night Live performance, he instead decided to do “Runnin’ Down a Dream” and “Free Fallin’.” “I Won’t Back Down” had been out for some time, had already had a good life as a hit, so Petty thought he’d introduce something new. He didn’t consult with MCA on the matter, because that’s not how he worked. “I then had a meeting,” Dimitriades recalls, “to thank Al Teller for the money to do the show. Those were the days when they wrote checks if it was important enough, which SNL was. Al just went off. ‘What do you mean by not doing the single? I’m paying all that money, and he doesn’t do the single?’ I did my best to smooth things out. And I guess he was entitled, as the head of a record company, to want to promote his single. So I left, then called Tom to discuss a number of things. And on that call I mentioned that Al Teller wasn’t happy that the band didn’t do ‘I Won’t Back Down’ on the show. Tom immediately goes, ‘What do you mean he’s not happy?’ I say, ‘Well, you know, he’s paying for this.’ But Tom says, ‘He’s not happy? I’m promoting the record, but he’s not happy?’ I realize quickly that I’ve given Tom more information than he needs. After all, Al didn’t force us to do anything. He was simply not happy. But then Tom asks me for Al Teller’s phone number, says, ‘What’s his number? I’m calling him right now.’ I say, ‘Tom, don’t do that. It’s fine.’ He says, ‘I want the number.’ To which I reply, ‘Tom, I’m not giving it to you.’ Then he hangs up on me. Only a matter of minutes later, I think to call Mary [Klauzer] at the office and say, ‘If Tom calls…’ But she cuts me off and says that he already called. ‘What did he want?’ I ask her. ‘Al Teller’s number.’”
By the time Dimitriades put in a call to Al Teller it was too late, and Teller let him know it. “Al tells me, ‘Don’t ever put me in that position again,’” Dimitriades recalls. “I explained that I’d tried to stop Tom. But I had to ask Al what exactly Tom had said to him. And he tells me that Tom, who knew Al had been at Columbia Records, called him and said, ‘Did you ever tell Bob Dylan what to play when he went on TV?’ I said, ‘Well, that seems fair enough. What was your answer?’” Petty remembers the call but only says, “Sometimes you have to consider what you think is right and act on it. But, yeah, I really sandblasted his hood over that one.”
For the most part, though, Al Teller got behind the records, pushed for their success, and enjoyed the rewards when they came. But he was unknowingly up against a situation that was hard if not impossible to compete with. Petty was already somewhere else in his mind. He wanted the kind of relationship with an executive that would be along the lines of what George Harrison had with Mo Ostin. Harrison and Ostin were in business together, but they were also friends in business. “When George just didn’t feel like making records for a while,” says Olivia Harrison, “Mo didn’t push him. Mo simply waited, stayed in the background, let George go do what he needed to do. And when George came to him with Cloud Nine and the Wilburys, it was worth that wait. Mo didn’t look at George as a product, you know?” Petty wanted some of that same culture, even if it meant coming to Warner Bros. late in the Mo Ostin years.
Tony Dimitriades wasn’t there when Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker offered Petty a secret deal. “Tom called me and said he met someone from the music business at a dinner,” Dimitriades says. “I’m thinking, ‘Interesting.’ He didn’t have a history of mixing with the industry types. I asked who it was, and he told me Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker. He says, ‘They’re fantastic guys, and I want to be on their label.’ I said, ‘Well, Tom, you have two more records to deliver on your MCA contract.’ He says, ‘Well, you’ve got to get me out of it.’ No one found out for several years that we had a deal.” Almost no one.
“Six to nine months after I went to Al Teller about my interest in Tom,” says Rick Rubin, “I was having lunch with Mo Ostin one day, and he said—in the context of everything else we were talking about—he said, ‘It’s a secret, but guess who we signed? You can’t tell anybody.’ I said that’s fine. And then he says, ‘Well, we signed Tom Petty.’ I said, ‘Tom Petty made my favorite album. I love Tom Petty. That’s incredible.’ Mo is like, ‘He’s making one more record for MCA, and then he’s coming over to Warners.’ I said I thought this was great and that if they ever needed someone to work on a record with him, I’d love to. And that’s how I got to meet Tom.”
There was too much at stake for this to be an easy handoff, with Warner Bros. and Rick Rubin stepping up to usher in the next era. MCA was enjoying what Tom Petty brought to them. Why would any record label allow one of the biggest acts in the company’s history to walk away, just to watch another company count the millions? No one was going to make a move in the name of Art when old man Commerce was looking down on the scene. Why should MCA? But things began to unravel when the “secret” contract was no longer a secret. Just as Rick Rubin had heard about the Warner Bros. deal, so too had others within the industry. When Tony Dimitriades received a phone call from one of them, he knew he had to inform Al Teller that Petty had plans to move on to Warner Bros. when the MCA contract was up for renewal. There was one more album to be delivered after Into the Great Wide Open. Petty could make the jump after that. But Dimitriades had to inform Teller. Teller couldn’t hear it on the street. That’s not how Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers did business.
Knowing he should move fast, Dimitriades called Teller to set up a meeting. But Teller was heading off to Hawaii. It would have to wait. By sheer coincidence, Dimitriades was also going to Hawaii. And on the flight back to Los Angeles, the two men were only seats away from each other. Aware that this wasn’t going to be an easy conversation, Dimitriades spent the flight pretending to be asleep. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t going to go down in first class, with the manager trapped above the clouds, an angry label president in close proximity, and a full bar to make the good times better and the difficult times worse. When he finally sat down with Al Teller the following week, it was hard enough. But he got it done. Al Teller was pissed.
But that wasn’t the end of it. And the drama that followed is the Tom Petty part of the story. Something bothered Petty, even after Teller got the news about Warner Bros. Maybe Petty had some feeling in his gut that the next record was going to be an important one in his artistic life and it had to have the right home. Maybe Petty was operating on pure intuition. Maybe he felt record labels were complicated enough when fully in support of a project—and if MCA knew it was about to be stood up for Warner Bros., how could it be fully in support of the next record? Maybe he knew himself well enough to know that he had already moved on from MCA. He was gone, and he couldn’t go back. He called Dimitriades and told the manager to schedule another meeting with Al Teller, that it was time to leave MCA. No last album. The contract couldn’t be the final word.
“It was just the two of us,” says Dimitriades, remembering when he let Al Teller know about the bigger change that would be coming. “We were talking, and I said, ‘Look, Al, Tom’s really not happy with how Into the Great Wide Open is doing.’ Al says, ‘I know, I know.’ And I just get to the point and tell him that Tom doesn’t want to give him the last album. Al says, ‘What do you mean he doesn’t want to give us the last album?’ I say, ‘He’s not going to give it to you. He wants to leave. He’s unhappy.’ We’re in this restaurant, you know? And Al says, ‘You can’t do this to me!’ But I could. The artist we were talking about was a guy who chose to file for bankruptcy rather than deliver an album.” Teller ended up negotiating, with part of the deal being that the Heartbreakers would record an extra original track for the Greatest Hits album that MCA had planned. Petty hated the idea but wanted out. “Why,” Petty railed, “would a new recording, one no one knows, go on the Greatest Hits album? It makes no sense.” The problem fixed itself. The extra song they recorded was “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” which, conveniently, became a greatest hit. And the collection went on to sell twelve million units, a windfall that MCA didn’t refuse.
* * *
Though some viewed putting the Heartbreakers together with Jeff Lynne, a producer who didn’t need a band to make records, as a failed experiment, Into the Great Wide Open had songs that would appear and reappear on the Heartbreakers’ set list. “Learning to Fly” would always have a home in the live shows. It became one of those songs that an arena could sing. “That record,” Petty says, “gave us some of our most evergreen songs. It’s our biggest album in Europe. But suddenly we were in a business where you could feel bad about selling only a few million records and recording some songs that live forever.” But even as he says it, shaking his head at the strangeness of the predicament, Petty acknowledges that he had tried to make the Heartbreakers something they weren’t. The solo album had caused long-term trouble among the Heartbreakers, as did that Lynne-produced “band album.” In Rolling Stone, Benmont Tench spoke candidly about it all. “I was pissed off and hurt. I was also worried [that Tom would] split up the band because there was conflict within the group at that time. There wouldn’t be anybody coming to blows, but Tom and Stan would have disagreements, and Stan would leave the band, or get fired, and then come back less than a week later. Stan was always worried that Tom would go [solo] or just grab Mike and pack up. So when he did that [solo work], that’s how it felt.” No matter how outspoken, though, Benmont Tench was not the band member that tripped the wire in Petty’s brain.
“I could always look around the room,” Petty says, “in the studio, say, and know right where I stand with everybody there, except Stan.” Lynch’s ways of handling his fears about Petty breaking up the band generally found the drummer doing more to ensure that the band did break up than anything else. That Lynch had more skills than were being used in the Heartbreakers hardly set him apart within the group. He’d gotten a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell in the early 1980s. He had ambitions. “Stan was more talented than just being a drummer,” says Petty. “He was quite a bright guy. He wrote music, though he never approached me with any. But he was a songwriter, a producer. There was a lot he was capable of. But there never would’ve been that outlet for him in the Heartbreakers.” Petty says Lynch was kicked out of the band “two or three times.” Others see that as a low estimate. Lynch’s decision to move back to Florida shortly after Full Moon Fever, leaving Los Angeles for good, was the geographic symbol of an emotional divide that the band and crew had been living with for years.
By the time Petty and Rick Rubin had begun to commingle their ambitions for what would become Wildflowers, and Petty had entered into a writing phase that would be richer than any other in his career, the question came up again: is this going to be a band record? “I said to Tom, ‘Do you want to do it with your band? Do you want to put a band together? Like, how do you want to do this?’” recalls Rubin. “I was completely open to however he wanted to approach it. The album that I was a fan of was not a Heartbreakers album, so I wasn’t tied to that. It was really more up to Tom. And he talked a lot about not wanting Stan to play on Wildflowers.” Which meant that Petty was again weighing his own ambitions in record making against his loyalty to the band. It wasn’t a place he liked to be, but it was a place he often found himself. Loyalty, which seemed unambiguous as a virtue, was bringing him a lot of trouble. He resented the people with whom he had to work the hardest to remain loyal, which meant Stan Lynch but also his wife, Jane. How could they not feel it? Surely they did. Some days they hated him.
“I think people need to feel that their place in the world is something they found through their own actions,” says Adria Petty. “Or they don’t know who they are. In some cases, if another person helped them to find their place in the world, they can actually feel angry about this. The person who helped becomes far too important, and they resent it. In my dad’s case, he had people around him that didn’t completely know how to handle that he’s not just Tommy and that their identities are almost reliant on his. I think it began to look like the dynamic had shifted in his favor. But he didn’t create that situation. It’s just his situation. I think it affected Stan, and I think it affected my mother in some way.” As Wildflowers was being created, Petty felt like he was living under the weight of both those relationships. The relationship with Lynch would be far easier to negotiate than the one at home. He would choose to make a solo recording. “I didn’t want to find myself writing things,” Petty says, “limited to what Stan could do. It almost got there. I was almost on that path. He was really good onstage, a great singer. But the studio was a different place.” There was somewhere Petty had to go in his next batch of songs, and he didn’t want anything in the way of his getting there. There was a story he had to tell. He needed to know what it was, and he had to make the record to find out.