Of all the secrets that set him apart, this may in the end be the worst.
—J. M. COETZEE, BOYHOOD
Lenny Waronker talked Petty and Rubin out of making Wildflowers a double album, instead pushing them to assemble something that would stand as one of the great releases of its time. It wasn’t always obvious what songs should be included. This wasn’t a collection of tracks fighting to be singles. It was an outpouring of moods, meditations, rants, rock and roll, poetry. The bigger decisions would come less in what should be included relative to a song’s individual strength and more in how those tracks sat against one another. What were the family traits? Which songs had them? Petty was dogged in making as good a collection as he could. Even if it meant leaving something off that might be a single. “Even his okay songs are great,” says George Drakoulias, who worked alongside Rick Rubin at the time. “Poor guy. You know what I mean?” Even decades later, Wildflowers tracks would emerge that seemed too good to have been left off. Rod Stewart recorded a version of one of them, “Leave Virginia Alone.” Ryan Ulyate, the band’s current coproducer, confidant, and musical archivist, played some of the others for Petty and Mike Campbell in 2013. Certain cuts Petty remembered. But he had no memory at all of “Somewhere Under Heaven,” a beautiful recording. It came from a time when such things were lying all around the room, piling up one on another.
The Heartbreakers appeared on Saturday Night Live to promote the release of Wildflowers. Dave Grohl sat behind the drum kit. The Foo Fighters were still only an idea in the back of Grohl’s mind, what he hoped would be an outlet for songs he’d written that were otherwise homeless. It made sense to see the Nirvana drummer up there as the Heartbreakers played “You Don’t Know How It Feels” and “Honey Bee.” Rock and roll had become a smaller club. The very idea of a band, once the fundamental unit for music making, was just another category among many. But if you were raised during the British Invasion or the punk years, a band was everything, a shield and a shelter. That was no longer true for all kids in the late twentieth century. In their ways of thinking, Petty and Grohl belonged to what would soon have to be acknowledged as a passing age. Grohl made his brief stop in the Heartbreakers as a figure of enthusiasm and light, but it was clear enough to Petty that Grohl had something he needed to go do, a band he needed to form. So Petty put in a call to Steve Ferrone.
“I was in Germany, working with Bryan Ferry,” the drummer says. “I got a message from my girlfriend, who said that Tom had called, that the album was finished. I thought, ‘I wonder what that’s about?’ So I called him, and he said, ‘What are you doing next week? Wanna go on the road with me?’ It was exactly what I wanted to do, but I thought he was going out with the Heartbreakers, so I asked, ‘What about Stan?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’ve been having our differences.’ I asked if he’d spoken to Stan about this, because, you know, I’ve been in a band and know what it’s like. He said that, no, he hadn’t discussed it with Stan. I said, ‘Well, put it this way: I’m really flattered that you called me, and I’d love to do it, but you should talk to Stan first and just see where you are with that stuff. You’ve been together such a long time.’ Two days later, my phone rang, and it was Tom saying, ‘You’re working next week.’” Ferrone knew nothing of the Bridge School shows, just as he knew nothing of Petty’s efforts to enlist Lynch for the Wildflowers tour. But there was too much to start trying to explain to Ferrone. It was either a one-minute conversation—“Stan’s out; do you want to be in?”—or a three-hour walk into anger, frustration, and what could only be a subjective account of years of hurt feelings and misunderstanding. Fuck it. Ferrone was in. He could hear all the bullshit later.
Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Graham Parker and the Rumour, or Billy Joel and the guys who played with him for a long time and left really pissed off: they were a class of artists who came up in the confession and quiet of the early seventies singer-songwriters but got off on the energy punk rock released, guys who wanted both the intimacy of the folksingers and the powerful live shows of early rock and roll. They wanted it both ways but didn’t always have an easy time keeping their bands together. If they could carry on without those bands when the burdens of leadership got to be too much, they generally did exactly that. Sometimes a man knows when he just can’t see the bass player’s face in the hotel lobby one more morning. The problem is: when he lets that bass player go, the troubles are often out there, among the fans. The kids who bought the records, the ones who believed from the beginning, they don’t want to see Mick Jagger or any other bandleader take up with another group. They’ve been asked to make an investment in an idea, and they did it. There isn’t an off switch for their commitment to that original band. And as it turns out, the fans have more power than they know—as a collective, they have the governing vote. Springsteen released Human Touch and Lucky Town in 1992, left the E Street Band and recorded and went on the road with new players. But it was clear that his audience didn’t approve of this latest fling; they liked to see Springsteen backed by the guys who knew him when. If inadvertently, Lucky Town and Human Touch were public reminders of what bands meant to the fans who had invested in them, ever since the Beatles transformed and deepened the concept. A band wasn’t a group of backing musicians. That was something else, even if it went by the same name.
More than his peers, Petty remained aware of what a band meant, and of the history to which the idea was attached. It was being in a band that had made this world a habitable place for Tom Petty. And he stuck at building one long enough for that rarest thing to transpire: his group found a sound all their own. Even the finest musicians could come together without achieving that result. It typically took years, and even then happened infrequently. The Beatles and the Stones got there. The Heartbreakers did, too. Most of their peers didn’t. They lost patience or couldn’t manage it. But with the Heartbreakers, there was something in the way Mike Campbell and Petty played together, in the way Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell found melodic spaces without the place getting overcrowded, in the way those three together landed on a Petty original. That was the center. They weren’t the sole architects—but they were the sine qua non of the Heartbreaker sound. Whatever went on with Petty’s adventures as a solo artist, he’d never stray far from that. The idea of a solo record? Possible. The idea of a solo tour? Never. The Wildflowers tour, as with every tour before and after, was a Heartbreakers event.
By the time the band was on the road, it was clear that Wildflowers was going to be a big record for Petty. It sold two million copies within just a few months. “When Wildflowers came out,” says Rick Rubin, “and it did as well as it did—and it did really well—I remember being a little surprised. And I think the reason I was surprised has to do with the idea of a grown-up making a good record. There were so few grown-ups making good records that it really stood out, for just that reason. When you think of the great songwriters, they weren’t making great albums at that point. I can’t remember what Paul Simon record or what Paul McCartney record came out around that time. But I’m guessing they just weren’t as good. Wildflowers had a lot of good songs. I knew there were enough to make a great double album. It didn’t have to be. But we had the quality to be able to do it. It’s a really special record.”
If Long After Dark was an album in which Petty looked into the troubled places beyond love’s gilded entryway, Wildflowers was something else, one man’s open journal of love’s demise and the dream of more. It was equally direct and fiercely personal but often quieter. “Time to move on, time to get going / What lies ahead I have no way of knowing.” There’s a stark, distilled poetry to the lyrics and an almost unnerving openness. In “Don’t Fade on Me,” Petty speaks to someone with whom he could no longer speak: “I remember you so clearly, the first one through the door / And I returned to find you drifting too far from the shore / I remember feeling this way, you can lose it without knowing / You wake up and you don’t notice which way the wind is blowing.” “To Find a Friend” begins as a more comedic playlet, a character-driven song that steps back from the intimacy of “Don’t Fade on Me.” But even there, Petty becomes the man in the song, as though he’s rehearsing some future moment, trying to see where things will land in his own life, or if they will. “In the middle of his life, left his wife / And went off to be bad, boy, it was sad / He bought a new car, found a new bar / Went under another name, created a whole new game / And the days went by like paper in the wind / Everything changed, then changed again / It’s hard to find a friend, hard to find a friend.”
It all made for what was possibly the best album of his career. But, for the family at home, it could have been seen as a betrayal. What Petty could do in the songs, he couldn’t do in his life. No one called it betrayal, of course. The family had learned to live with it, found a way to see it as something else. They just called it songwriting. But all of his openness was reserved for the art, and it left little if anything for his family. It would have made no difference, anyway. But the discrepancy between the world of songs, where things were talked about, addressed, and explored, and the world at home would wear on Petty. Would break him. And a few of those around him.
* * *
The firing of Stan Lynch was in some ways the first round, practice in doing the unthinkable. Petty had been with Lynch almost as long as he’d been married to Jane Benyo. And the drummer had been, in Bugs Weidel’s words, “so much a part of the vibe and the identity of the Heartbreakers.” But when Lynch was let go, the mail still came through the same slot at the same time. Tickets got sold, songs got written, records were made, gossip leaked into the atmosphere but didn’t become headlines. Petty’s anxieties had exaggerated what Lynch’s firing might mean to the stability of his band, to the fans. Lynch went his way, and perhaps not surprisingly the two men had little to say about each other that wasn’t underpinned by anger and disappointment. But everyone landed in a room with a soft bed where a window revealed the sun coming up the next morning. It could be done. Somewhere inside, that’s what Petty needed to see. He was as ready as he’d ever be.
“In ways, I see those relationships in similar lights,” says Petty, “because they both lasted about the same amount of time and through the same years of change, dramatic change, that affected all of our lives. We all started as kids, didn’t even show up on anyone’s radar. Then things got moving so fast I’m not sure anyone was having an easy time keeping up. Everything kept getting bigger around us, but we stayed the same size. You could get a little lost in your new clothes. And we all did, to some degree. One relationship was in a band and one was in a family, which makes them as different as they are similar. But they were both decisions I put off making, that I kick myself for. I knew I was going to make this decision, and I didn’t act on it.” But when the Wildflowers touring came to a close, he did. With Jane, there was some bargaining at the end, prolonging the inevitable. He’d stay through Christmas, that kind of thing. But the theater of the marriage—and that’s what it had become—was over. Soon enough the bargaining was over, too.
“I’ve read that Echo is my ‘divorce album,’” says Petty, “but Wildflowers is the divorce album. That’s me getting ready to leave. I don’t even know how conscious I was of it when I was writing it. I don’t go into this stuff with elaborate plans. But I’m positive that’s what Wildflowers is. It just took me getting up the guts to leave this huge empire that we had built, to walk out. My kids … I knew this was going to be devastating to the whole family. I was leaving them there, without me to balance things out. My kids knew that a nightmare was coming. Adria was already out of the house, but Annakim was just entering her teens. But staying there was finishing me off. I’d become a different person.” After Petty’s therapist heard the song “Wildflowers,” he asked who the singer was addressing. “I told him I wasn’t sure,” Petty says. “And then he said, ‘I know. That song is about you. That’s you singing to yourself what you needed to hear.’ It kind of knocked me back. But I realized he was right. It was me singing to me.”
Petty moved into the house in Pacific Palisades, the “chicken shack.” “It was really cool,” says Rick Rubin. “Like a little log cabin on a lot of land. Going there was like stepping back in time, to a hunting lodge or something. The house was all wood, not modern, with giant trees—redwoods, I think—all around. If Levon Helm walked in, you wouldn’t think twice.” But Petty didn’t know how to set up a home for himself. He went to the supermarket but didn’t know how to shop for food, because that hadn’t been a part of his adult life. It was as if he didn’t have a point of reference for everyday activities. For their part, the band members, back from the Wildflowers tour, were off in their own lives. The Heartbreakers weren’t holding hands and asking about one another’s feelings. That just wasn’t the culture that had been established. Bugs Weidel and Scott Thurston may have known more than anyone else about Petty’s struggles, but that didn’t mean that either man felt like there was a lot he could do beyond listening. This was the boss, and that was his life.
“I went over to the house in Pacific Palisades,” says Stevie Nicks. “I could get there quickly because I was fifteen minutes away in Santa Monica. It was a beautiful house. You wouldn’t even have imagined it was there. It was almost like a bird sanctuary. He was … you know … he was alone. Jane had been such a huge personality. She was one of those women that, when she was in the room, there was no one else there. And so, all of a sudden, he’s in this really nice, beautiful, small house, with all these birds everywhere. But alone.” It could have been a place for new beginnings, and surely that was the idea at the outset. But it never became that. It was, instead, a place of endings and isolation, of being lost in one’s own creation.
“I left, but then I had this huge realization of what had happened,” says Petty. “There was terrible pain and guilt, as I guess comes to anybody who leaves a family. But I didn’t foresee the shit storm that was going to come my way when I left. I thought it would be more like, ‘Okay, the door has finally been shut. That’s the end of it.’ But that ain’t the way it happens. Annakim didn’t know what to do. I took her in, and she stayed for about a month. But it would be like, ‘Look, I have to go to the studio. Do you want to come to the studio with me?’ She’d say, ‘No, I’d rather stay here.’ But I had to realize that I couldn’t live with this kid and just leave her all alone when I had to do something. Annakim was right in the middle. It was so painful.” By the time Petty wasn’t going to the studio, wasn’t even getting out of bed on some days, Annakim was already gone.
“My sister was with my dad for maybe a month,” explains Adria Petty. “Then she was with me. And there was a long time when I was really angry with him. I was twenty-one, and Annakim was fourteen or fifteen. I got her into a school in Boston, but she got kicked out and came to live with me in Greenwich Village. I drove her to school every day, took care of her for a long time, which created problems between me and him.” But by that time, Petty had fallen into a clinical depression. In Adria’s words, “He just couldn’t get up.” Jane, getting closer to the point at which those around her recognized that her problems went beyond drugs and alcohol, was sliding into a mental illness that had, in fact, held her down for years. No one was getting the help they needed. They were caught behind closed doors.
“The human condition is the same for everyone,” says Olivia Harrison. “But once you’re isolated, it’s even worse. When those big life events happen, you can’t see your way out of them. When you’re in the world, you have outreach. When you’re in a bubble, how do you see outside of that? How do people get in? And then you feel like you really don’t want people to see what your troubles are, you’re so private at that point. It’s really easy to not get help.” The boundaries Petty had set up with his band and crew, which helped keep the Heartbreakers going as an enterprise, became the walls that kept friends away when he could have used them. And for some people who had been around Tom and Jane for years, it would be hard to adjust to the end of their marriage, no matter how far down it had gone. “I didn’t discuss it with anyone,” says Petty, “so no one knew.”
Even George Harrison didn’t know. “I didn’t talk to him much about that,” says Petty. “And then, when I moved out, he called me up and said, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing here?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do. You don’t know anything about what I’ve been through here. I have to do this.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve come around to really liking Jane.’ After we split up, he went to see her a few times, sent her some letters and stuff. But he didn’t know.” Tom and Jane had been there long enough that people used them in that way, as something permanent amid the flux. “I didn’t realize,” says Olivia Harrison, “how difficult it would have been in that marriage. I think that Tom did try to keep his family together and did a good job making it seem like it was all working. Had he not been a musician and had his music and his studio and his songwriting, it probably would have fallen apart a lot sooner. You can always go sit down, play a song, and sort of put your head in the sand and express yourself.”
“My mother was a really soulful, gregarious, fun person,” says Adria Petty, “and she loved him so much and had so much pride in his success. At the same time, she was very insecure, very resentful, very unclear about her place in the world. She also suffered from mental illness. And being married to someone who is mentally ill for a long time is really painful and isn’t the kind of thing you can do a sound bite on. It’s not neatly tied up with a bow. My mom could be a mean person. She’d been really verbally abusive and cruel to my dad, had disregard for all three of us, way before they were even on the verge of divorce. I think my dad’s reticence to admit that there was a problem there was so prolonged and sort of avoided by continued success … I think that only when I went to college did it become more obvious that he was in the house with someone who was unwell. I just hated watching what she did to him.” Adria and Annakim Petty were quickly cast into the middle, in a powerful, poisonous stream of anger and resentment. Petty left because things were bad, but then they got worse.
Stevie Nicks tried to get Petty to write with her, an effort to distract him from his pain. “I said, ‘Let’s just write some songs. I don’t write songs with anybody, and, really, neither do you. Let’s write some.’ He said, ‘Well, okay. Maybe.’ So I went home, thinking I’m going to go there every day, until six at night, and we’re going to write. The next day I arrive with my grocery bags, with like Hershey chocolate syrup, instant coffee, and the kind of milk that I like. He’s looking at me like I’m crazy. I say, ‘I’m going to be here, so I need my supplies.’ He’s like, ‘Your supplies?’ I say, ‘Supplies! Like when you go camping.’ I’ll never forget, just because of the look on his face. It didn’t really work out. And really, I knew it wouldn’t. So I said, ‘Okay, so we’re not going to write songs together. But I’ll come visit you, and I’ll keep in touch.’ But also, by that time, Dana had come into the picture.”
Petty had seen Dana York at a show in Texas in the early nineties. But that was it. He’d only seen her. “But her face … I remembered her face,” Petty says. “And that night, when I fell asleep, I had a dream, and I saw her, so clearly.” The following night, Petty was at the hotel after an Austin show, where there was a party in the lounge. Dana, there with her husband, himself a musician and, like her, a lifelong rock-and-roll fan, came up and introduced herself. “It zapped my brain, like, ‘This is the girl I dreamed about last night.’ But there was no real conversation, other than when she said, ‘I’m Dana,’ and I said, ‘Of course you are.’” Petty and York would run into each other on tours, Dana there with her husband. Some in the Heartbreakers camp picked up on the energy. And some of them didn’t like it. However many problems Jane had brought into the bandleader’s life, they were used to Jane. But this wasn’t the band’s or the crew’s or the kids’ decision to make. When Petty saw Dana at a Johnny Cash show in Los Angeles in 1996, she was no longer married. And neither was Petty. “I felt like I’d known him my whole life,” recalls Dana Petty.
“I got her number at that Cash show,” Petty explains. “And I was calling her, and finally convinced her to come back to LA, on a weekend when she didn’t have her son, Dylan. I thought she was the most beautiful, wonderful thing in the world. And we started, you know, we started seeing each other. And really, I was so deep in the trouble because of my family life falling apart … she was kind of my release from that. Every few weeks she’d come out. But two things were happening at the time. I was falling apart, and I was falling in love. It can happen like that. But the fact was, Dana didn’t know how fucked up I was. I mean, I didn’t know.” York didn’t move to Los Angeles until a year or so after the Cash show, by which time Petty, in therapy more regularly but struggling to keep the darkness at bay, had started doing heroin. He kept it from her. From most everyone.
* * *
The people around him didn’t know a lot about many things in Petty’s life. He was isolated. There was an awareness that Howie Epstein was using heroin, as far back as Southern Accents. The drug was around the band. When Petty came up against a deep depression of the sort he’d never known and saw a chance to shut down his feelings altogether, he took it. “I knew that Jane had troubles. She retreated to her bedroom years before I left,” Petty says. “And I sometimes thought, ‘This is because of me. My extraordinary life, what’s happened to me, has had some bad effect on her.’ And, really, she wasn’t opposed to it when I started thinking like this. It shifted her load onto me. But when I went into therapy, before I got divorced, I started seeing some things differently, learning some things about myself that otherwise might not have dawned on me. It always went back to childhood and what happened there. I mean, I was amazingly resilient, could find things to make me happy, could push the bad stuff down. But there was a nightmare back there. And when I went from that nightmare into a marriage that became as conflicted as my childhood had been, I went from the frying pan into the fire. And I just kept pushing it all down inside, like I always had. When it all came up, it was more than I could handle. Years of it just flooded me.”
Dana York couldn’t have known that the rock-and-roll star she was dating was dealing with scenes that went back to a two-bedroom ranch house in Gainesville. And she didn’t immediately know what Petty was using as anesthesia to soothe the shame, guilt, and anger. When York would visit, Petty would be lifted; “life would turn good,” as Petty says. But when he was alone, there was nothing holding the darkness at bay. He was all the way in both directions. “I was used to living in hell,” says Petty. “My parents’ marriage was hell, and I lived through that. I lived through being terribly abused as a kid, and then I found myself in an abusive marriage. But I managed to be somewhat optimistic, to see something ahead. I sometimes wonder if my career would have been more or less productive if it hadn’t all gone that way, you know? Songs were a safe place to be. And I needed a safe place. So I went there a lot.”
Stevie Nicks cautioned Petty to watch what he was getting himself into with Dana York—not because of anything on York’s side but because of everything on Petty’s side. “I told him, ‘Well, don’t sleep with her!’” says Nicks with a laugh. “‘Right now, you’re trying to heal what happened between you and Jane. You’re still fighting that. You gotta fix yourself from this last thing.’” But when Nicks realized that Petty was doing heroin, she felt a door closing between herself and an old friend. “I would never imagine, not in a million years,” she says, “that Tom Petty would start using heroin. I mean, we used to sit around and drink, and we did coke and smoked pot—and that was hard enough on us. But if you’d have said to me that Tom Petty was doing that, I wouldn’t have believed you for a second.” No matter what Nicks felt coming between herself and Petty, when Dana did finally move to LA, it was Nicks who offered her a place to stay in Santa Monica.
“That’s how close we were,” says Petty of his long friendship with Nicks. “That was someone I would talk to about my more private thoughts. Stevie would visit me at the house, and she’d go, ‘You’re moving too fast [with Dana]. You’ve just gotten out of this other thing. I don’t think you should dive into this.’ But I told her that I was only seeing Dana every two weeks, and that there was no one else I was interested in, that I’d been mad for this girl all my life. That’s when she offered Dana a place to live. Then, by sheer coincidence, some gossip magazine, The Star or something, published a picture of me and Stevie, saying we were a couple, and Dana saw it on the plane coming to see me one weekend. So Dana thought I was full of shit, just using her while I was dating Stevie Nicks. Dana wasn’t from this world of ours. Trying to take someone who’s not from show business and convince them that this bullshit goes on all the time, that it’s not real? It takes a minute. Dana felt weird about it all and ended up renting a tiny little apartment. I mean, she kept that apartment for a long time. We were married five years before she let it go. But in the beginning, I didn’t want her living at the chicken shack. We’d fallen in love, but I was broken. And I was using. I did not want her to know about that. I kept that from her for a long time.”
It was beginnings and endings overlapping, tangling. A lot of the time, Petty felt like he wasn’t out of his marriage, that it had followed him. Jane would call regularly, obsessively, and threaten suicide if he said he was hanging up. After she got Dana on the phone, he finally had to change the number at the Palisades house. Petty refused to engage with Jane through Adria and Annakim, who were hearing a lot from their mother. Jane told them that Petty left the marriage because of Dana, but Petty trusted that the girls knew better and waited it out.
Amid it all, Dana York’s young son, Dylan, saw a side of Petty that stood in stark contrast to what Petty’s daughters were hearing about their father. Dylan, three and four at the time, saw his mother in love and got to know Petty as a friend. “Tommy was great with Dylan,” Dana says. “They’d roller-blade on the tennis courts. He’d write songs with Dylan’s name in them. He taught him to dance like James Brown and set him up with a guitar and a fuzz pedal with a whammy bar. I’d stepped onto a fast-moving train, but we were having moments of tremendous happiness. Chaos and darkness, and all this happiness at the same time.”
It was the first time Petty had taken an extended break of this kind, but that didn’t mean that the office closed. Pulling from the pile of Wildflowers outtakes, Petty and Rick Rubin put together a soundtrack for Ed Burns’s She’s the One, which starred Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz. In the end, it seemed like this was an easy way to get a release out when Petty, forty-six at the time, was mostly isolated, not working at full strength, at far more than an arm’s length from his team.
“I was approached about putting together a soundtrack for the movie,” says Petty. “I liked what I’d seen of Ed Burns’s work. But when I took the job, I didn’t think it through. I wound up in a situation where they wanted different artists for a soundtrack. They had a few but said they wanted me to call more artists. I made a couple calls, and I felt terrible. I went, ‘Oh my God, I’m one of those guys.’ I called Tony and said, ‘I just can’t do this.’ That’s when Jimmy [Iovine] called and said, ‘You should do it, but like Paul Simon did for The Graduate. Hey, bang it out. It’ll be easy. You don’t have to go to all these artists asking favors.’ Somehow, he talked me into it. I blame him. I shouldn’t, but I wouldn’t have done this on my own. After that it was matter of having a deadline, hurriedly doing some overdubs and mixing. I was completely off my game. I was doing something that went against my grain. Some people thought I was following up Wildflowers. Then, with everything being done at such an incredible rate of speed so that the record could come out with the film—with me making my deadline—they held the film back six months. My record came out with no movie. I was so depressed—that just made me more depressed.”
The New York Daily News captured the general feeling of things after the album’s release: “His last album, the soundtrack to She’s the One, sold only 490,000 copies, the sole commercial disappointment in his career.” In an interview with the publication, Petty played down the album’s importance to his catalogue: “It was marketed as a soundtrack and put in [those kinds of] bins,” he says. “And I didn’t promote it. I think it’s a good record, but I don’t look at it as one of our normal albums.” It went gold, but without Petty’s spirit behind it.
There was no hint in the article that anything was out of place in Petty’s life. But he was getting into deeper troubles. “I probably spent a month not getting out of bed, just waking up and going, ‘Oh, fuck.’ Lying there,” he says. “The only thing that stopped the pain was drugs. But it was stupid. I’d never come up against anything that was bigger than me, something that I couldn’t control. But it starts running your life. It went for a while before Dana and my family got involved. And Echo came in the middle of that mess. I’m lucky I came through. Not everyone does. My therapist said something to me that, in that moment, cut through all the clutter: ‘People with your level of depression don’t live. They kill themselves or someone else.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding.’ ‘No,’ he tells me, ‘with this level of depression, people can’t live.’ Maybe that was when I realized that in fact I wasn’t living, that I was heading in the other direction.”
Petty says he knew he wasn’t doing his job when he went in to make Echo. For Mike Campbell, it was a period of time—and a project—that became something to get through. The man Campbell had worked with for so many years was only half there. By that time, Campbell was well established as Petty’s partner. He’d cowritten some of the best-loved Heartbreakers songs, and he was a guitar player who never used a song as an excuse to show what he could do as a guitar player. Most of what he was capable of, he left out—unless a song asked for it, he didn’t play it. Mike Campbell wasn’t there to give the light man something to do at shows. His interest was in songs and records. In the musician community, Campbell was viewed as the quiet presence who was Petty’s equal in sheer consistency. With Echo, however, he had more to do than he had in the past. Petty was belowdecks for much of the storm.
During Wildflowers, Petty and Rubin had worked through an abundance of material, picking the best. They’d meditate in the control room before sessions. All that was over. Echo didn’t stimulate Rubin in the same way. He liked working closely with artists, and this artist was under a few layers that couldn’t be unwrapped. Which meant that Rubin, too, wasn’t as present. Campbell was the one who remained accountable. There was tension, and no one—true to Heartbreakers style—was addressing it directly.
There were efforts to change the mood. Rubin went to Barnes and Noble and purchased several magnetic poetry sets, the boxes of words intended for building phrases on refrigerators. “I went through them all,” explains Rubin, “and took out all the little words, ‘the’ and ‘to’ and ‘for,’ and then put the rest of them on a music stand. You know the metal music stands? Then, when Tom had songs without words, just chord changes and melodies, he’d randomly look at words and make up sentences. I could show you specific lines he wrote that were words from the poetry set. It was remarkable and beautiful. He could draw on this pool of information to create the stories. His mind works very fast. But there were often sour feelings. I remember that there was a while where Tom was walking with a cane. It got bad.”
“You do the best you can in whatever condition you’re in,” says Mike Campbell. “We always strive for greatness. Sometimes we fall short. It was a hard record. That one, definitely, I don’t put on. There were good moments, times we had fun. Doing ‘Free Girl Now’ was fun, here at my house. Tom was singing great, and we put a surveillance camera on his mic. A fish-eye thing on Tom’s face, and we had a monitor up to see it. He looked all warped out. The energy on that was good. I don’t know how that album holds up against others. Probably not that well.”
No matter his own condition, Petty was angry that Rubin left Echo before it was mixed, moving on to a Red Hot Chili Peppers project. “We got up to do the mix on that record,” Petty says, “and Rick left, right when we were going to mix. That infuriated me. So I mixed the record with Richard Dodd and Mike. And I changed the production credits to ‘Produced by Tom Petty and Mike Campbell with Rick Rubin.’ Which pissed Rick off. But I thought, ‘If you don’t mix the record, you’re not the producer.’” It was the last time they’d work with Rick Rubin.
In addition to Wildflowers and She’s the One, Rubin and Petty had worked together on Unchained, the second Johnny Cash album for Rubin’s American Recordings. It was a brighter experience than Echo, coming on the heels of Wildflowers and before Petty started losing his way. Petty had been there when Rubin courted Cash and vehemently supported the idea of a collaboration. The experience of making Unchained affected not just Petty but the other Heartbreakers, who came in as the band. Cash’s paternal character, spiritual side, humor, and, of course, music came at a time when the whole band needed a shot of something real from another side of life. Here was a man who’d seen a few things and who had turned what he’d seen into a kind of wisdom he could pass along, if those around him were interested. And they were all interested. Petty felt genuine pride as the agile Heartbreakers settled in as Cash’s backing group. Unchained went on to win the Grammy for Country Album of the Year, without any support from country radio. Years after Cash’s death, standing in the living room of his Malibu home, Petty pulls out a postcard Cash had written. It says on the back, “Tom, you’re a good man to ride the river with.” It’s another one of a few treasures Petty has kept from the past few decades. But for all Rubin and Petty had been through together, whether with Cash or as creative people in recording studios, sentiment wasn’t going to keep them together.
“Echo was the only time,” Rubin says, “that I saw anything like ego-y behavior in Tom. I feel like there was a frustration but also a sense of acceptance that this was out of our control. You know? I didn’t confront him, but, like I said, he was less present for conversation. He was in his head more, less open, wearing shades all the time. Just, like, separate. Different from the Wildflowers sessions, where we worked long hours. He wasn’t wanting to work much. We’d come in, work for a few hours, and he’d be like, ‘Let’s just pick it up tomorrow. You can take off.’ Short hours.”
The miracle of Echo may be just how good it is. Dana Petty, years later, made her husband listen back, just so she could show him how good. But Petty had been writing songs since he was a young man. He didn’t have much of anything outside of that. When, years later, he showed an interest in basketball, taking Jack Nicholson’s Lakers tickets on nights the actor couldn’t use them, it was big news around the Heartbreakers’ management office. Tom has a hobby. Until then, it was all songs and records and the pains he went through to make them great and get as many people as possible to hear them. Likely that’s the reason Petty’s writing on Echo has the strength it does. The years of almost obsessive creative work, of focus and intention, meant the factory on the inside just kept turning out product, even as the head engineer dozed off. “Counting on You,” “Free Girl Now,” “Room at the Top,” “Swingin’”—these were songs written by a man fumbling for his keys in the darkness of unmanageable loss. If Petty and Mike Campbell have a hard time listening to the record, it’s likely because they’re seeing that man. And another: Howie Epstein.
* * *
“That was such a dark time,” says Campbell. “It represents Tom being really sick and my friend dying. I don’t know … for some reason I don’t want to go there, psychically. It was an unpleasant period.” The fact was, Petty’s drug use was partially obscured by Howie Epstein’s more dramatic decline. By Echo, the heroin was fully in charge of Epstein’s life. No one was counting on him for anything. He might show up, and he might not. When it came time to do a shoot for the cover of Echo, Epstein promised to be there. When, after hours of waiting, he wasn’t, Petty made the decision to carry on without him. He’s not on the cover of his band’s record. It had gotten to that point. A second photo shoot was planned. “Out in Malibu, yeah,” recalls Campbell. “It was just too sad. He showed up real late, went to the bathroom, and when I went in there after, there was blood in the sink. I thought, ‘Oh fuck, man. If this guy’s doing it this often…’”
Though Petty had cleaned up by the Echo tour, refusing to let his drug use overlap with a Heartbreakers tour, for Epstein things were coming to a head. It was different from earlier road work. Petty, because of the album’s association with his own world of shadows, didn’t want to play songs from the record that they were supposed to be supporting. And across the stage, Epstein was half there, though the band members, who would see the bass player only at show time, didn’t know the full extent of the damage. Epstein’s beloved German shepherd, Dingo, was his closest companion on the road, sitting by his bass amp during shows. The crew had to keep it all together, working to prevent Epstein from going into withdrawal. “The band and all of us on the crew, we knew,” explains Richard Fernandez. “And Howie knew that we knew. It was one of those. But during the last two months of the tour, he was waking me up every night. I’d be getting calls at three or four in the morning and have to go over. But he promised that this was it. We had it all set up for Howie to go into another rehab, and he promised he’d go. We’d had enough conversations during all of this, had been told he’d get help. So when the tour ended in Indianapolis, there were two planes. One was going to the Bahamas, where the rehab was. The other was going to Van Nuys. We spent an hour trying to get Howie to go to the Bahamas. He went to Van Nuys. And when he did, I knew it wasn’t going to be good. But I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t want to have anything to do with his situation.” It wasn’t the first time they’d set up a rehab for Epstein.
Mike Campbell and Mark Carpenter are listening to Fernandez share his account, the three of them in a hotel room in Texas. “I think the truth is,” says Campbell, “and I’m talking about myself here, I didn’t know anything about hard-core addiction. I was insensitive to it, didn’t understand it. I get it now, because I’ve been through some things with people I know. So now I understand better where Howie was at, but at the time, I was just pissed off at him. Because I didn’t know better. I wasn’t educated. From what I know now, though, and what I know about where Howie was at, I don’t think counseling would have done it.” After the Echo tour, Howie Epstein would no longer be working as a Heartbreaker. “We were told we were being enablers,” Petty says, “and we were advised by these drug counselors to let him go. It was a brutal decision. I’d tried to tell him he could do it, that I had and he could. But we had to send a message about the seriousness of this. We hoped he’d come back clean, but there weren’t a lot of signs that it was going that way.”
* * *
It was in the midst of making Echo that Petty started to fathom the trouble he was in himself. That was also when Dana York found out what was going on and started working to convince Petty he could be helped. “It was a lot of me and Tommy, just us, talking,” she remembers. “I couldn’t lose him. He needed to know that things would get better.” The songwriting process Rubin described, with Petty playing with random, magnetic words on a music stand, almost like the automatic writing of the Surrealists, helps one to understand how Petty might have managed to put songs together at the time of his struggles, and how the songs themselves might have pulled up a few blinds. “Put down your things and rest a while / You know we’ve both nowhere to go / Yeah, daddy had to crash / Was always halfway there, you know.” Using someone else’s words allowed him a little distance from an experience that was, in truth, pushing him up against the wall. It was an approach that allowed him to write, very directly, about the only thing he could write about at that moment. Maybe he needed to feel like they were someone else’s words because his had too much pain in them. “The end of any marriage is tough, but that was a really long marriage,” says Benmont Tench. “And you look at Echo, and you see a very sad record. The talk goes around about Howie being at a low point, but Tom was at his own kind of low point. Those were beautiful sessions. But they were dark. I have very vivid memories of them. A lot of really beautiful music got made. But there was some kind of dark energy going on.”
It would be hard to know what would have happened if Dana York had not been there, as some kind of reminder of all that was worth sticking around for. She was the only one close to Petty at the time who had no connection to the past. No matter that those around Petty, the Heartbreakers family, didn’t yet trust her. Maybe the shared borders between the end of his marriage, his relationship with York, and the growing drug use made them doubt the whole scene. That York didn’t know about the heroin for some time was lost on them. As a couple, they moved slowly, waiting a few years before moving in together. They never lived together at the Palisades house. In the earliest period of the relationship, she would come to Los Angeles every other weekend, sometimes with Dylan, sometimes alone. Petty’s drug use was a secret he kept from her as long as he could. “A lot of them were really hard on Dana,” says Petty. “Someone else might have been driven away by the pressure of being with me. And by the situation I’d created for myself. There are all sorts of little jealousies and insecurities that come up, people worrying about her influence on me. Everyone gets paranoid. ‘What’s this about? What’s this girl want?’ And she didn’t want anything. But she had to prove that.”
“I think maybe she saved him,” says Olivia Harrison. But that was a hard thing to see amid the mess. In the months before Echo was finished, he was still a man with kids he couldn’t help. Still a man with tremendous wreckage in his personal life, a man divorcing his longtime wife, a woman who was struggling with delusional thoughts and a mind that was turning on her. He was still a man playing at the edge of death. It might have been hard for insiders to welcome York as a guiding light. Petty was in too much trouble for anyone to believe he was moving toward a better place. But he was. “She did save me,” Petty says. “I know that.”
“He just went off with Dana,” says Adria, “and I think that’s something he was very ashamed of. It complicates the guilt. He couldn’t just stand up and deal with my sister, with this out-of-control teenager who really needed him. But he was in a massive depression and struggling with drugs, struggling with all sorts of stuff, and he just couldn’t stand up and do it. I felt happy that he was changing his life. And I felt like taking on the responsibility of my sister, at least I could do that while he was trying to get his life going. I don’t know if I could have been in his shoes. My mother, who had loved him for such a long time, had started to abuse him. But I think he felt responsible for the failure of the family, and it kept him from leaving, for far too long. By the time he did leave, he didn’t have enough left in him to handle it. He was up against something that took precedence over parenting. But I don’t think it ever took precedence over the amount of love he has for us.”
At the Palisades house, alone with Dana one night, Petty saw his wife, Jane, in silhouette. By that time the divorcing couple had been through a few years of negotiations. It was late, and Jane was in a limo at the end of his driveway. She was yelling toward the house, trying to get the driver to ram the gate. Petty and York could hear their names, even York’s son’s, Dylan’s. It startled the neighbors, who called the police. Standing partway down his driveway, hidden in the dark, Petty saw Jane’s profile in the flashing blue lights. It would be the last time he saw her.