Petty

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

—JOAN DIDION

Earl Petty died in 1999. The losses were piling up. Though Tom Petty had not attended his mother’s funeral, he did fly to Gainesville to see his father off. “I went back there,” Petty says. “Bugs was with me. He drove me over to the funeral home. It was either a funeral home or a church. I can’t remember. I met my brother there. We went in, saw Earl there in the box, checked him out. He looked peaceful. We’d picked some music for them to play, some music that Earl liked. We didn’t stay long. Gainesville could be tricky to navigate.” But the scene wasn’t one of quiet remembrance and unencumbered farewells.

“After things had gone well enough, and we were getting ready to leave,” Petty says, “Earl’s twin sister, Pearl, shows up. And she just lets out this huge scream, like, ‘Nobody told me you were going to be here! Come here, come here!’ And I was like, ‘No, we’re leaving right now.’ And she’s grabbing my arm, insisting, ‘No, you can’t leave—I got stuff ya’ll gotta sign!’ I mean, I’m walking away from my dad’s coffin. It’s a hundred feet away from us, right? I’m thinking, ‘He’s your brother, for Christ’s sake, and you’re looking for autographs at his funeral?’ I’m just shaking my head. So we get in the car kind of as quick as we can, and we start to back out, and she’s at the window, banging on the window. And she gets her hand on the door handle of the car, trying to open the door. I just said, ‘Bugs, go.’ And we took off, with this screaming woman in the background. That was my father’s funeral.” The swamp had sent its ambassador.

Some weeks earlier, however, Petty had talked with Earl. His father had extended a hand. It may have been too little too late, a meager feeding of paternal recognition, but it was something. “He called me one night,” Petty remembers, “and it was the last conversation I would have with him there at the end of his life, right before he died. He said, ‘I’m calling because I don’t think I’ve got a lot of time left, and there are issues to work out with the will.’ I said, ‘Look, I don’t want anything. Give it all to my brother. Thanks for speaking to me about it, but I don’t want anything.’ Then he went on and said, ‘I just had to tell you, I’m really proud of the way things have gone for you.’ He goes, ‘It always just sounded … I couldn’t hear anything in what you were doing. It always just sounded really out there to me. But you must have done it really good, because you’ve done so well.’ He said, ‘I remember you telling me when you were a teenager that if I’d just leave you alone, you’d be a millionaire before you were thirty. Damn if you weren’t.’ Then he said, ‘So it kind of proves that you were right and I was wrong. And I love you. I just wanted to say that.’”

It was the only time Petty could recall his father saying those words. They were tacked on, hanging there a little awkwardly at the end of the conversation, a burp of emotion. Petty describes it as “kind of a touching moment.” But he had to wonder why it couldn’t have come sooner. Forgiveness would come in time. But right then, he felt the waste. And when he felt himself judging his father, it brought his own failings to the surface. Self-recrimination was just one thought away from any judgment of Earl. But both were easier than grieving. And by that time, Petty didn’t have the heroin to help him hide from the grief. He’d gotten clean. Struggled to get there. The Echo tour found him uncomfortable in the strange world he’d built but no longer willing to abandon the place through drugs.

* * *

Petty hasn’t talked about his heroin use, not during that time and not after. He worried what kind of message he’d be putting out there—another rock star with tales of excess to clog up the minds of young people? Who needs that. He discussed it during the interviews for Peter Bogdanovich’s Runnin’ Down a Dream documentary, which chronicled the Heartbreakers’ first three decades. But then he insisted that the section be cut.

“I wasn’t a guy that grooved on being a junkie. I was a more clandestine drug addict,” he says. “But people picked up on it. I know Rick [Rubin] was worried about me. But he finally dealt with it by going behind my back and telling my kids. I was so mad at him. I was pissed off for a long time. Because I just thought, ‘That’s none of your business. Why are you doing that?’ I think his take was, ‘Well, we had to do something to shock you.’ But I was like, ‘No.’ I felt like I knew what was going on, and I knew I had to get out of it. And right as I’m getting out of it, he busted me to my kids? Maybe he had the best intentions. I don’t know.”

It’s difficult to hear Petty talk about it and not understand Rubin’s side. Petty was in trouble and needed that shock. “I was feeling so lost,” Petty says. “I remember waking up one day and just thinking, ‘Why even wake up?’ Dana wasn’t around right then. I had to get some food, and I went into town and bought myself a sandwich. I went back home with the sandwich and just sat there, watching it get dark. The phone’s not ringing. Everybody has their own lives they’re busy with and I’ve got no life. I’m just sitting there. I’m still better than where I was. But I’m between that and wherever I’m going. And I’m really starting to wonder if I’m going anywhere.”

The drugs played what Petty calls their “dirty trick” on him, initially relieving his depression and then compounding it. “You start losing your soul,” he says, obviously troubled by the memory and ashamed to have found himself there. “You realize one day, ‘Shit, I’ve lost myself. I’m hanging out with people I wouldn’t be seen with in a million years and I have to get out of this.’ I wanted to quit. Using heroin went against my grain. I didn’t want to be enslaved to anything. So I was always trying to figure out how to do less, and then that wouldn’t work. Tried to go cold turkey, and that wouldn’t work. It’s an ugly fucking thing. Really ugly. I fear that if I talk about it, people will think, ‘Well, I could do it and get off.’ But you can’t. Very few people do. Very few.”

By the time Dana York realized what was happening, she grasped more completely just how sensitive and emotionally spent Petty was. She was no stranger to addiction. Her own father had struggled with it most of his life. When she moved out to Los Angeles, to be with the man she’d fallen in love with, his drug use was no longer something he could easily conceal. Maybe he wanted to be seen, to be helped. “When he was using,” she recalls, “he was alone. He was alone with his thoughts and pain. I have tremendous empathy for anyone who is in so much pain that they turn to drugs. Addiction is often misunderstood. I wanted to protect Tommy from the drugs and from the misunderstandings about them. He was suffering from a real depression. He needed help.”

“I was worried,” says Mike Campbell. “I remember going over to that house. I always kind of felt like, ‘He’s having a hard time, but I didn’t know what to do other than to be a friend.’ I kind of thought, ‘He’s strong. He’s got a core, something that will get him through this.’ With Howie, I didn’t think, at least by that time, that there was a core.” As Petty tells it, however, his core was being dismantled quickly enough as he entered into the last months of using.

“I was in therapy,” he says. “And I finally said to the doctor, ‘Look, I’ve become a drug addict. I don’t want to be one. But I am. What do I do?’ And that’s when it began, the first steps in turning this thing around. I’d tried to kick it so many times, but that’s just the worst thing that you can dream of. I couldn’t do it. So they put me in this hospital, and I did this detox thing, where they put you to sleep. And they shoot this drug into you that literally drives the heroin out, and your body goes into spasms. It forces the detox process. When I woke up from that, I felt different. And I said to the nurse, ‘So, it went okay?’ She says, ‘Yeah, it went okay.’ I said, ‘How long have I been asleep?’ She says, ‘Two days.’”

After that, a doctor would arrive every day at Petty’s Palisades house, administering a medication that would block the effects of an opiate. He’d hold a flashlight up, making sure the pills went down. “They made me eat them every day, for months and months and months. And I started to feel alive again.” When he did begin to return to himself, Dana York was still there, hadn’t gone anywhere. She’d talked him through it, talked him back to himself. She was the reminder.

“Tom built something really good with Dana,” says Benmont Tench, “out of a period that was really unhappy, really hard. And I think it was a fight to build it. But against a lot of bad odds, they created something really, really beautiful.” By the time the Heartbreakers headed out to tour behind Echo, with Petty clean, Dana was there with him. More than once, people who worked with the band thanked her for what she’d done. “It confused me,” she says. “They’d tell me, ‘Tommy’s so happy. He’s so different.’ I just thought, ‘Really? What was he like before? Did he never talk to anyone?’ The man I knew was the only one I’ve ever known.”

* * *

“Reborn” is how Petty once described the change. But somehow that’s too neat. It obscures more than it reveals. He moved, this time with Dana, to Malibu, just across the street from where Denny Cordell had once lived, though Petty only realized that later. Within a few years they married. Twice. Once in a private ceremony in Las Vegas and a second time at the new place, with Little Richard officiating and fifty friends and family in attendance. There was enough there to make some onlookers think that “reborn” was a fitting description. And it is a good story, the best one to tell if you want to divide a life into discrete parts and get on with things. But Petty wasn’t reborn. Rebuilt, maybe. But from parts left over from a wreck. He wouldn’t be the same man again. No one goes that low without carrying traces of where he’s been. There remains a frailty in Petty that wasn’t there before. And it wasn’t just the effects of drug use. It was a long trail that went back to that small house in Florida. It may be that a lifelong depression, masked by years of activity, found its moment to come toward the surface and came. Some days you can see the seams where the break happened. It’s a relationship with the pain of the past that doesn’t preclude joy. But Petty’s history seems to be there in everything, even the joy. He’s like some of the men he always admired. Men like Johnny Cash. The ones who had seen a lot and survived a lot but were still there, playing shows, writing songs, telling their stories, passing something along. Because that’s what they knew how to do. He’d become one of them. And there was a beauty in it.

“It was a rocky moment near Echo,” Adria Petty says. “I think that record says a lot. It tells you everything that was going on in his head. I always laugh, because he’ll say, ‘Oh, I divine these songs. They’re not really about anyone or anything.’ He’ll try to deflect the sentiment that’s right there in the albums. But they’re very autobiographical. You can really tell, on beautiful albums, like Into the Great Wide Open and ‘Two Gunslingers’ or ‘King’s Highway,’ that he’s struggling, constantly fighting, just to find a peaceful place.”

* * *

While Petty was down, and through the time he spent, with Dana at his side, getting himself back, he lost some things he cherished. Some he could get back, like his connection to his daughters. Others he couldn’t. George Harrison was one of the latter. Harrison went public about his throat cancer around 1998. He fought it with positive results, after which he and Olivia had traveled widely, what she describes as a “couple of great years.” But in 1999, Harrison was brutally stabbed by an intruder at Friar Park, their home in Oxfordshire, England. It weakened him. When he died, Harrison was in Los Angeles. He saw very few people in his last days. “When we came, in 2001, to Malibu,” says Olivia Harrison, “George was really ill and going through some treatment. We didn’t see Tom then. I saw Tom and Dana shortly after George died. He came to the Concert for George and he was amazing. Eric Clapton reached out to him, and Tom flew his whole band over. He was all over it, the rehearsals, the show. Then I saw him again, back here in LA. Both Tom and Dana. They were so kind. They sat in a room with me, put their arms around me. We all cried. And Tom said, ‘Don’t worry. We’re not leaving you.’ And he meant that not just for that moment but for life. I have a special fondness for him. It makes you feel a little bit safer to know that someone like Tom is there for you. It’s a good umbrella to be standing under.”

What Petty could do for Olivia he may not have been able to do for George. He wonders. “I don’t know if I could have handled it, seeing George then,” says Petty of Harrison’s last days. “But I don’t struggle with my decision. Everyone has their own way. I often feel George around me. Still.” His father, his mother, his marriage, what might have been his closest friend: for a man in the middle of his life, Petty seemed to be making a business of loss. The past had too many representatives milling about in his mind. After taking more than the usual amount of time off from work to settle into his new life in Malibu, Petty was ready to get busy. The best thing he could do for his family, for his new marriage, for his band and the people who worked alongside them, was to force his gaze toward something that lay ahead, whatever that might be. He was prepared to write his way there. That’s how it had to start. Songs. He needed songs.

* * *

Producer George Drakoulias had been in the background throughout the years when Rick Rubin was working with Petty. Sometimes what Drakoulias was doing caught the attention of the band. He was the kind of guy who might crack the code on a song they were trying to cut, just as much as he might be the guy who figured out how to reach up into the vending machine for Sour Patch Kids. Drakoulias had a lightness, an enthusiasm, and an irreverence about him that suited the Heartbreakers. He’d been at Rubin’s side since NYU, when records got shipped from a dorm room and hip-hop was making its way to the center of American life. But he’d also been a freak for the Heartbreakers since his high school band covered “Refugee.”

Petty was looking to effect a kind of return. It had been more than three years since Echo’s release. But like some modern-day, Malibu-based Rip Van Winkle, Petty had come out of his slumbers to find that the music industry in which he’d been living since he was a young man was in a state of accelerated change. And he didn’t like what he saw. So he started writing songs about it. “I went by his house,” Drakoulias says, “and I was asking him how they made those Jeff Lynne records. He and Mike ended up showing me the way they’d layer acoustics, switching guitars after each take so the sounds and feels could blend. Pretty soon we were recording. It wasn’t like there was a master plan. It just happened. ‘The Last DJ’ was one of the first songs that came.”

More than any album since Southern Accents, this one was emerging as a concept album. The corporate influence on twenty-first-century pop music was addressed and redressed in a number of the songs. By the end of 2001, the biggest acts that could be thought of as rock and roll were bands like Train and Matchbox Twenty, not exactly beacons in the night for rock and rollers raised on Jerry Lee Lewis and James Brown. There was good stuff happening closer to the margins, but Petty had lived for so long on the charts that he didn’t look to the periphery to understand the moment—he looked at the mainstream, and it appeared that the end-times were coming. He wasn’t alone in seeing that.

The sound of the record had some of the lean strength of Echo but also the shimmer and tight production of Full Moon Fever. Benmont Tench suggested bringing in Jon Brion to write some string arrangements. Brion had been making records with Aimee Mann and Rufus Wainwright, which was proof that good things were happening in the world of pop music. Tench knew that Brion was a bit like the Heartbreakers themselves, a guy who played in bands and liked songs that sounded best when bands played them. His arrangement for “Money Becomes King” quickly showed him to be a sympathetic collaborator. The hole left by Howie Epstein was filled by Petty and Campbell, who switched off on bass, except for the two tracks played by Ron Blair.

Blair had stayed in touch with Mike Campbell. “I played a little bit over those years,” Blair explains. “With some kind of songwriter guys, a few gigs at the Palomino Club. We opened for the Ventures.” He was obviously not a man working with publicists and managers to craft a return to the business. “When I had the surf shop,” Blair says, describing the period immediately after leaving the Heartbreakers in 1982, “I had a burglary at my house, and a lot of stuff was stolen. After that I sold everything that was left, kind of felt disgusted. For fifteen years there, I think all I had was an acoustic guitar. I hardly played, mostly withdrew.” Mike Campbell was his one link. “Mike kept me on some kind of thin tether, kept me from drifting off into a black hole. He’d invite me over to his house, show me the latest thing, MIDI keyboards or something. He’d be working with Patti Scialfa or on a Stevie Nicks track. I remember being at his house and saying to him, after ten or twelve years, ‘Mike, I think I’m living the wrong life.’”

Campbell had been holding what Blair calls “workshops” at his house, bringing in musicians to record songs, sometimes in batches of ten or more—Steve Ferrone, Jim Keltner, Charley Drayton—the group’s makeup would shift, but Blair was a part of it. When one of the recordings from a workshop was being recut for the new Heartbreakers’ album, Campbell suggested to Petty that they bring down the guy who played the bass on the demo. “I went down to the studio,” Blair describes, “and it went pretty good. I worked a couple of nights, and I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is interesting.’ There was a kind of tension in the air, like a nice kind of tension, right? There I was, after so many years. By the end of the second night, Tom asked me, ‘So, what are you doing this summer?’ ‘Nothing, brother,’ I tell him. ‘Nothing I couldn’t get out of.’”

The reuniting of an original Heartbreaker with the band was more meaningful to Petty than anyone likely knew. Petty didn’t want to run auditions. “Mike had suggested bringing Ron in. And he played so well,” says Petty, “that I suggested we bring him back the next day. I knew we had to come up with a bass player for the tour that was being planned. I was standing with Ron on the back steps at Ocean Way studio, and I just said, ‘What would you think about coming back and playing on the tour?’ I hadn’t talked to Ben or Mike about how I was feeling, but the idea of bringing in someone new, someone we didn’t really know, no matter how good a player, would have been just … too many missing people. I need to be a member of a band. Or not. Ron was an answer to my concerns. Had he not appeared, I think I would have put an end to the band. I couldn’t have done it with a hired gun. His appearance was almost mystical to me. And, then, the band just got better, gelled in a really good way. And I think that’s when we all became friends again.” Drakoulias believes the reunion brought a kind of heightened sensitivity to the group in the studio. “Everyone wanted to bring the best parts of themselves,” he says. “Ron’s return leveled things out in some way. There wasn’t anyone saying, ‘What kind of fucking sandwich is this? I know this is what I ordered, but this is not what I wanted.’ Everyone brought in their best behavior.”

Adria Petty served as art director for The Last DJ, coming up with one of the most memorable among the Heartbreakers album packages. In the years since her parents split, she’d managed to maintain a strong connection to her father. Dana Petty’s patience and care for the family had helped everyone. Adria finished her undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence, attended film school at NYU, and would soon enough be directing major music video and commercial projects. But in her father’s world, she was already among his closest advisers. “There was a lifetime of healing to be done,” says Dana Petty. “You could say there are few things more difficult than dating a man with teenage daughters, but Adria and Annakim had been through so much, had been denied so much. I always felt their pain. But, finally, our world began revolving around family as much as music.” With the making of The Last DJ, Petty felt he’d really come through something.

When the Heartbreakers headed out to support the record, however, they already sensed that not everyone wanted to hear what Tom Petty had to say about the state of the music industry. The Last DJ suggested that the business was a mess caused by greed, much altered from its glory days, and that everyone knew it. But the hitch was this: that didn’t mean everyone wanted to listen to songs about it, particularly from a well-compensated career artist who had likely paid off his mortgage with ease, if he even knew what a mortgage was. A Rolling Stone review set the tone for the album’s reception, evenhanded but tough in a way that signaled trouble:

On The Last DJ, Tom Petty sounds like the crankiest middle-aged punk this side of Neil Young. “Well, you can’t turn him into a company man /You can’t turn him into a whore,” Petty declares on the title track that ushers in his thirteenth studio album in twenty-six years, a loosely constructed concept piece about how much the music industry sucks.

“Dreamville” stands out as a song that perhaps reveals more about where Petty’s mind and heart really were than does “Joe.” As Rick Rubin had remarked, Petty had always written from the place he was in, whether as a young man, a grown-up, or as a guy blown down in midlife. The songs followed him. He didn’t chase them backward in time. Coming up on fifty, Petty was looking around, considering where he came from, what was left of that place. “What I think about with Tom,” says Jackson Browne, “is, ‘How did he become that writer? How does he know what he knows?’ He’s so good I have to ask these questions, like he’s that kind of a figure to me. The songs are so compelling. There is such an intimacy to them. But, thinking of The Last DJ, when this same artist, who for so long has delivered emotional truths, suddenly goes after historical truths, the audience has a hard time swallowing it. The Last DJ was a fucking great record that nonetheless suffered that fate. But then, in the middle of it, there’s ‘Dreamville,’ and this image of like, Tom Petty, this skinny little white kid, shivering by the pool with blue lips, whose mom took him places. It’s masterful. And it’s that emotional truth, full on.” Petty thinks of it as among his best songs and recordings. “Sometimes,” he says, “they just come out like you hear them in your head. That’s one of those.”

“Dreamville” was the clue hinting at what was coming in the next decade of Petty’s artistic life. He would be going back, sorting through some boxes, questioning old friends to see what they knew, calling old numbers to see who picked up. Those who saw only nostalgia in “Dreamville” were going to miss the subtlety of it all. If “nostalgia” is an empty effort to recover some idealized past, an escape from the present, then, no, this isn’t what Petty was engaged in. Before the release of The Last DJ and Ron Blair’s official return, in 2002 the Heartbreakers would accept induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Then, starting in 2005, Petty would work with director Peter Bogdanovich to capture the story of his band in a four-hour documentary. Petty would collect a few awards, create a few anthologies. But he didn’t approach it all as an archivist. One got the sense that he was going back because he’d left something there and needed to go find it. When he rummaged back there, it was as much about his future as it was his past.

* * *

“We were standing in some hallway,” says Tom Petty, “waiting to be inducted. But we couldn’t hear what was going on out there. We’re just kind of looking at each other. I know Stan said something like, ‘You know what this means, right?’ Like he really appreciated the meaning of it all. I was kind of touched by that.” Tony Dimitriades had called Jakob Dylan, Bob Dylan’s son and the leader of the Wallflowers, to let Jakob know that Petty would like him to induct the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “He asked me that,” recalls Dylan, “said my name had come up. And, honestly, I was kind of taken aback. To go to a room like that and induct someone into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? I was concerned that maybe I wasn’t the right person.” As a teenager, Dylan was sidestage watching the Heartbreakers when they backed his father. “I used to sit with Bugs,” he says. “By the amplifiers. Soaking it up, learning as much as I could. I couldn’t have asked for much more at sixteen years old than to watch those guys play every night.” Still, Jakob Dylan didn’t feel like he was the one for this job.

“I asked Tony who else they had in mind,” he says. “Like, if I decide I’m not the right guy for it, who are they thinking of? He tells me, ‘You’re the only choice.’ He wasn’t going to let me off the hook. Then he said, ‘You know, Jakob, if you want to be one of those guys, like the ones you really admire, these are the kinds of things you’ve got to do.’ He was right. I belonged up there and deserved to be there if Tom was asking me to do this. I knew their career so well. It began to make sense to me. I hung up the phone thinking, ‘Hell, yeah, you’re going to do that. Are you kidding?’ I was younger then.”

The Heartbreakers rehearsed in Los Angeles. Stan Lynch flew in from Florida. Howie Epstein and Ron Blair were both there. “I drove Tom to rehearsals that day,” says Mark Carpenter. “I certainly wondered what it was going to be like. But Tom walked in, saw Stan, broke into a grin, and they had a genuine hug. It just broke the tension. My instinct had been that Tom wouldn’t want to go back there again. But the rehearsals were great.” No doubt it was harder to walk into that rehearsal space for the guys who were no longer Heartbreakers. They’d be in their old band for one more evening in New York City. But that was it. “I felt at the Hall of Fame,” says Lynch, “that I had no connection to anybody in the room. They didn’t even let me travel with them to the event. I thought, ‘They don’t want to relive this.’” That Lynch hadn’t asked anyone if he could travel with the band has to be noted. Petty gives a quizzical look after hearing Lynch’s remark: “Didn’t he go back to Florida, then on to New York? As God is my witness, he would have been with us if he’d asked for that.” After rehearsals in Los Angeles, the band’s equipment went by truck to New York, and everyone scattered for the days prior to departure. Lynch, apparently still in Los Angeles, was on his own. As was everyone else.

Jakob Dylan had among the best lines of the evening, describing from the podium a moment during the early dates his father did with the Heartbreakers. “On that tour,” he said, “[Tom] had his two daughters there. And I remember sitting with his daughters, I remember thinking, ‘Jesus, your dad is Tom Petty.’” Once they were at the front of the room, the Heartbreakers took turns sharing a few words. They thanked one another, thanked girlfriends, wives, children. But Petty delivered the message. “I’m very proud that we’re being inducted as a group, as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, ’cause they’re the best fucking band in America.”

Campbell was in a purple suit; Howie Epstein looked very sick; Stan Lynch seemed, somehow, larger than ever; Benmont Tench was professorial; Ron Blair looked like Ron Blair. If their appearance as a group could have been captured in music, it would have been dissonant. But they got up and played “American Girl” and “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” under imperfect conditions, and it was the Heartbreakers. They sounded like that band.

In the men’s room, Stan Lynch found himself at the urinal next to Steve Ferrone. “We’re both pissing,” says Lynch. “Two drummers trying not to look at their dicks. Looking at each other and looking at the wall. I wished someone could have taken a picture of this. I said, ‘Steve, thanks for lending me the band.’ Then I poured myself a couple martinis and danced on the table while Isaac Hayes did ‘Shaft.’”

Going to New York, Lynch was on a flight with one of the Ramones and a few other guys who had once been in bands. The Heartbreakers were, of course, on their private plane. After the event, he sent Petty a letter. “It was a very nice note,” says Petty, “and it hinted at the idea that we’d be seeing more of each other. But I never saw him or heard from him again. I’m sure if we ran into each other he’d be very pleasant, and I would, too. But there’s a lot that went on there. We grew up together, for Christ’s sake. I feel like that was when I grew from being a boy to being a man. In that band. We confronted the real world, changed, saw a hell of lot, and went through an experience you couldn’t really explain to anybody who wasn’t there. But I’m glad he was there. I’m glad they were all there. To have been alone would have been a nightmare. But there’s a difference now: I’m still in that band, and Stan isn’t. Hasn’t been for a while. I need to take care of the band I’m in.”