Petty

We’ve got to start thinking beyond our guns. Those days are closin’ fast.

—THE WILD BUNCH

Everyone at the Hall of Fame inductions was shocked at Howie Epstein’s condition. He looked like a different person—thin, smaller, his face changed. Heroin had stolen the boyishness for which he’d always been known. It was the last time most of them would see their old bandmate, if they were seeing him even then. At a show in New Mexico, he would appear one last time, asking to see Dana Petty. “By that time,” says Tom Petty, “most people in the Heartbreakers camp knew that talking to Dana was like talking to all of us.” Assistant road manager Mark Carpenter didn’t bring Epstein’s message to her, though. He made the decision not to, knowing he was protecting her from something that would break her heart. Epstein wasn’t himself anymore.

Benmont Tench and Stan Lynch attended Howie Epstein’s funeral in Milwaukee. Petty and Campbell didn’t, and some judged them for it. As late as 2011, a Milwaukee Magazine writer, in a piece about Epstein, charged Petty with a “career cold-bloodedness that has allowed [him] to stay at the top of his game for almost 40 years.” Stan Lynch, interviewed for the story, helps the writer along: “I’m really pissed that Howie was allowed to die while in the employ of a multimillion-dollar corporation.” In the same article, however, the writer describes Epstein’s arrest, two days before his last tour with the Heartbreakers. Epstein and Carlene Carter were found with 2.9 grams of black tar heroin, considerable amounts of drug paraphernalia, driving a stolen car. Things had gotten way out of control. It was no casual matter when the Heartbreakers stopped working with Epstein. And the fact that they had stopped working with him certainly didn’t mean his death didn’t affect them. With little to no basis, the Milwaukee Magazine writer, and Lynch, suggested otherwise. In some ways, Lynch is still at work on that angle.

“I never forgave Tom for not being at his funeral,” says Stan Lynch. “I can’t. I wish I could. You know, ‘If I could fly to Milwaukee in the winter, why couldn’t you?’ I’ll never forgive him. It doesn’t mean I don’t love him, and maybe I even understand why. But, no, Howie was buried in Milwaukee in the snow, on a cold fucking winter day, and it sucked.” Lynch put a pair of drumsticks in with the casket. When he did, the rabbi asked him who he was to Howie Epstein. Hearing that Lynch and Epstein were bandmates, the rabbi asked Lynch how he could have let this happen. There are those who don’t understand addiction. Maybe the rabbi was one such person. Neither he nor Stan Lynch knew what the Heartbreakers had done to try to help their friend.

“I didn’t go to Howie’s funeral in Milwaukee. Everyone has their own way of processing death,” says Mike Campbell. “I don’t have any guilt about that. We had our own memorial. And it felt like a proper way of saying good-bye. I don’t see how my choice has anything to do with my love for him.” The band’s memorial was held at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. “It was full of people,” Campbell continues. “It was friends, the band, everyone. It was spiritual. I felt better afterward, taking the time to remember, to say good-bye. I don’t usually speak in public, but I felt moved to get up and speak. It was bittersweet. Was Stan at that?”

“Everybody loved Howie,” says Benmont Tench. “Everyone was devastated when he died. The memorial that Tom organized here was really, really beautiful. Respectful. Worthy of Howie. Tom wouldn’t have done that if he was practicing avoidance or if he didn’t care.”

“I heard people insinuate that Howie died for the Tom Petty machine,” Petty says. “Stan did some of that. Suggestive stuff. It hinges on the idea that we didn’t love Howie. That’s absolute bullshit. I don’t think Stan knows what we went through with Howie. Nobody does. I owe Howie more than to tell those tales. But I will say that I miss him all the time. I hear his voice on records, and it just kills me. I miss that voice. Just like I miss Stan’s. We were a powerful vocal group. I feel awful about Howie’s death. And I know what Stan meant to the Heartbreakers. None of this was ever taken lightly. But if you’re going to run a rock-and-roll band for forty years, there will be some casualties. I don’t know of anyone in my spot who has gotten away without having to face some.”

Whether or not it was because of that Heartbreakers reunion in New York or because of Howie Epstein’s death shortly thereafter, around that time Petty became a little more reflective about the band. He’d always seen himself as a member of a group. He worked to put one together, and fought to keep it. His words at the Hall of Fame podium made his respect clear. But Petty was beginning to put ever more thought into just what that band meant, what allowed it to survive. Why he needed one so much in the first place, what it gave to him. You could hold a band together through power, through fear, through money, through anger. You could hold a band together through love. Most bands were bound by some combination of those things. Just like families. And Petty had watched his family fall apart. So what, he had to ask, held his band together?

* * *

There’s something about the way Dana Petty came into the Heartbreakers’ world that made even the tougher critics bend a bit. “She knew,” says her husband, “that you don’t walk right into the Heartbreakers’ dressing room. There are girls that will do that. But to this day, Dana won’t go in. It’s a hard circle to break into, but she put in the miles with these guys. She was respectful, never said to anyone, ‘Hey, carry my bag.’” Even now, when she’s on the road, Dana Petty watches every show, standing by the monitor board. “Dana has my back and knows what matters in my life,” says Petty. On tours, it was Dana who went to every show, something even managers rarely do. She became part of the fabric of the touring organization, always out there, always offering a hand where she could. She earned the respect of the crew, not something that’s offered up to the undeserving.

Dana became the one who could say what the others couldn’t. She stood up to Petty’s rage when she saw it. “Where it comes from is hard to know,” Petty says. “But in that moment, I snap, and some of it comes out. It really comes out, in a scary way. Tony got the worst of it. And when I was younger, it happened too much. It could come without me expecting it. And it’s not how you want people to see you. But I didn’t even realize until I was with Dana what shouting was. I was used to people talking that way. But she would say, ‘Stop yelling at me.’ She insisted on some change. But I already knew that it had to go. That’s not how you want your band or your family to think of you. There were some things I no longer wanted to get away with.”

Playing in Washington, DC, during Ron Blair’s first year back, Petty was having problems with his amp. Yelling at Bugs Weidel onstage, Petty got frustrated, started to tell himself the band wasn’t trying. “I thought the Heartbreakers sounded like shit,” he says. “I kept getting into it with Bugs. I thought the band was just phoning it in. It might have all been in my head. I got in this bad space. In the middle of the show, I just started playing ‘High Heel Sneakers.’ They were all looking back and forth at each other, but they went along with it. I was so uptight, I went across the stage and played what must be the worst solo in the history of rock. I think I shocked people. Then I got mad at myself, was yelling more at Bugs. When we came off stage before the encore, I just lost my shit on the band. I’m yelling at everybody. I was even screaming at Richard [Fernandez], putting him in the Tony position. I think Mike tried to calm me down. Like, ‘Hey, it’s okay. It’s just a show. Everything’s fine.’ No matter how bad we were playing, my behavior wasn’t called for. I knew it. When we got to the plane, I told Richard, ‘I’m really sorry for yelling.’ I admitted that it was a problem. But Richard didn’t really give it up. He looked at me and kind of nodded but no words of, you know, ‘That’s okay.’ He let me know in his own way that I was out of line. And I never did that again. But it showed me that it’s still in there. I have to be careful.”

Knowing Tony Dimitriades had gotten more of it than anyone, Dana Petty talked to Tom. “She said to me, ‘That guy loves you,’” Petty recalls. “‘He’s dedicated his life to you. And you’re not thinking that you’re hurting him, but you are.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Do you ever tell Tony you love him? I know you love him. But he should hear it. He’s not just your manager; he’s one of your best friends.’ I thought about it for a few minutes, and then I just picked up the phone and called Tony. I called him and I apologized to him. And I said, ‘I really love you, and I really value our friendship. And I may never say it again, but I wanted you to know it.’ It felt good to say it. After Dana, Tony’s my most trusted friend. He doesn’t get the credit he deserves. But he’s a perfect manager. He never makes it about himself. He’s a smart guy. And he stuck with me all the fucking way.”

In the studio, it was Campbell who was most consistently at Petty’s side. But Campbell, it seems, never got the call that Dimitriades did. Nor did he make it. Petty will tell a third party that he loves Mike Campbell, and Campbell will tell a third party that he loves Tom Petty. But that’s as close as it gets.

“I love Mike,” says Petty. “His opinion means the world to me. We have a natural working relationship. I give Mike and Ben a song, and they return it to me better than I pictured it in the first place. They make me better. I honestly don’t think I would have made the mark I made in music without them.” For those band members who have believed or worried that Petty sits atop the Heartbreakers power structure, casually considering his next move, waiting to see what comes his way: they’ve misunderstood their band leader. As much as anyone, Petty has tied his identity to this band.

“The solo records,” says Petty, “made me realize how good the band is. But the solo records were also important to the life of the band. I always came back different. Things need to breathe. The marriage metaphor doesn’t always work. I wasn’t out cheating, even if some people need to see it that way. Just recently, I was doing some album promotion, and this guy is asking me questions, going, ‘Do you think you’re a tough guy?’ I say, ‘Tough guy?’ ‘Like rugged,’ he says. ‘I don’t know. I guess,’ I tell him. ‘Have you ever been brutal? Do you think you’re brutal?’ he asks. I thought for a second and went, ‘Yeah.’ He gave me the dirtiest fucking look, like he despised me. And I thought, ‘Brother, I’ve had to be brutal, and it’s not fucking fun. You misunderstand brutal.’ There are times when it fell on me to do something, and I had to do it to save this thing that’s become bigger than all five of us, all six of us. It’s a much more important thing than any one of us now. And if it were to go away, none of us would want to be the guy that ended it.”

* * *

Around the time of Highway Companion, the core relationship in the Heartbreakers was quietly tested, when the balance between Petty and Campbell got thrown off-kilter. For so many years they had worked together closely, fusing their individual strengths. “I’ve always written music,” explains Campbell. “And I also made a lot of it that Tom just couldn’t process. He’d pick what he thought were the best tracks, and sometimes I felt like he overlooked some pretty good ones.” Campbell had given a lot of material to Petty over the years, far more than the Heartbreakers could have used, and that pile of tracks started to weigh on him. “I just wanted to write words to this stuff,” says Campbell, “to sing it myself, see what it sounds like. I wish I’d done it earlier in my life, but I never felt the driving ambition. I wanted to see what my voice sounds like, if I could write words that are any good. Just for myself.” But who really does that just for himself? Campbell was leaning into Petty’s area. If the Heartbreakers were Tom Petty and some backing musicians, it wouldn’t have mattered. But they’re a group, their identities bound up with one another’s, and the delicacy of the dynamic revealed itself. Particularly when Campbell put a band together and made himself the front man. But also because Campbell’s vocals sounded like, well, Tom Petty’s.

When Howie Epstein was in rehab, he called Mike Campbell to talk about the band. “We’d talked for a while,” Campbell says, “and I asked him what was bugging him. He goes, ‘Part of it is, you know, in the band you and Tom dictate the bass. Sometimes you play it, and I’m not allowed to play as much as I’d like to.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, Howie, I’m not allowed to write all the songs I’d like to write either, but I accept my role. Why can’t you just accept your role?’”

Now Campbell was questioning that role. He handed Petty a demo, as had happened so many times before, but this one included complete lyrics and lead vocals. “I had no idea,” Petty says, “that there was any part of his personality that wanted that. I had no idea that he had even the slightest dream of fronting a band.” Petty called Bugs Weidel, who had moved up to Santa Maria. “I got this call from Tom,” Weidel explains. “He goes, ‘Can you come over?’ ‘Um, yeah,’ I tell him, ‘but you know I don’t live there anymore. I live a long way away.’ He goes, ‘How soon can you get here?’ I drove down, just thinking, ‘What’s going on now?’ I get there, and he says, ‘I had to share this with somebody.’ He puts on this cassette. And like, after all these years, Mike had made an album.” For someone on the outside, it might have seemed that Petty was out to limit what his band members were doing. And in some ways, he was. The harder thing to consider was why. Was he protecting his own ego or protecting the band as it had been built?

The truth of the Heartbreakers’ operation is in their sound. The way Campbell and Tench move in and out on a Petty song. The way Petty’s and Campbell’s guitars sit against each other. The way Ferrone plays to Petty’s vocal. When one man moves, the next man feels it and responds accordingly. That was how they arrived at a definable, defining aesthetic. Now Campbell had abruptly stepped out of his position. A few bodies fell over when they went to lean on him. This wasn’t Keith Richards taking a song on a Rolling Stones album. There was no tradition here. Apart from one song on Echo, Campbell didn’t play the role of singer and lyricist.

This wasn’t like Howie Epstein’s earlier work with John Prine or Benmont’s session work, or even Campbell’s cowriting or outside production with other artists. This wasn’t Campbell’s surf band. All of that had gone on for years, with Petty supporting it. This was Campbell as a front man, on a project that sounded kind of like the Heartbreakers. “It was just close enough,” says Petty, “to fuck with my head.” As the one responsible for guiding the band, Petty had to address the issue. “We had a long conversation,” says Petty, “the only time we talked about this. We were on the phone a couple hours. I was completely honest with him about what I thought. I said, ‘Look, you know I’m going to be pissed if you make a record that people think is us.’ I’m going to protect, desperately, the quality and character of what goes out in our name. If somebody doesn’t play this role, the whole thing will run off the rails. We created something that needs to be respected and cared for.”

“I didn’t realize that I sounded like Tom until he said something,” Campbell says. “I wasn’t hearing it that way. I said, ‘Well, that’s good that it sounds like you. That means it’s good, right?’ It perplexed me for a while. I started to hear a little of it in there, tried to filter it out. I told him that I didn’t know I was doing it. He said, ‘I know you don’t mean to do it, but it’s there. We grew up in the same neighborhoods, spoke the same slang. But that’s not how you want to present yourself.’ It was great advice. But I could tell it made him uncomfortable. When I step out of my box, it throws him off his game. That was never our dynamic in the beginning, so he doesn’t know what to do with it. And I understand that.” When Benmont Tench made a solo recording several years later, it was music that lived at a distance from the Heartbreakers’ sound. “He had the best players,” says Petty. “He went out, took on the front man role with ease. You would have thought he’d been doing it his whole life. He could talk to the crowd, lead the show. It was fantastic. And it wasn’t too close to what we do.” Petty had invited Campbell, more than anyone, into the center of his creative life. But there was a trade-off. It would limit Campbell’s freedoms elsewhere. He wasn’t a sideman. He was a partner.

* * *

Highway Companion may well be the last Tom Petty solo recording. Petty came out of it thinking more about the Heartbreakers, about the preciousness and precariousness of what he has. Highway Companion didn’t necessarily cause that, but it’s where he landed when the album and the roadwork supporting it were completed. Something shifted, and whether because of therapy or aging Petty was doing more than ever before to understand his close relationships, his mind, his past. “I had this discussion the other day with Tony,” Petty says. “We were talking about getting old, and out of the blue, he said, ‘Do you find yourself thinking about the past more than you do the future?’ I said, ‘Actually, I think about the present most of the time.’ I’m not necessarily a nostalgic person. You know, I look back, but I don’t stare.” The music business, however, had gotten nostalgic. Nostalgia made cash registers ring. By the turn of the millennium, the major artists of the sixties and seventies had to think about legacy projects, about the archive, as much as they did their new recordings. Often more. Neil Young, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones—they were putting out their classic records, remastered with new bonus tracks, releasing “official” live albums from earlier periods, making documentaries that picked through their careers.

After the airing of Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, the legacy culture of the music business seemed to gather more momentum still, at least among those artists with meaningful back catalogues and paying audiences. Being in that mind-set personally, Petty was in sync with the business when he went into the more than two-year process of making Runnin’ Down a Dream. The Peter Bogdanovich documentary came out as a four-hour film but was cut down from something closer to eight. Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show is perhaps the most obvious clue that the director has a sympathy for the American landscape from which the Heartbreakers emerged, but George Drakoulias says the inspiration for their directorial choice was less that and more about some tapes he’d given Petty. The tapes, recordings of conversations between Bogdanovich and Orson Welles, revealed Bogdanovich to be almost as much of a character as Welles, full of opinions, a history of film in his head. Petty dug into Bogdanovich’s writings on John Ford, Hitchcock, American screwball comedy. He liked the director’s mind.

Warner Bros. had already approached Tony Dimitriades about the possibility of a thirtieth-anniversary film. A meeting between Petty and Bogdanovich, much of which revolved around a discussion of films such as Howard Hawks’s Red River and John Ford’s The Searchers, proved that the most important question—would Petty and Bogdanovich make a connection?—could be answered in the affirmative. The secondary question—does Peter Bogdanovich know anything about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers?—was merely that, secondary. He didn’t. Not a thing.

“In some ways,” Drakoulias insists, “it’s better that way. He’s learning, rather than coming in with preconceived notions. The process started with me and Peter meeting in a hotel room here in LA. We watched—I’m not kidding—hundreds of hours of footage. We’d meet at noon, have a sandwich, and screen every piece of footage that existed. Pretty soon we were labeling stuff, separating it into years. By the end, and this is almost three years later, I’m not sure Peter wanted it to end. I remember we were out on the road at one point, and he’s on the side of the stage. He’s looking out at the audience. He asks me, ‘Are all those people waiting for Tom? Who are those girls? Do you think those girls want to sleep with him?’ I go, ‘I really don’t think that’s where Tom is at.’ Peter just says, ‘I chose the wrong path.’”

The first Petty interview session was done at the Heartbreakers’ clubhouse, a warehouse in the valley where the band stores their gear, rehearses, and, these days, makes their records. The racks of Fenders, Gibsons, Rickenbackers, Martins, oddball Silvertones, and other guitars dwarfed the film crew’s equipment. Bogdanovich was there, wearing a cravat. He was also suffering from acute back pain. On and off the couch, he conducted interviews, with Drakoulias standing behind him whispering band history, suggesting follow-ups.

As the film slowly came together, Petty was obliged to think about it all, from childhood on. But Mudcrutch was the thing that, for some reason, stuck in his mind. He began hatching the idea of trying, as a kind of experiment, to put that band back together, to see if his gut feeling was accurate. “I just thought,” Petty explains, “that maybe there was some music back there. Mudcrutch never really got to be a band and make records. But we were good. It was a different thing than the Heartbreakers. But it really was a good little band.” Petty initially thought to run the idea past Mike Campbell first. But when he approached Campbell, the guitar player was distracted, so Petty waited. In the interim, though only in passing, he mentioned the idea to Bogdanovich, who thought it sounded like a whim, a one-off at best.

“My brother Bernie, and also my brother Mark,” recalls Tom Leadon, “had left me some messages saying that Tom’s manager, Tony, was trying to get ahold of me, that it might be important. So I called the number I’d been given. It might have been Mary [Klauzer] that I talked to first. She asked if I’d be willing to be in the movie. Of course, I said I’d be glad to. We set it up for Peter Bogdanovich and the film crew to come to the music school where I teach. When Peter showed up, we were looking around for a space to shoot. I showed him the room I teach in, but it wasn’t big enough. I didn’t realize they’d have lights and sound. But we found a spot, and while they were setting up, Peter asked if I had any old photos of Mudcrutch. I showed him what I had. As he’s looking at them, he says, kind of offhandedly, ‘Yeah, Tom’s thinking of having a reunion of Mudcrutch.’ And his words, just him saying that, shot through me like a bolt of lightning. Somehow, I could almost see the whole thing in that instant, that this band could be really good … like the whole thing. I could see it. I was trying to act like I hadn’t been hit with 186,000 volts. Then Peter said he’d asked Tom why he’d do that. You know, ‘Why have a reunion?’ I was thinking to myself, ‘No, don’t ask him that. Don’t say that. Please don’t question that.’”

Petty had responded to Bogdanovich by saying only, “Well, I just want to do it.” To Leadon, that seemed promising. “I heard that,” says Leadon, “and thought, ‘That’s just what Tom would say if he really did want to do it.’” But Petty was wrapped up in finishing the film and the thirtieth-anniversary tour. With opening acts that included Pearl Jam, the Allman Brothers, the Black Crowes, and a few others, and with Stevie Nicks joining for several shows, the tour was a complicated production, demanding all of Petty’s time. When the film came out, it quickly got a lot of attention. In the New York Times, David Carr described the film as “a vivid reminder that Mr. Petty remains one of the coolest guys out of the South since William Faulkner.” A double platinum success, the film was the event that caught the attention of the Super Bowl’s production team, and not long after that the Heartbreakers were on a football field, playing to television cameras that brought them into homes across the world. It led to the biggest spike in sales of any Super Bowl act to date. The Heartbreakers didn’t engage in a lot of theatrics; they let the songs do the work. “American Girl,” “I Won’t Back Down,” “Free Fallin’,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream.” You could hear a stadium on background vocals.

Some six months after the film was finished, however, Leadon, working as a guitar teacher in the Nashville area, got a call. “I’d been at the supermarket,” he says, “and was on my way home with my groceries. My cell phone rang, I answered it, and the voice said, ‘This is Tom Petty.’ I didn’t believe it was really him. I thought maybe it was one of my friends pulling a prank. I wasn’t going to fall for it. He had to convince me it was him. We hadn’t talked on the phone for thirty years. The last time I remember talking to him on the phone was 1977.”

No one’s experience was going to be as high as Leadon’s. “The anticipation was just amazing,” he says. “I remember getting my gear together for the trip. I had a case I converted into a flight case for my Gibson 335. I remember being on the plane, like it was some kind of dream I was flying into.”

The Heartbreakers’ clubhouse was made into a studio for the Mudcrutch sessions. With Ryan Ulyate engineering and coproducing alongside Petty and Mike Campbell, the crew set it up so that the band could play without headphones, everyone hearing one another through their own monitor mixes, as if they were back in Gainesville playing a club show. It meant that separation would be impossible, that one instrument would bleed into the next man’s microphone. To get a usable take was possible only if each individual performance was good top to bottom. There wasn’t a lot of room for error. It was closer to how records were made when the Beatles walked into George Martin’s world, which might have been fine for a band that had been playing together for some time. But this was a group that had disbanded thirty years earlier. It was a calculated gamble on Petty’s part. If it wasn’t going to work, they’d know about a minute into the first song. “I think,” Leadon recalls, “it was ‘Swinging Doors,’ the Merle Haggard song.” Petty thinks the Haggard track could have been the warm-up song but knows his original “A Special Place” was the first thing they recorded. “It was good,” Petty recalls. “But then we cut ‘Crystal River.’ It was one take. When we listened back we saw no reason to do it again. It was one of the greatest nights of my life. I went home and started writing more songs while the other guys slept. That’s always a good sign.”

You didn’t see Billy Joel re-forming the Hassles or Bruce Springsteen re-forming Steel Mill. Probably for very legitimate reasons. It was a career move that could stop a manager’s heart. But Dimitriades knew Petty. And Petty didn’t always think in terms of what made sense; it was all about the songs that he thought “might be back there.” He didn’t re-form the band as a bit of theater meant to prod the aching hearts of a rock-and-roll audience grown older. They didn’t know Mudcrutch anyway. Warner Bros. certainly hadn’t asked for this. “To see Tommy with them,” Dana Petty says, “was so different from seeing him with the Heartbreakers. He’s not the main guy in the same way. I think a lot of stress was taken off. And there he was, back with Tom Leadon, who he’d known since he was seventeen and Tom [Leadon] was fifteen, and Randall Marsh. It was just beautiful to watch how much fun they were having.”

Once the reunion was under way, Petty paid attention to the details. He wanted it to be true to what the band had been. When Mudcrutch was active, Petty wasn’t the only songwriter. The band members didn’t have vast collections of guitars, just the one or two that got them through the gig. Petty played on bass. So Benmont Tench brought in a few songs and sang them, as did Tom Leadon. And Campbell stuck to his B-Bender Telecaster. Petty stayed on bass, and, of course, Randall Marsh was on drums. In some ways, they may as well have been playing at Dub’s Steer Room. Except that it became a top-ten album.

“I didn’t do it to share the spoils,” Petty says. “I didn’t think of that. It wasn’t me trying to be generous. I did it because I love those guys. We’re all getting older. And one of the luxuries of this great success is we can pick and choose our projects. When you pick something that’s fun, you usually get good art.”