Hippies? Why, I’m the original.
—JERRY LEE LEWIS
The twin smells of dirty barbecue platters and embalming fluids had done their work on Tom Petty, proof enough that rock and roll was better than the alternatives. Ricky and Rodney Rucker had rented a duplex apartment in North Gainesville, attaching themselves to some neighbors, younger, college-age women who helped keep the party going. Soon enough, Petty moved in, too. He was, again, out of the house for the moment.
By the summer of 1969, the Epics had a residency at Trader Tom’s, considered the best club in town after Dub’s Steer Room. In Tom Leadon’s view, it was the most productive time for that version of the band. They were either playing or rehearsing. Their show was at its tightest. But they were also no longer the Epics. The band had decided on a new name: Mudcrutch. “What happened to the Epics?” Ricky Rucker says. “That name had stopped working.”
The Beatles had changed American life, but it wasn’t simply the legendary “sixties” from there on out. For rock-and-roll bands, another leap, almost as significant if less obsessively celebrated, came in the form of Jimi Hendrix and Cream. No longer would Florida groups like the Epics look to the Tropics and the Nation Rockin’ Shadows for inspiration. No more would bands wear suit and tie. No more would they be practicing dance steps. Even the hipper shirts with puffy white sleeves that Dickie Underwood’s grandmother had sewn for the members of the Epics, worn with matching white pants, even those wouldn’t survive the shift. Matching suits, no matter how many beads you draped over them, were still uniforms. And it wasn’t the moment for uniforms.
A lot of the major Florida groups didn’t manage the transition well. Some disbanded entirely. The Tropics got to New York but found themselves to be relics of another time. They heard “Purple Haze” on a jukebox at the Greasy Spoon coffee shop in Greenwich Village, crossed paths with the Doors, had an opening act named Tiny Tim, and saw Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention perform. In the midst of all that, they came onstage in their band outfits and did their choreography. “I couldn’t wait to get back home,” Charlie Souza says. “Where I still had a chance at being cool.”
Clothes, performance styles, language, sex—all contributed to the cultural leap that would come to be called the “sixties.” But to live through it was to experience a series of departures, each one defining itself against whatever came before. As a category, “cool” was redefining itself so regularly that some people, like Souza, felt they weren’t quite keeping up. Some got so high it wasn’t an issue. Jeff Beck saw Jimi Hendrix and figured it was time to become a licensed plumber. For a while there, the American teenager could still settle into the parents’ world at the end of the day, if smirking all the while. Now teen culture was going to rip off its clothes and walk naked through the center of town. No longer were young people the children of Dick Clark, with a little Alfred E. Neuman thrown in. Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary were the chaperones. By the decade’s end, those bands in matching suits were as much a thing not to be as any Ozzie Nelson sitting in his upholstered chair, nodding out over the evening paper. But there were still starts and stops. Hendrix had to open for the Monkees before he could get on with things. In Gainesville, where local bands grappled with the unchanging reality of having to land the next gig, things played out with a degree of subtlety. But in retrospect, this was the moment in which Tom Petty could at last start becoming Tom Petty.
Before they took on the name Mudcrutch, the Epics had always lifted their material from records. That’s what bands did. Not just the songs, the recordings. The closer you could get to the record, the better. Same arrangement, same key, same guitar solos. When Rodney Rucker was singing out of his vocal range, no one even thought to transpose the music. If the record was in G, so was the Epics’ version. Rucker would have to meet them there. When they played the frat houses, they were, in Petty’s words, “just a big jukebox for a drunken crowd.” The teen clubs might have had better listeners, but the audiences were still looking to hear the records they knew. When the Epics got their first opportunity to record at a studio, that was the spirit they captured. They covered Buffalo Springfield’s “On the Way Home” and, less likely, Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys medley of fifties rock and roll, including “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Party Doll,” “Chantilly Lace,” and far too many more. Everybody in the band sang. Petty remembers being on amphetamines, “prescribed” to him by one of the Ruckers’ neighbors because Petty was short on sleep. He also remembers that they wouldn’t have gotten into a studio at all if they hadn’t, for a short time, found a manager, a kid who got it into his head that handling a rock-and-roll band might be fun, and if the Ruckers hadn’t leaned on that kid to buy them some studio time.
The new manager was watching the clock for the whole two hours, not so happy with the reality of the job. But the Epics were thrilled. Petty had never heard his bass played direct through a mixing board to tape. It was like hearing for the first time what a bass should sound like. “I loved it. I’m sure the drugs helped, but it sounded so good.” The recording captured a fleeting moment. No one would listen to it and think that there was some special talent in there. No one saw the band that way. No one saw Petty that way, either. As Jeff Jourard put it, “I wouldn’t have put my money on him. Not then.”
* * *
Jim Lenahan had known Petty for several years, first through school, where they were in homeroom together and regularly kicked out for having long hair. Lenahan had joined the Sundowners one summer in 1965, when the band was playing Fridays and Saturdays at the Keystone Heights Pier and Lenahan’s group, the Certain Amount, had lost a few members to summer activities. When Rodney Rucker finally left the Epics, and the group needed a lead singer, it was Lenahan who came in. He would be a part of Tom Petty’s world for the next forty-five years.
Jim Lenahan’s mother was a single parent, earning a living as a teacher. “A widowed schoolteacher, that’s right,” Lenahan laughs, “and we still had more money than the Petty family. As blue collar as you can get.” At five years old, he was singing on the radio. His aunt hosted the Youth Variety Hour, and he’d join her every Saturday until he finally couldn’t tear himself away from the cartoons. His material included “Freight Train” and “Cry Me a River,” but Elvis Presley covers like “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel” were also a regular part of the show. Along with the other performers from the variety hour, he traveled around doing performances at Moose Lodges. From there it was the marching band in junior high school, drums in a surf band, and, finally, the Beatles hitting, and all of that coming together. Within a short time, he was deep in the same local scene that produced Petty and Leadon.
Lenahan knew the Ruckers, ran into them regularly and had once admonished Rodney, suggesting he make the choice between hunting and playing in the Epics. “Hunting, no problem,” Lenahan says. “He didn’t have to think twice about that one.” The truth was, after Rodney Rucker had been moved off the guitar into the front man position, he’d never felt quite right. “I don’t think he liked that he was just the singer,” explains Dickie Underwood. “His guitar was like his baby blanket. He could hide behind it. We’d taken that away.” And it was dove-hunting season.
By Lenahan’s arrival, the Epics had become Mudcrutch. The only person who thinks maybe Tom Petty didn’t come up with the new name is Tom Petty. No one is fighting for credit. But Mudcrutch was selected, and it stuck. As with so many names, its strangeness would lift soon enough, becoming more like something imposed by nature. One of the Ruckers painted “Mudcrutch” on the side of his van, “in the shape of a large cock,” as Petty recalls. If only for a few weeks, with the band still a four piece, Petty sang lead. But that was temporary.
Lenahan was at a party soon after Rodney Rucker left the Epics and ran into Rodney’s brother, Ricky. “Ricky was a huge guy, and he was real drunk that night,” says Lenahan. “He needed a singer. He cornered me and said, ‘Hey, you just joined our band. You don’t like it, I’ll kick your ass.’ I was like, ‘Okay.’ That’s how I got into that band.” With Lenahan on vocals, Ricky Rucker and Tom Leadon on guitars, Petty on bass, and Underwood on drums, a new chapter had begun. A very short new chapter. Underwood got called up and would be heading to Vietnam. With his best friend leaving for the war, Ricky Rucker got as philosophical about it all as he had been about anything up to that point in his life. “I figured I’d better find something to do to make a living.” The newly christened Mudcrutch was a three piece. They didn’t even get the van with the cock on the side.
Mudcrutch could play coffeehouses as a trio. And they did some of that. But it wasn’t going to make them enough money to get by. The other major concern was the draft, which they hoped to avoid. The Ruckers had faked the hearing test and were ready to teach others how to accomplish that. Not everyone took the lessons. Petty enrolled in Santa Fe Junior College there in town, which gave him shelter from being drafted. But this school experience was no different than any other. It didn’t last more than a matter of weeks. He certainly wasn’t inspiring anyone to invest further in his education. That would be it. Petty was back in the family home but not in school and ripe for conscription. Earl was starting to ask for some food money. At the least, Petty needed to find work.
Word was out among the locals that you could go get a job at the university’s grounds department. Petty and Tom Leadon went down to apply. “It was a dollar twenty-five an hour, a really bad wage, but it was an okay job,” Petty explains. “I just changed the screens on a water purification system they’d set up in Lake Alice. They were dredging the lake, trying to get all of the water hyacinths out so there would be more oxygen in the water, which was filled with alligators, all kinds of wildlife. I had a few adventures with snakes out there.” Left by himself, he didn’t have much to do once the screens were replaced. He’d find a nice spot to sit and wait for the truck to pick him up. All of that went on for a while, until the supervisor saw Petty resting in the sun, collecting a wage.
“Basically all I did was sit around,” he says. “But one day I’m there on the grass, waiting for the truck, and they pull up and this guy goes ape shit on me, gets really mad. He starts yelling. It just hadn’t occurred to me that I should make a show of it. I’d done the work. But after that, they didn’t want me around anymore. The problem was, you couldn’t just fire someone. You had to have good reason. The university had its policies. So, from then on, the idea was that they’d make me quit.” When Petty came back the next day, he was thrown in with another group, what one of the other workers called “a truck full of retards.” He was the only one among his new team who hadn’t come in from the nearby mental health facility. But if they thought that would break Petty, they had the wrong guy. You could argue that he’d been in rock-and-roll bands long enough already to withstand most any company.
“I didn’t mind,” Petty insists. “It could have been worse. I could have been on a truck full of rednecks that wanted to kill me for having long hair. But, then, after they saw that the strategy wasn’t working, they had me picking up rocks, gave me a canvas bag and told me to get to work. I was dragging this bag of rocks, without any point to it. The foreman was a hellacious redneck who couldn’t read—had to ask what it said on cans of paint—and he just hated me. When I asked why I was dragging these rocks around, he just said, ‘Shut up and do what I tell you.’ I finally went, ‘Okay, you win. I quit.’”
The next job Petty got through the city employment office. Like some strange extension of his time in the funeral business, he was on the grounds crew of a local graveyard. Some among his circle started calling him “walking death.” On a few occasions, he helped to dig a grave, but mostly it was heavy labor in high heat, mowing lawns, keeping the trees and bushes trimmed and neat. He couldn’t avoid breaking into a sweat, which might have been fine onstage but wasn’t anything he wanted to do with a rake in his hand. There was no way it was going to last. That was the last straight job he held. Fired, again.
* * *
Despite how long Petty, Leadon, and Lenahan had been playing in bands and how well they were known on the scene, Mudcrutch couldn’t find the players to complete its lineup. “We were asking everybody, and no one was interested,” Tom Leadon says.
“There wasn’t an endless supply of people, of musicians that wanted to dedicate their lives to being in a band,” Petty explains. “If you found somebody willing to do that, that was interesting. And the really good players always had something going on. Like the Maundy Quintet guys, Don Felder and Bernie Leadon. Then Bernie was gone, out in California and in the Flying Burrito Brothers, making records. And Felder had Flow, and they got a record deal. The only way to get there was to find guys who were ready to give one hundred percent. And we just weren’t finding them.”
But it wasn’t just a matter of identifying players who could make the commitment. Mudcrutch also needed musicians who were ready to play in a band that performed some of its own material. They’d have to come up with parts rather than copy records. Petty had started to write in earnest. Several years later, when the Heartbreakers had their first song on the charts, Petty would recall in interviews how he took note of what Don Felder had started doing with his group Flow. Flow’s lead singer was John Winter, from an Ocala band called the Incidentals and someone Petty already admired. “They did a lot of Zombies, which I loved, but could do the R&B thing, too, handle Otis Redding covers,” recalls Petty. “I remember Felix Cavaliere embraced John Winter at one point. But I saw Winter play with Felder at some hippie house party, and it blew my mind how good they were. And no more covers. Everything was original. I talked to Don after, and he said, ‘We’re not going to get anywhere if we don’t get record deals, and we’re not going to get record deals playing other people’s hits all the time.’ It stuck with me. I’d started to write songs early on, but the bands I was in played covers. It just didn’t occur to us to do otherwise.” Petty’s writing was intermittent, done for no one but himself. As a practice, it was not yet the personal sanctuary it would become. What Felder was pointing to, however, was the practical value of having original material.
Jim Lenahan proved a good audience for Petty’s early songs. “There were great bands, like Ron and the Starfires, great bands with great singers,” Lenahan says. “But they just didn’t see the point in writing their own songs. And they never went anywhere. Part of the reason I wanted to be in Mudcrutch was because I knew Petty was writing songs. And I thought they were good songs.” Lenahan also had a car, and Petty didn’t. It put them in a lot of contact. Petty didn’t so much know it, but he needed someone to listen. On your own, it was never easy to gauge what you had. Lenahan listened and didn’t tell Petty to stop.
With no job and without the Ruckers’ apartment as a place to go since the brothers had left the band, Petty was back to sleeping in the bunk bed at his parents’ house. Years earlier, he and Bruce Petty took turns sitting on the hallway kerosene heater before school. It got cold in the North Florida winters. That’s where they’d eat their breakfast. Now, with Tom out of school and out of work, Bruce Petty had his brother back again. But they didn’t see each other in the hallway. Tom slept late, came in late. It wasn’t much more than a bed that he needed. But, depending on what kind of place his girlfriends had and how things were going with those girlfriends, it was important backup.
The members of Mudcrutch wouldn’t find out until years later that Buster Lipham, Petty’s former boss at Lipham Music, had discouraged more than a few musicians from answering the ad Mudcrutch had posted at the store. Randall Marsh was one of them. When he saw “drummer wanted,” he ran it past the store manager. Buster told Randall that he shouldn’t get involved, that those guys weren’t going anywhere. For whatever reason, Randall didn’t listen. When Randall Marsh walked into the Mudcrutch world, he came with a rehearsal spot, a rented farmhouse where he lived with a few other guys. That farmhouse gave Petty a place to work with the band but also a place to hide out.
No time was wasted—Mudcrutch was setting up the gear at Marsh’s farm a mile outside of town the night after his audition, ready to rehearse, when they heard one of Marsh’s roommates running scales in the next room. “We looked at Randall,” says Lenahan, “and said, ‘Tell him to come out. Let’s hear him.’ So Mike Campbell comes out with the worst guitar I have ever seen in my life. It looked like it had been cut out of a door. He was super skinny, just looked unhealthy. He plugged into Leadon’s amp. We asked if he could play ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ He ripped into that opening, and our jaws dropped. By the end of the song, we said, ‘You’re in our band now.’ He said, ‘No, I’m in school.’ But Petty had a powerful gift when it came to fixing problems like that.” It was, in Petty’s words, “an amazing stroke of good luck and fate.” They were a five piece again.
The new Mudcrutch started playing gigs right away. After one of those early shows, the band was packing up their gear when Amy Gunderson, a girl Petty dated on and off, rushed in to tell Petty about a car accident in which his family had been involved. “Someone went to Amy, and she found me, told me, ‘You gotta go home,’” remembers Petty. “I think we were playing at the American Legion Hall.” He let the others finish with the gear and got Amy to drive him to the house.
Bruce Petty had been sleeping in the backseat of the car when it happened. Earl was driving. It was afternoon, but Earl had already been drinking—though his family says not a lot. Families have a way of tidying up the place before guests arrive. Kitty Petty was in the front seat beside her husband, not happy about him getting into the booze that early in the day. They were driving over the crest of a hill when they rear-ended a car that had stopped in the middle of the road. You could argue that—no matter the drink—this wasn’t Earl’s fault. And they did.
Bruce’s body hit the seat in front of him so hard that the frame beneath the vinyl buckled into a U-shape. Everyone was knocked out cold by the impact. After the crash and the moment of stillness that followed, Bruce Petty was the first to come to. He looked around, at first thinking his parents, unconscious, their heads bloodied, were dead. A couple of bottles had rolled out from under the front seat, and he instinctively threw them into the woods. The police came, and an ambulance was there not long after.
The rescue team got Earl and Kitty into the ambulance, which quickly pulled away. After that, the few people who had stopped at the scene of the accident also left. Then the police. Their report said nothing about the driver’s condition. Neither did it mention that, with everyone else gone from the scene of the accident, Bruce Petty was still there, apparently forgotten. He stood there for a few minutes before a stranger pulled up. Seeing a kid standing around a wrecked car, the driver asked Bruce if he was okay. That was how he got home.
By the time the eldest Petty boy got to the house, Bruce was home, and his parents had already been released from the hospital. “I went in, and I don’t know how much information I picked up walking across the front room,” Petty recalls, “but I said I wanted to see my mother right away. My grandmother was there, and she said, ‘This is really bad. I don’t know if you should go in to see her.’ But I said, ‘Look, I’m going in.’ And I did, and it was devastating. I came out and said, ‘Why isn’t she in the hospital? This doesn’t look right to me.’ My grandmother said that the hospital had sent her home, that the doctor would see her tomorrow. My dad had been in the crash, of course. They were coming back from a fishing trip. He had a cut on his forehead, was just kind of zoned out, not saying anything. My grandmother, who hated him, was like, ‘Look at him. He’s acting like something happened to him.’ I just thought, ‘This is fucked.’”
After the accident, Kitty Petty’s health further declined. Between the cancer and the epilepsy, she had already lived too much time behind a closed door. But the accident took her deeper into her bedroom. “My mother was never herself again,” Petty says. “I was losing her, and it was awful. I was internalizing it, trying to deal, at least the best way I could. I knew I had to just keep pushing ahead, get more and more independent. It was like I really realized then that, you know, ‘I’m going to have to look after myself, because there’s nobody here that’s going to do it.’” The other band members knew almost nothing about what was going on at Petty’s home.