There’s nothing more rewarding than a fresh set of problems.
—DONALD BARTHELME
It was 2007, and Danny Roberts was mad as hell. And he didn’t have any interest in keeping a lid on it. For those who wanted to hear, he was ready to tell his side of things. Of course, if the Internet is your megaphone, you can always find someone to listen and sign off on your rant. The World Wide Web can even offer the impression that people give a shit. Roberts was ready to storm the castle where Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were surely living well. It became an obsession for him. Even he had to admit that little could have stopped him, short of a massive car accident a few months later, which left him hospitalized for a number of weeks.
It was the Heartbreakers documentary, Runnin’ Down a Dream, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, that pissed him off. Not that Roberts was an ambassador of goodwill before that—he’d allowed himself to talk shit about Tom Petty on more than one occasion, well in advance of the film’s release. But the documentary provided him with a new platform. For the first time, the Mudcrutch part of the Heartbreakers’ history was given a close study. And nowhere in it was there mention of Danny Roberts’s contribution or participation. But the more compelling point of friction went beyond that: a band promo shot, originally featuring the five members of Mudcrutch, the five members that comprised the group during Roberts’s tenure, had been doctored. Through whatever means, airbrushing or creative “cropping,” Danny Roberts was removed from the photo. In effect, he’d been erased from a story that was part of who he was. It went beyond embarassment. It was, in his view, an affront. Why, he asked? And no answers came his way.
* * *
Tom Leadon’s absence from Mudcrutch was conspicuous. Every time someone left the band, it lost momentum. It was like a string of divorces. Too many of those and marriage itself can seem a folly. The band needed a collective faith in its mission. Leadon’s departure meant another “musician wanted” note on the Lipham Music board. Losing a member, whether he was fired or he quit, brought on a low burning anxiety. Only when a new member joined would that anxiety be lifted. The right choice could even throw off an energy that would make a crowded Ford Econoline a better place to be. For a time.
Mudcrutch remained alert, considering possible replacements, looking at other bands and thinking about who they might try to steal. There was a danger of fatigue settling in or of band members considering other ways to burn through their twenties. Not that long before Leadon’s departure Mike Campbell had been talked out of going to college—but he could always reverse his thinking.
Whoever joined the band had to be all in. From where Mudcrutch stood, it appeared that Don Felder and Bernie Leadon had walked through the golden gates. The Eagles were both a symbol of possibility and an uncomfortable reminder of where Mudcrutch was: shackled to a schedule of local gigs, with the same faces looking up at them from the same small dance floors. They needed someone in the band who was as interested in changing that as they were. No part-timers. You share the dream and the taxes imposed on those who chase it.
Benmont Tench heard about Mudcrutch losing Jim Lenahan. He was away at boarding school, Phillips Exeter Academy, when he got the news from a friend, Stewart Powers, who kept him updated on the Gainesville scene. Phillips Exeter was considered one of the very best secondary schools in the country, a seat of privilege. Abraham Lincoln sent his son there. Gore Vidal and George Plimpton were Exeter students. Daniel Webster went there in the eighteenth century, Mark Zuckerberg in the twenty-first. Tench, the son of a Gainesville judge, may have shared a town with Petty but not a whole lot more.
While in New Hampshire at school, Tench read the letters Powers sent describing Mudcrutch as a “cool band in town.” But a later mention regarding Jim Lenahan’s departure was less optimistic. “The drag is that the singer quit,” Powers wrote, “and now the bass player, Petty, is singing, and he’s not nearly as good.” When Tench came home on a break, another of his Gainesville friends, Sandy Stringfellow, coaxed the underage Tench into going out to Lake City to see Mudcrutch play. By that time evicted from Mudcrutch Farm, the band, still a four piece, had relocated to Lake City and were doing a residency at a bar that required them to wear bolo ties and white cowboy shirts. Stringfellow was helping Mudcrutch with their gear and managed to sneak Tench into the club. “They were really, really good,” Tench remembers. “These were older guys that we looked up to because there were girls around them like crazy. They were very opinionated and seemed to know what they were talking about when it came to music. One of the guitar players had a brother in the Flying Burrito Brothers. And they played the shit out of ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy.’”
Some weeks later, Stringfellow again called Benmont Tench, this time to see if he wanted to get onstage with Mudcrutch at Dub’s. “I knew some of these guys from Lipham’s,” says Tench, “but I can’t tell you when I first met Petty. Maybe when I was twelve or so. He was one of a bunch of older kids hanging around the store. They had their hair combed down in the front like the Beatles. And if you’re in Florida, you’ve got humidity to deal with. Your hair’s gonna flip up and curl and do all this stuff. These guys managed to keep that under control. They were intimidating. They were fifteen, sixteen. I assumed they were up to no good.”
The question in Tench’s mind when Sandy called about the Dub’s gig, however, was whether it was worth the hassle of packing his Farfisa organ into his mother’s car. He suspected that the band was inviting him because Sandy had intervened on his behalf. Mudcrutch knew David Mason and Trantham Whitley, the two best keyboard players in town. “They were just bored,” Tench insists. “I think they were like, ‘He can play all right, and he’s friends with Sandy, and we’re bored out of our fucking skulls. Let’s do something different.’” It could have gone either way, but Tench decided to load his instrument into the car, along with a little Fender Princeton Reverb. When he got up there, he played the rest of the night. “It was so damn much fun. After that, they started calling me to sit in with them. A couple nights after I played Dub’s, I got up with the band at the University of Florida auditorium. Lynyrd Skynyrd opened up the show.” By that time, however, Tench had been accepted to Tulane University and was due to leave Gainesville for New Orleans in the fall. As his parents had conveyed, “That’s what you do.”
Tench was away at Tulane when he got word that Mudcrutch was a three piece, that Tom Leadon was out. Home on break, he went to see the results of the downsizing, making his own pronouncement: “They were a terrible three piece.” Petty disagrees. Regardless, at that moment, Tench wouldn’t have guessed he would feel compelled to join the band. And local fans wouldn’t have assumed that Petty would emerge as the band’s unequivocal leader. Anyone who says they saw the glory coming has probably forgotten that they didn’t.
* * *
The earlier Mudcrutch Farm Festivals were a good moment for the band. With Leadon and Lenahan still in the group, the festivals were the hillbilly cousin of Monterey Pop, of Woodstock. No longer was young Gainesville about AM radio, TV variety shows, and teen dances. It was about smoking dope and hanging out on lawns watching bands play long versions of short songs. Mudcrutch catered to these needs with their self-promoted shows, organic in conception and enormously popular, pulling in thousands at their peak. But the Farm Festivals came and went quickly, after the third occurrence.
The Rose Community Center concerts, however, the brainchild of Bruce Nearon, shared the spirit of the festivals while based at the university and on better terms with the police. Charles Ramirez, who collaborated with Nearon, still feels like there’s a little too much of Dub’s in the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers story. “It’s always ‘Dub’s this and Dub’s that,’” Ramirez complains. “I understand why the band would remember Dub’s. I mean, you don’t play a place five or six nights a week without remembering it. And that experience certainly made them tight. It probably doesn’t hurt that Dub had naked dancing girls on the stage. I’m sure the band remembered that. But there’s another thing about Dub’s: he’d fire you if you played anything original. He was a businessman, selling drinks. He would do whatever it took to sell drinks. If a band playing top-forty hits and topless dancers sold drinks, then that’s what he was gonna provide. When we put on shows, we were just the opposite. We wanted bands that did originals. We encouraged that. We were putting on concerts. We weren’t a bar. We gave local bands a way of seeing themselves as something more.”
The Rose Community Center shows started as a fund-raising mechanism for a student architecture project. Bruce Nearon wanted to turn the old movie theater in Gainesville’s black neighborhood, the Rose Theater, into a community center. It was a Quonset hut, owned by a local family. The university approved the project. But it would cost fifty thousand dollars to see it through. With his roomate, Ramirez, Nearon decided to promote some shows to raise the money. The Rose Community Center was never completed. Or started, for that matter. But Nearon and his team became the local promoters who fit the spirit of the moment. Licensed as a student organization, Rose Community Center put on some of that era’s best-remembered concerts. The second one they ever promoted was the inaugural Halloween Masquerade Ball, held outdoors at the university’s Plaza of the Americas. The university chapter of the Yippies helped organize it. They got the university’s approval to start the show at midnight and go until 4:00 a.m. Five thousand people attended.
Danny Roberts was in the group Power, the headliner of that first Halloween Masquerade Ball. Before Power, he’d been in a few other groups in the Lakeland area. He was no different than Petty, Leadon, the Ruckers, Don Felder, and so many more. A different Florida town but the same story.
Power was playing shows with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, the original Fleetwood Mac featuring Peter Green, Delaney and Bonnie, James Gang. They even opened a handful of shows on Black Sabbath’s first US tour. It was no surprise that the Rose Community Center wanted Power for its first Halloween Ball. “They were really good, like Cream,” says Mike Campbell. “Danny Roberts was playing bass, and they had this guitar player named Donnie ‘Dumptruck’ Hanna. He was scary, intimidating, he was so good. Great stage presence. He’d do this thing where he’d sit down, play bass pedals from an organ, harmonica, and guitar. All at once. A one-man-band kind of thing. I thought, ‘This guy’s fucking amazing.’”
Power knew as well as any band that the reason to make it in Florida was to get out of Florida. With regional success confirmed, they chose New York as their next proving ground and went up to play on a bill with NRBQ and Dreams, a jazz fusion act that included Will Lee, the Brecker Brothers, and Billy Cobham. They went over well and were quickly offered more shows. But it may be that band members don’t really begin to know one another until they get out of town. Donnie Dumptruck showed the others a little something about himself when he said that, in fact, he couldn’t stay in New York for any further performances. He had some students in Winter Haven who had booked guitar lessons with him for the next week. He didn’t want to have to reschedule. Two-thirds of Power felt sure a band shouldn’t drive from Florida to New York just to turn around again after one show. Power was finished.
Roberts was back in Florida within weeks, quickly joining his brother in a Fort Lauderdale band. “The drummer of that band went on to be in Quiet Riot,” Roberts says. “We were called … What was the name of that band? I’ll think of it.” Arriving at a club gig, one of the band members shut the car door on Roberts’s finger. And that one ended without a whole lot of glory attached. He was unable to play for six months.
Bruce Nearon knew that Power had split up. He figured he’d call Roberts, see if he wanted to put something together for the second annual Halloween Masquerade Ball. He didn’t know about the finger. Mudcrutch was headlining, playing as a three piece. Road Turkey, future Heartbreaker Stan Lynch’s and Marty Jourard’s band, was also on the bill. Roberts was still healing, but he figured he’d do a solo thing, play some blues numbers, get himself back into the scene. Mudcrutch was coming on after him. In the window between Roberts’s set and the Mudcrutch performance, Roberts moved the little bit of gear he’d brought. “I was carrying my stuff from the stage to the stairwell, and they were coming up the stairs. Tom comes up and goes, ‘Hey, wanna join our band?’”