The humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness of these pictures!
—JACK KEROUAC
Charles Ramirez was working that Halloween Ball but didn’t pick up on the backstage changes to Mudcrutch personnel. Packs of hippies in costume, tripping on acid, proved a distraction. It only registered later. “We did a show with Mudcrutch once when they had a banjo player, a real hot picker, do the whole set with them,” says Ramirez. “They were really a true country-rock band. Then Tommy Leadon was gone, and Danny Roberts was playing guitar. I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ Then Benmont joins. By then, they were definitely more rock. I think Roberts probably brought that. Maybe that’s a direction everybody in that band wanted to go. But you wouldn’t have known it a year earlier.” If he didn’t say yes right away, Roberts wouldn’t take long to join Mudcrutch. Soon after he’d move to Gainesville. But no one, it seems, knew exactly what all the comings and goings meant.
“They told me they were really excited because Danny Roberts was a popular, well-known musician in the area,” Benmont Tench says. “He played bass and guitar, and they told me he sang like Gregg Allman. And I’m kind of thinking, ‘Well, I like the Allman Brothers. But that’s not what I like about Mudcrutch.’ But they were really enthusiastic. He certainly brought a lot to it, but, I mean, something wasn’t … I don’t know.” The idea was that Petty and Roberts would switch off on bass and guitar, playing guitar on the songs for which they sang lead. If you asked who the lead singer was, it wouldn’t have been easy for anyone to answer with confidence. For a minute there, Petty was.
“Danny Roberts was much more extroverted,” explains Marty Jourard. “He was essentially the lead singer in Power. And they were a big deal. He played wild guitar, good too, and he and Campbell really worked out a lot of two-guitar stuff.” Roberts had the more powerful, more obvious voice. Lenahan describes him as “a much more pro singer than Tom.” He covered the white soul and rock thing in ways that his bandmate couldn’t. Tapes from live shows at the time capture the situation. Petty’s voice is laid-back, a voice with personality that no one was quite ready to see as the unchallenged front-runner. Even Petty wasn’t sure—and you can hear that. “When they asked me to join the group,” Roberts insists, “they asked me to sing Tom’s stuff. I thought it was insane. But they said, ‘Tom’s got a funny voice.’” Given the transitional moment and the lack of assurance within Mudcrutch as to what should happen next, Roberts’s entrance affected the balance of the whole musical operation, without anyone really resisting it. Mudcrutch was only half-sure as to what exactly they were or what they should become. Roberts took them into a period that, eventually, they’d have to find their way out of.
This was the scene Benmont Tench faced when he finally joined Mudcrutch as a full-time member. “Benmont was a kind of nerdy little guy that would come watch us play,” recalls Mike Campbell. “He was from a very different world, wore glasses, a turtleneck, went to prep school, came from a rich family. I just thought, ‘Oh, he’s just a college kid, and we’re cool, out in the world with girlfriends, smoking pot and taking drugs and playing music. And then he played the piano. I was like, ‘Whoa!’ He could play circles around us.”
As a boy, Tench’s parents made him play with an egg timer on the piano, set for an hour, every day. He hated it, but it wasn’t his choice as to whether he did it or not. He made his hours count, however, traveling far and wide in what he played. “Even just the radio in the midsixties was amazing,” Tench says. “It could be ‘Busted’ by Ray Charles, or Sinatra doing ‘That’s Life’ into ‘Satisfaction’ into the Yardbirds doing ‘Over, Under, Sideways, Down.’ I suppose I latched onto some of that eclecticism.” At boarding school, starting in the fall of 1967, he heard John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and the other British blues acts that made him consider more deeply the South and its music. On trips home, he’d ask the family’s housekeeper about the black music he was discovering up north. “Her name was Elizabeth Joe,” he recalls. “I’d known her forever. She helped bring me up. I’d say to her, ‘This B. B. King record is amazing. Have you ever seen B. B. King?’ And she’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, he comes through here all the time. But you want to see Joe Tex. Joe Tex is the guy.’” It was a particular historical juncture, when southern children of privilege could have that relationship with the hired help. As Memphis producer and musician Jim Dickinson describes in Robert Gordon’s It Came from Memphis: “We all learned it from the yardman.”
“My parents were very smart, very well read. Intelligent but not effete. Not elitist, not snobs,” Tench explains. “Well, I mean, everybody’s a little snobbish about something, I suppose. They were a bit Anglophile. But I came out of it all not interested in anything but piano. Piano, reading books, and going to movies. I didn’t have any connection to that hunting and fishing culture around me. And I didn’t yet think that piano would help me connect with all these girls that didn’t even know I existed. It worked for other people but not for me. I remember a girl writing in my yearbook something like, ‘You play so great it makes me sick.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Well, that’s certainly a mixed message.’”
At Tulane University, Tench was an art major, because, in his words, “all rock musicians went to art school.” He would play with Mudcrutch when he could, but that wasn’t often. He was finishing his first year there when Petty called him at 2:00 a.m., after a gig in Naples, Florida. “I was cramming for an economics final,” Benmont explains. “The phone rings, and it’s Tom. He says, ‘We just played such and such a place.’ I’m like, ‘Cool.’ Then he says, ‘What are you doing?’ And I say, ‘I’m cramming for an economics final.’ He says, ‘No, what are you doing?’ And I go, ‘You’re right.’ I went home after that final and played with them all summer.”
When the bill arrived in the mail for the next year’s tuition, Tench’s parents wrote the check, unaware that their son had another plan. Tench’s sister headed back to college. She was at Newcomb College in New Orleans, the sister college to Tulane. It was conspicuous that her brother was still in Gainesville, sleeping late and coming in long after his parents had gone to bed, while she was starting her semester. “At first they wanted to know why my sister was starting and I wasn’t,” Tench recalls. “So I said, ‘Yeah, well, the guys register a week or two later than the women.’ That bought me maybe a day. Then all hell broke loose.” The judge told his son that if he wasn’t in college, he would need to find another place to live. No free room and board. “That’s when Tom came over to talk with my father,” laughs Tench. “I think he went into my father’s study. My dad had a study with his desk in it and a bunch of law books. I have no idea what Tom said. It was just the two of them. But my dad was a formidable character.”
“He was a judge,” Petty says. “So this wasn’t the crowd I usually hung with. But he heard me out, back there in his office, surrounded by books. Looking back, I’m not sure where I got the balls to do that kind of thing. But I just told him that this was all going to work out. There was a plan, I assured him.” But there wasn’t much of a plan, only a goal: to make records and sell them, to play shows in places other than Florida. Whatever happened in the judge’s study, however, worked. Tench still had a place to live at the end of that day. “I wasn’t there,” Tench says, “but I think Tom kind of said, ‘Look, this thing is going to work out. It’s gonna be really good. You don’t need to throw him out of the house.’ Mainly, I believe Tom didn’t want me to end up crashing on his couch.”
“Tom Petty,” Jim Lenahan insists, “is really good at getting people to quit school and join his band. He got Benmont to do it. He got me to do it. He got Mike to do it. He got a lot of people to quit college so they could be in his band.” With Benmont severing his ties with Tulane and the art student’s life, Petty needed to actualize the vision he’d shared with Judge Tench. A University of Florida student by the name of Mike Lembo wanted to help Mudcrutch do this. Self-described as “the kid who drove the van,” Lembo didn’t just drive the van; he owned it. The Mudcrutch family went through a growth spurt. No one was entirely sure what a manager was supposed to do, which gave Lembo a certain advantage. “We had no clue,” Petty says. “We assumed that a manager was there just to make sure we had gigs coming in. Long-range planning was beyond us at that point. The thing I really remember about Mike Lembo was shoes. He said, ‘You guys gotta get decent shoes. A decent pair of shoes can make your jeans look good.’ I’m thinking, ‘Hmmm. That does make sense.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t you buy us all shoes then?’ We all got these flashy shoes. He meant well, but he was in over his head.”
“Mike Lembo came off as being older than he actually was,” says Danny Roberts. “He was a real sharp talker and looked really slick. So he became our manager, helped us get a lot of things organized. He and Tom and I did a run all over Florida in his van, went to every club between Miami and Tallahassee. We booked a string of gigs. Then we played a string of gigs. By the time we were at the end of them, we were really tight. And that was the material we were going to record for the demo. We were hot on it.”
* * *
Most people don’t remember 1973 as the year President Richard Nixon was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. But it was that, among other things. It was also the year Congress voted to end funding for operations in Indochina, and the White House announced that it would continue bombing despite that congressional vote. It was the year the Watergate scandal got ugly. It was a season of distrust. More than ever before, the music on the radio seemed like one of the more reliable places to get your truths, whether they came from the Staple Singers or Mott the Hoople.
Within Mudcrutch, Petty was coming forward as the leader, not just by virtue of his singing and songwriting. “I think very few people are as ambitious as Tom Petty,” Mike Campbell says. “He just has that drive, always did. Thank God somebody in our group had that. Tom Leadon was ambitious, but nobody’s like Tom Petty.” When Leadon came back through Florida as a member of Linda Ronstadt’s band, it increased Petty’s concern that somehow he was getting left behind. Spending much of his time at his girlfriend Jane Benyo’s apartment, Petty would meet up with Danny Roberts and plan the band’s next move. “Tom kind of lived with Jane,” says Roberts. “His home was a few streets away, but he was mostly there. It was great. We’d meet every day at Tom and Jane’s, sit there and smoke cigarettes and herb, and then start playing songs and talking about what to do, how to do it. We started piecing together how we would make a demo and then do a trip out west and hit on this person, hit on that person. We went to Tom Leadon to see if he could help us out.”
Making the demo was the necessary first step. No label was going to want to see the band or hear them without some kind of decent recording in hand. Judge Tench’s living room became Mudcrutch’s recording studio. Rick Reed worked at Marvin Kay’s music store before opening his own stereo shop. Mudcrutch roadie Keith McAllister bought strings from Reed at Marvin Kay’s. By 1974, Reed had a 1973 Dodge Maxivan outfitted with a Stevenson mixer and an Ampex two-track recorder he’d roll in. He’d learned a few things about audio recording as a student at Oberlin, making money back home recording high school bands in the area, selling what he made in batches of a couple hundred. After pulling into the Tench driveway, he ran a snake from the van into the living room, working with McAllister to set up microphones. The band had just come off the run that Mike Lembo booked. They didn’t do much more than two or three takes of each song. After two days at the house and one day editing together a master, they were done. It was mostly Petty originals, though there was also “On the Street,” a Tench original, and “Once Upon a Time Somewhere,” a Petty/Tench cowrite, both of which Petty sang. Roberts took the lead on two of the eight tracks, “Mad Dog,” his own composition, and “Move Over Rover,” the other Tench song on the demo.
“We didn’t spend a lot of time working on songs as a band,” says Petty. “There was no really deep thinking about the material. No one was going, ‘Well, you know, that could be better lyrically.’ That just didn’t come up. If someone brought something in, we just did it. We weren’t aware how to make a great song. I was close but not ready.” Throughout the demo are moments where you can hear Mudcrutch being another band, whether in Roberts’s and Campbell’s Allman Brothers–inspired twin guitar parts, or Roberts’s Blood, Sweat, and Tears chord changes in “Mad Dog.” Still young and still so close to their apprenticeship as a cover band, they can’t be faulted for not knowing fully who they were. The playing is strong throughout. You can hear that Benmont Tench is already a highly evolved player, and the band doesn’t shy away from putting him right up front. When Campbell pulls away from Roberts’s guitar, his economy and taste show themselves. And Petty sings like he knows he’s meant to be there. It’s actually hard to believe that the band had any hesitations about making Petty the sole lead singer. And not everyone agrees that they did hesitate. A character comes out when Petty opens his mouth. You knew there was a story there.
The odd man out is Roberts. There’s no question that his playing and singing are as good as anyone’s in the band. He was their equal, maybe even one step ahead of some of them. But there’s little individuality in what he does. His two lead vocals, often difficult to understand, come off like he knows what he should sound like but not who he is. By contrast, Petty, perhaps only because he didn’t have the ability to be anyone other than himself, is already interesting. Eccentric, personal, with a certain confidence. The songs are only beginning to suggest where he’d take it, but there’s an emerging sense of who he is. The demo proves that Mudcrutch had songs and could play them and that there was someone there who could be a leader. “I don’t think it was that good,” says Petty. “There was a song called ‘She’s a Screamer’ that was just crap. Ben’s ‘On the Street’ was the best thing. There’s another song called ‘Making Some Noise’ that’s kind of a Mexican-sounding song about taking a girl to a rooster fight. None of it was that good.” Petty’s judgments aside, there was more than enough material to work with. But making a demo was the easy part. Now they had to get people to listen. They started sending tapes out to record companies.
It didn’t take long for the rejections to come in. Initially, that was all they got. But then they heard from Playboy Records. Hugh Hefner’s label had a hit with Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds’s “Don’t Pull Your Love.” Playboy was also at work on a record by Barbi Benton, Hefner’s girlfriend. It was a spotty operation. But its A&R man, Pete Welding, sent along a song-by-song analysis that excited Mudcrutch. No one at any other label had given the music that kind of close listen. If Welding’s scrutiny ultimately led to a rejection, it was a rejection so positive it was reason enough to start planning a road trip to meet the man. In Petty’s mind, Welding practically asked them to come west.
“The greatest trip of my life” is how Petty describes that trip to Los Angeles. It was Danny Roberts, Keith McAllister, and Petty, together in Roberts’s van, a Volkswagen bus outfitted to be a camper. It had an icebox. Roberts made some chili. They brought along a Coleman stove, an ounce of pot, some speed, and a few sandwiches. It was the year of the oil embargo, the beginning of a fuel crisis. They drove straight, with the exception of one longer stop when they were low on gas and had to get in a line, waiting until the pumps opened at seven the next morning. That and one run-in with the police.
“We got to that area where Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico are all really close,” says Roberts. “It was about two or three in the morning. We’d just smoked a joint, and all of a sudden there’s a ‘prepare to stop’ sign. So we stop, and this big Texan with a badge leans in the window and says, ‘So, which we smokin’?’” Roberts, who had been splitting the driving with McAllister and was at the wheel, was quick to say that it was Marlboros. But as soon as he said that, three other men stepped from the shadows to join the first policeman, and they started stripping the van, looking for whatever could be found. Petty, asleep until the side door opened and a policeman woke him, climbed out with the others. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, the three travelers knew that the pot was in the middle of a toilet paper roll that Roberts had put between two other rolls. And the speed was in his boot. Nothing was found. Toward the end of a long search, they began to think that they might indeed see Hollywood. They got back on the road, and smoked another joint to celebrate.
* * *
“The thing about LA was that it was exactly what I hoped it would be,” says Petty. “We drove down the streets and everywhere you looked were signs for record companies. MGM, RCA, Capitol, A&M. It was obvious that we had come to the right place.” They went by Playboy Records, but they were told that Pete Welding had left the company. Someone else in A&R listened but turned the tape machine off within thirty seconds. “I thought, ‘Shit, this isn’t going to be easy,’” Petty recalls. “But the fact is, we could just walk into these places, and a lot of the time, someone would listen. It certainly doesn’t happen like that anymore. A van from Florida rolls into town, and the guys driving it get meetings? That was another time.” In a telephone booth, looking through a phone book for record company addresses, Petty saw a piece of paper on the ground. For whatever reason, he picked it up. It was a list of twenty-five record labels and their numbers and addresses. Obviously, he wasn’t the first one to be out there doing this. His heart went in two directions, glad for the list but discouraged that he didn’t have an exclusive on this dream.
By the end of three days, they had interest from three labels. London Records was the most promising. It was a label everyone knew from Stones records. Capitol wanted them to record a demo. Why? They had one. MGM wanted them to do a single. Why? They wanted to make albums. London told them to go home and get their band. That made the most sense. “But, really, we just thought that if a label put out records,” Petty explains, “that was all we needed to know. We didn’t get that there was a difference between record companies.” Petty called home to tell the rest of the band. No one knew quite what to think. How could it have been that easy?
“Hollywood was … I mean, how does one describe that?” asks Danny Roberts. “We were kids from Florida. This was another world. We went to the Whisky because we’d always heard about the club. We go in, get a little booth. Holy shit! And it’s rocking. Then I hear a voice near us that sounds familiar. I listen for a few minutes, and then, finally, I have to get up and look over this little divider between the booths. It was Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, and Jesse Ed Davis. It was the only night we went out in Hollywood. And if that happens, I mean, do you think we wanted to go back to Gainesville to do anything more than pack our stuff?”