Through the freak we derive an image of the normal; to know an age’s typical freaks is, in fact, to know its points of standardization.
—SUSAN STEWART
A little more than a year after being kicked out of Mudcrutch, Jim Lenahan left Gainesville for Orlando and a job at Disney World. He’d gone to college, learned a few things about the theater, and from there it was a matter of considering where and how he might apply his accumulated knowledge. Disney World was still show business, right? He could come back to Gainesville on weekends, see his girlfriend, Alice, and do lights for whatever band was playing the University of Florida Rathskeller. It had been long enough since he had been fired from Mudcrutch that he had outlasted any lingering ill will and worked with the group when he could, including the second Halloween Ball on the Plaza of the Americas. Then the fuel shortages came.
“The Arab oil embargo hit, the first one, and nobody was coming to Florida,” Lenahan says. “Disney World makes all their money from people driving down from the North. And no one was driving because they didn’t know if they could get gas. Ticket sales plummeted, and they laid off twenty thousand employees in one fell swoop. And they did it by seniority. I’d been there for, what, three months? Which isn’t a whole lot of seniority.” Lenahan took a job on the night shift at the Magic Market and moved back in with his mother. The wee hours at the Magic Market adjusted his view of the future. His American dream was looking soiled.
Working his shift one night, no customers in the store, Gainesville quiet, his mind not so much restless as turned off, Lenahan saw someone coming into the store. “Tom Petty walks into the Magic Market,” he recalls. “He’s with maybe Danny or Randall, and says something like, ‘We got six offers. You’re the stage manager. We leave next week.’ Drops it like a bomb. Of course, I’m working at Magic Market. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Stage manager? For a band with no shows booked?’ I was like everyone else. If Petty had room in that dream for me, I wasn’t going to let reality stand in the way.”
Keith McAllister and his girlfriend, Ramie, Benmont Tench, Mike Campbell, Randall Marsh, Danny Roberts, Jim Lenahan, Tom Petty, and Jane Benyo. With cash to get them so far from Gainesville that turning back would make less sense than pushing on, they planned the journey. They had one small truck, Danny’s van, and a station wagon that Benmont’s mother gave him. Oil embargo be damned. Then, in the midst of all the packing, Petty married Jane Benyo.
“I married Jane right before we came out to California,” says Petty. “I think it was a week before we left. We’d been going out for a while, didn’t officially live together, but I spent a lot of time at her apartment. She shared a place with Jim Lenahan’s girlfriend, Alice, who would later become his wife. And we got along good, but she was adamant that we get married before we leave.” Jane Benyo was tall, blond, with pronounced cheekbones like her boyfriend. They’d been together on and off for more than a year. In Gainesville, to some eyes, they seemed like a matched set. “She was a good rock-and-roll girlfriend to him,” says Mike Campbell, “really behind what he wanted to do. For a long time.” Benyo had picked the right time to insist that they marry. Petty’s view of the future was oriented around a single point on the horizon. A record deal was almost in his hands. It was all he saw. And if that deal could happen, after the long years of working toward it, surely everything else could fall in behind it. He could barely sleep. If there was any moment in which marriage might have seemed like not such a big deal, it was this one. He could roll the concept of marriage into the whole glorious picture. That’s all he was being asked to do. But it wasn’t love that was keeping him up at night.
“I’ve given it a lot of thought,” says Petty, “and I think it was a bit of a conspiracy between Jane, my mother, and my grandmother. I think Jane wanted to find a way to make sure I didn’t elbow her out of the picture. And my mother was a Christian woman. Jane was going over there a lot, hanging out, talking to them. Jane’s rap to me was, ‘What’s the difference? We’re going to be together anyway. This way everyone will be happy.’ And in her mind, we were already married. But I didn’t want to do it. I was very vocal about it, too. On the first trip to the church, I jumped out of the car and tried to run away. Then my mother called me and said she wanted me to come over to the house. I did, and she said, ‘Listen, for my sake, please get married before you go out there. It’s the right thing to do.’” Petty honored his mother’s request. Then he got back to what he’d been doing. It was done in haste, under pressure, without a lot of thought.
* * *
They were outside of Keith McAllister’s, loading the truck, when the phone rang and Petty went inside to get it. “I thought it was someone calling about a car we had for sale,” Petty says. “But it’s Denny Cordell. He’d heard the demo we dropped off at Shelter Records in LA. He tells me he wants to sign the group, that we’re like the next Rolling Stones. Well, I knew who Denny Cordell was, that he’d done the Joe Cocker records and “A Whiter Shade of Pale” for Procol Harum. But I had to tell him that we already promised London Records that we’d sign with them. Of course, Denny was the real thing, a man of the record business, and he wasn’t going to let that become an issue.”
Cordell convinced Petty to bring his caravan through Tulsa, where Shelter had its Church Studio and Cordell could meet the group. Tulsa may not have had the glamour of Hollywood, but Petty knew that Cordell’s partner, Leon Russell, was the king of Tulsa. And that they made records out there. And that some of those records became hits. When he went back outside where they were packing things into the vehicles, everyone liked the idea. A lot.
Denny Cordell and Leon Russell ran a record company much the way Russell put together Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, which was basically a hippie commune on wheels. The Mad Dogs and Englishmen experience would stand as a kind of summit of seventies excess, with three drummers and a choir and endless hangers-on. But Russell’s and Cordell’s careers started well before that. Leon Russell had been a member of the Wrecking Crew, playing on Phil Spector records, Beach Boys and Byrds records, Monkees and Paul Revere and the Raiders records. He’d been a member of the Shindogs, the house band on television’s Shindig! He’d had his own hits and seen his songs become hits for other artists, from Gary Lewis and the Playboys to the Carpenters. When George Harrison organized the Bangladesh concert, he called Russell, who helped put the band together. At those shows, Russell stood out like the natural star he was.
Denny Cordell had worked with Chris Blackwell at Island Records when Island was just beginning its ascent. Cordell’s production of the Moody Blues’ debut led to the number one UK hit “Go Now,” after which he left Blackwell’s label, though the two would remain good friends. In quick succession, he then worked with Georgie Fame, the Move, Procol Harum, and Joe Cocker.
Cordell and Russell pooled their significant creative and business backgrounds to form Shelter Records. As the seventies got under way, they were hot. It’s little surprise that when Cordell got Mudcrutch to Tulsa, he helped them forget London Records. The members of Mudcrutch parked their caravan, found Cordell at the diner where he’d suggested they meet, and liked the man instantly. Whether it was his history as a record maker, his natural charisma, or the three thousand dollars in cash that he pressed into Petty’s hand, he convinced Mudcrutch to become a Shelter act. If Denny’s interest in them was benevolent in many respects, he did suggest the band get a lawyer.
Cordell brought Mudcrutch straight into one of Shelter’s Tulsa recording studios. There were two, one at Leon Russell’s sprawling house and another, on Third Street and Trenton Avenue, called the Church Studio. The latter was where Mudcrutch would set up, after spending their first night in a local motel. Built in 1913 for the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, it was a large place, taking up a good part of the block, and had gotten a makeover from Leon Russell the year before. Whatever Cordell was hoping to see once he got in there with Mudcrutch, it must have revealed itself. After only a day in the Church, he gave them Shelter’s LA address and told them to go to Los Angeles. “He was sold on us, and we were sold on him,” says Petty. “London Records looked cool to us, but the guy over there was an executive. Cordell made records, records that were a big deal. Shelter was this label run by a couple of renegades, artists, guys who were actually out there finding music and cutting records. We didn’t need to deliberate.”
As with any other young band, they thought that the hardest part was now over. They’d played for years, working toward this. They’d been advanced some money on a handshake basis, would sign a contract once settled in Los Angeles, and had a producer with hits to his credit. They’d cut some tracks in Leon Russell’s studio, and now they would drive to Los Angeles and go straight to their record company’s office, where, after a few nights in a questionable motel, they would get two houses in the San Fernando Valley part of Los Angeles, with swimming pools. “When we were in that motel in East Los Angeles, the Hollywood Premiere Hotel, Jane told me she was pregnant,” says Petty. “We’d just gotten to LA, and she tells me this. She must have known back in Gainesville. My mother probably knew, too. She’d probably stopped taking her pills is what I think. I just kept looking ahead, which was all I could do, really. There was so much happening at once. I couldn’t possibly know what it all meant. A lot of musicians I’ve known have run when that flag went up.” Everyone in Mudcrutch, Petty included, figured that all they had to do now was make records. No one understood that getting a record contract was the equivalent of having a lottery ticket in hand—it felt too much like winning the lottery itself.
The Shelter office was in a building down at the end of Hollywood Boulevard, east of Western Avenue. “A big one-story house. That was the record company,” Petty explains. “There were a lot of rooms, and one big hallway through it. The publishing division was over on the left. There was a big reception area. Then it was different people’s offices as you went down the hall to the back porch that had been turned into Cordell’s office. Next door was a huge building, two stories, that was also Shelter’s, and where they’d later build a studio. We went to Shelter every day, just hung out. We knew everybody. We hung with them on weekends, fucked all the secretaries. It was that kind of thing, where everybody was friends and pulling for everybody else.” Once settled, the band was ready to work. And then everything slowed down.
Cordell was sitting with Petty, playing records for him, making him think about where Mudcrutch fit in the world, making him write. “I remember one time we finished working,” says Petty, “and Denny rolled in—this was in the really early days—and he came by and said, ‘Come on, we’re gonna hit some clubs.’ I was like, ‘Man, I’m tired.’ Denny goes, ‘Mick Jagger doesn’t do a gig and put on his slippers afterwards. Let’s go.’ And off we went. I reckon he probably knew it would be a year before I was going to be ready. I think he got that I just wasn’t there yet, that he’d have to coax it out of me. We didn’t know how far off we were.”
But Cordell took to Petty. “We listened to a lot of music,” Petty remembers. “It’d be six o’clock, and I would’ve been hanging around Shelter all day, and I’d go to his office. We’d smoke some dope, and he’d go, ‘Hey man, you ever hear Lloyd Price?’ And I often didn’t know what he was playing me. I’d never had the money to buy that many records. And his collection was huge. He’d play it and be telling me, ‘Bass and drums is the foundation of every record you like. You get that right, make a groove, and it’s gonna work.’ The groove, that was his focus. It’s like Duck Dunn told me later, kinda rolling his eyes, watching an engineer try to make something sound perfect: ‘Did you ever hear four guys really playing good together sound bad?’ Denny was working on the fundamentals, the stuff you have to learn before you can really make your way from the stage to the recording studio. But he was also teaching me something about taste. ’Cause if you have good taste, then you at least know what you’re chasing, right? But that meant that sometimes there’d be a record I liked, but I’d play it for him, and he’d go, ‘That’s bullshit.’ I’d be like, ‘Really?’ He’d say, ‘No, it’s not speaking to me. It’s not real.’ Then I’d have to go figure out what the hell he meant. And he was always right.”
The band’s other singer, Danny Roberts, worked the record company from a different angle, quickly finding a girlfriend in the Shelter office. From the time of their arrival, Roberts seemed to be operating at a remove from the rest of the band. The money Mudcrutch got from the record label each month, intended for rent and food, was split equally among the band members. But, in Petty’s recollection, Roberts parked his VW in the driveway of one of the two houses and felt this would exempt him from paying rent. He’d sleep in his vehicle. “I guess the idea was that he’d use the bathroom when he needed it,” Petty says, smiling, “and we’d offer that as a complimentary service.” If accurate, it wasn’t exactly the all-for-one-and-one-for-all mentality. But the trouble went beyond questions relating to bathroom rental. Roberts wanted to bring his own songs into the recording studio. As Mudcrutch started the first of their several recording sessions, Roberts wasn’t getting the response he hoped for from Cordell. “I just felt like Danny wasn’t getting exactly where we wanted to go,” Petty says. “There was one song of his we were doing that Cordell went cold on, but Danny kept insisting that this song would make sense when he put the guitar solo on. Cordell just said, kind of flatly, ‘Oh, really? I’ve never seen that happen before.’”
With mattresses on the floors and lawn furniture in the living rooms of their houses, the band was in some in-between world. They weren’t playing shows because they didn’t have any recordings or any audience. Clubs like the Starwood and the Whisky weren’t an option for a band unless it had a record that was getting some attention or a local following. Van Halen passed out flyers at nearby high schools, and that worked for them. They’d be stars in the LA clubs. At one point Mudcrutch cut a demo of other people’s hits, because someone at London Records had earlier suggested they could make extra money in LA playing as a cover band. But with material like Bobby Bland’s version of “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination,” they were not moving toward the top forty. And their hearts weren’t in it—that was too close to where they were coming from, a step back. Cordell took them to the Village Recorders to begin making a record, but Petty describes it as “a complete disaster.” What would eventually be the first and only Mudcrutch single on Shelter, “Depot Street,” came out of those sessions.
Through his association with Chris Blackwell, Cordell knew his Jamaican music, how good much of it was, and what made the best of it work. He also recognized that reggae was about to explode on the international market. “We didn’t know anything about reggae,” explains Danny Roberts. “But Denny got us together in the studio, me and Mike, and he shows us these reggae rhythms, Mike a guitar part and me a bass part. He’s like, ‘Play it like this. And you play it like this.’ We’d gone through it probably thirty feaking times. Then we’re about a quarter of the way through a take and in walks Joe Cocker and Henry McCullough, his guitar player, the guy who was with him at Woodstock. They’re trying to be real quiet. But we see who it is. Holy shit! Couldn’t believe it. But we kept playing, and that was the take of ‘Depot Street’ we used.”
Denny set up a meeting to play “Depot Street” for the staff at Shelter. They all gathered in the main meeting room, where Cordell could turn it up, get his staff a little excited. But when the moment arrived, with the song cued up and the staff ready to listen, it wasn’t “Depot Street” they heard when someone pressed play. Danny Roberts’s in-house girlfriend, Andrea, had switched the tape for another recording, one of Roberts’s compositions. The couple awkwardly played it off as a bad prank, but Roberts obviously wanted more for himself and wasn’t getting it. Cordell, annoyed, asked that the correct tape be put into the machine, and the meeting carried on.
There was some satisfaction for Petty in having a song that seemed, to most of the staff, like a single ready for release. But it was a muted satisfaction. The record would go out, radio would be serviced, and nothing would happen. “To me ‘Depot Street’ was a novelty record,” says Petty. “I was hearing reggae for the first time, because Denny and Chris Blackwell had gone over and signed everyone in Jamaica and bought all their publishing. And they’d put out The Harder They Come and these seminal reggae records. From the time I hit town, reggae was everywhere. And I loved it. I just never thought I’d be doing it. But it was the only thing worth listening to from that session at the Village Recorders. Cordell loved it, and it got put out as a single, but, after that, Denny had to kind of sit down with us and say, ‘Hey, you gotta work on being a recording band, on figuring that out. And you need more songs. When you get songs, we’ll record.’” Around that same time, the Dwight Twilley Band also signed to Shelter. Mudcrutch watched them make a record, release it, and score a hit. Nothing was so easy for Mudcrutch.
For his part, Danny Roberts’s recollections are sometimes at odds with Petty’s, though not in every way. No one denies that Denny Cordell was less than enchanted with Randall Marsh as a drummer. But producers and drummers are, more often than not, the ones who will feel the friction first when things aren’t working in the studio. Roberts, however, makes more of the issue. “I kept hearing from Andrea how displeased Denny was,” he says. “And that if he was displeased with Randall, he was just as bothered by us for not doing anything about it. That was why he quit coming to sessions. So at one point, we were recording at Producer’s Workshop, going through songs and songs and songs, not getting anything. And I put down my bass and just left. It was right down the street from Shelter, so I went down there, just sat down on a couch, and thought about what the hell was going on here. That was when I got on the phone and called Marty Jourard so that I could get Stan Lynch’s number. And Marty says, ‘I can do one better—Stan’s right here!’ And Stan was interested in this idea of joining Mudcrutch.”
Roberts insists that no one else in Mudcrutch was taken with his plan to replace Randall Marsh with Stan Lynch. He brought the idea to Keith McAllister first, which might be the most telling sign of where Roberts sat with his bandmates. When he did take the idea to the band, no one agreed, he claims. “Had that one issue been dealt with,” Roberts insists, “I would’ve been very happy to stay in the band and just do the thing, because it was really cool. But no one was with me, and I said, ‘Well, then I guess I’m going to go back to Florida for a bit.’ And that was it.” Roberts insists that not long after he left, the band called him five days in a row, begging him to return. Even Denny Cordell, he says, reached out in a vain effort to bring him back. But no one else can or does confirm that part of the story. “I have no memory of that happening,” Petty says. “I remember him leaving and giving a speech about Ringo doing one of his songs, Johnny Cash doing one. We were a little pissed at Andrea for filling Danny with all this bullshit. We were playing the Shelter Christmas party the day he told us. We did the gig. Campbell was fuming. I think Danny would have walked here from Florida if Denny Cordell had called him to come back.” When asked about the call Roberts made to ask him about joining Mudcrutch, Stan Lynch says he has no memory of receiving such a call. In the end, the stories of Roberts’s final days are confused, tangled in frayed memories.
At Cordell’s suggestion, Mudcrutch went back to Tulsa to do some recording in a studio that wouldn’t cost the company extra money. “We all flew to Tulsa, but Denny only stayed a day,” says Petty. “He told the engineer to take care of us, told us to learn all we could. And he left us there. We cut ‘I Can’t Fight It,’ ‘Cry to Me,’ the Solomon Burke song, I think. It was a lot of trial and error. But with Danny gone, nobody sang but me. And I wanted another singer in the band. Even then I didn’t want to be the only one. And we needed another writer. And harmony singing. I mean, no one was thinking this was a Tom Petty thing. Maybe Cordell. But I wasn’t. It was awkward, though, because I wrote songs on the guitar, and now I was stuck on bass all the time. I’d have to teach someone else my guitar part. We needed a solution of some kind. That’s when we called Charlie Souza, the bass player who had been in the Tropics.”
Souza had been a hero to the teenage Petty. “The Tropics were really good,” Petty says. “Great vocals. And Charlie was a really good bass player. When I’d go to see them, I’d think, ‘Man, this band is on fire.’ They just did the hits of the day, but they did them real good.” The call came out of nowhere. Souza was playing in a bar with his band Bacchus, a power trio he’d formed with Tropics guitar player Eric Turner. Petty asked him if he wanted to come out to LA and sent him a copy of “Depot Street.”
“It sounded like a pretty good record,” Souza recalls. “But I was playing Hendrix stuff with Eric Turner, so it was like a little pop song to me. But I thought it would be adventurous if I went out there to scope it out. They mailed me a plane ticket, and Tom picked me up at LAX in his little blue Opel, took me around to meet the guys. We went into rehearsals at a place on Lankershim Boulevard. Next thing I knew, I was in the band.” Souza flew home, met the equipment truck that picked up his furniture, and followed it out to LA, with his wife and cat traveling at his side. Stopping in Tulsa, Souza went into the studio with Mudcrutch, cutting “Don’t Do Me Like That” with the band. It had been written quickly, the tag phrase something Petty remembered his father saying. But Petty didn’t think there was anything to the track and quickly set it aside, forgetting about it. His focus was on writing more. When a song didn’t seem to make sense with the band, he didn’t linger unnecessarily. With Petty’s permission, Cordell later pitched it to the J. Geils Band when they were out looking for material, but the Boston group passed on the song.
In Tulsa for those few days, Mudcrutch picked up a show opening for Asleep at the Wheel. “It was a country bar,” Souza says. “Being in the Tropics, I was taught to do steps and jump around when I play. And I couldn’t give that up, no matter what band I was in. But that night, I ripped my pants right down the back. I was standing in front of Benmont’s keyboard, and he got the biggest kick out of it. I pulled my shirt down in the back to cover it, but still. Years later, I read something Benmont had written, something about, ‘Yeah, and he ripped his pants.’ Not that I played bass or sang great harmonies. I was the guy that ripped his pants.”
Back in LA, after the Tulsa sessions, the band set up at Leon Russell’s house. Without ever meeting Russell, Petty had been asked to house-sit for him, with the agreement that Mudcrutch could use the studio. In Petty’s view, the musical results weren’t particularly good. But they did get a song called “Hometown Blues.” Charlie Souza could get a few notes out of a saxophone, so Petty had him play a part, then put down a harmony. In the middle of the sessions, Souza did his best to convince Petty to cut a Souza original. “I tried,” Souza says. “It was one I wrote about a spaceman and a UFO coming down, called ‘Brother in the Sky.’ Tom thought I was nuts, so there was … there was a little edginess between us.”
“I was like, ‘Oh shit, this isn’t working.’ And he’d just moved here,” Petty says. “And he thinks he’s in the band. I mean, I guess he was in the band. But we were all thinking, ‘Maybe we just need to give it more time. He’s clearly a good player and a good singer, but he’s just not on our channel, you know?’” Nobody wanted the job of telling Souza he was out of the band. They deliberated long enough that, in the end, no one had to.
“I walked into Leon Russell’s house one day,” explains Souza, “and Tom says, ‘The band has broken up.’ I didn’t understand, couldn’t figure out why. It took me three or four decades to figure it out.” The other band members were almost as thrown. Cordell had timed out. He didn’t want to chase something that he wasn’t sure he’d get, something that, most likely, would end up costing him more than he felt like spending even if he did get it. The gamble wasn’t worth it. And the money that seemed like it would just keep coming from Shelter wasn’t.
“The band breaks up because Cordell calls me to the office one day and says, ‘We’re dropping the band. I have to drop the band because it’s taking too long and it’s too expensive,’” Petty recalls. “Then he tells me that he wants to keep me, that I’m under contract.” Not wanting to leave Mike Campbell behind, even though Cordell had promised to set Petty up with the best studio musicians in Los Angeles, Petty convinced Cordell to support them both as they worked on the music. “I asked Mike to please not leave,” says Petty. “But then I had to let everyone else know what was happening. And Denny wasn’t going to be there—he had me do the dirty work. It was one of the hardest days of my life. But I went over there to Leon’s house, where we all met, and I told them the band had just been dropped from Shelter.”