Up until 1981
“Straight Into Darkness” appears on the fifth Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers record, Long After Dark. There is a general consensus among fans, the record company, and the band itself that this album kind of sucked. The album was not mixed in a way that kept pushing the big-drum sound of Damn the Torpedoes. The record company couldn’t hear any singles among those ten tracks, though the promotional success of the “You Got Lucky” video would launch that one song anyway. The RIAA certified it as gold, but the singles never cracked any top slots until the video for “You Got Lucky” garnered some belated love. Fans would wonder what the record was trying to say. The Heartbreakers always felt clear in concert, but inside the studio, something or other there was always a big struggle, ever since their debut.
In the beginning, after Mudcrutch crossed the country to sign with Shelter Records, Denny Cordell immediately scrutinized the rhythm section’s ability to get into a proper groove. He thought the groove was the basis of all great records, and drummer Randall Marsh couldn’t hack it. Tired of pouring in money with little to show so far for an album, Cordell cut the entire band loose and retained Petty as a solo act. But Petty very much felt himself as a bandleader, and when a gaggle of Gainesville, Florida, musicians found themselves in a studio to mess around at the invitation of keyboardist Benmont Tench one day, Petty showed up with a harmonica and left with his band, the Heartbreakers.
Lead guitarist Mike Campbell came direct from Mudcrutch, having been invited to team up after Petty was impressed with his rendition of “Johnny B. Goode” at an impromptu, informal audition back in Gainesville. Bassist Ron Blair and drummer Stan Lynch, both of whom had traveled with other bands in Petty’s Floridian orbit, were already in Los Angeles working recording sessions. Keyboardist Tench had been performing with Petty since the days of the Sundowners when Tench was just twelve years old. By the time his old pal called Petty in to that fateful session to add some vocals, all the best pieces of Gainesville had fallen into place, and each of them jumped at the chance to join Petty’s new outfit.
With their successful next try at a debut album delivered into the hands of the business people, it was time to tour. They went to England as an opening act because they got no traction on the singles in the United States. When that opening act became a headliner, only then did ABC show up with a check to support the financially strapped tour. Petty tore up the check, insulted by its tardiness and tokenism. A second round of radio publicity in the United States helped their debut finally catch fire, and the pressure was on to record a follow-up of the same caliber.
Again they struggled in the studio. Petty wanted to deviate from the debut album in some way, but there was no time to flesh out a target toward which they could aim changes. Cordell was already stepping back into the business side of Shelter, spending a lot of time on the phone in the other Shelter building next door to the studio. With a lack of direction and a shortage of collaborators, other than acid-addled producer Noah Shark, You’re Gonna Get It! faced lukewarm critical reception, and its singles did not rank as high on the charts as those from the debut had.
Another general consensus is that the third record, Damn the Torpedoes, changed everything. To even get the record made was a tremendous uphill battle. Petty had found proper management in Tony Dimitriades and came to understand all the many ways his Shelter contract was designed to keep the band from making any money. These were legendary legal entanglements—they’d signed away their publishing royalties out of a naive eagerness to start recording, they’d been sold to MCA without their consent, the entire band was strapped for cash, and Petty had been taking an equal share of their meager profits despite doing all the administrative legwork with the business side of their operation while the other guys sat around the swimming pool. They were trapped in a bad situation and Petty’s lawyers pulled out the lynchpin by declaring him bankrupt.
The entire music industry watched and waited for the outcome of these interwoven complaints, which would set an important precedent. Eventually, Petty was victorious. Biographer Warren Zanes remarked, “The lawsuit revealed something about just who Tom Petty was, his identity as an artist and a man. . . . There was no mythology attached to Tom Petty, and he never tried to build one. But this episode gave the audience, the press, even Petty himself, something to consider. Petty had to make a sacrifice in order to take all of these steps forward, and that was his relationship with Denny Cordell. Petty had lost a mentor, but gained a sense of self.”
These legal battles took place throughout the production of Damn the Torpedoes, which was financed independently so that the record company couldn’t grab it out from under them. Bugs Weidel, their faithful roadie, would load up his trunk with the master tapes and stash them who-knows-where every night, only to bring them back the next morning, to ensure that the record execs had no way to confiscate the album. Though the courtroom battle was harrowing, the band’s time in the studio was also extremely fraught, the sound inching along by tooth and nail. The result was a major breakthrough—their first top ten album held steady in the number two slot for seven weeks, topped only by Pink Floyd’s The Wall. For once, the band got universal critical admiration. Petty said, “On that album, we came up with that big drum sound. That I think, after that, was really imitated everywhere. I think that record changed drum sounds for a long time.” This brings us to producer Jimmy Iovine.
Iovine was a college dropout from Brooklyn who parlayed a janitorial job into a staff position at Brooklyn’s Record Plant studio. By 1978, he was best known as an engineer on Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and the producer for Patti Smith’s Easter. Petty had intended him to be an engineer, but Iovine brought along his own engineer and quickly established a common wavelength with Petty for how the two of them could steer the record together. Iovine’s enthusiasm was infectious, and the band was swept up in his methods, which were even more exacting than what they’d learned from Cordell and Shark. Petty and Iovine shared a grand vision; both of them felt the pressure to make something truly excellent, lest their careers face an early plateau. As Zanes noted, “If the first two records took significant effort, the third was taxing on another level. It was less about joy than ambition.” And that pioneering drum sound had to be wrestled out of Stan Lynch.
Petty said, “In the studio it could be quite difficult with Stan because he wasn’t really a studio drummer, and he didn’t like the idea of sometimes being cut back to just playing time.” According to Weidel, “Live, Stan was a great drummer. He’s brilliant. But especially in the studio, these guys were almost clinical. . . . That was the tradition from early on, maybe not the second record but by Damn the Torpedoes: start recording to record, kind of hit a brick wall, fire Stanley, go a little further, hire Stanley back, make the record. That went on several times.” Petty said Iovine was “really tough on Stan. Really tough. They did not get along” and that Iovine “just couldn’t understand why Stan wasn’t fired.”
Iovine was a drill sergeant, and, Petty said, “I remember taking a day to get a snare drum sound. That, to us, was just outrageous. Took a whole day to get a drum sound. It was really boring and hard to understand. But we got there.” It was hard on all the Heartbreakers to be stuck in the room for that. Campbell said of this period in the studio that “it’s the only time I’ve walked out of a session.” As early as the Damn the Torpedoes recording sessions, Zanes said Campbell wasn’t alone in this, that bassist Ron Blair “was already drifting away, discouraged by the way his friends changed when their dreams started coming true.”
Their follow-up to this triple-platinum third album was Hard Promises, which Petty said “is when this became a job as well. It became a job, it had to be done. [Laughs] Which is the first time that it really hit me that way. That this has to be done, and it has to be good, and it has to be successful. Which really ain’t the way to go about it. So it wasn’t as much fun, that record, as the one before it.” The Heartbreakers wanted the studio to stay fun, but the album had to sound different once again. Petty said, “We always frowned on people that made the same record again with different words or whatever. We were going to try and take it somewhere we hadn’t been.”
“Hard Promises was an extreme example of trying to do something different from Damn the Torpedoes, which I think frustrated Jimmy quite a bit. I wanted to start moving away from this anthemic sort of music. There’s extreme things on there like ‘Something Big’ and ‘Change Your Mind’, and acoustic numbers. It was a little scattered. We worked very hard on it and were under the terrible pressure of following a huge hit,” said Petty. But Iovine thought if it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it. According to the Playback liner notes written by Bill Flanagan, “Hard Promises had represented something of a tug-of-war between Petty and producer Iovine. Restless as always, Petty had wanted to pull away from the studio craft of Torpedoes, while Iovine thought it was nuts to screw with a winning formula. The result was an album that sounded of two minds about itself—was Hard Promises a mainstream rock LP with a few eccentricities or the work of a quirky singer/songwriter with a mainstream polish?” Though Iovine eventually rallied as much enthusiasm as he had for Torpedoes, even to the point of believing Hard Promises could top it, he still made a clear division between the marketable singles, which he would care about intensely, versus Petty’s interest in telling stories, which he utterly dismissed as “the Dylan thing.”
When the album was finished, Petty would face the recording industry behemoth once again, this time in the name of pricing. MCA was testing the waters, seeing how much fans would pay for their rock star’s next album. Steely Dan’s Goucho and the Xanadu soundtrack featuring Electric Light Orchestra with Olivia Newton-John had been rolled out at $9.89—upcharging by one dollar from previous album pricing. Hard Promises would have been the next trial balloon if Petty hadn’t raised such an enormously public stink about it. In the end, he got his way and dodged the price hike, and said, “I was proud that I pulled it off, but what I was not happy with was that I had just been through all that legal trouble with Damn the Torpedoes, and I found myself right back in a record-company conflict. I think it wore on me pretty bad at that time.”
After the studio struggle and the business struggle, next came the touring struggle. Petty lost his voice onstage, which was diagnosed first as laryngitis, then, after a few days of unsuccessful rest, as tonsillitis. Petty said of the incident, “That really affected me mentally for years. It just terrified me, the idea of going onstage and not being able to sing. I still deal with it, to some degree. It traumatized me. And so, yeah, I was actually put in the hospital and had my tonsils removed in the midst of a tour. And that, with the price thing, is when I really realized that being famous can be hard.” Uncertainty had proliferated across all facets of the one thing to which Petty had devoted his whole life.
Hard Promises was destined to live in the quadruple-platinum shadow of Stevie Nicks’s solo debut, Bella Donna. Nicks rose to prominence on two wildly successful Fleetwood Mac albums, but after they released the comparative failure of Tusk in 1979, the frustration of accommodating three songwriters on each album left her with a surplus of good material to launch on her own. Iovine was still working with the Heartbreakers, but he’d begun dating Nicks and also working on her album. The couple prevailed upon Petty to give Nicks a single for her record. His “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” duet on Bella Donna would top the charts, and, ironically, block the singles on his own album from getting much play. Radio producers couldn’t see the sense in promoting “A Woman In Love (But It’s Not Me)” or “The Waiting” when Petty’s voice was already airing every hour on the track that belonged to Nicks. Beyond gifting her a number one song, there is at least one Heartbreaker playing on nine out of the album’s ten tracks.
Here was a band that seemed to always get in its own way somehow. The mission was so simple, but the logistics were convoluted: there were clashing visions and difficult personalities in the studio; the tour kind of choked; Stevie Nicks was getting the boost from Petty’s killer single at his own expense; and things were looking pretty bleak in 1981, when it came time to turn their attention toward Long After Dark.