Memories of Tom Petty
An excerpt from The Decibel Diaries: A Journey through Rock in 50 Concerts by Carter Alan
Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers: even
the losers get lucky
(third time)
My buddy Clint
and I waited for an inbound trolley, staring hopefully down the empty rails divided
by crushed stone, wooden ties, and pizza joint litter. Fragments of glass
glittered in the bright street-light glare of a cold November night that
forced us to shuffle about to keep warm. A Green Line train, if it ever came,
would take us down the center of Commonwealth Avenue past the classrooms at
Boston University, then plunge under Kenmore Square where we had witnessed many
a punk-rock show at the already-legendary Rat. Heading downtown under the
streets of Back Bay, we’d exit at Park Street, walk upstairs, and pop out in
front of the Orpheum Theater, where the marquee tonight read Tom Petty and the
Heartbreakers. Of course, we were excited; the Gainesville native who had
journeyed to Los Angeles to find fame and fortune in rock and roll had reached
a high-speed career trajectory after punching through with his debut album a
couple of years earlier. “Breakdown” from that release had been the initial
American hit, and the meteoric, under-three-minute, scorcher, “I Need to
Know” from a solid second album in ’78 continued the upward thrust.
Right across the street from the trolley stop we were
stomping around on stood the Paradise Theater, where Petty and his band had
played an epic sold-out gig the previous July that aired on Boston radio powerhouse
WBCN. Those that managed to get tickets were already believers, but the
broadcast convinced thousands more who couldn’t get in that this white-hot
group was on to something — a fresh reboot of rock and roll straight out of a stack of
Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly 45s. I thought about how amazing
that concert had been, so mind-blowing that I had never regretted laying out
the extra cash for a scalper’s ticket; in fact, I wish I could find that
scruffy street capitalist and give him a big hug. Petty’s band, especially
right-hand man Mike Campbell on guitar, had stuck to their leader like glue,
elevating his every move and forcing a worthy comparison to nothing less than
the gold standard of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.
A distant squeal of metal on metal whisked me back from a
year and a half ago as an ancient trolley made the corner down the street and
rumbled drunkenly toward us. The rusty doors swung wide with a screech and we
stepped in. This car should have been retired years ago, but the cranked-up
heat worked fine, so we weren’t about to complain. My mind started wandering
again: Petty had been away for a long time from what he and his management
considered a key city during this early and critical period of building a success
story. The new single, “Don’t Do Me Like That” and songs from the third album Damn the Torpedoes that had just appeared on the radio had
actually been delayed by intense music business drama for several months. We
had no idea that was going on until interviews with Petty began appearing in
newspapers just prior to his return. Instead of working on the road to promote
his career, the rocker had spent a major portion of a year raising his right
hand and swearing to tell the truth in court. Like a pantheon of young players
before him, Tom Petty had originally signed a record deal that assigned him a
paltry percentage of any profits and no ownership of his publishing rights.
Then, his record label was gobbled up by industry giant MCA in 1978. Fearing he’d
be lost in the shuffle at the corporation and also desiring a more equitable
deal, Petty invoked a clause written into the original contract that allowed
him free-agent status if his label was ever sold. Even so, MCA refused to let
go, suing the band and locking the two parties into a legal struggle that
forced Petty into bankruptcy. Recording a third album had already begun and
continued during this process, but with MCA threatening to seize any master
tapes and release whatever music it found, the group handed off the precious
results of each day’s work to one of its roadies, whose assignment was to hide
the masters from the musicians and even Tom Petty himself until the next
session. This arrangement shielded the musicians from committing perjury in court
should MCA’s lawyers demand the tapes.
The wheels of justice ground slowly, but Petty’s tenacity
remained strong. Eventually, when it appeared likely that he’d actually win the
case, MCA caved in completely, giving the songwriter rights to his publishing,
a better percentage of the profits, and a custom label for the band that the
media giant would distribute. With this process, MCA gave Petty his freedom,
but held the bright, young talent close in its corporate grasp. The master
tapes were summoned back from their clandestine location and released as the
album Damn the Torpedoes, which became a ticket to ride
as it ascended to number 2 on the U.S. album-sales chart and sold millions. In
November ’79, “Don’t Do Me Like That” hit the charts and eventually took Tom
Petty to the Top 10 for the first time, followed early the following year by
further hit singles “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl.” Suddenly great demands
were being made on the musicians’ time and energy with scads of newspaper and
radio interview requests and an invitation to guest on Saturday
Night Live. The opportunity for the November 10 TV appearance could not
be ignored even though it meant postponing his Boston concert at the Orpheum
Theater the night before so that Petty and his group could be in New York to
rehearse. They’d only perform two songs, but it was critical to get them right;
at the time, SNL was the foremost promotional vehicle a
rock-and-roll band could get on American television.
We had our tickets for Friday the ninth, but got word that
the concert would be postponed to the following Wednesday. Disappointing, yes,
but at least the Boston appearance hadn’t been cancelled outright. I had an
excellent eight-dollar mezzanine ticket burning a hole in my pocket; it would
just have to smolder in there for another five days. When Wednesday night
finally arrived we jumped out of that train and practically sprinted up the
steps to leave the subway station. Right across the street was the alleyway
leading up to the front doors of the old vaudeville theater. But as Clint and I
rounded the corner, we were practically mowed down by a wave of figures
marching full tilt in the opposite direction. What’s going on? People should be
rushing toward the building at this point. But we kept
bumping into bodies, struggling upstream as if fighting a white-water torrent.
I picked out words from the fleeing figures: “I can’t believe it,” “What do we
do now?” and “This sucks!” We finally reached the front doors where several
ushers, wearily repeating themselves over and over again, yelled, “The show is
postponed because of sickness . . . hold on to your tickets!” Really? Tom Petty was postponing
a second time? Plus, it was at the last possible
moment.
Mikal Gilmore, following the tour for a Rolling
Stone article, sat backstage at that moment. He detailed in his piece,
published in February 1980, that Tom Petty had been under the weather for
several days and felt he had blown his previous night’s performance in
Philadelphia. Gilmour wrote: “By the time of the group’s sound check, Petty can
barely croak. With just an hour remaining before the doors are scheduled to
open, he agrees to postpone the show.”
We were certainly disappointed, but understood. It was
obvious, even at this early stage in his career, that Tom Petty was a
perfectionist. Committed to the quality of his performances as much as he
remained devoted to the craft of writing great songs, his meticulousness was
often overlooked, submerged by an enduring image as a laid-back, long-haired
stoner from Gainesville. But it was that attention to detail and driving
ambition that had placed the artist and his band at a perfect point in
rock-and-roll history. After the punk explosion had driven a boot through the
door a couple of years earlier, exposing a scene of complacent rock stardom and
excess, a host of what became “new wave” bands piled through the hole,
scattering the bloated occupants in the room beyond. Some star bands like
Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Electric Light Orchestra, and Supertramp would
never really recover; styles such as southern rock and progressive rock were
driven into background roles while other groups, like Yes, took sabbaticals
until some of their relevance to the mainstream returned. Tom Petty and other
lean late-seventies rock and rollers such as the Police, the Clash, Elvis
Costello, Talking Heads, the Cure, AC/DC, the B-52’s, and (in England) the Jam
and XTC had grabbed the flag and taken up the charge. It was a whole new field
of battle out there, and the musical world was being remade in front of our
eyes and ears — we wanted to be right in the thick of it!
The show must go on, and it finally did on November 19. The
band walked triumphantly out on stage to a tumultuous reception, drummer Stan
Lynch sporting a comical T-shirt with the three scheduled Boston concert dates
written on it and the first two crossed out. Petty admitted he was recovering
slowly and still on antibiotics, but you wouldn’t have noticed it as the group
accelerated into a breakneck two-hour show that left everyone in the house
panting in exhaustion. All the new songs from Damn the
Torpedoes that would soon become classics hit their mark, rising to meet
and challenge the proven in-concert standards like “Listen to Her Heart” and
“American Girl.” In a monumental Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performance,
the band piled on three scoops of effort to compensate for the missed dates.
But as I would discover in subsequent years, this was actually their standard
operating procedure: punch the pedal at the beginning, kick in the nitrous
about three-quarters down the track, and only take the checkered flag when the
last fan had collapsed in a puddle of sweat or simply couldn’t clap any more.
We reached the peak when Petty tore into a cover of the Isley Brothers’
“Shout.” Anyone who hadn’t heard the 1959 R & B classic in years past knew
the song intimately because of Otis Day & the Knights’ recent party version
in the Animal House film. Petty made a party of it too — for ten joyous, rollicking minutes of pulsing dance fever.
The playful call-and-response between the band and the crowd involved
everyone, convincing even the last holdouts in the Orpheum to give it up and
join in. As the final echoes faded on a night when Petty made losers feel like
heroes and refugees taste home, he showed us what rock and roll was all about — giving it all and making us shout!
