by Paul Zollo
So it was just trial and error, doing it a lot, learning about it. I’m really grateful to Cordell for giving us that time. Because most groups don’t have it. They’re just dumped in the studio. They get six weeks and that’s what happened. But we were kind of trained; [Laughs] we got the chance to learn and spend a lot of time recording with no bill, no recording costs. It was really nice.
So being sent back to Tulsa was a good thing for you?
Yeah, it was great. The record company owned the studio, so they weren’t billing us. And it was another adventure, going to another town and living there. After your two-week stint in Tulsa, did you master the art of recording?
‘Master’ is a little heavy. We got better at it. It was a long process. You’re always learning more about recording. I wish in those days we knew everything we know now. Because now we’re pretty proficient at it. Recording is not difficult at all. We know our way around the studio really well.
But in the beginning it was tough?
Yeah. You had to learn how to get this sound, from this side of the glass to that one. [Laughs] People don’t understand that they are different arts, playing live or making a record. It was a little bit of a challenge. Actually, it was a big challenge. But we loved it. I was just completely mesmerized by it; how it went down. And when you did pull something off, it was such a rush, that it would inspire you to go through a lot more shit to get another one. But there have been times when it was really hard to get a track, and get it to sound right.
How did the sound come back? What was the problem?
You learn that when you’re recording you have to kind of trick the microphones into making the noise you want them to make. And if you’re playing through a big amplifier, like you would play live, it sometimes tends to shut the microphone down. A lot of the art of recording is learning how to use the space in the arrangement, where you don’t play. Where live, you tend to play more than you would on a record. You need to leave space for the music to breathe and find its dynamic.
It was things like that, like learning that you don’t necessarily have to play as much here. Or how do we arrange this to make this really pop and present itself? Because playing live is a different art form. It’s a different kind of thing. And we were really good at that, but we knew very little about how to make it come back over the speakers like we wanted it to.
How long did you stay in Tulsa?
Probably two weeks. It wasn’t a long time. We were still Mudcrutch at this time. The Heartbreakers didn’t happen till the next year, after Mudcrutch had broken up. Mudcrutch became disillusioned; we made an album, but it never came out.
A whole album of your songs?
Some were Benmont’s. We made a record, but we weren’t completely happy about it. And the idea back then is that you put out a single first. And if the single got some action, they brought the album out. And the single didn’t do anything.
The single was “Depot Street” [released in 1975 with “Wild Eyes” as the B-side]?
Yeah. And we became very disillusioned. And then I could see it wasn’t going anywhere. And I was frustrated. And I just went, ‘I’m quitting,’ you know? I went to Mike, and said, ‘If I quit, will you stick with me?’ And he said, ‘Yeah,’ and I quit. [Laughs]
With the intention of forming a new band with Mike?
Yeah. I didn’t really know. But I knew that Cordell wanted me to make records. And I wanted Mike to stay with me. And I think that was the idea: I was going to be a solo artist.
Did you like that idea?
No, because I’d always been in a band. I’d always been part of a group. We had supported each other. I’m still like that. I still think of everything we’ve done as a band. I didn’t want to be alone with hired hands. I wanted to be part of an outfit that stayed together. So I was never comfortable with the idea [of being a solo artist]. It didn’t last long. A few sessions were done, but I didn’t like the idea. Even though they were great musicians. Jim Gordon on drums, Al Kooper playing the organ. And Mike was playing guitar. That was kind of cool. But I wanted a band more like the Rolling Stones or the Byrds. I wanted to have a set lineup that we worked with all the time. And I’d never been in a solo situation; I’d always been in a band. So I didn’t understand the other way. And I’m glad I didn’t. I’m glad I didn’t go through all of this alone. I’m glad I had my friends with me.
Was that a tough decision to make? Did you give serious thought to being a solo artist?
I did, yeah. When that started, and when Mudcrutch broke up, I felt like, ‘Damn, I put all this energy and all those years into Mudcrutch and the band broke up and I had nothing to show for it. Nobody knows who I am.’ [Laughs] I think Denny Cordell urged me to be a solo act. And it was okay—I mean I only did a few sessions, and I did them with really great musicians and it was okay, but it didn’t feel like what I was used to.
And then I walked in the Village Recorder one day and The Heartbreakers were playing. Benmont had put them all together. [The lineup was Benmont Tench on keys, Ron Blair on bass, Stan Lynch on drums, Randall Marsh also on drums, and Jeff Jourard on guitar.]
And it instantly hit me that, man, you know this is home. This is where I should be. And I quickly did my pitch about talking them into going in with me. [Laughs] Well, my pitch was, ‘I’ve got a record deal, and so you know you could go all the way around the search for record labels, just come with me.’ And they all knew me and I think that they quickly decided to go in with me.
Benmont had stayed on playing in some soul band. He’d hustled his way into some time at the Village Recorder, and he was going to make a demo of his own stuff. He put The Heartbreakers together—all Gainesville guys. Stan had come out from Gainesville, and Ron Blair and Randall Marsh. I can’t remember all of them, but The Heartbreakers were there. The ones I was interested in were the four: Ben, Mike, Stan, and Ron. And Ben invited me to play harmonica. [Laughs] I was out here [in Malibu], right across the street in Denny’s house. Strangely enough. And he called me, and said they were in Santa Monica, and would I like to stop by and play harmonica? Yeah.
So I drove over there and I went in to do my harmonica track, and I went in and heard The Heartbreakers playing. And I thought, ‘Shit—this is amazing.’
So I went to Denny, and told him I had this really good band of guys from Gainesville. And he said, ‘Okay, well, bring them in. We’ll see what goes.’
We kind of creeped them in. On the first session we did, Stan [Lynch] didn’t play. Jim Gordon played drums. We did “Strangered In The Night,” which is on the first album. And then we kind of moved Stanley in. [Laughs] And when Cordell heard the band, he kind of liked the whole idea, and we were all pretty good-looking kids, and they knew they could market us that way. And that’s what happened. And we’ve been together ever since.
You were recording your solo album with great musicians; it must have sounded good.
Yep. There’s a bit of it on the boxed set, which gives you an idea. “Louisiana Rain” was done back then with a slightly different lyric. It sounded great, but I was really band-oriented. I’d always been in a group and I was more interested in the idea of putting five people together and keeping them together and seeing what that would create. That seemed more interesting to me than just calling the best musicians in and doing the track, and then having a pickup band that you put together for each project. Which a lot of people do, but it seemed to me a much more creative endeavor to have five distinct personalities and work within that kind of framework. Good or bad.
You are always going to have weak links or things that you can’t do as well as if you called Jim Keltner to play the drums. But you get another kind of magic that way, when the people are really close and you are working as a unit.
Cordell didn’t think it was solid enough?
We just weren’t mature, we were just kids [Laughs] and he was used to working with these incredible guys. We were just kids, and we played like kids. There would be th
e odd times like “Hometown Blues” where we had Duck Dunn play the bass. So [Cordell] was always trying to get us to really listen to those great rhythm sections like Duck Dunn and Al Jackson, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, you know, these really great rhythm sections.
We would do listening sessions a lot with Cordell. The session might start with an hour of listening to records. He’d say, ‘Listen to his, listen to that, listen how they’re playing and listen how they’re accenting this.’ So in that way we kind of learned. Hopefully. [Laughs]
You had Ron Blair on bass. Did you like him as a bass player?
Yeah, I did, for a long time. He was quite good on the bass. Even today he is still like that. He practices and really learns the song well. Ron was great until he got sort of disenchanted with what was going on and just withdrew, really. I mean it got much too big for Ron at that time. [Laughs] It was really more of a life commitment than he wanted to make.
And you had Stan Lynch on drums.
Oh yeah. [Laughs]
What were your first impressions of Stan?
Stan. Now there’s a book in itself.
He came from another group that was sort of a second tier, a little younger than us, called Road Turkey, which had Jeff Jourard’s brother Marty Jourard, who would later join The Motels. It was Marty Jourard and Stan who were in a band together called Road Turkey, and they were on the bill with Mudcrutch a lot, a lot of gigs. I remember doing a whole summer off and on at this one place called The Keg [in Gainesville] where we were both on the bill and we both did two sets a night. And that’s where I got to know Stan.
Stan was a little bit younger than us. But he was a very good drummer and he was really conscientious, and he worked really hard. But he had a really explosive personality and he could get really pissed off. I always thought that Stan was passionate in all directions. [Laughs] He could be really sweet and really loving and then the biggest sort of asshole. But he did it all 100% passionately.
You liked his drumming.
Yeah, I loved his drumming onstage more than I did in the studio. He was really a powerhouse onstage. Sometimes I still miss him onstage. He was so powerful. I used to say he had this fifth gear that he could go into and just really make everything explode. He was really good at that, and he always knew the songs really well. And he really wanted to be good. He was a big cheerleader. His personality was a huge part of The Heartbreakers. There was me and there was Stan. And those were the two main personalities. The other guys kind of just tried to manage both of us. But he had a huge thrust in what was going on.
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 and so, just like kids do, we had our arguments in the studio and we’d work really hard and sometimes I think we worked harder than we had to to get a rhythm track because Stan would just be really difficult. But like I say, we were kids. We weren’t these super professional guys like we are now. [Laughs] We were going through growing up at the same time.
Was Stan’s playing too busy in the studio?
Sometimes it was too busy.
But was he solid in terms of keeping the beat?
Yeah, it’s really hard to be a studio drummer. It’s really, really hard. Recording is the hardest on the drummer. It’s different than playing live because it’s so microscopic. If there’s a squeak on your bass pedal, it comes through really loud. It’s very intricate, and so it’s really hard on them. And they’ve gotta keep the time and the feel and if they drop that at all, boom, the whole thing goes.
But we made a sound that was quite unique to us. When I look back at it, I don’t think I’d have changed anything because it made a sound that was us. You know, like “The Waiting,” no one could have played that but Stan. No one could have played a lot of those things. They wouldn’t have been like that. So he had his own style of playing, and we butted heads a lot for twenty years. [Laughs] But I think we sort of loved each other too, like brothers. But we fought a lot. Everyone fought with Stan, really.
Over the material?
Over anything. Over what we were eating. [Laughs] Stan was as big as life and very confused about a lot of things. He could be really passionate in two directions. You just didn’t know really where you were with Stan. His personality was huge and he has to be responsible for a lot of what happened because he was such a cheerleader. Nobody wanted to do anything bad because you’d be judged by Stan. You wanted to pull off every gig.
He and I had incredibly good communication onstage; he could read the movement of my shoulder. He could go anywhere I wanted to go. He never took his eyes off me. This is something I still go through with [Steve] Ferrone [current drummer in The Heartbreakers]. Stan never took his eyes off me. Anything I did was accented on the drums. Any movement I made. We had a great eye communication where I could turn around and look at him, and he knew just exactly what I wanted to do.
So Ferrone, who is a whole different kind of drummer, he’s learning now that in a show you never take your eyes off me because things might change. So, yeah, Stan was really good. It was a lot of work making the records, but then again I don’t think any of us were as good at making records as we are now. The craft side of things is not very hard now. We know how to make a record. It’s still hard to come up with the material but making the record isn’t very difficult now.
So Stan was much better onstage as a live drummer?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. He’s very powerful. He reminded me sort of like Keith Moon in a way. He had that kind of power on the stage. He was very powerful. Very powerful. And he sang as well. He sang harmony. He was like our main harmony singer in those days before Howie. Yeah, before Howie came along Stan was really the only other person that sang much, and he sang a lot of the harmony.
I’ve said a lot about Stan. But I want to make it clear that I wasn’t always an easy person to deal with. I could be very, very demanding of people. Onstage, offstage, in the studio with people. I was pretty turbulent, looking back at it. I was a pretty turbulent person. I don’t think I was an asshole. But I think I was intense. Very intense. So I don’t think it was always somebody else’s fault. I’ll take the blame as much as anyone else [Laughs] for what went on. But I was very intense, very serious about this. We were going to do it. We were going to make something great. And sometimes that requires a lot of intensity. I think it was just born into me. I’m incredibly changed. I think I’m a much changed person from those days. I think I’m a lot mellower.
Was that a gradual process?
Well, I think it comes with age. You get a little wiser. Maybe I’ve gotten a little better at my craft. I know I’m not nearly as turbulent as I used to be. [Laughs]
My kids have this huge laugh about me. I just spent some time with them, and they were laughing about my image. They said, “The world pictures you as this laid-back, laconic kind of person, and actually you’re the most intense, neurotic person we’ve ever met.’ [Laughs] And that’s kind of true. You’re not always what people picture you as. Like “laid-back.” I’m not a laid-back person.
Did Stan bring in Ron Blair?
We all knew each other from Gainesville, but I think Benmont was the catalyst that put everybody in that place at once.
Jeff Jourard was on guitar?
Very briefly. He was also from Gainesville. But we decided really early on that we had too many guitars. [Laughs]
So The Heartbreakers came together while you lived at Leon’s house?
Probably. I think I had a leg in both camps for a little while. But once The Heartbreakers got going, I was with them. The thing at Leon’s just kind of burned itself out. It got to where there was really nothing for me to do anymore. His album was done, and he was going back on the road. Once that project was done, there was nothing for me to do anymore. So I was gone.
Back to the motel?
[Laughs] Back to the motel, literally. [Laughs]
No. I think Cordell had the name. But I’m not sure. I don’t think it came from me. Things like that just didn’t seem significant at the time. [Laughs] I wanted the name to be the King Bees. And they didn’t like the King Bees. I thought it sounded good. And I always liked that Slim Harpo song. I’m not sure where “The Heartbreakers” came from. Mike thinks it came from Cordell. I think when The Heartbreakers came in we liked it much more than King Bees, or some of us did, and that’s what flew.
Was it always Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers?
It was going to be Tom Petty, because I didn’t want to go through the Mudcrutch thing again. Did all this work, and no one even knows who I am. But at least I want to get my name in the billing so people would know who I am. I was right up-front with them about it. I said, ‘Look, I’m not doing this unless my name is in the billing. This is the way it goes. It’s my record deal.’ And they thought that was fair.
Roger McGuinn told me that was a really smart thing. He said, ‘I should have done that with the Byrds.’ He said, ‘It would have made a big difference in my career if I would have been Roger McGuinn & the Byrds.’ Though I think it was cooler just being the Byrds. But it was for those reasons. And they all knew that, too. And that was kind of understood that I was the singer and the writer.
I understand that Cordell taught you a lot about music.
Yeah. Every day at 6:00 I went to the Shelter offices. Work ended there at 6:00. And there he would get out his records, and teach me musical history. We would play records way into the night. Every night. All kinds of music. Everything from Lloyd Price to Bo Diddley. Because I didn’t have a lot of records. I couldn’t afford them. I didn’t even have a record player, he got me one. And he turned me on to a lot of records and lent me his records. That went on for a couple of years. We would meet at 6:00 every day. And a lot of time on Sunday, I would come out here to [his house in] Malibu and spend Sunday with him as well. And we would do the same thing—play records all day.