by Paul Zollo
Quite an education for you.
It really was. He was quite a man. He was really something else. An English gentleman, but with sort of a pirate side to him. [Laughs] And he really knew his music. He really knew it well. He did a lot to shape my whole personality, I think. It’s true that he took you to art shows, and told you to think about art in relation to music?
Yeah. Pretty far out. I remember taking a break from the studio to go to an art show. I couldn’t put it together. I wanted to go back and record. And he said, ‘No, there’s a connection here. Just take this in.’ He was a very cryptic guy. He spoke very cryptically. Made you work a little bit to understand what he was saying. [Laughs] I think he really shaped the whole personality of the group. He had to have a huge influence on us. So we owe him a great deal.
anything that’s rock ‘n’ roll chapter three
For the first albums, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers [1976] and You’re Gonna Get It [1978], were you writing with Mike Campbell or did that happen later?
tp: That happened later. Mike was always making his backing tracks and playing with tape recorders. I think it was Cordell who suggested [Mike and I] try to do something together. And that took off sort of slow. There was one track on the first album that we wrote together, called “Rockin’ Around (With You).” That came from a little riff that Mike had, and then I wrote the rest of the song myself. But he was the inspiration for it. And then maybe he had one or two on the next album. But where he really blossomed was Damn The Torpedoes, when he came in with those incredible songs. “Refugee.” “Here Comes My Girl.” That was when it really blossomed.
Did Benmont want to continue writing?
Yeah, he did. He just couldn’t come up with anything that seemed to fit. He’s a good writer. He’s come up with a lot of songs for other people. But we haven’t ever really written much together.
Was the first album difficult to create?
It was in that it took a long time to find the right ten songs to make the record. There was a lot of trial and error. But that record didn’t seem as difficult to make as Damn The Torpedoes, which was a really, really hard record to make. I think the first two we made, we didn’t think that much.
And those first two were produced by Denny.
Those were more about feel, and they were made in the Shelter studio, which was a real funky studio. Then we moved to Sound City, when we started to work with Jimmy Iovine. And that was a whole different world. There we set out to do something big. We wanted to do something nobody else had ever done. [Laughs] The first album had some great songs on it—it has “American Girl” and “Breakdown.”
It’s funny, isn’t it, how those songs have endured all these years. It’s the last thing I would have ever dreamt.
In those days, when we did that record, there weren’t that many rock ‘n’ roll stars over thirty. You didn’t think it was going to go on that long. My dream was that maybe I could learn to be a record producer. And when this burns out, I could produce records. That is really what I thought I would end up doing: Being a record producer, or a songwriter.
I never thought our trip was going to go on so long. I thought if it went on five years, in those days, that was really successful. We never thought about growing old doing it. That those songs have survived, and that I still hear them, is amazing. I never would have dreamt that. That was beyond my control. [Laughs]
On your first album you have “Hometown Blues.”
Yeah, that was recorded at Leon’s place in Encino, as I was house sitting for him. I wrote that song, and I started recording it on my own there. I think I got Randall Marsh, Mudcrutch’s drummer, to give me a backbeat to start the track, and I might have played a cymbal or two on it. You can imagine how that was: We were in this huge mansion in Encino with this big recording studio in it. And we were kind of using used tape and just trying to create something.
Did you know how to engineer?
Not very well. [Laughs] But somehow I got that track going, and I got the drums down. And then the track laid around until The Heartbreakers arrived. Mike and I played guitars on it. And one night we were at Sound City Studios working, and Denny ran into Duck Dunn and Steve Cropper. And he said to them, ‘Hey, come in here and listen to this.’ And he put that track on. And they loved the track. So Duck sat down, and got his bass out to do the bass part, and Cropper kind of guided him through it with these weird code things, like, ‘Turn! Walk!’ And Duck put the bass part in and kind of made the whole thing come together.
And we became friends forever right then. Yeah, [Dunn] is one of my great idols. He’s one of the best musicians I’ve ever met. And I loved Booker T. and all that stuff. So that’s how that one was done.
After the first album was released, you started to tour?
Yeah. We went to England. Because the first album became a hit right away in England. It took a year here for it to catch on. Which seemed like a long time for us, but now it’s not that unusual.
But then we thought we were a failure. We thought we had failed in America because it’s not catching on. It caught on in a few cities. San Francisco and Boston. And it took a long time for it to seep out. But immediately it hit in England big. So we went to England, where we were actually met off the plane by the press, and we were rock ‘n’ roll stars. It was a huge rush. We were just overwhelmed. We were on tour, and the girls were going crazy, and we were in England, the home of our heroes.
And then suddenly we’re back in America, and we weren’t on that level at all. In England, you had a hit with the song “Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll”?
Yeah. We did Top Of the Pops. It was great. We actually went over there as a support group for Nils Lofgren. And wound up staying through that tour, and then we did a headline tour before we came back. So we stayed for quite a while in England. And then when we came back here, because we were getting on the cover of Melody Maker and the weekly music things there. I think in some way that probably drifted back here, that we had that buzz in England. And then we had San Francisco and Boston, which were really hot for us.
Before England, Al Kooper had a solo record, and he gave us the gig of opening up for him on a tour of clubs. So we went to Florida, and played a couple of bars there on our own. And then we went to South Carolina, and opened for Kiss—and that was weird. And then we picked up the Al Kooper tour and went to six or seven cities. In the middle of winter. It was really kind of a not well-attended tour.
Our fourth gig was in Boston, at a place called Paul’s Mall, and there was only about nine or ten people at the bar. WBCN, the radio station, recorded it. They broadcast it live. So a bootleg record was made. And it’s really good. I hear it now, and it’s really good. And the funny thing is that it’s just this really burning track, and when it’s finished you just hear [claps hands slowly] a few hands clapping. [Laughs] But when I heard it not long ago, I thought, shit, we were good. It’s no wonder people started to notice, because we were really good.
Before we did that tour, because it was so expensive here to rehearse, we all moved to Florida. And we got two apartments in Florida, and we all lived in those apartments. And we rented a warehouse. We’d go out there and practice every night. We did that for about a month before we started the Al Kooper tour. So we were tight by the time we went on the tour.
But that was before England. And then we went over to England, and that happened. And then our record started playing [in L.A.] on KROQ. We were an alternative band. The New Wave was being invented. So they started to play “American Girl” on KROQ. And we got this gig at the Whisky-A-Go-Go. We used to play the Whisky-A-Go-Go fairly regularly. And that’s where things really went bang. Robert Hilburn [music critic for the Los Angeles Times] was coming down, reviewing the shows at the Whisky and giving us great reviews. And then things really started to go. We got some more tours. Roger McGuinn gave us a tour. He recorded “American Girl” right away. And he put us on the road with him, and we went out and did a col
lege tour. And we played the Bottom Line in New York. So things started to roll then. And they never slowed down again.
It was the time of the New Wave, but you didn’t conform to the style of the New Wave in any way.
I think we kind of invented the New Wave. [Laughs] Punk had caught on right when we were in England. In ‘77. That’s really right when it happened. The Sex Pistols and all that stuff. I remember meeting the Sex Pistols and them coming to the shows. And Elvis Costello. But we weren’t that. There was a lot of confusion. We were labeled a “punk group” for some time. It was a little bit of a problem, because they’d seen me with a leather jacket. And if you weren’t a big corporate rock band, like Fleetwood Mac, they didn’t really know what to do with you. We definitely weren’t that. But we weren’t punks. So they didn’t really know where to put us. For a while they called us “Power Pop.” But I think about the time the New Wave was really popular, we were probably above all that. We had our own identity by then. In truth, we were just a rock ‘n’ roll band. [Laughs] But that was far too simple for people.
I remember being in Scandinavia and seeing an album, and one side of it was the Ramones and the other side was us. And we did shows with the Ramones and Blondie and Patti Smith. We did tours in ‘78, I remember we were with The Kinks. Different groups. We did a lot of opening band slots.
Did you like punk music?
Some of it I liked. It wasn’t what I would take home and play. I liked the Sex Pistols. It’s funny how tame that stuff sounds now when you hear it. Because at the time it seemed so radical. We liked old music. We were into Carl Perkins. [Laughs]
And when you came back to L.A., there were bands that started to imitate you.
Yeah. That was a real eye-opener. Seeing people do an imitation of you was really strange. But that was going on.
It took a full year here for your first album to catch on?
Yeah. It came out in late ‘76, and then in ‘77 “Breakdown” was the first one to hit the Top Forty. And the record started to sell. It was amazing. We were so busy in those days. God, we were busy. Touring. We did a lot of photo sessions in those days. ‘Cause there was no MTV or anything, so it was all about being in the music magazines. So we were incredibly busy. Always on the run, is how I remember it, anyway. Just keeping an amazingly full schedule. [Laughs]
Did you enjoy that?
Yeah, I loved it. I ate it up. You get tired, but when you’re that young, you bounce back pretty fast. So it was great. We were always up all night.
When it came time to record your second album, You’re Gonna Get It, in ‘78, you wanted to do something different. You didn’t want to repeat the feel of your first album?
We certainly wanted the success. But we wanted to branch out a little. We didn’t like groups who did things over and over. So we wanted to try to do something a little different. But that record was made so fast, that second record. And the truth was we didn’t really need to bring out a record. I don’t know why we felt this urge. I think we were just bored with playing the same songs, because the first record was still doing real well when the second one came out. But we felt this urge to get another record out, and we went in and did that record really fast, and wrote it really fast. And probably should have taken more time with it, looking back.
It came out really well.
Yeah, it did, for what it was. I think it’s only twenty-eight minutes long. [Laughs] It was just the first ten things written. And we did it at lightning speed. And you could do that with Denny?
By that time Denny was pretty much leaving us on our own with this guy named Noah Shark, who was kind of the co-producer/engineer guy. [Denny] brought him in and would leave us with him, and maybe two times a week we would get Cordell there, and he would sit down and say, ‘Okay, here’s what we’ve got to do with this; here’s what we’ve got to do with that.’ And then he would leave us on our own to work. It wasn’t that he wasn’t there. He was. But I kind of remember that record being more on our own. With Cordell taking kind of a supervisor position. ‘Cause he also ran a record company. He was really busy And that’s how Jimmy Iovine came in for the third record. Denny just didn’t have the time.
Did you write the songs for it fast?
I had written “Listen To Her Heart” and “I Need To Know” before we went in to do the album. So I had those two, which we had been playing in the show, so we knew them really well. The rest of it was written pretty quickly, because we didn’t really take a long time. I think by the time we had ten songs, we quit. There were no outtakes. There wasn’t anything left over. Oh yeah, there was one song left over. It was called “Parade Of Loons.” But it was so distorted, it wasn’t recorded well, so I didn’t want to put that out.
Intriguing title.
It wasn’t a bad song. It was kind of about all the loons that were appearing. We suddenly had all sorts of people around us from all different backgrounds with all different motives.
A lot of loons.
Lot of loons, yeah. But it didn’t make the cut.
How did you choose the song “You’re Gonna Get It” as the title song?
Noah Shark, the producer, sat me down one night and almost beat me into it. [Laughs]
Did you resist?
I did. Cordell wanted to call the album Terminal Romance, which I thought was a better title. We also had a better cover. A much better cover taken by Annie Leibowitz. And Noah Shark, who, for some reason, had some power over us at that time, hated the cover and hated the title. And he sat me down one night and just finally convinced me that he was right. So we wound up using that really gloomy cover. But Annie’s cover was much better. And probably Terminal Romance was a better title. But Annie was kind of all over the map at the time, too. I wish we would have gone the other way with it.
Your song “Restless” has a hip drum-bass groove to it.
That’s about all it has. [Laughs] I think that’s about it for that song. I think at that point we were driving our way through to finish the album. Bugs said he never wanted to hear it again. It was one of those that I sang all night. It wasn’t a great song. I’m sure if we would have waited another day, we could have come up with something better.
Is your roadie/guitar tech, Bugs, in on all the sessions?
Yeah. Every one we’ve ever done. He’s got to get the gear there. He’s got to get the amps and the guitars. He started on the first album, and he’s been on everything I’ve ever done, including the Wilburys. He’s always been there to get the gear together and to look after me, and to get us dinner, or whatever goes on. So he has a kind of keen perspective on things.
And he lets you know what he feels about your songs.
Oh yeah. And he’s also driven me everywhere I’ve ever gone. He still drives me wherever I go. So we spend a lot of time in the car talking, just him and I. So he’s a roadie, but he’s also very keen. All our crew guys are really big music fans. We like to have people around us who really like music. And they’re all very honest. They don’t go for jive stuff. They’re very pure. [Laughs] Maybe more than me. And that was one song [“Restless”] I remember him saying, ‘If I never hear that one again, that would be okay with me.’ [Laughs]
I love him very much He’s very much one of our brothers. He’s looked after us for thirty years now. He won’t ever give an interview. He’s never spoken two words to the press. That would be beneath him. It would be against his code. He knows where all the bodies are buried, though. He probably knows the whole story better than anybody. Including me. [Laughs] Because he’s heard everybody’s perspective on it.
tangles & torpedoes chapter four
You stopped working with Denny Cordell. Was part of your impetus for the switch the fact that Denny wanted a big cut of everything you were earning, and you didn’t feel it was fair?
tp: It was his one flaw. Business. He was from that old school from the Sixties in which the artist didn’t really get a lot of money. [Laughs] I got fed up with it when I started
realizing we had been ripped off. That our publishing has been ripped off, and we were still on the royalty rate from Mudcrutch. Which was about a penny a record. It was nothing.
By then there were business people—managers—coming around and telling me, ‘Hey, you’ve got a bad deal here. You’ve got a hit record and you should be renegotiating the deal.’ And he wouldn’t renegotiate the deal. It was too much by Damn The Torpedoes. The second album had gone Gold, and we knew that we were perched to have a big record. We were right there where if we made the right record, it was going to be a big record. And this caused a huge court battle. Which is a whole other book. [Laughs] But that was when we decided that it was worth fighting Denny in court and getting onto another record label that could do more for us.
Was it tough fighting this guy who helped launch your career?
It was really tough. But the weird thing is that we remained friends. He remained very friendly to me, but in the court, when it came down to that, he was just a tiger. [Laughs] I had to fight like hell to get free.
When did you connect with your current manager, Tony Dimitriades of East End Management?
Tony was there at the release of the first album.
How did you meet him?
We could not a find a person in all of L.A. that wanted to manage us. And we had made our first record, and we had no manager and nobody that wanted to do it. But there was a guy, an Englishman, a friend of Cordell’s, who managed Joe Cocker. And his name was Reggie Locke. Who we owe a great deal to, because Reggie, bless his heart, was just a terrible businessman, but a really passionate kind of manager. He loved the group and he loved the music and he had a lot of enthusiasm. And Reggie came and said, ‘I’ll manage these guys.’ And Reggie really was a great cheerleader. ‘Everyone’s a winner,’ he used to say.