by Paul Zollo
So Reggie owned up and said, ‘Listen, I’m no good with business and money. I’m not good at it, but I have a friend from England who is a former lawyer’—solicitor they call it—‘Tony Dimitriades. And I think that I should be partners with him because he is quite good at tour financing and he understands the money end of it better than I do and I’m not responsible enough to watch the money.’
So enter Tony Dimitriades. The first album had just been made and Tony showed up and Tony really liked the group. Tony had managed a group called Ace that had this single, [sings] ‘How long has this been going on?’ Paul Carrack sang it. And Tony, that was his sole music-business experience, he had been the manager of Ace and that was falling apart. And so he came into our camp, and it wasn’t very long until we realized Reggie’s great and he got us there. We were breaking in England and everything. But he’s really shaky on the money. I can’t remember if he left before we went to England or after. I think it was before. I think we went on this kind of really dire tour, that’s right. Yeah, we went on tour with Al Kooper. It was the first tour we did and we wound up in Baltimore or somewhere like that in a motel with no money. And we didn’t even have enough money to get to the next gig. We were out of money. And we phoned Tony, and he said, ‘Well, Reggie spent the money,’ [Laughs] ‘And I’ve got to say, I’ve got to bow out because I don’t want to be party to this, because Reggie’s just too loose with the money.’ Reggie spent all the money and so Tony pulled some sort of deal where he got some money off the record company and we had enough money to just finish the tour. But that was the end of Reggie as far as being a manager. But we still like him. And whenever we see him we’re real glad to see him and he understood. He had a lot to do with getting us off the ground and he really built up our confidence a lot. He was really a passionate Englishman, loved his rock ‘n’ roll, and he really believed in us.
And Tony has been with you ever since.
Yeah.
Did Tony’s associate Mary Klauzer come on the scene yet?
No. She came along in 1978. Tony had a couple assistants that we’d hated. And he was still doing business out of his bedroom in his apartment building. We didn’t have an office. We just worked out of Tony’s bedroom.
Where did he live?
Hollywood. In this apartment complex. Mary came along, and she told me this later, that her first job was to give me a ride home from somewhere. And [Tony] said, ‘Listen, if he doesn’t say anything, or he’s mean to you, don’t let it get to you because he doesn’t like anybody.’ [Laughs] And that was her first instruction. And I liked her a lot instantly. We got along great on the ride home. And she’s been there ever since. And she’s taken care of every single one of us. Everything in our lives, she takes care of and always has. She probably doesn’t get enough credit but she is the home fire. She takes care of our lives, right down to any time we leave the house or go out or do anything, Mary is right there setting up the whole thing making sure everything runs smooth. Dealing with everybody. She’s a wonderful person. And really gets along with people and has probably smoothed over a lot of things for me because I was quite a turbulent person in those days, [Laughs] in the early days.
Were you?
Yeah. I had a huge temper and I’d get really pissed off, and I was really passionate, too. And I think she was kind of a balance to that. She could bring me back to earth, or explain to whoever I’d offended that I didn’t really mean it. And she’s just remarkable. I mean, even to this day, if we’re leaving the house to go somewhere a fax will appear with a map and who’s going to be there and where you go. She’s really meticulous that way.
And then Jimmy Iovine came in [as producer], and the rest is history. He had done some work with John Lennon, engineering. There was an album out by John called Walls And Bridges, and Jimmy played a role in that, and I liked that record. And then Cordell really found Jimmy. He suggested him. Jimmy hadn’t really produced anything except that Patti Smith track [“Because the Night” written by Bruce Springsteen]. And he had engineered Bruce’s Born To Run. So I thought, really, I was hiring him as an engineer. And he showed up with his own engineer, Shelly Yakus. Which I hadn’t planned on.
Were you intending to produce the next record yourself?
I thought Denny was going to produce it. And Jimmy would be kind of the liaison between Denny and us. But it turned out that Jimmy and I produced it together, and we became fast friends. We got very close, doing that. We were two ambitious kids trying to pull it off. And we did. But it was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.
Was it Jimmy who initiated the practice of doing countless takes and spending hours to get a drum sound?
Oh yeah. We had never thought about that before. He wanted to do a much more sophisticated kind of recording. 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.
They got bigger in the mix.
Yeah, bigger and bigger and bigger. And it’s not my favorite sound, those huge drums. ‘Cause when you have the drums that big, it’s really hard to fit things around them. To fit the guitars and stuff around them was really tricky. But that was Jimmy’s vision, to create this drum sound. He’d be changing the drumheads dozens of times. [Laughs] 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.
You said that both you and Stan were turbulent. On the recording of Damn The Torpedoes [1979], was there a lot of turbulence?
I remember that when Jimmy Iovine came into the picture around 1978 when we started to make Damn The Torpedoes, he was really tough on Stan. Really tough. They did not get along. And Stan was one of those people that would kick up a lot of smoke to keep you from looking at him. [Laughs] Like if he was the problem, he would just kick up a big fuss where you’d get confused and look all around, but you wouldn’t really zero in on him.
I don’t really want to knock Stanley. Because it all went great. We all wound up in great positions in life. And I don’t think it would have happened exactly the same way without him. I really liked him, for some reason [Laughs] or another.
We were good friends. So I don’t want to knock him. But he was certainly the most difficult Heartbreaker and I think he would admit that, too.
I think he had a lot of insecurity in a lot of ways. It probably goes back to Gainesville. When Stanley and I first met, he was still in high school. And I think we were a few years older than him so he kind of looked up to us in some ways. And to him it was quite a big deal to be playing with us, even back in Gainesville. He saw us as the top band and so I think he had a little bit of insecurity, which is true of most people that are difficult [Laughs] or hard to deal with. You usually find that they are a little insecure about something.
So I think that might have been his problem, but like I say, we were boys. [Laughs] We weren’t men. We were boys and we were going through a really wild life experience.
The result, after all that work, was Damn The Torpedoes, which was an immense hit. It had so many great songs—“Refugee,” “Don’t Do Me Like That,” “Even The Losers,” “Here Comes My Girl.” Did you write some of these in the studio?
Oddly enough, the songs were all written. I think I only wrote one song during the recording. And that was “You Tell Me” on the second side. There are only nine songs on the record. I had written “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl,” and most of “Even The Losers.” “Don’t Do Me Like That” was the first hit off that record. That was a Mudcrutch song that we worked on way back when he sent us to Tulsa. We cut it down. “Louisiana Rain” was another one that was cut for my solo project.
Jimmy went back to the tapes at Shelter, and went through everything I had ever done, and he found those songs. And wanted to recut those. So they were written.
“Century City” was written during the record, certainly.
Because that was where I went for the lawyers and the lawsuits. So that was written then. So with that record, things were never the same. Things became very mega at that point. [Laughs] Very large.
In a good way? Was it positive?
Yeah, it was positive. As usual we were just running like wild men day and night. The big difference now is that a lot of money was coming in. We started being affluent young men. [Laughs] But even that didn’t really dawn on me. It didn’t seem that real or that significant, for some reason. It was great to have all the attention and the huge crowds coming in. That we really loved. I remember, in those days, not really knowing the difference between, say, $8,000 and $80,000.
Eight thousand dollars sounded like so much to me that I’d forget a zero. And I could see accountants being a little shocked, and saying, ‘No, man, no, we mean $80,000.’ So money was coming in, and was just being put in the bank. One day I looked up and I had a lot of money. But my life didn’t change on a day-to-day basis because we were just living in hotel rooms and touring all the time. As a matter of fact, as the story goes, we were doubling up in hotel rooms. We stayed two to a room. There’d be me and Ron, Mike and Stan, and Ben and the road manager. We’d all double up in three different rooms.
Then we got a new road manager around late ‘78. And this guy got his own room. And so that left Ben with a single room. So we devised a rotating thing where every few days somebody got the single room. Then one night we were in Miami, and we were going down the hall, and the road manager put the key in his door, and was going in his room. And I said, ‘How come you get your own room?’
He said, ‘Because I demand it.’
And I said, ‘Hell, what if I demanded a single room?’
He said, ‘You want a single room?’
‘Yeah. We all do.’
He said, ‘Okay, let’s all have single rooms.’ And from that point on, we all got our own rooms. It was just that nobody from the office or anywhere had bothered to tell us we could afford them. They were just waiting for us to discover that. And so that’s kind of the way we started to learn that we had a little more money than we used to have, things like that. But nobody was gonna tell us. We just had to stumble onto it.
How did your father respond to your success?
He had this real left-handed way of complimenting you. [Laughs] Right before he died he said to me, ‘You know, you’ve done really well. You’ve done really well with your life. Because I’ve got to say, I never would have dreamed you could have made a dollar doing what you’re doing. [Laughs] I never dreamt that you could do it. But you did it, and I’m really proud of you.’
That must have been great to hear, after all those years.
My father really liked the idea of us getting wealthy when we were young. And then he became a huge Heartbreakers fan. Wore a Heartbreakers jacket, and went to every gig in Florida. And had an endless amount of people—fans who would turn up at the door—he’d bring anybody in the house. And some of them just stayed for weeks. I thought it was kind of creepy.
But he really stepped into the role of Tom Petty’s dad in a big way. And he gave interviews. It pissed me off. Because I’d see him, and instead of, ‘Hey, how’ve you been, how are you?’ it’d be like, ‘Hey, can you sign these things for me?’ and ‘Will you do this?’ and ‘Will you do that?’ and ‘Will you speak to this fan for me?’
But he’d never say, ‘Oh, by the way, how are you?’ It took him years to kind of come back around to ‘How are you?’ ‘Cause that became his identity. Tom Petty’s dad. So it was funny to me to see him embrace that in such a big way when he’d been such an asshole about it. [Laughs] So he was quite an interesting guy. [Laughs] Very unusual.
When did he die?
1997.
So he saw the fullness of your success.
Yeah. I bought him Cadillacs and [Laughs] he really dug that.
And a truck?
Yeah, I gave him a truck. I would have bought him a house. But he wanted to stay there where he knew all his neighbors. So I had the house remodeled for him. Updated. And virtually anything he wanted, I took care of him. Though some people around me, they said, ‘Why do you do this?’
How did your mom respond to your success?
She wasn’t like [my father]. She was always concerned about me. And, in the late Seventies, she worried that the girls were going to hurt me. [Laughs] There were girls diving on me and stuff. She saw a gig and I guess chicks were coming over the stage everywhere we went. Especially in Gainesville, we were just followed by crowds of kids, and even their house was completely covered in kids. And film crews. And people from the TV station. It was impossible to go to the house, really, in Gainesville. I usually set up another place to meet with my parents. They lived in a little four-room house. And the media and the kids, when they knew I was coming, they would descend on the house. So we’d usually meet somewhere else. It was kind of cute—she’d be worried they were going to hurt me. [Laughs]
One night I got really torn up onstage. I got pulled into the crowd in Winterland [Ballroom], up in San Francisco [December 1978]. And I guess they put it into one of the music magazines, a picture of me being mobbed by the crowd, and being torn up. That’s one of my memories. What happened that night is that the crowd was very close to the stage, all on their feet. And I was walking the edge of the stage. As I leaned forward, somebody got me around the legs. And I fell into the crowd. It was really like falling into a lake of people. I went down, down, down, toward the floor. But I never hit the floor, I just landed on people. And then people were coming over the top of me. And they were literally grabbing me everywhere. There was a bandana around my neck, and they somehow stretched that almost to my belly. When I came out I noticed that. My shirt was ripped open. The vest I had on was ripped off from the back. And I really thought I was gonna die, because there was no air. And I couldn’t even see; everything went dark. And then suddenly I see a little hole above me. And in that hole I could see Bugs, looking down from the stage. And he literally did a dive, like you were diving into a pool, a hands-first dive, and came down the hole of people, and landed on top of me. And kind of grabbed me around the shoulders. And then there were a few seconds there where we looked at each other, and both of us thought we were goners. Like we’re gonna die right here in the middle of this mob. And what happened is that more and more security people started jumping in, and they made kind of a human chain, and pulled us up. And we made it to the top. And when I got to the top, I was really stunned. My lips were broken and bleeding. I was really bruised up and pretty shaken. Ever since then I’ve been a little nervous about getting near the edge of the stage. I’ve seen these bands that dive onto the people and get passed around. Well, my crowd just tears you to bits.
It’s a funny thing; it still stays in my mind. There were bodies stacked on top of us maybe six-feet deep. And it’s a hard thing to get any air and to get up through that. Bugs and I looked into each other’s eyes. And he was looking at me like, ‘I’m gonna take care of you.’ But I did see that flash between both of us that we might die here. And it’s like one minute you’re doing a rock ‘n’ roll show, and the next minute you’re in fear for your life. I think that’s the only time that’s ever happened to me. But it really did something in my head and has always stuck in the back of my mind.
There was a picture of it somebody took from the stage down. It was printed in a magazine, and my mom saw the photo and was really disturbed about it. That what I was doing wasn’t safe and that I wasn’t being protected. So that was probably one of the things that made her nervous that I wasn’t safe.
But she was also very proud of my success. I sent her Gold records and stuff with her name on them. She put them all on the wall.
She and your dad stayed together?
Yeah, but she died in ‘81. She had seen us have this huge success and everything, and I always felt that she knew that I was okay. She just cared about me. She didn’t really care about the “Tom Petty.
” She stayed the same. She cared about me. And it’s one of my great regrets and it’s really sad, that I could have done so much for her. And she died. It was devastating. But had she lived, I think I could have given her a really great life.
You once said that nothing is sweeter than having a hit record.
[Laughs] It was really rewarding. It felt great. All that work wasn’t in vain. Things were just happening at such a pace. And everywhere you looked, there was a huge pay-off for doing the work and for working so hard. And it really was a pay-off for those first three years. Of everything we had done. It was all this building and momentum. Then when it got to that point, it all paid off at once. But I’ll tell you, the years before that, I remember them very fondly. Like being a cult group and being not quite so big. I remember that very fondly. It was a real comfortable time, although we were driven to be more successful. We didn’t have the weight of being a big business. We were just young and happy to be doing what we were doing. I remember that as being a really nice time.
With Damn The Torpedoes, by the time we got to the next record, things were a lot more serious, and then there was this huge pressure to do it again. That was something we had never faced. Things changed then.
How was it to hear your songs on the radio?
It was killer. In those days, in L.A., there were three or four rock ‘n’ roll stations. Playing new rock ‘n’ roll music. Imagine that. [Laughs] I remember sitting in my den, and I had this big dial on my tuner, and I could really just spin that dial and go across the stations, and hear us all over the place. Sometimes I could hear the same song playing at the same time on different stations. And being a radio nut like I was, it was like, ‘God, this is amazing!’ I remember Mike calling and saying, ‘Hey, turn on your radio’ and ‘Now go to this station!’ Because we were being played all at once on every station. It was ridiculously saturated. I don’t know if it was everywhere, but it was here. [Laughs]