by Paul Zollo
He’s not the kind of person who is going to tell you everything about himself. But I found him to be a good guy. I like him. Liked him then, like him now. He’s a really good musician, and a great songwriter.
One of the nicest things about Bob is that he’s an honest guy. Really, really honest. Not someone that would ever lie. Not someone who would blow his own horn. And I enjoyed all those years working with him, and I think we had a genuine friendship. Still do. We had a lot of long talks. He knows a lot about music.
What kind of music?
Well, he could go back with songs to sea chanties. Folk music. He really knew a lot of folk songs, a lot of early R&B, a lot of early rock ‘n’ roll songs, fairly obscure songs that I didn’t know. Some of the times I remember the fondest are the rehearsals where Bob might start playing some songs that we didn’t know, and you’d discover something new.
When you have that kind of success, and you’re the best songwriter who ever lived, a lot of myth is built up around you. And it’s quite a lot to carry around every day. But I admire him for remaining a good guy, an honest guy.
I’ll tell you this about him: I saw a lot of people running circles around Bob, being afraid of him, or afraid to say what was on their mind. Trying to anticipate what he was trying to say or do. I always found that if I asked Bob a direct question, I would get a direct answer. So maybe our friendship wasn’t that difficult, because I made up my mind that I would treat him like anybody else. Though I certainly was in awe of his talent. But people are just people. [Laughs] And I don’t remember ever asking him a question when he didn’t give me a direct answer.
He can enunciate his view of the world really well. And he can enunciate it in a way that’s poetic. That’s a gift. That’s not something you learn, or get out of a manual. It’s just a gift. So I was lucky to be around him. I never took it for granted that I was getting to work with someone that was a master of what he was doing. But I never found him to take himself too seriously. He was a professional. Never showed up late, made every show. [Laughs]
I found Bob to really put his family first, and to have a great concern about his children. The man himself is a professional musician and a family man. A troubadour of the truest sense.
During one span of the tour, you were interspersing your songs with Dylan. How did that feel to do that?
Scary. You know, because you’re there with the greatest writer who ever lived. [Laughs] But you try to just not think about that. And people were really happy to hear us play, too, thank God. So I think it really intimidated me at first, but once you’ve done the show a few times, you get used to it.
It was great playing with Bob. I even got to play the bass on some songs, when Howie would play a lap-steel. And there was something very free about it. I think we learned quite a bit. It was good for me to step back and see what it’s like to back somebody up. And it was really interesting to see the whole dynamic of how it works, how you have to really pay attention to what the singer’s doing. And it’s a whole different mindset than if you’re up front. So I think we emerged from that a much better band.
When I saw you, you guys were on fire.
It was so rewarding musically. Just so much fun.
The whole band enjoyed it?
Oh yeah. And there were great, great songs to play. Wow. All those songs, and they were all good. And it was just so much fun. It was such a thrill to play “Like A Rolling Stone” with Bob. And we’d sing harmony, and there was only one mike. There was that theory, that kind of goes back to folk music, that everybody is going to sing on one mike and balance themselves. But God, it was fun. And [Dylan’s] been a good friend for years. And treated us great, really. Treated us great. And it was a great honor. And really rewarding musically.
Did it change the band?
I think it did. It’s hard to put it into words. But we became a band that just didn’t play the parts from the record. We became a band who could go up there and really express ourselves as to where we were at in the moment. And still stay within a framework and make it all work. But I think it just expanded the horizons. We saw that we could be a better band. And we were honored to be there.
In Dylan’s book Chronicles, Vol. 1, he writes about touring with you, and I was surprised to read that he said that you were at the “top of your game” and he was at the bottom of his.
Yeah, I was surprised to read that, too. All I can say is that If he was at the bottom of his game, then the bottom is pretty high, because he really could be riveting on some nights. I recently saw a bootleg video of one of the shows, and I was taken back by just how great he was in the show.
You know, artists at times aren’t really the best judges of how they’re performing. I’ve had nights where I thought I wasn’t very good, and then people who had seen the show would come to me raving about it. I did have the sense of that tour that Bob was searching for something. It’s very hard to put into words. We had a lot of long plane rides and talked quite a bit. It was nothing he said in particular, but I did sometimes feel that he was maybe searching for the next step in his career.
But he said in the book that the crowds for the most part were coming in to see me. I don’t think that was true. I think they were coming in to see the pair of us, in see us together. And I feel that we had a lot of great nights musically. And maybe because he was in some kind of inner turmoil, he doesn’t remember it that way. Maybe I was at the top of my game, but I don’t think he was at the bottom of his. I don’t think the bottom of his game is that low, anyway. I think he’s always good. Maybe, like anyone else, to different degrees on different nights.
In the book he mentions Malmuth, Sweden, where he had a great epiphany onstage that kind of showed him through the next door of his career. And I do remember that happening. I didn’t know what was going on in his head, but I remember him stepping up to the mike to sing, and nothing coming out, and I felt really worried for him, like that maybe his voice was gone. And then he dug down deep, and bang, it came out, and he was a new man within seconds there. And from that point on, and for the rest of the tour, the shows actually did go up a notch. The energy level went up, and he did seem renewed a little bit. So when I read that in the book, it brought that back to my mind. I do remember that happening.
But Bob is a great artist, and I think that he’s always going to be worth the money to come in and see. But artists are like that—they don’t necessarily see when they’re working at their best.
But I loved his book. I saw it saw it as just one long poem.
I was surprised that during the recording of his album Oh Mercy, that he had so much self-doubt. He would go into the studio with only lyrics and no melodies, and try to find the melody while in the studio.
The great thing about the book is that it reveals that he has insecurities like everyone else has. When you’re that famous, people don’t often give you that benefit of the doubt. They kind of just assume that you understand how great you’re supposed to be. [Laughs] But the truth is, you’re only a human. And you’re still going to go through everything that humans go through.
Was this the time during which your house got burned?
Yes. It was quite a weird time. That was ‘86 and ‘87. [May 17, 1987] Weird stuff happened. And that was when my house got burnt down.
Was it arson?
Yes. It was arson. They found the evidence where someone had cut a hole in the back fence on a hill and had been watching the house. For probably a period of time. And really early one morning they came down and set the house on fire. And it was a wooden house, and it went up really quickly. The whole place, just like a matchbox, it went up really fast.
You were there with your wife and kids?
Yeah. Actually, only one of my kids was home. And the fire started really close to her room. [Softly] I mean. I’ve never talked about this ever. Because it was such a shock. To have somebody try to kill you is a really bad feeling. And I never really wanted to talk about it in
detail, because it frightened me so bad. I wouldn’t even use the word ‘fire’ in a song or anything. It really frightened me. They didn’t just try to kill me, they tried to wipe out my whole family. And it was a hell of a day. It was my wife’s birthday. We were planning an afternoon barbecue. So as the house was burning, guests were arriving.
You all got out of the house okay?
Just. Just got out. I got [my family] out. And it makes that really thick smoke and then down at the ground, it was clear. You can’t imagine how black it gets inside because immediately the windows are just smutted up, there’s no light coming in. So you couldn’t see. But you could see clearly at the bottom of the smoke.
The first thing I did was just push my wife and kid out a side door and told them to go to the swimming pool. Just go and jump into the pool, because that won’t burn. And then I ran out the back door, and picked up a hose to try to fight the fire in the back. And the hose melted in my hands. Just absolutely melted. I got kind of burned; standing close to it was kind of like being in the sun for too long. And I remember then I tried to come out of the house, and that’s when I realized the whole place was on fire. I hit the ground and crawled on my belly. I knew enough, from hotel safety films, to get on the ground and not breathe the smoke.
I crawled under the smoke, got out through an open door, and at that point I saw that my housekeeper was standing about fifty feet away from me with a hose. And she caught fire. Her head caught fire. Her hair went up. And I yelled at her, ‘You’re on fire!’ And she took the hose, and put it on her head, which actually saved her.
Then I went diving down by the pool, pulled my wife and daughter out, went down the driveway. By that time the press arrived. They were the first to get there. Because they listen to those radios. They got there before the fire people. just before. And I was really angry. There was a news crew, and they were shooting everything. And I was kind of crazed. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I didn’t dream at that moment that it was arson. I just thought something had happened. It was a pretty big house, and I couldn’t tell. I just thought something somewhere had caught fire.
Literally everything I owned was burnt. I think there was one little corner of the house that didn’t burn. Luckily, it had a couple guitars and stuff there. That was about all that didn’t burn. Everything else burned.
Did the Dave guitar make it?
The Dove guitar made it, it was sitting in the far corner of the house. But everything burned. [Pause]
It was really weird. I didn’t have any shoes. I had run out of the house in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. And Annie Lennox helped a whole lot. I remember seeing her out of the corner of my eye. I was running around, and there were a lot of people there. And I’ll forever he grateful to her. I sent the family away to a hotel right away.
And I stayed. And at the end of the night, when I finally left and went to the hotel, Annie had gone and bought us all a complete wardrobe of clothes. And that was really the only clothes I had for weeks. She went and bought me a pair of shoes. Actually, some pretty nice stuff. Because she was bright enough—she got there and immediately saw that these people are going to need everything. So she left and went and bought all the clothes, and then brought them to the hotel.
A lovely person.
So Annie was there with the family. And we were all in shock. Deep shock.
I remember the firemen got two cars out. One was a Mercedes, and it has that rubber thing on the key And he gave me the key when he got it out, because the rubber had melted to just this long trickle of plastic. [Laughs] And he gave me the key and said, ‘That’s how close it came.’
The studio sprinklers turned on, which kind of ruined all the equipment, but we got the tape out. Whatever tapes were in the studio.
You know, it had a devastating effect on me. The arson guys showed up. And said, ‘This was arson. Somebody burned your house.’ And I couldn’t possibly accept it. I just kept saying, ‘No, you’re mistaken.’ And then they took me around the back of the house, and showed me where someone had lit a can of lighter fluid, and thrown it into the back of the house. And it was completely clear that it was arson. So when I went back to the hotel I was very scared that somebody was trying to kill us.
Life changed. Suddenly security was going to be around us night and day. And a day or two later, I went to rehearsal. We were rehearsing. I’ll never forget, the strangest thing was I drove myself to rehearsal and I was in such a state of shock that after the rehearsal, I drove all the way to my front gate before I remembered the house was burnt down. Pulled up to the gate, and then it hit me. [Laughs]
So I’ve never really talked about that. [Pause] Then you really start to think about fame. It’s a good and bad kind of thing. You realize that there are real lunatics out there who may just pick you for, whatever it is, their release or their obsession.
Because they love you so much.
Or they hate you. Or whatever.
So you lived in a hotel for a while?
Yeah, I lived in a hotel. And immediately there were security guards all around us. I’ve never liked to go around with security guards and an entourage and people. I don’t like the idea of servants. And so life changed a bit then. It was necessary to have these people around.
We lived in a hotel for a few weeks, and then I rented a house up on Mulholland Drive that Stevie [Nicks] had been living in. And then I went right on tour first to Egypt, and then with Dylan to Israel and Europe. Without a possession. Without anything. [Laughs]
Did you have your guitars?
The only guitar at the house was the Dove. And everything else was with the other equipment that was being prepared to go on the road. So I didn’t lose my guitars. But I lost so much. You know, a lifetime of photos. Everything that I had. I had quite a lot by that time in my life. It was all lost. Completely. The house was just burnt to cinders.
Was your family pretty shaken by it?
Oh yeah. Yeah. We were shaken for years by it. It’s sort of like being raped, I would imagine. It really took a long time. And it was ten times as bad, because you knew that somebody just went and did it. Somebody tried to off you. So you go through a lot of emotions: Anger, confusion; I think it was fairly therapeutic that we went on the road. The whole family went. For a while. And then they went back to L.A. and I kept touring. But I think ii kind of saved me in a way, because it kept me busy with something to do. It was just so odd to own nothing. [Laughs] You know, you’d go, ‘Oh, I think I’ll pick up this coat here, because I don’t have one.’ I might like another pair of shoes. And you just rebuild your life.
Did you rebuild that house?
I did. I rebuilt. That was the ultimate therapy, because it wasn’t even anywhere I wanted to live that badly. I moved to a place on Mulholland, and lived there for a year, and then I moved to Beverly Hills, and rented another house there. Dave Stewart, actually, showed up that afternoon [of the fire] and said, ‘You’re not going to move, are you? Because, you know, I just built my house and you’re my neighbor. You’re not going to move?’
And I thought that would be the ultimate therapy to build the house back, and to say to whoever did it, ‘You didn’t get me. I didn’t move an inch. And I’m still alive. And I’m going to build it back.’ So I built it back in an even greater way, a more expanded kind of house. So I built it back. Took a few years to build it back.
Did you like living up on Mulholland?
Yeah, it was nice. I think I was just in shock through all that time. [Pause] I was kind of just shocked. I then moved from the house on Mulholland to Charo’s house. Charo was this Vegas entertainer, Xavier Cugat’s wife. Cugat had bought this big house in Beverly Hills back in the Forties or Fifties. And [my family] moved from Mulholland to there when I was gone. I lived there until I rebuilt the house, and then I moved back.
Were your children okay?
Yeah, they were okay. Kim had this kind of ticking sound [clicks with his tongue] for about a year after,
but that went away. They were okay. Everybody pulled together. And we came very close. And we just kind of went through it. What else can you do?
It’s a little confusing to me what happened in what order. The fire happened in the middle of the Bob Dylan tour. I remember telling Bob, when we were in England at the end of the tour, that we were going to have to stop, as far as backing him up. I had to go back and sort out my life and my family, and find a home, and we needed to get back to just being The Heartbreakers. And we had really enjoyed it, and now he needed to get his own band, because we needed to get back to our own thing.
And Bob said, ‘No, we don’t want to break this up, it’s too good.’
And I said, ‘It is really good, but we kind of had our own agenda before we got into this.’ And he thought we could do both. And maybe we could have, but we were really tired. Because we were still trying to be Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. And we did our own tour in the middle of that, and we made a record. We made Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) [1987]. [Laughs] And that title says a lot about that period. So I get it out of order. All I remember about all of it really well is that it ended in 1987 right around Christmas time. I came back. Kind of tired, but happy. I was in a new house, living in Beverly Hills, and I was going to put my feet up for a little while. And, of course, that never happens. [Laughs] And then a whole other chapter of life started.
You and Mike produced your next record Let Me Up yourselves. It was the first album you produced on your own. How come you did that?
This album was made on a break during the Dylan tour. It was just before we went to Israel and Europe. We did make this album then, and did a quick tour of the U.S. on our own, and then went back to working with Bob. I think we just wanted to get out from under producers for a while and just produce it ourselves. We’re not great at doing that. It taught us that we should never do it again, because we’re both too lazy to push ourselves the way we should be. If you hear that record, it’s two records in one. There’s my stuff, and there’s Mike’s stuff. And all of Mike’s stuff sounds completely different than mine does. [Laughs] His stuff is this really produced stuff, like “Runaway Trains.” Then you’ll hear my side of things, and it’s much cruder. I did a lot of songs in the studio and cutting them really quick after we’d written them.