by Paul Zollo
“The Damage You’ve Done” is literally the first time they’re hearing the song [Laughs] We were very hold in that sense, about just going for spontaneity. And I think it worked on some levels and it didn’t work on others.
handle with care chapter nine
Was it while touring with Dylan that you heard an advance tape of George Harrison’s Cloud Nine, produced by Jeff Lynne?
tp: Yeah. And I loved it. We played in Birmingham [England] with Bob and then a few weeks later we played London for a few nights. I think we were there for three or four nights in Wembley. On the first night in Birmingham, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne came to visit. And Bob was not feeling well. He was not really around before the show, and then he didn’t want to hang around afterwards too much.
It was funny—that first night we were in London, when we had that great time, a hurricane hit. In London. Completely unannounced and unpredicted by the weather bureau. I always thought that [hurricane] had something to do with changing my life. This literal hurricane.
The Hindus think that when you meet someone and you feel really close to them immediately, that maybe you knew them in a past life. And that was how it was with George. We met each other and instantly became really close. Instantly we became very close. And I remember him saying to me, ‘You know, I’m not going to let you out of my life now.’ And it wasn’t about The Beatles or anything like that. We really got along well. And shared a sense of humor. And we became very close friends. And Jeff, too.
So we hung out, and one night we really had a nice time, after the gig we hung out for hours with George, and Ringo was there and Derek Taylor [music journalist, former Beatles publicist, and collaborator on George Harrison’s autobiography, I, Me, Mine]. And all of their wives. And we hung out, and we had a lot of laughs. And then the next night was my birthday. I have a photo. They brought me a little birthday cake. And there’s a photo of me and George and McGuinn and Bob and Mike, and we’re all backstage laughing. And it looks pretty accurate. Victor Maymudes, who was Bob’s roadie, was there. We had a really good time. And George gave me this cassette, and said, ‘This is the album. Let me know if you like it.’
So I took it home. That was the last gig of the tour, London. And that was when I told Bob, I can’t carry on because I have to go home and rebuild my life. The house had burnt down and all of this, and I’ve kind of got to put my life back together, so I’m going to have to bow out. Which I think he understood, but he was kind of sad about it.
So I came back, and it was Thanksgiving Day. I was at the house in Beverly Hills, and some people were coming over. And I like to have softball games. And so I was going to have a softball game at the house. But I didn’t have enough mitts to play ball. So I was going to drive down to the Sav-On in Beverly Hills and buy a dozen ball mitts so everybody could play ball. Which was the only place open on Thanksgiving Day. So I’m at the traffic light, and I look over to my left, and there’s Jeff Lynne. Who I’d only just recently seen in England. So I honked my horn, and he turned around, and we pulled over. And I said, ‘Wow, what are you doing here? And I love that album; the album’s great.’
He said, ‘I’m working with Brian Wilson.’ And he said, ‘Where do you live?’
I told him where I lived, and he said, ‘That’s weird. I live really close to there. So we should get together.’
‘Okay, let’s do—let’s get together.’ Because I really liked Jeff—he’s a great guy. And very warm, and has a really great sense of humor.
So we fast-forward a little bit. And I think Jeff probably came over after that in a day or two. And we hung out a little bit. And fast-forward a little more and it was right before Christmas. And there were a lot of magical things going on in my life. I was with my daughter Adria, and we were out Christmas shopping. We had driven over to Studio City, there was this one restaurant there on Ventura called Le Seur, a French restaurant that was a really good restaurant. It was really good, and it was the kind of place you went to on special evenings. It was kind of our special night restaurant. And I wanted to give Adria a big afternoon out. And we were shopping and buying gifts. And we were driving past Le Seur and she said, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if you could just eat lunch at Le Seur?’
And I said, ‘Why not, let’s go.’
She said, ‘You’re kidding.’
I pulled in the parking lot and we came in. I sat down in my chair, and the waiter came over and he said, ‘There’s a friend of your’s here and he’d like you to come over to the table.’ And that’s all he said.
I said, ‘Oh,’ and I got up and walked around—there was kind of this private dining room—and as I walk in, there’s George [Harrison]. And he was having lunch with some people from Warner Brothers. And Jeff. And as I walked into the room, Jeff was writing my number down for George. And George said, ‘How strange, I’d just gotten your number and somebody told me you’d walked into the restaurant at the same time.’
I said, ‘Yeah, that’s far out.’
He said, ‘Where are you going?’
I said, ‘Well, I was just gonna eat.’
He said, ‘Where are you going after you eat?’
And I said I was going home, and he said, ‘Can I come with you?’
‘Well, I guess so, why not?’
And he said, ‘Well, I’ve got my car but I’ll follow you to your house.’ He said, ‘I’m staying at the Hotel Bel-Air,’ which wasn’t too far away. He said, ‘We’ll just hang out, okay?’
And I said okay. He followed me to my house, and we hung out that afternoon. And this is kind of strange, because when I talk about George, he’s so famous, and so much of an icon. But he really had the ability to make you forget about that and be a real good friend, and we had a lot of fun. A lot of laughs, a lot of playing the guitars.
The next day, the door rings, and George is back with his family. We spent Christmas Eve together. Actually, we spent several Christmases to come. He would usually be on his way to Hawaii at Christmas, and he would stop in L.A. And our two families became close. Dhani [George’s son] became a close friend of Adria’s, and they’re still good pals.
Did George like L.A.?
I don’t think he really liked L.A. He complained a lot about the smog and it being over-populated. But he had a lot of friends here, and he came often to see his friends. You know, Jeff [Lynne] and Jim Keltner, Mo Ostin, and just many, many more. He had a lot of friends here. And so sometimes he would just come to hang with the guys.
So it was around this time that I showed Jeff one night I had written the song “Yer So Bad.” But there was one little bit in the B-section where I didn’t know where to go. And he showed me this E minor chord. And that kind of opened it all up to me. And he showed me this little part, E minor to C, and said, ‘You could do this.’ And I said, ‘That’s great!’ And I was so elated, because I had been working on the song for days and I couldn’t get from the verse to the chorus somehow. And he showed me this little bit, and I said, ‘Great! Will you produce this?’
And he said, ‘Sure, let’s do it.’ And he said, ‘Where should we record it?’ And Mike had the studio in his house, and Jeff said he much preferred working in houses than studios.
And then Jeff came back the next day. We hadn’t gone to Mike’s yet. And that evening we wrote “Free Fallin’.” And that was a pretty big rush. And then he left and I wrote the last verse about Mulholland and all that. And so he came back the next day and I showed him that I had finished the song. And he was really jazzed, and said, ‘Let’s go record it.’
So I took Jeff to Mike’s. And there was just enough room to get the three of us into the room with the recording console. It was this little bedroom that was so small, it was so jammed with recording gear and a recording console, that Bugs had to stand in the hall outside the door. Because it was that small. It was so funky, nobody would ever believe it.
We ran mike cables out to the garage. Which was a real garage. We pulled the cars out. And we re
corded it that way. The first track we did was “Free Fallin’.”
How long did it take to record?
One day. Maybe two.
Phil Jones played drums?
Yes. He had been around a long time. He was a drummer, a good friend of ours, and he played percussion on a lot of our albums and on a tour in ‘81. “Free Fallin’” took one day, maybe two. It was Christmas, so we didn’t know where the band was. I think Stanley was in Florida. And so that became a solo record. And that was a real kind of a weird thing for me, because it was a big deal for The Heartbreakers.
I remember calling Howie because I thought we had better get as many of [The Heartbreakers] as we can. Though we had really made the track, and we had done the bass. But maybe Howie could come and sing, and this would smooth the wound over to have them come in. And I guess they had already talked among themselves, and they were pissed about it. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I think they had probably talked among themselves, Stanley and Ben and Howie. There was a vibe.
So I got to Mike’s, and Howie was sitting outside the door of the bedroom. And he seemed kind of preoccupied, like he could be in those days. He was waiting, almost like a doctor waiting in the waiting room. And he said, ‘You don’t really need me for this, do you?’ And he said, ‘I don’t like it.’
I said, ‘Well, if you don’t like it, I don’t need you.’
And he said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna go,’ and he left.
Right then I went, well, this is going to be a Tom Petty solo record, because I like it. And I’m not going to go through this vibe, and there’s really no room for them on this anyway. And Mike engineered the track; we didn’t have an engineer.
Who played bass?
Jeff.
The next day we recorded “Yer So Bad.” So we mixed those two songs. While we were mixing “Free Fallin’” we wrote “I Won’t Back Down.” Jeff and I did, in a little booth in the studio.
So now George is back in town, and he helped us record “I Won’t Back Down.” And we’re having a ball. We’re just having a ball. It seemed like musically we could do no wrong. We were digging everything we were doing. And I was afraid—Jeff kept saying, ‘I don’t know about doing a whole album, ‘cause I have to go to England.’
And so I really quickly said, ‘We’ll write a song a day and do a track a day. If you can just put off the trip for a week.’ I was that desperate for him to finish the record with me. And we really did write a song a day and we recorded the next day. We did almost all of it. I think we did nine songs. The last one was “Runnin’ Down A Dream.” We wrote that around a riff Mike had. [Sings descending riff.] And so the record was made really quick. And we mixed it really fast.
Was it a fun experience, working like that?
Yeah, it was a ball. I had so much fun.
Did you have room for drums there?
In the garage. We’d sing in the garage; and we did everything out there. It was cold out there, too. Sometimes you could see your breath [Laughs] when you sang.
Jeff kept saying, ‘Roy Orbison is coming to town.’ And that was Jeff’s great hero. Roy Orbison and Del Shannon were his two favorites. He idolized Roy and Del Shannon. And that was another strange connection, because I knew Del Shannon, I had done a record with him way back when, and so had Jeff. And he kept saying, ‘Roy Orbison is coming to town, and we’re going to do something with Roy Orbison.’ And Roy came. I guess Roy was living out here in Malibu. And they hooked up.
Jeff lived not far from me, and one afternoon the phone rang and it was him, and he said, ‘Hey, Roy Orbison’s over here, you’ve got to come over and help me write a song for him. I need some help.’ So I jumped in the car, I had a new Corvette, and we went over to see Jeff and Roy, and we all went out to look at the car, and we raised the hood of the car. And we were such a bunch of musicians, non-mechanics, you know, and we couldn’t get the hood back down on the car. [Laughs] And I remember my first meeting with Roy, he’s got his head under my hood trying to figure out how to get the hood down.
And we wrote “You Got It.” [Sings, “Anything you want, you got it…”]
The three of you wrote it together?
Yeah. And that was on that first day. And so I think that went on. We came back the next day too, wrote another song called “California Blue” that he did on his album. So this became a kind of circle of friends. Occasionally Roy would show up for dinner, and George [Harrison] was in and out of town. And Jeff and I were pretty tight, because we were neighbors. So that was the germ of the Traveling Wilburys.
Roy was a mysterious guy, always wearing those dark glasses.
He never took the glasses off. But he was very jovial. Very funny. One of the funniest guys I’ve ever met. A sweetheart. You couldn’t help but love him. He always had some jokes, and he had the most infectious laugh. That’s one thing I remember about him a lot, his laugh, for some reason, was really infectious. Like when you heard him laugh, you couldn’t help but laugh with him.
And he was a bit older than us, and he seemed maybe a little wiser. [Laughs] But I liked him a lot. That’s who I was hanging with, that year, that Christmas. And the time after that. We were all pals. George came back from Hawaii, and I think he stayed until March or something. He stayed because he had to go to the [Rock and Roll] Hall of Fame and get his Hall of Fame induction—I remember he was in L.A. before he went to that. [The Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.]
George was known as “the quiet Beatle” but I understand he was anything but.
Oh yeah.
Funny too?
He was so funny, it’s hard to explain. He was the funniest guy I ever met. Such a keen sense of humor. A lot of fun. A wise person. He really wanted to know the meaning of it all. But at the same time, he was really light-hearted and tremendous fun. [Laughs] Just tremendous fun. And we got along so well. There’s really not a day that I don’t think about him. Many adventures were to come after that.
You once mentioned that on guitar he would play what he’d call “naughty chords,” such as diminished chords.
Yeah. Well, he knew every chord. He knew so many chords. He was a great, great musician. Jeff too. They were really great. I was in awe of how good they were. And just how musical they were. And there’s nothing like that to make you want to step up and do your best work.
So that became my crowd. And I didn’t see much of The Heartbreakers during that period. Mike I kept in touch with, of course, because he was working on Full Moon Fever with me.
But you knew you didn’t want to break up The Heartbreakers?
I never thought of leaving. And I kept reassuring them that I wasn’t going to leave. But I think there was some doubt in their mind.
Where did the title Full Moon Fever come from?
It just came out of my noggin one day. “Full Moon Fever” was a little phrase for what’s happening tonight, it’s a full moon—ah yes! It’s full moon fever! That was the first solo album, so that was quite an event. Because I always thought when the full moon comes, I get some kind of charge from it. But I think I chose it just because mostly it sounded good.
Were all the songs on that album written with Jeff? Did you have anything pre-written?
Nothing but “The Apartment Song.”
You two really inspired each other.
A lot. Denny Cordell came by my house one day, who I hadn’t seen in a long time. We were going to call the album Songs From The Garage. We had shot the cover, even, which was a photo of me sitting in Mike’s garage, surrounded by all these instruments and things.
And Cordell heard the record. Loved the record. Which was really reassuring to me, ‘cause he didn’t hand out compliments easily. And I showed him the cover, and he said, ‘Oh no, no, no, this is not right. This is far too good to be called Songs From The Garage.’ And he said, ‘Give it a name, man.’ [Laughs] ‘Give this thing a name.’
So I rethought it and came up with Full Moon Fever. Which
was probably good advice. We just completely jettisoned the cover and redid it.
Is it true that MCA didn’t like the album at first?
That was the next big shock. I brought the record in, and they didn’t like it. Which had never happened to me. I was stunned. They didn’t like it.
What was their problem with it?
They didn’t hear a single!
With “Free Fallin’” and “Runnin’ Down A Dream?”
And “I Won’t Back Down.” But they didn’t hear a single. So this is what you’re up against in the music business.
Was it just one guy, or a number of guys who felt that?
I think it went all the way to the top. They didn’t want to release it. They wanted me to go away and come up with a single. So I was pretty devastated. And I just kind of put it on the back burner. And I was really depressed. Mike and I cut that song “Alright For Now,” the kind of lullaby that’s on there. We did that without Jeff. Jeff was out of town. And then Jeff came back and I said, ‘They don’t want to put the record out.’
For one thing, it was too short. It was only nine songs. And the CD had become really popular. So they wanted it to be a little longer. Then I cut the Byrds’ song, “Feel A Whole Lot Better” just to make the record a little longer.
A Gene Clark song.
Yeah. To which he was eternally grateful. Then later on, I brought the record back. And the regime had changed at MCA. And I brought exactly the same record in. And they loved it.
They heard singles this time?
Yeah. But this is how the record business is. A guy can leave, or come, and his viewpoint is completely different than the guy that was there. You’re just at the mercy of these guys. To some degree.
I would think at your level, that this couldn’t happen to you. That if you wanted to put out a record, you could.