Conversations With Tom Petty

by Paul Zollo

  It’s a great example of a song where the verse leads us so strongly to the chorus. The phrasing has such great rhythm built into it: “Somewhere, somehow, somebody must have kicked you around some. …” And I love the line, somehow, somebody must have kicked you around some…” And I love the line, “Tell me why you wanna lay there/revel in your abandon…”

  Yeah. I remember all of it coming very quickly. I don’t know why or how. Sometimes you can’t look too deeply at these things. I’m almost superstitious about it. It’s like I say, you don’t see it coming. Sometimes you can, with some kinds of songs. But this one just appeared as I was just kind of pacing. I remember pacing around the room, and I started singing to the cassette. And within twenty minutes, it had all appeared. I think I worked a little longer filling in the bridge. But I’m not even sure of that. It really came quickly. There was no effort at all. It was just very easily done, as far as the writing.

  Isn’t it unusual that you will work with the cassette on one of Mike’s tunes instead of learning to play it yourself?

  In that instance, it didn’t go on long enough to learn it myself. It was over really quickly. But I will usually do both. I’ll sing along to the cassette. But then, if I’m going to change any chords, or change the arrangement or something, I’ll transfer it over to the piano or the guitar, and I’ll learn it. And I’ll often add something to it or change something. But it’s not unusual to pace around to the cassette. [Laughs]

  That’s in a minor key, and some songwriters have remarked that writing strong melodies in a minor key is easier than writing them in a major key. Do you agree?

  Well, [minor keys] are spookier. And kind of romantic sounding. I don’t know if they’re any easier. Especially if you’re working with an LP. You can’t do too many minors or you’ll really drag down the whole. I always think that I’m only going to get so many minor keys in the framework of twelve songs. If I do six, I might create a mood I don’t want to create. So, yes, when you strum a minor chord, it’s got a more exotic feel to it than a major chord. But I don’t think it’s any easier. There’s a lot of drivel written in minor chords. [Laughs] And in major.

  The song “Century City” is a great blues song in A. And it’s got a cool bridge, which comes twice.

  Yeah, the bridge is kind of the chorus in a way. I wrote that on piano. During my lawsuit phase, when I was being sued, and had to go to Century City often. And if you’ve never seen it, it’s kind of an acre of skyscrapers, a really modern-looking place. It’s full of lawyers. And they take you up to big glass conference rooms. Just completely a million miles away from where I was at at the time. I dreaded going there.

  Did you?

  Dreaded it. Legal stuff. There’s nothing worse. I went quite often, because there were a lot of legal meetings. We were in a huge lawsuit that had the kind of horizon of being a precedent-setter in the music business, and they tend to take those things seriously. And I was just a kid, and I was just dropped into the middle of it. And I think that song was just a was of letting off steam.

  It’s great you got a song out of a dreadful experience.

  Yeah. I remember writing it on the piano. The house I rented at the time came with a piano. The same one I wrote “You’re Gonna Get It” and some other things. I remember I came up with it on the piano.

  The song “What Are You Doin’ In My Life?” is cool. I like the way it stays on the E chord for a long time before it changes, and it just keeps building. And it has a great chorus that builds harmonically and rhythmically and melodically. Great piano on it, too.

  Yeah. Benmont. I remember that. It was very early on. Written about an annoying groupie in New York. But it was a good track. We played it not long ago. We hadn’t played it in about fifteen years but we did an AIDS benefit show about a year ago. And for that show, because it was just a one-off, we hadn’t been touring, we did a number of songs that we hadn’t performed in a long time, and that was one of them. And I really enjoyed singing it, it was a lot of fun. [TPATH performed at Art for AIDS III: The Concert for Stephen on February 7, 2004. They helped raise more than $500,000 for the Laguna Art Museum and AIDS Services Foundation Orange County. The concert was dedicated to the memory of Stephen Cy Costick, Dana Petty’s brother, whose life was claimed by the disease in 1993.]

  It’s a good song.

  Better than I realized at the time. I wasn’t that knocked out by it at that time, but when I played it at that show, I realized it was pretty durable. It held up really well.

  You’ve said that about a lot of songs and albums, that at the time you didn’t think they were very good, but in retrospect, you’ve realized how good and durable they are.

  That’s nice when that happens. They’re some that at the time I know are really good. I’ll be really knocked out by it. And then they’re some that have something drawing me to it, but I’m not really sure what. And that song was good. But it was up against “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl,” “Even The Losers.” You know, it’s pretty stiff competition. But it did hold up.

  You have to compete with your own work, and your own hits. Is that a challenge?

  Always. Yeah, it is a challenge. You’re always competing with yourself, even a hundred songs later.

  And you’ve managed to pull it off.

  But you’ve got to stick to a standard. It’s in the back of your mind. I don’t have it in the front of my mind. But it’s certainly in the back of my mind that I have to compete with myself on some level. I have to stay up to a certain standard. So even within an album, everything has got to be as good as the thing before it.

  There are so many instances of songwriters whose first albums are great, and then they never manage to match that quality in subsequent albums.

  Well, you’ve got all your life to write your first album. And then you’ve got nine months to write the second one.

  And a lot of people don’t succeed.

  Well, it’s hard lonely work. That’s what I said to Scott Thurston recently. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was doing that ugly, hard, lonely work. Writing songs. There’s nobody there but me. And most people don’t want to do it. Especially once they’ve been successful.

  It’s much more fun to run around being a star than going home to your room and sitting there, sweating it out hour after hour. Fortunately, I was much more interested in writing the song than going to a movie premiere. And then I just got into that discipline. Because I always knew I had to come up with ten more for the next year. So it usually took a year to come up with ten that were any good.

  Is it lonely, or does the music give you some sustenance?

  The music does, but you’re kind of off to yourself most of the time. Most of the evening and the day. I’d stick with it. I’ve learned over the years that once it’s not coming anymore, put the guitar down and walk away. Don’t beat yourself up. So it is kind of lonely work, sometimes. But if it’s coming good, if it’s coming fast, that’s great.

  Do you have any routine where you write at the same time each day?

  A little bit, it there’s time booked, and you know there’s gonna be a session on such and such a day. I kind of block out some time to write songs, because I’ve got to come in with something.

  Have you ever had writer’s block, where nothing comes for a long time?

  I’m sure every writer’s had that. But it’s just a lack of confidence. You have to remind yourself that it’s a lack of confidence. If you did it once, you can certainly do it again. If you start doubting yourself, you can get in that frame of mind. But you’ve got to remind yourself, ‘This is what I do. And I’ve done it a lot. And there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to do it again.’ So, yeah, I bet everybody’s gone through a period when they couldn’t write anything.

  Have you had any long periods of that?

  Not really. I’ve been pretty prolific. I’ll tell you what happens: If I’m doing a record, and I’ve written ten or eleven, it’s almost like the we
ll just needs to be refilled before any more is going to come out. I’m out. I’m out of ideas. Where I can come back in eight months and boom, there it is again.

  When you’ve written an album, and you’ve written nine or ten things, then you’ve really restricted yourself, because you can’t go back to a rhythm that you’ve already used. Or a beat that you’ve already used. Or maybe a certain mood. If you’re written a number of minor key songs, you know you’ve got your quota on minor keys here. So there are those restrictions that come down late in an album. But the best thing to do is to ignore that. Because you may write a minor key one that’s better than one of the others. So it’s a little bit of a mind game.

  When you write ten or eleven songs, do you stop for a period of time before you write again?

  I tend to. I tend to stop completely. The pattern is usually that I stop and go on a lengthy tour.

  And you don’t write on tour?

  Never. Writing on tour has never really happened. Maybe in a very one-off situation. There’s just too much going on. And you can really fool yourself in that kind of situation because even after a tour it takes me awhile to come down and get back to the reality of what a record is. Cause it’s so drastically different than what a show is. Or what will work in a show and what won’t work in the studio. They’re drastically different animals. If you write at the end of a tour, you might think that anything with a good beat that would go over live is worth recording.

  But it’s often not.

  “Here Comes My Girl” was also written to a track Mike gave you.

  That was quite a tape. I got that tape, and “Refugee” was the first song. The second was “Here Comes My Girl.” And in that instance, we religiously copied his arrangement of what he had done. And I struggled with that song for a little while. Until I hit on the idea of doing narration. And then it really came through to me.

  I struggled with it, because it’s not an easy song to sing over. And I kept listening to it. I remember Ron Blair came by my house one day and he said, ‘You know, that’s really a great piece of music there.’ And that stuck in my mind. I felt I have to learn this thing. I’m not going to let it get away from me. And then I got the idea for the narration. And once I started that, it started falling into place.

  I read that you got the idea from a Blondie track.

  That might be true. But I don’t know if Blondie ever did a narration track. I know we’d been playing gigs with Blondie, and maybe I heard [Deborah Harry] do it in a show. But I’m thinking, maybe not Blondie, but the Shangri-Las, or somebody like that. Blondie sort of reminds me of the Shangri-Las. You used to hear [narration] done like that on those girl-group records from time to time.

  It’s a great sound, when you talk, and then burst into the singing.

  Yeah, it’s kind of an R&B vocal. It’s kind of weird. It’s kind of like our whole vision of the Stones and the Byrds and all that wrapped into one. Where it sort of goes from narration into R&B and then the chorus is almost Byrds-like. But wrapping it all into one bundle, you come up with something that’s original in itself.

  It’s got the great line “Yeah, I just catch myself wondering, waiting, worrying about some silly little things that don’t add up to nothing…”

  Yeah. There’s that theme again. Yeah. It comes back from time to time. Yes.

  You said with “Even The Losers” that you had the song, but no words for the chorus?

  That’s the weirdest one ever. I still have a hard time believing that happened, but it did. I had everything but the chorus. I had the tune for the chorus. And I had the chords. And I was bold enough to say, ‘Let’s cut this thing.’ But I had no idea what I was going to sing when I got to that point. And boom, divine intervention, it just came out. “Even the losers get lucky some time.” The whole thing. I don’t know if I even told [the band]. I don’t know if they even know that. But I was kind of wondering what I was gonna sing when that came. I was really happy. I’m not even going to question where that came from. [Laughs]

  But I will: Any idea where lines like that come from?

  In a spiritual sense, I think they’re all out there. They’re all out there. It’s just a matter of you getting yourself into a place where you can receive, where you can get your antenna out there where you can get that signal. I think if you get your antenna out there and you get into that space, a lot will come in. You never really get the results if you try to force it that you do if you just let it come in. But it can be frustrating if you’ve got session time booked, and you’ve got to come out with something, it can be tough.

  There have been times, such as with “Magnolia,” where you forced it to come in, and you got something great.

  Well, there I had to make it come in. I had to. And I think maybe I’ve been in two minds about that song, always have been, because I forced it to come in.

  Is that so?

  I know we never performed it. There’re still guys who hold up signs that say, “Magnolia” in concerts. [Laughs] To this day, you’ll see the signs that say, “Magnolia.” But I think it will be a cold day in hell [Laughs] before we ever play “Magnolia.” I doubt we know it.

  It’s not something I would put on. But I think I’m in two minds about it, because a), I forced it, and b), it was for McGuinn, so I was really trying to do an imitation of McGuinn. So I never felt it was really me. So I never chose to perform it.

  On “Shadow of A Doubt (A Complex Kid),” Mike said it was the band bashing in the studio, and that it didn’t take very long, and was cut pretty much live.

  As I remember it. It was in open-A tuning. I think pretty much all of Damn The Torpedoes we cut as a group. Playing together. I kind of have a picture of us doing that song. I remember thinking it had some humorous lines in it. “Sometimes she sings in French…in the morning she don’t remember it.”

  Yeah, it’s a good rock ‘n’ roll song. We put that in the show in the last tour. We hadn’t done it for years. And we put it in the show, and it worked really well.

  “Don’t Do Me Like That” was an old Mudcrutch song. I read that you didn’t have a piano, so you rented a little recording studio and wrote it there. Is that right?

  Yes. It was in North Hollywood. A place called The Alley, It’s kind of dingy. Mudcrutch had rehearsed there. I wrote the song when I was in Mudcrutch. So I didn’t have a piano. But in my head I could hear that rhythm. The piano playing that right hand part: “Ding ding ding ding ding.” It was only, about eight bucks an hour. It wasn’t much money to rent the studio, but it was the loneliest feeling, walking in there by myself, sitting there, and playing the piano. And I didn’t stay long. I think I only stayed an hour or so. And I wrote that song pretty much there. And then I went home and finished the words. That was something my dad used to say. “Don’t do me like that.” I always thought it was a humorous [Laughs] thing he said. So it was kind of an R&B idea. I was trying to do an R&B song.

  It has a cool bridge, which shifts tempo, and really rocks.

  Yeah. Yeah, it’s all-out rock. And it was a big hit for us.

  Your first AM radio hit?

  Yeah, the first big, big AM hit. Yeah, probably the first one to make the Top Ten.

  How about the song “Louisiana Rain?” It’s one of your oldest.

  Yeah. I wrote that while I was in Mudcrutch. I wrote it in Leon Russell’s house, while I was keeping his house while he was on tour. I first cut it at the Warner Brothers’ studios with Jim Gordon and Al Kooper. And Mike. And that version is on the boxed set. And it was Jimmy Iovine who heard that version. He came to me. He had gone down to the publishing office and went through everything I had ever written when we started Damn The Torpedoes. And he came to me with “Louisiana Rain” and “Don’t Do Me Like That.” And wanted to re-record them. And I was less than keen on it because I felt like I had already been down that road. But he did wind up making a great record out of it. I think we only did a few takes of it, and it came out really nice right away. Which was unus
ual on Damn The Torpedoes, because most of those songs were really worked on, and there were a lot of takes.

  hard promises. 1981

  “The Waiting” is from your fourth album, Hard Promises (1981). Is it true you got the title from a Janis Joplin line, ‘I love being onstage and everything else is just waiting?’

  That’s where I think I got it from. McGuinn swears that he said it to me. Maybe he did. I don’t think so. I think I got it from the Janis Joplin quote. That’s where it stuck in my mind. I don’t think she said. ‘The waiting is the hardest part,’ but it was something to that effect: ‘Everything else is just waiting…’ And so that’s where that came from, I think.

  That was a long, drawn-out process. It took a very long time to write the song. I had a really good chorus, and I had to work backwards from the chorus. So that’s always hard. But I was really determined that I was going to get it. And I got it, it just took me a long time. It look weeks of working on it.

  And during those weeks, would you work only on that song?

  I’m afraid to say I worked only on that song. So I had to work a little while, take a break, and come back, and work a little longer. But I knew I had something. And I was determined I was gonna get it. I just had to get the whole fish in the boat. I knew I hooked it.

  There is that challenge in songwriting when you have a piece of a song, and you know the potential for a great song is there. And you have to hold up that element of it that will keep it alive, like holding up a tent with one hand and knowing you need the other pieces.

  Sometimes that is the case. If you’re not lucky enough to get it all in one burst, but you know you’ve got something there, and there’s any number of ways of getting it, any number of ways of completing it. But only one’s gonna be right.

  Is it unusual for you to have a chorus before having a verse?

  Yeah. It is unusual. I usually kind of work linear, from the beginning. It’s a whole lot harder to work back from the chorus. It is for me.