Conversations With Tom Petty

by Paul Zollo

  Well, if you’re gonna sing every song, you have to find a lot of voices. [Laughs] I like the idea that you could be a number of voices, so I have had some success at doing that.

  Was Elvis an influence on your singing style?

  Oh yeah. I don’t really hear it that much, but as a child, when I was eleven, twelve years old, I absorbed all of Elvis’ recordings up to that point. This was about 1961. I really hunted down everything he’d ever done. I was just fanatic about it. So I’m sure that had a lot of influence. One of my favorite records that probably no one would ever think about is in the boxed set, when we covered his song “Wooden Heart.” I love our record of that.

  I think we did it better than Elvis. That’s saying a lot, but I think we did. And that was a one take. I had no idea I was going to do it. I just said, ‘Let’s play “Wooden Heart,”’ and I just started it, and we played it. And that was the only time we did it. But it was right from the heart. We just did it, and sang it live. And when I hear that, I’m really touched by it, because it reminds me of being young and listening to those records. It doesn’t sound like Elvis, really, but I’m sure there’s some of that influence.

  You wrote the song “Dogs On The Run” with Mike.

  I think he had some of the chords, and I wrote some of the chords. I liked it a lot. Not one of our more well-known songs.

  Did you like “Mary’s New Car”?

  Yeah. It’s got Marty Jourard on sax. We recorded that in my house. It’s based on the trusty Mary Klauzer. And I think she got a new car. Or we thought she should get a new car. [Laughs] So it was just a light-hearted thing. [According to Mary, she had just bought a used 1980 gold Honda Accord, which she proudly showed off to the band in the parking lot of a church at the wedding of a friend.] She’s wonderful, and we love her so much. She’s definitely been the den mother of The Heartbreakers. She manages every crisis in all our lives, right down to the kids’ toys. Everything.

  pack up the plantation: live! 1986

  Pack Up The Plantation: Live! was your first compilation and it included five covers, including “Needles And Pins” (a duet with Stevie Nicks), “Don’t Bring Me Down,” “Shout,” and “Stories We Could Tell.” You guys also did a great version of “So You Want To Be A Rock & Roll Star.”

  Yeah, that was a live recording. Where Mike put elements of “Eight Miles High” into the arrangement. And we were particularly pleased that when we saw McGuinn play it, he kind of copied our arrangement. [Laughs]

  McGuinn said, about the Byrds, that if it wasn’t for you, they would probably be forgotten.

  He did say that to me. I don’t know if that’s true, but they felt that I reminded people of them.

  You said of the song “It’ll All Work Out,” that it was one your favorites, and that it’s a ‘durable song.’

  It is durable. It still holds up. It was one that I really liked. Which, strangely enough, the record was all Mike. But I wrote it. But I was going through a crisis at the time with my marriage. My first marriage was on the rocks. I was separated. Though it was later reconciled. So I had more on my plate than I could handle. I had written “It’ll All Work Out” and I sang it into a cassette. And I brought it to Mike’s house, giving him the cassette. He had a studio at his house. And I said, ‘Could you just make this a record?’ [Laughs] ‘Because I don’t have time, I can’t deal with it mentally, but I think it’s a really good song.’ And I gave him the tune. And when I saw him again at the proper sessions, he brought in the track, and he had done the whole track, and I sang it, and we were done with it. That’s never happened before or since.

  It’s got beautiful instrumental acoustic guitars on the intro.

  He’s playing a Japanese koto. Which you don’t hear in rock very much. But he found a way to bring it into the track. But I don’t play on that at all. I don’t think any of us are on that except for Mike.

  let me up (i’ve had enough). 1987

  Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) was recorded in 1987. Where did that title come from?

  Stan. I don’t remember how, but it was his line. “Let me up, I’ve had enough.” I wrote a song with it.

  You said to Rolling Stone about Let Me Up: ‘The number one characteristic is that there are only the five Heartbreakers on this album. There are not outsiders on it whatsoever. Most of it is just off-the-cuff stuff. I like the feel of it so much. It was just really meant to be a good rock ‘n’ roll album.’

  Yeah, well I guess that’s fairly accurate. There were no producers, it was just me and Mike, and we were doing whatever we felt like doing. We had been on the tour with Bob [Dylan]. I think it was made on a break in those tours. Some things are ad-libbed on that record. “The Damage You’ve Done” is ad-libbed completely. You can hear on the boxed set, there’s “The Damage You’ve Done” country version. And that was the first take. It was like a George Jones kind of thing. And the very next take is the one that’s on the album. Where I just started to play a different rhythm, [the band] fell in, I ad-libbed the entire song. Boom. That was it. Thank you very much, that’s the record.

  I did that again on two other songs. They were ad-libbed right off the top of my head. One called “Think About Me.” Another one called “How Many More Days.” That was a complete ad-lib. Count four, let’s see what happens. Very bold. Very much flying by the seat of my pants. Can’t imagine doing that again. But I did it. I had the band set up, had a sound up, let’s try this. Not having any idea at all. But just started to sing, and seeing where it took me.

  “Jammin’ Me” is unusual in that you wrote it with Dylan and Mike, and you have modern references, whereas most of your songs have timeless imagery. This one has “Take back Eddie Murphy,” and also “Vanessa Redgrave” and “Joe Piscopo.”

  That was all Bob, that verse about Eddie Murphy. Which embarrassed me a little bit because I remember seeing Eddie Murphy on TV really pissed off about it. And I had nothing against Eddie Murphy or Vanessa Redgrave. [Laughs] I just thought what [Dylan] was talking about was media overload and being slammed with so many things at once. And times were changing; there weren’t four TV channels anymore. It was changing, and that was the essence, I think, of what he was writing about.

  We wrote a version together at the Sunset Marquis Hotel. We wrote a couple of songs that day. There was another one called “I Got My Mind Made Up.” That was on one of his albums, Knocked Out Loaded, I think. I produced the track. We had done a version of it for Let Me Up that didn’t get used. It’s on the boxed set. So we wrote those songs, and then I took really just the lyrics to “Jammin’ Me,” and completely rewrote the music with Mike. And then I sent it over to Bob to see if it was okay, and he said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ So that’s the extent I talked about it with him. [Laughs]

  So you changed the whole melody?

  Yeah, we changed the melody and the chord structure somewhat. Mike had the idea of the chords, and how the track went, and I wrote the melody and used the lyrics I wrote with Bob. And it was successful. It came out really well, and they released it as a single.

  When you write with Bob, is that something where you’re exchanging lines?

  Yeah, just like you’d think. I remember we would write a lot more verses than we needed. We did that in the Wilburys, too. It’s a great honor to work with some-one so great. And more than an honor; it was fun because he’s really good at it. So anytime you can work with somebody that’s really good at what they do, it’s going to be a good experience.

  We’ve spoken about the use of unusual keys, and “Runaway Trains,” which you wrote with Mike, is in F#. And I know you’ve said it’s not one your favorites, but it’s a great song.

  I heard that on the radio not long ago. And it is good. I was pleasantly surprised. Somehow I got it into my head that I didn’t like that. But I did like that when I heard it.

  You’ve said that about some of your albums, such as Echo, and then you hear them later and change your mind.

  Well, I don’t listen to
them. Usually by the time I’m done with it, I never play it again. So it’s only on the radio that I hear them. But Dana likes to play them. And with Echo, she actually made me listen to it again. So sometimes that’s true, that with time gone by, I’ll hear it, and it’s like a revelation to me. Cause I’ve forgotten the sequence of it, or a song. Cause we’ve done so many. But I’m pretty distanced from them once I’ve done them. Unless we’re playing it in a show. But even that isn’t the record. I don’t remember the record that well, unless I hear it. But I always listen to them when they come on the radio.

  You talked about using only two chords in a song, and “The Damage You’ve Done” is basically just G and F. Two chords, but with the melody rising and falling inside them.

  It was an improv. And I think there’s probably a bridge in there, too. What I’d do is yell, ‘G!’ And everyone would go to G. Then ‘F!’ And everyone would go to F. And then I’d go back to the tape, and take out those instructions. But while we were playing I’d yell, ‘A minor!’ And everyone would go to A minor. They had that much precision as a unit, that you could call out the chords and [the band] would change. So that’s how I was doing that. [Laughs]

  And the other side of the coin on that record were the things that Mike was more involved in. And they tend to be more production pieces, where we really buckled down and made more serious-type records. Things like “Runaway Trains.”

  Another song you wrote with Mike is “My Life/Your World.”

  Yeah, that’s an overlooked one. That’s a really good song. I had a good set of lyrics for that one. “They came out here with a dog on a chain/came and took my little brother away…” I liked that one. That’s one of Mike’s really good chord patterns.

  It has that great line, “His generation never even got a name.”

  I was thinking about my brother, who is seven years younger than me. He’s in that generation that didn’t get a name. He’s not in the X generation or anything. They were just dismissed. [Laughs] They came right after the Sixties and nobody really called them anything.

  “Think About Me”?

  That was another one that was improv right from the start. They had to actually go back and find another chord for the very first chord; it was clipped, because the engineer wasn’t rolling. And he turned the tape on right as I started to play, so it clipped the from of the track. So I think they had to find one later, and edit it onto the front. But that’s completely ad-lib, with me yelling out the chords.

  It’s got some funny lyrics in it.

  Yeah. God knows where they came from. It wasn’t very serious; it was just meant to be a rock ‘n’ roll song.

  The song “All Mixed Up” starts with clapping and singing and laughing.

  [Laughs] Right. It was another light-hearted one. Wrote it with Mike, too.

  It has a spoken bridge, which is not something you do very much.

  Yeah. I remember it has a catchy chorus.

  You once said you saw your song “A Self-Made Man” as a B-movie starring Johnny Cash.

  [Much laughter] That’s pretty accurate, yeah. Later on in life, I tried to get Cash to do that one. But he couldn’t deal with the major-seventh chord. [Laughs]

  Too pretty for him?

  I guess so. He just said,, ‘I can’t sing over that. My voice doesn’t sound right with it. Can you find another chord?’ And I couldn’t come up with another chord that sounded right. But I always wanted him to do it, and almost got him to do it, because he liked it. And he wanted to do it; he just couldn’t get over that major-seventh chord.

  “Ain’t Love Strange”?

  I wrote it on electric piano at my house. That was all in that rocky romance period I was in. “Make you string barbed wire/around your little piece of ground…”

  So that was a time you were writing, although your life was in turmoil.

  Life was really interesting during that period, yeah. It kept getting interesting. But for me it was like a, ‘Where did I wake up today?’ period. [Laughs] One of those times in life.

  “How Many More Days”?

  It was ad-lib. That was ad-libbed completely. And not a bad song. Our wardrobe girl, Linda [Burcher]—Queenie, we call her—she’s been with us, God knows, since the early ‘80s. She always requests that one. And we always laugh, because we know damn well we’re not gonna play it. [Laughs] We’ll always be back there during an encore, waiting in the hall, and Queenie will run up and go, ‘“HOW MANY MORE DAYS”! Do “HOW MANY MORE DAYS”!’ [Laughs] But we never do it. We don’t know it. Just that she thinks we would know it is hysterical.

  full moon fever. 1989

  On to Full Moon Fever now, which was released in 1989. You wrote “Free Fallin’” with Jeff Lynne?

  Yes I did. It was, I think, the first thing we wrote together. When we really got nose to nose and wrote a song. Jeff came over, and I had a little electric keyboard that Bugs had bought. I really gave him hell about buying it. I said, ‘Why would you waste money on this? I would never play something like this.’

  He said, ‘Well, look, take it into the house, if you write one song on it, it will pay for itself.’

  And I thought, ‘Well, okay,’ and Jeff was over and I had the little keyboard. And I started playing on it, and I hit this riff. This little chord pattern that we would know as “Free Fallin’.” But I had a couple notes more in the riff.

  And Jeff looked up, and said, ‘Oh, that’s good. Can you leave out that last chord there and see what it does?’

  And when I did that, it made this nice round of chords. And so I was just trying really to make Jeff smile, as I was ad-libbing these words. You know, “She’s a good girl/loves her mama/loves Jesus/and America too.” And Jeff smiled. I kept going. And I got right up to the chorus bit, and I didn’t know what to sing, and he said [in a British accent] “free fallin’.” And I tried to sing it, but I couldn’t get “Free Fallin’” to fit into the line. So I just sang “Free…” And then in the next line I sang “Free Fallin’.” And then he perked up and said, ‘That’s good—that’s great!’ But take your voice up an octave when you do it, when you go to the chorus. And bang, there it was. “Free Fallin’.” I was very excited. I loved the song.

  So Jeff went home and I sat there for a while and I finished the last verse alone, the one about flying out over Mulholland and writing the girl’s name in the sky. And he came around the next day, and I played it for him. And he said, ‘Man, you stayed up and finished the song. That’s incredible, it’s great.’ And so this is how these things happen. And it’s turned out to be probably the most famous song I ever wrote. And there’s not a day that goes by that somebody doesn’t hum “Free Fallin’” to me, or I don’t hear it somewhere. It’s become synonymous with me, I guess. But it was really only thirty minutes of my life. [Laughs]

  You also wrote “I Won’t Back Down” with Jeff.

  We wrote that as we were mixing “Free Fallin’.” We wrote that in the next room. In a little glass booth, where I could actually see into the control room, I could see them working on the mix. So we went in next door, where the piano was, and came up with that. We came out really excited. It was hard to keep our mind on the mix because we already wanted to cut this other song.

  Jeff showing up was such a lightning bolt from the Gods. It was such a big deal. It had such an impact on everything we would do after that. Literally, I think everything we’ve done since then, it’s always been, ‘What would Jeff think of this?’ It’s always been like that.

  I’d always admired Jeff so much. And I got to hang out with him a little bit when we were in England on the Bob Dylan tour. He’d come down with George Harrison. Jeff came out to Birmingham when we played there. And then we were in London for a week. They would come down pretty often in the afternoon, and hang around till late after the gig. So I became pretty tight with him and George right away. We had a marvelous time.

  But Jeff was such a genius in the studio. Just so good. He made things that had bee
n really difficult seem so easy all of a sudden. Like getting a good take. It just all came so easy with him. He taught me a lot. A lot about singing, a lot about harmony, a lot about arranging. Everything.

  What could he teach you about singing?

  He’d say, ‘Here’s where you sound best. Here’s what you do really good. And here’s what you don’t do really good.’ It’s hard to put your finger on it and put it into words. But he had just such a great perspective. He could sit back and see everything. Hear the record, and guide you though it so effortlessly. Where things that had been really hard—sometimes making those records would really bring us to our knees emotionally, it could be really hard—and with Full Moon Fever, everything was a breeze.

  Even the writing?

  Even the writing. We made it so fast and did it so effortlessly that it was done before you knew it. There it was! I remember coming home after we cut “Free Fallin’” and “Yer So Bad.” And having those two tracks on cassette, and I must have played them for two hours, over and over, just sitting there on the bathroom floor, feeling, wow, this is so great. It was really exciting.

  With Mike you always write to tape, but with Jeff you would write nose to nose.

  Yeah, we did. We sat there with our acoustics and wrote together, nose to nose.

  And who would guide those sessions?

  Both of us would. Whoever had something. We were great friends. We had a lot of laughs together. We would just start playing, and then one of us would say, ‘Oh, that’s nice, that’s a nice bit.’ And we’d say, ‘Okay, let’s work on this bit.’ And I did all of the words. He didn’t want to get involved in the words. He said, ‘You’re gonna sing it, so you may as well write the words.’ So I did.

  It is that way: If you’re gonna sing the song, it’s good to write the words yourself, so you can believe it and get behind it. And we would just throw things around. He was good, too, about that we’re gonna finish the thing. Completely finish it.