Conversations With Tom Petty

by Paul Zollo

  Mike remembered that when you wrote “I Won’t Back Down” you didn’t have all the words, so you went to the piano and finished it. And then you did harmony vocals with Mike, Jeff, and George Harrison.

  Yeah. George was around a lot during that time. Just socially, just hanging out. His family would come over, and we became close, the two families. So George would sometimes come to the session to hang out. That was a particular time that he was there, and he wound up singing with us.

  I played the piano. Jeff had the melody for the verse, and then I came up with the main riff. We got together, and with all this synergy, we pretty much finished the song—all but one line. Which was “There ain’t no easy way out.” I didn’t have a line for that. And I was singing, “I’m standing on the edge of the world.” [Laughs] And when we were recording it, George said, ‘What the hell is that—“I’m standing on the edge of the world.” Surely there’s got to be something better than that.’ [Laughs] And then I came up with “There ain’t no easy way out,” which seemed so obvious. But that was George going, “That line’s dumb.’ And so I’m really glad that I got all the dumb lines out, because it’s a song that apparently a lot of people have been inspired by. I get a lot of people telling me, either through the mail or in person, how that song has played a role in helping them in some way in their life. How it’s given them conviction to get over a certain obstacle in their life. It’s really gratifying. I even saw an article in a paper about a girl coming out of a coma listening to that song. It had been her favorite song.

  There was a pro-choice doctor who was murdered, and they did a rally for him, and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam phoned me and said, ‘I’m gonna sing “I Won’t Back Down” tonight and I wanted to make sure you wouldn’t mind.’ And I said, ‘No, the song is there to be used.’ And I later heard Pearl Jam’s version of it, and it was really good. [On March 10, 1993, Michael Griffin murdered Dr. David Gunn outside a Pensacola, Florida clinic. Pearl Jam appeared at a Rock the Choice event at the Pensacola Civic Center on March 9, 1994 and sang “I Won’t Back Down” in memory of Dr. Gunn.]

  I’ve heard a lot of different versions of it. I heard a church choir sing it. My brother’s told me he’s heard marching bands do it at football games. And I just heard a gospel record of it, where the guy was doing it as a shuffle. So when I first wrote that song, I thought, ‘This might not be right, because it’s so blunt. There’s not a lot of metaphor in it, there’s not a lot of hiding behind anything. It’s very blunt. But I think that bluntness may have been what inspired people. One of my more well-known songs. I just have to do it in shows or people feel let down. So I’m really happy to have written that one.

  “Love Is A Long Road” was written with Mike; he said the music was inspired by motorcycles.

  I didn’t know that. I remember writing it. Mike had a track that was close to what we used, but it had a very different rhythm. It had a lot of drum fills, and was a little more chaotic. And we began recording it without Jeff, because he had gone to England for a week or two. When he came back, he helped us straighten it out. He really was the one who made it work. And Jim Keltner played the drums. But it was basically, musically, Mike’s idea. I wrote all the melody and the lyrics to it. And then all of us had a hand in the arrangement. It’s a really good one. We still play that a lot.

  “Runnin’ Down A Dream” is something you wrote with Mike and Jeff?

  Actually all Mike wrote was that one descending riff.

  Which is the engine of the song.

  Yeah. He had that riff, but in a different time signature. It was kind of a broken beat, much slower. I liked the lick a lot, and I’d sit around, playing it on my guitar, experimenting with it in different ways. I came to think it sounded good in a really straight beat, really fast. And I played it for Jeff, one night when he was over at my house, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s good. That might be one of those last riffs left.’ [Laughs]

  So we sat down and came up with some chords. Just blocked it out. Didn’t have any words. I had the lion’s share of the chords. He [Jeff] may have helped me with the chorus. I remember writing the bridge and all that myself. So we had a vague tune that we kind of blocked out, and hummed it into the tape recorder. And over that weekend, I worked on it for two different afternoons. I didn’t feel completely confident about it. Because I was singing in a low register. I remember saying to them, ‘Do you think we should change the key?’ Jeff said ‘No, no, no, it’s perfect, it’s perfect the way you’re doing it.’

  Del Shannon was around. He was running around with us a little bit during that time. That’s why I threw in that line: “Me and Del were singing, ‘Little Runaway.’” I put that in for him. He was very pleased. I got a big smile from him on that. And “Little Runaway” fit the whole concept. So that was that.

  The most incredible thing about that one to me, which to this day amazes me, was the solo at the end. Mike played that. There was no one there but me, Mike, and Jeff. And Mike was engineering. We were in Mike’s tiny little studio in his house. Four people could barely fit in. If any more came, they had to stand in the garage. You had to pull the cars out to work.

  Mike was just sitting there with his head down. And that bit came, and he started to play. And he played that incredible solo. But he looked like a stone statue. He didn’t ever blink or move. And he had his back to us. I remember Jeff looking around his shoulder and looking back at me, and making this face, like, ‘Is he really doing this?’ It was one take. One take. And he played that incredible solo.

  That song is longer than most of your songs, over four minutes.

  That was because he got on that roll at the end, and he just kept playing, and I wasn’t going to edit it out or fade out, because it was just so good what he was playing.

  “Yer So Bad” has some funny lyrics: “My sister got lucky/married a yuppie/took him for all he was worth…”

  Black humor. I was stuck on the little turn-around and couldn’t figure where to go. The “Not me baby” place. And Jeff said, ‘Well, put an E minor there.’ And when I put the E minor in, it led me right through everything.

  One of the most haunting songs on the album is “Face In The Crowd,” which is in E minor. Written with Jeff. A beautiful song.

  It’s held up well. I went to Mexico not long ago and there was a male flight attendant. And he didn’t speak much English. And he came over, and said [with Mexican accent], ‘Or yes, Tom Petty. “A Face In The Crowd!”’

  [Laughs] “‘A Face In The Crowd!”’ That was the one he keyed in on.

  And I do like that song. I think it’s a really sweet song. A nice sentiment. Very simple. Extremely simple. It’s not complex in any way. Just E minor, C, D, A minor 7th.

  That was one of the first CDs I ever got. And I would hit repeat to hear that song over and over. [Compact discs were first introduced in Chicago at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1983. It would take a few years for music fans to convert from records and tapes to this new medium.]

  It’s on that CD where I put, in the middle, “Hello CD listeners. We’ve come to the point in this album where those listening on cassette or records will have to stand up or sit down and turn over the record or tape. In fairness to those listeners, we’ll now take a few moments before we begin Side Two.” Yeah, CDs were getting big around that time.

  Do you like having your work come out on CD as opposed to LPs?

  I miss the covers [of LPs]. Because it was such a huge part of the experience. It was something you held in your hands as you listened. And it was an art form in itself. Which really is pretty much gone now.

  We still have covers.

  But they are really insignificant though, aren’t they? They are so tiny, and your eyes hurt trying to read anything on them. I miss the jackets. I’m glad I got to be involved when records came around. I’m glad I came up that way, because it was a lot of fun.

  Do you still listen to LPs?

  Yeah, I do. A lot. It was different, because yo
u had a beginning, and a middle, and a second act. I miss that. You could only get about twenty minutes on a side. So you planned it out where you had two twenty-minute sides, usually. Now we don’t think that way. Time is unlimited. And I think once we had the luxury of all the time we wanted that records got really long, maybe too long. Echo I think is too long. Some of those songs should have been held for later. When you sit down for a listen, seventy minutes is kind of a long time to really pay attention. The song “Depending On You” is one you wrote yourself.

  That was really fun to do. We should play that song. We’ve never played it [in concert].

  That whole album [Full Moon Fever] sounds so good. I mean, the sound of that album—sometimes you get lucky and a little magic happens and you get this magical sound going. And that album really has it. It intimidates me a little bit. How will I ever do that again? It’s such a magical sound, I don’t know how it happened. I mean, obviously, there were a lot of talented people working on that. But it really had something beyond that. Maybe it was because we just had such positive energy. But there’s such a good sound to that record.

  It’s amazing you did it crowded into Mike’s little home studio. Did that contribute to the magic?

  It must have. That period of our life, speaking for me and Jeff, that was the best time of my life. The Wilburys, Full Moon Fever…The music was coming with very little effort. Deep, deep friendships, and a lot of laughs. Between Jeff and George and I. And everyone else.

  Olivia [Harrison, George’s widow] was over here last week. They’re doing a film on the Wilburys, and she showed me a lot of video that Bugs shot. George had Bugs shooting us all the time. I didn’t know it. I knew that some video existed. But I guess that every time we left the control room, and went into the studio proper, [George] handed the camera to Bugs and had Bugs shoot. And there was a lot he shot himself. But we are having such a good time. You never saw a bunch of guys having a better time than we are having. It’s really something to see.

  I’ve never seen any film of Bob in the studio. And we’re there, and we’re writing. There’s a point where Bob has a paper in his hand, and says, ‘Let me do this again, there’s too many “I’s” in this.’ [Laughs] ‘Too many “I’s.”’ He just scratched them out. But, God, it was a great, great time. Just great friendships. A really nice time.

  “The Apartment Song” made the album, though you wrote it long ago.

  Yeah, I had written that for Southern Accents, and it had laid around all that time. We were going through songs really fast, and [Jeff] said, ‘Have you got anything laying around?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got this one thing.’ I cut a demo with Stevie, just the two of us. That was the only thing I had, that demo. Jeff made it into a great record.

  It’s nice, after the second chorus, the way the guitar and drums kick into a different rhythm.

  Yeah, that’s us doing our Buddy Holly thing.

  “Alright For Now” is a gentle, lovely lullaby.

  Yeah. That was written late at night, with my kids in mind. That was when Jeff wasn’t there. He was gone and Mike and I did it. We dubbed everything on it.

  Beautiful acoustic finger picking on that one.

  Yeah, we did that live, the two of us, just playing together.

  How about “A Mind With A Heart Of Its Own?”

  [Jeff and I] heard Connie Francis singing “My Heart Has A Mind Of Its Own.” And we were both in two cars driving to the studio, we used to listen to this AM station playing oldies. And I got out of the car, and I said, ‘Did you hear that Connie Francis thing?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I just heard that. But what if you sang that the other way? Then it means an entirely different thing.’

  So I kind of put that in the back of my mind, and then the next day I came up with this Bo Diddley idea, and then we knocked it out pretty fast. There’s one verse that’s ad-libbed, where I didn’t have the verse lyrics. And I was doing the vocal on the other one: “I’ve been all around the world/I’ve been over to your house/You’ve been over sometimes to my house/I’ve slept in your tree house/My middle name is Earl.” [Laughs] And I was so pleased with that. And my middle name really is Earl. And it just landed perfectly with ‘world.’ So we kept that in. Sometimes songs seem to just fall together for you, if you’re in the right place.

  Well, that one did. Because I had a couple of verses, but I couldn’t come up with the third one. So [Jeff] just said, ‘Come out and do the ones you’ve got.’ So when it came to the third one. I just threw that in.

  I understand that with “Zombie Zoo” you heard that name from a Mohawked punk in a diner.

  Yeah. It was when Jeff and George and I went out to Anaheim to ask Roy Orbison to be in the band [Traveling Wilburys]. We were working on Full Moon Fever at the time. We were writing everything we saw. One line I remember that we saw on a billboard was, “Every day is judgment day.” That later turned up in, “End Of The Line,” the Wilburys’ song. We stopped at a restaurant on the way back, and these punky-looking guys recognized us and came over. And I said, ‘Where have you been? Where are you playing?’ And they said, ‘The Zombie Zoo’ and out came the pads! [Laughs]

  It’s a very light-hearted song. Nonsense, really. There’s no great statement. It was just for the fun of it. I kind of wondered about “Zombie Zoo” really. I don’t think I would have had it on if Jeff hadn’t really campaigned for it. I would have cut it out. But there it is.

  into the great wide open. 1991

  Into The Great Wide Open, from 1991, has the great song “Learning To Fly.”

  That’s been one of our most popular songs. We still get a lot of requests for that in movies, and people always want to hear it in the show. People embrace it.

  You said once that you heard a pilot say that learning to fly is easy, but coming down’s the hard part.

  True. That was the inspiration, and I took it from there. Jeff and I wrote that together. I think I started it, and pretty much had it going, and then he came in and helped me with the chords. We finished it off together. I still like that song. I like to perform it. I’ve gotten a lot of different mail on it; different people that were inspired one way or the other in life by that song, and they send me letters about it. I’m proud I wrote that song. And it’s a good-sounding record, it’s a good-sounding single.

  Did it come quickly when you and Jeff were working on it?

  Yeah, I think we wrote it in an evening. It came quickly because I had written most of the words, and I had gotten a tune in my head. So I had this idea, and we sat down and spent a whole evening on it. But that’s fairly quick, if it comes in a day or two. I just had this little tune in my head, and I sang him this tune, and he said, ‘Let’s see what fits nicely under it.’ And he played a big part in the chords. The song “Into The Great Wide Open” starts with a great slide part that Mike plays. Sounds very George Harrison-inspired.

  Well, it might have been. George really liked Mike’s playing as well. They had a mutual admiration for each other on slide guitar. There’s a lot of good guitar on that track. The 12-string he plays on that track is really good. He added quite a bit to that album.

  Was that one of the first songs you wrote for the album?

  Yeah, it was.

  You called it a ‘very funny song and a very true song.’

  [Laughs] It’s a narrative. It’s a story. And I think it has some truth in it. It’s light-hearted in a way. With a kind of black humor to it. The video was the great thing with that song. The video was as good as the song, I think. It’s a rare instance where they really complemented each other. And we actually had to extend the song for the video. The video is seven minutes long. Because we shot so much, and we didn’t want to lose it. So we went back and did a re-edit and remix of the song to make it fit the video. [Laughs]

  The key line is, “the sky was the limit.”

  Yeah. Well, that’s what people think when they come out to California. Strike it big. Some people hit it, some people don’t.


  Did you just fall into that story, or was it one you intended to write?

  I just kind of fell into it. You don’t know where those things come from. I was just playing those chords, and this little story started to appear. I carried it around in my head for a while, and refined it a little bit. And I had it pretty well written, and then I played it for Jeff, and he helped me, and he added a few ideas too. Like that chord turn-around. [Sings chords.] Jeff’s idea. And we added that in, and we altered a couple chords. Gave them a little bit more exotic treatment under the melody. But it was pretty much all done. I pretty much had it when he came aboard.

  I was happy to see you included “Two Gunslingers,” which is a wonderful song from Into The Great Wide Open but not a hit, on the Anthology album that was released on October 31, 2000.

  Well, with that Anthology album, I didn’t see the point in that record. But we were under a contract where we had to deliver. So what we did was to pick our favorites. As many of them as we could get in. Because they insisted on having all the hits. But since it was a double CD, we were allowed to pick more songs. So we picked our favorite ones and put them in.

  So “Two Gunslingers” is one of your favorites?

  Oh, definitely.

  Mine, too.

  I love that song. I was really proud of that when I got it done.

  It’s a funny song, but also meaningful.

  Yeah. It’s a really good anti-war song.

  Do you remember writing it?

  Yeah, I remember. I have a picture of where I wrote it. There was a poster that Jim Lenahan had given me. He’s a movie buff. And back when we were in Gainesville, he was always telling me about movies. And I would kind of wind him up by giving him a really bad movie. Like I’d say, ‘How about Hostile Guns, now there’s a movie.’ [Laughs] And it was this terrible Western, and I thought the title was so funny. He’d be talking Citizen Kane, and I’d say Hostile Guns, and it would really wind him up. So many years later, he came upon the movie poster for Hostile Guns, and he sent me the poster. Gave it to me. And it was on my wall. I’m pretty sure that’s what was the germ for that song, the poster of the gunslingers.