Conversations With Tom Petty

by Paul Zollo

  I swear to God it’s an absolute ad-lib from the word, “go.” I turned on my tape deck, picked up my acoustic guitar, took a breath, and played that from start to finish. And then sat back and went, ‘Wow, what did I just do?’ And I listened to it. I didn’t change a word. Everything was just right there, off the top of my head. The production of it is so nice. It has no drums and is very tender.

  It’s a very sweet song. Its got really good intentions. It clears my head. That’s why I like that music in that album. It’s got a purity to it that clears your mind when you hear it.

  The production of that record intimidates me. It’s so well done that I find myself in competition with it all the time. Trying to do something that’s on that level.

  And we were all very pleased with it. Rick Rubin and Mike and I. We worked so hard on it. We worked two years on that record. And I mean working five days a week. Really concentrating really hard. Very few breaks. Just determined to do something really good. And we were pretty successful. We were getting off on what we were doing. And it was a new friendship, having Rick there. And it’s very much his album, too. Because he bled like the rest of us. [Laughs] He put a lot into it.

  It was going to be two CDs. And we were just determined to do something great. We wanted it to be great. I think we succeeded on that level, because it’s a piece of music I think will be around. I think that people will continue to buy it and listen to it. And that’s a really good feeling. That’s the best feeling that I can get. That I made something that has a timeless quality to it. So it was a very good feeling when it was received so well. ‘Cause sometimes you can work on something and maybe people don’t get it. But this was great because we had that great feedback, that great reception of it. So God, it was a wonderful feeling.

  I know many people who consider it their favorite album of yours.

  I can understand that. It’s certainly my best work of the later period. I like it quite a bit.

  I love the way the track swells up in “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”

  Yeah, that was something Mike got. I think it was a Magnatone amp, and he got this great swell that came up. And it was so cool we kept it, because it wasn’t planned that way, it just happened.

  That’s such a great song—I love the line, “Turn the radio loud/I’m too alone to be proud.”

  [Laughs] Well, that guy’s pretty down. He’s out for adventure. [Laughs] “Time To Move On”?

  Dana and I heard that on the radio a few days ago, driving home from Santa Monica. I had forgotten the lines, and there’s a really funny line in it: “Nauseous adrenaline/Like breaking up a dogfight.” [Laughs] I was really pleased with that. To get those lines into a song that’s pretty was really hard. [Laughs] But it worked out really nice.

  The song “You Wreck Me” was based on a track by Mike. I know you worked a long time to get the word “wreck” in there.

  I had “You Rock Me.” I had that down as something to sing; I never thought I’d use it. Because you wouldn’t use that. But I had to scan something for the melody, so I had, “You rock me, baby.” It was so obvious to change “rock” to “wreck” and the whole thing made sense. Because I really wrote every other word. I don’t know why it took me that long. Suddenly a lightbulb went off and, I went, ‘Oh, it’s “wreck.’” And we really held off for a long time, and didn’t record the song until very late in the album because I didn’t think I had the line. And when I got the line, it just all fell into place, it was very easy to record. Steve Ferrone really played amazing on that track. That’s a live track.

  So, yeah, that’s a great one that we nearly always play live. That was a good one. That was one that I really felt like it paid off. When you’re writing a fast rock ‘n’ roll song, that’s one of the most difficult things to do.

  Is it?

  Oh yeah. They’re really hard to do. It’s not where you’re drawn to when you’re gonna write. You tend to find yourself going to the minor chords, and going to the slower tempos. But to write an uptempo rock ‘n’ roll song, and have it work, God, that’s a huge pay-off.

  Did you change that much from Mike’s original conception?

  No. Not at all, really. I think he had completely mapped out the chords and the arrangement. I just had to find a tune and lyrics for it.

  [Laughs] That’s all.

  [Laughs] Yeah. And I did. We were all very pleased when it worked out. But I did hold out a long time. I wouldn’t record it until I had every single thing in place.

  “It’s Good To Be King” has a great melody, and funny lyrics.

  It’s one of my favorite songs I ever wrote. “Excuse me if I/have some place in my mind/where I go time to time…” I love that. And I liked all the verses. I thought it worked really well. I was very pleased with that song. That’s just the truth. I thought it was one of my best things. That one had something to say.

  The ending is nice—the orchestra changes chords, and keeps going up.

  Yeah, that was Michael Kamen’s idea, to have that note at the end go up. And I thought it was a great idea. That was just another good case of having a lot of talented people, and you’ve got a good piece of material, and then when you bring in all those people and they fully realized what I want to do, it really works. And that doesn’t always happen exactly like that. But that was just a case where I sat back and felt, ‘Wow, this is so nice.’ And Benmont played the piano on it, just this simple little thing [sings four notes], but it really made the verses work so well. Yeah, that one was very satisfying.

  “Only A Broken Heart”?

  I liked that phrase, “It’s only a broken heart” Like you can throw away the most serious ailment known to man. Like saying, ‘It’s only cancer.’ It’s a pretty song. And kind of a bittersweet one.

  The song “Honey Bee” is another rocker. It starts with some funny muttering. And then some very distorted guitar before the drums kick in.

  Yeah, that’s me playing the guitar there. It’s kind of like a blues-based song. And I got the idea to do that walk-up verse, where the chords kept going up and up. It was just kind of fun. It was meant to be a release from getting overly serious. Because some of those songs get pretty deep, and I think it’s good to have something that clears the mind for a minute. Let’s rock for a second, and not get overly serious here. And that’s what “Honey Bee” was, and that’s another one that so many people want to hear live. I get so many requests for “Honey Bee.” People just love it.

  It’s got very funny lyrics: “She give me her monkey hand and a Rambler sedan/I’m the king of Milwaukee/Her juju beads are so nice/She kissed my third cousin twice/I’m the king of Pomona…”

  [Laughs] Where does it come from? I don’t know where I got, “I’m the king of Pomona.” But I wanted it to be like that. I wanted it to be one part gibberish. Where it would be clear to anyone that I’m not taking this too seriously, I’m just having some fun here. So it was just a little fun with words. “Kiss my third cousin twice…” [Laughs]

  You wrote “Don’t Fade On Me” with Mike, which has a really pretty, somewhat spectral melody.

  Yeah, he showed me that tuning. I think what he wrote was just those chords in the chorus. He showed me how to do that on the guitar one night during the sessions and I thought, ‘Oh God, I love that sound.’ And he said, ‘It’s really simple—you do it like this.’ And I went home and wrote the song. And then I came back with it, and he said, ‘Well, I didn’t really write it,’ and I said, ‘Well, no, you did, you wrote that bit, because I wouldn’t have known that if you didn’t show it to me.’ So I wrote that, and then I made the record. It’s just two guitars and a voice. It’s very sparse. It’s just me and Mike playing in drop-D tuning.

  It’s interesting with that song, that you sing between those chords that Mike showed you, instead of singing right on the chords.

  Well, I loved the sound the voicing of those chords made. That inspired me to write the song. I don’t think Mike had thought of a melody
or anything, he just had that chord pattern. And he played it really good when it came time to do the track. The little solo thing he does in there is just great.

  It’s a nice sound, just the two acoustic guitars.

  Yeah. We practiced that quite a bit. We would play it from time to time. Took a lot of passes at it. It was one of those things we would try every day at the end of the session. So by the time we got it, we had practiced it quite a bit.

  The song “Hard On Me” is another one with a really beautiful melody. It has a cool structure, too, with two bridges.

  Yeah, it does. That’s Rick Rubin’s favorite. Both of us were a little sad that it didn’t become the big song from the album. Both of us thought that this was gonna be the thing that everybody picks up on. But it wasn’t. But Rick really loves that song. And it was the first song written for the whole album. Probably the first thing I did. “It’s all I can do to keep that little girl smiling/and keep my faith alive…” That’s what I remember.

  “Cabin Down Below”?

  It’s blues and rockabilly mixed. And it was another one that I saw as a relief in the sequence of things, that it would be a moment of semi-nonsense for a minute. Okay, we’re gonna party for a minute here.

  But it’s not a nonsense song.

  No, no, it fit in really well. But it was light-hearted. I think I probably ad-libbed a lot of it and then refined it from there. I had the skeleton from an ad-lib and then I took it and polished it up.

  It seems connected to “House In The Woods,” which is another strong song.

  Yeah, it is connected. I loved “House In The Woods,” too. That’s got a good chord progression.

  Yeah, it does. And no real chorus—it has the title in the verse.

  It’s one that we built with horns and pedal steel. I really loved the texture that that made. Because I had this hunch that with those kind of dirty guitars that we did, if we put a pedal steel in it with a very clear, clean sound, it would work. At first I was worried about how distorted the guitars were. I thought, ‘No, this is not the way I want to go with this.’ And Rick and Mike said, ‘No, it is. So let’s put a really clean sound against that. We’ll take four baritone saxes, and have them all playing in unison, and then play pedal steel with those chords, with a walking bass line under it.’ And it started to turn into this really beautiful thing there at the end. And I mixed the horns where you hardly notice they’re there. They just kind of come in as a texture.

  “To Find A Friend” is one of your story songs. It starts, “In the middle of his life/he left his wife/and ran off to be bad…”

  [Laughs] I like the way that guy gets mad, and everybody’s quiet. Like a family suddenly being turned over to a new person, who’s a tyrant. It’s scary.

  That one has Ringo playing drums.

  Yeah, I love Ringo’s playing. He was kind enough to come in and play a few things on the album.

  You’ve played with George before, of course, and also Ringo. How is it to have a Beatle play on your music?

  Well, it’s a luxury to have musicians of that caliber. And Ringo can really just play perfect time all day long. Yeah, God, that’s as good as they come, isn’t it? I’ve always been fortunate to have really, really good musicians. I don’t know why, but I’ve been very fortunate in that I really have the best musicians around.

  To have Ringo come in was a real honor. I’ve had him on a few things. And he knows he’s always welcome to come play. He did a really good job of playing. The feel of that song is so good. Many drummers today wouldn’t know how to play a song like that. But he knew exactly where to go with it. He plays with a lot of nuance. Just one of my favorite drummers of all time.

  I think he’s an incredibly creative drummer. A lot of feel. I just knew he would play that song well. And I was right. He played it perfect right away. I demoed it without any drums, and we thought, how would a drum pattern go to this? And I thought, you know who could play this would be Ringo. I’ve known Ringo for years. So I called him and asked him. And he was gracious enough to come down and play.

  We tracked it with just three of us—me on acoustic, Ringo, and Mike on bass. And singing it at the same time. Benmont overdubbed his little piano solo later.

  It’s got a beautiful chorus: “And the days went by/like paper in the wind/everything changed/and then changed again/it’s hard to find a friend.”

  It was those days. I was getting stuff. Like I said, I think I was really at the top of my game. Things were coming to me with very little effort. The material was coming in. And God, that’s what a record’s about, the material. And so you get the material, and that’s just a sheer luxury: I’ve got the material. Then you just try to bring in the best people and really concentrate and make a great record.

  How about the song “A Higher Place”? Benmont plays organ, piano and [Vako] Orchestron, whatever that is.

  The Orchestron is an old keyboard where you actually put in a plastic disc, which is string sounds. And when you hit the keyboard, it activates this plastic disc, this record, and the record plays the note that you were playing. Very shaky. Extremely shaky. I think one take on the record was all we could get out of the Orchestron. But for one moment there, it all synched up, and it worked. I’d never seen one before, or since. I never would have dreamt that there was a thing like that. I remember us just going, ‘Wow.’ Almost the first time he played it, he got that great thing. But then we couldn’t get it to work anymore. We couldn’t get it to do what we wanted it to do.

  On “A Higher Place” you do all the harmonies yourself.

  I do it from time to time. It was a very high part. And I could get it, so I just did it. Sometimes I do the harmonies myself just to get a certain blend.

  The album closes with two of your greatest songs, “Crawling Back To You” and “Wake Up Time.” “Crawling Back To You” has lyrics and music which are both phenomenal.

  That one [“Crawling Back To You”] took a little work. I wrote that song in three-quarter time. Where it had nothing to do with what came out. And then that wasn’t going to work, but I knew there was a song there. Then I brought it over to , but I still couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t really find where the accents should be. And I remember us tracking it all night and being really frustrated that it wasn’t working.

  Then they came on the idea of having us all walk out, and play this like we’ve never heard it before. I’m just gonna start playing, and whatever we fall in on, we’ll go that way. And that was the take. It worked. I started to diddle on guitar, we went around a couple of times, Ferrone dropped in on that beat, and bang, we had it. But we would have never had that feel if we hadn’t have done that.

  That’s the value of a live group in the studio. I’d have never come up with that without them. And it was a very tricky song to find the feel for, but once we found it, it was really, really right, and it was very easy to sing and very easy to make the words believable.

  It’s got some wonderful words in there, including my favorite lines, “I’m so tired of being tired/as sure as night will follow day/most things that I worry about/never happen anyway.”

  That’s one of my favorite verses, too, that I ever wrote. ‘Cause it just rings so true.

  My cousin gave me that line. She sent me a little book of phrases once. I opened that book, and saw just that phrase: “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.”

  And it works so well coming after the Indian shooting out the lights verse. You have the specific imagery, and then the abstract reflection.

  That’s a good thing to do. If you get too specific, you kind of want to pull away from it. Because now things are getting almost narrative, and you don’t want to do that. So you give them a little taste of that, and then back away. Into something that’s not as nailed down. And it creates a nice mixture, and does a certain thing in the mind. So that was an instance where that kind of thing actually worked really well.

  And then comes the song “Wake Up Time,”
which is such a poignant way of closing the record. It has sparse production—just you on piano and vocal, Mike on bass, Ferrone on gentle drums, and the orchestra.

  Yeah, I wrote that on guitar and we cut it that way. And then we weren’t quite satisfied with it, though it was pretty good. And then Rick said, ‘Why don’t you play it on piano?’ And I thought, ‘Well, damn, I’ve never played it on piano.’ And he said, ‘Go out and see what comes if you start to play it on piano.’ So it took me a little while to figure out how to play it on piano, because I’m not so great on piano, in terms of playing it on a track. I worked it out, and he said, ‘Okay, we’re gonna cut it with you on the piano.’

  And I said, ‘Well, Ben’s here.’ So then they got Benmont out. And they thought, ‘No, he plays it too good. Like, we don’t want it to be that good. We want it to be like you play it. Very simple.’ So I did it—with me on piano, and drums, and Mike on bass. Mike sat in the control room and played the bass.

  So, God, you talk about your short list of things you’ve ever done. That song is just one of my best songs. I was very pleased to get to play that to Denny Cordell, not long before he died. I hadn’t seen him in many a year. And he came down to the studio and he listened to the album and when he heard “Wake Up Time” he was really taken by it. And he said, ‘You know, TP, that’s not like anybody. That’s your thing, man. That’s your thing. And you should be really happy, because you’ve created something which is your thing and nobody else’s.’ And I kind of felt like that. That he’s right, and I felt really good about that, and I’m glad I got to come full circle with my mentor, who really guided me into this business of writing songs. To get that approval from him, so many years later, meant a whole lot to me.

  The song has an absolutely beautiful melody, one of your greatest ever. I love the way you extend the word “home” in “a long way from home…” It’s a perfect match of music and words.

  We came back to playing that on our last tour. We only played it a couple of times. And I just thought it was too delicate a number to try to play it in an arena. And then I rethought that, years later, and I thought that I could come out with a guitar, just me and guitar, and get that song over. So we came back and that’s how we did it. For the most part, it was just me alone with the guitar. And it really worked. It was easy to sell it in the arena, because bringing it down to one instrument really got everyone’s attention. So when the band finally did fall in, it really made a big impact. So it worked that way.