Petty’s friends always seemed to stick around.
In fact, he and fellow ex-Byrd David Crosby show up on the just-released, Petty-produced Bidin’ My Time album by yet another ex-Byrd, Chris Hillman - who, to further complete the circle, performed “Wildflowers” at this year’s Petty tribute. He liked rock ‘n’ roll he grew up in the South playing rock ’n’ roll in bar bands, and while he loved the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he was just as likely to be fixated by the music of those artists’ contemporaries - the Animals, the Searchers, the Zombies - instead of just the big guns, and that showed in his music.Īnd let’s not forget Yanks like the Byrds: When Petty’s 1976 debut album emerged, its highlight was the unforgettable “American Girl,” which many listeners thought sounded uncannily like some previously unheard Byrds track - as did Byrds founder Roger McGuinn, who good-naturedly covered it on his 1977 Thunderbyrd album. It might simply have been a matter of Tom Petty’s age and his background. He and his music touched many, many people. “We got together last week and rehearsed for this thing,” 2017 Person of the Year Tom Petty announced from the stage, “and I realized I may actually be in one of the best two or three rock ’n’ roll bands there is.” What followed then - a nonstop tribute set of Petty material played by the likes of Randy Newman, George Strait, the Foo Fighters, Jackson Browne, Stevie Nicks, Don Henley, and many more - was further confirmation of that fact and much more. This was the case at the yearly benefit concert for the Recording Academy’s MusiCares Foundation in February. While his personal life had been dotted with misfortune since his early days - a troubled childhood, a failed marriage, dalliances with drugs and depression - it was marked even more conspicuously with consistent critical and commercial success. If he was in the mood then to look back - at a career that saw more than 80 million record sales worldwide - he was likely pretty happy with how 2017 had been shaping up. “I want to thank you for 40 years of a really great time,” he had said from the stage at his final show at the Bowl. It was by any standard unexpected - he just played the last of three sold-out Hollywood Bowl shows a week earlier - and especially cruel in its timing. The song has become such a popular part of Petty's repertoire that he often lets the audience sing it as the band plays.Tom Petty’s jarring, sudden death Monday has made an extraordinarily odd year seem even stranger. But we were in that frame of mind where things had to be done right there and then.
It's amazing to me that: A) I had the balls to call them at that hour and B) they just came! I certainly wouldn't try that these days. So I called up everybody at 3:30 or 4 in the morning to come back and cut it again. Petty says that the original version of “Breakdown” was seven minutes long–“I started thinking this could be two minutes long. We'd run out of things to do and we'd say, 'Well, let's just write another one.' I'd go to the piano and write 'Breakdown.' We cut it with Mike's guitar riff only appearing at the end of the record…Then Dwight Twilley came in and heard Mike's lick on the end and said, 'S–t, man, that's the lick, that's the whole thing, and it only comes up right at the end of the song? I'd put it everywhere!'” Petty remembers that 'Breakdown' was written in the studio: “It was partly naivete. You just knew that you were going to play your f–king heart out and you could do it for days.” There was so much passion and you didn't even know why. Of 'Breakdown,' drummer Stan Lynch remembers, “When we cut 'Breakdown,' it was great. I never understood being so cool that nobody heard it.”
It looked like a much bigger challenge to work in the mainstream, to play with everybody. But it never looked like much of a challenge to me. Of the punk embrace, Petty says, “It would have been very easy to say, 'Okay, we are new wave,' and get the skinny ties. It was a top 30 album there shortly after its release, and the songs “Anything That's Rock 'N' Roll” and “American Girl” were hits. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers first made their mark in England, where fans and critics accepted the group as part of the burgeoning punk rock movement. The debut album from Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers was a slow-builder, finally creeping onto the Billboard 200 in September 1977, 10 months after its release.Īn appearance on the soundtrack to the film FM helped “Breakdown” climb to Number 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1978. Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers (Shelter, 1976) Recorded: Early 1976 at Shelter Studio, Hollywood, California
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