The “defiant” song Tom Petty wrote in “just a few minutes”
For as long as people have realised that consciousness and creativity are able to overlap, there has been music which is deeply defiant. Tom Petty is a great example with this, as it’s a tone set throughout his album Damn The Torpedoes.
The whole tone of that record came about because of the song ‘Refugee’, which was fuelled by a persistent frustration that Tom Petty had with the music industry. He was in a battle with his record label, who were attempting to sell his recording contract to MCA Records behind his back. Petty was understandably annoyed by the deceit, but also found the whole thing pointless due to there being a clause in his recording contract that specifically said the record label wasn’t allowed to do this.
“I was so angry with the whole system that I think that had a lot to do with the tone of the Damn the Torpedoes album. I was in this defiant mood,” he said. “I wasn’t so conscious of it then, but I can look back and see what was happening. I find that’s true a lot. It takes some time, usually, before you fully understand what’s going on in a song – or maybe what led up to it.”
Petty’s unconscious rage is evident in the fact that the track only took him a few minutes to write. When you have a lot bubbling up inside you, the minute someone gives you permission to write about the thing that is frustrating you, it tumbles out like rocks in a landslide. When guitarist Mike Campbell presented the music to Tom Petty, he essentially gave the musician a blank canvas on which he could vocalise his frustration.
“Mike [Campbell] had the whole track down, the whole chord progression. It’s one of the first things that we actually wrote together. It took minutes. Literally, just a few minutes,” recalled Tom Petty when discussing the track. “I remember walking around the room, singing it, just circling the room. The words came very fast, and there are only two verses. And that was it. Finished.”
Both Tom Petty and Mike Campbell look at that song with a very positive mindset. Petty likes it because it allowed him to vent about the anger he felt towards his record label and the music industry in general. Meanwhile, Campbell likes it because he can’t believe they actually managed to write it. While the words might have come quickly to Petty, writing the chord progression and laying it down on a track was a lot more difficult.
“We must have recorded that 100 times,” said Campbell. “I remember being so frustrated with it one day that – I think this is the only time I ever did this – I just left the studio and went out of town for two days.”
Because of these problems with the actual recording, Campbell felt a great sense of reward when he listened to the song back, especially given that it was one of the defining songs on the band’s album. “’Refugee’ always makes me happy,” he said.
Concluding, “Maybe because it was so hard to get on the tape, there was a time when I thought it would never come out, that we just can’t do it. It always sounds like it really captured a moment. If I had to pick one favourite, I’d probably pick that first.”
