‘Nobody could play it’: The drum performance Tom Petty called irreplaceable
Musicians don’t automatically pick up their instruments because they want to show off. For many people, playing music is much more of a calling than a competition, and sometimes it’s about listening to your fellow bandmates to make a track ebb and flow in just the right way when laying down a track in the studio. Stan Lynch may not have found his footing in the same way that the rest of the Heartbreakers did, but Tom Petty thought that his performance on ‘The Waiting’ was irreplaceable.
When the group were first laying down tracks for what would become their magnum opus, Damn the Torpedoes, though, they were already running into major problems with Lynch. Outside of his drum sound leaving much to be desired, producer Jimmy Iovine remembered clashing with how the drums sounded to the point where they ended up auditioning session players for the record.
But with a little elbow grease, Lynch made songs like ‘Here Comes My Girl’ and ‘Refugee’ leap out of the speakers, being half the reason why they sounded so good coming out of the radio. When the group finally won their lawsuit against their record company and became one of the biggest acts in the world, though, there was a lot riding on ‘The Waiting’ to set everything up nicely.
Right from the opening line, though, Petty has everyone in the palm of his hand with “Baby, don’t it feel like heaven right now”. At that point, it surely did feel like a miracle had happened behind the scenes, but Lynch’s playfulness behind the drumkit is one of the most unique drum parts he ever laid down.
It sounds fairly straightforward in the context of the rest of the band, but the magic behind the Heartbreakers was about making complex parts sound simple. Listening to it in isolation, Lynch is ever-so-slightly behind the beat, which leads the listener to be dragged into the next line every time. Given the song’s title, Lynch’s habit of literally making you wait with bated breath for the chorus is a work of mad genius.
And despite Petty’s grievances on the last record, he had to admit that no one could touch what Lynch did here, saying, “‘The Waiting’ always reminds me of Stan when I hear it because he’s the only drummer in the world who could play it. Nobody could play that song but him. That record is completely him. I mean, it’s all how the drums are played.”
That didn’t mean that it was smooth sailing with Petty and Lynch afterwards. By the time they had started working on Wildflowers, Lynch had become way too tired of the mellow approach to Petty’s music, to the point where he either quit or forced Petty to fire him by the end of their sessions for the single ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’.
While Petty did eventually break out the song later with guest singer Eddie Vedder singing, there’s a certain spontaneity that comes with the original that will probably never be eclipsed. You can try to emulate Lynch to the best of your ability, but there’s a perfect imperfection on that drum take that’s baked into his DNA.
