The one Tom Petty song that he always hated: “It’s just trash”
Some artists make a huge impact before shrinking away, like the Sex Pistols, for example. Others permeate the industry and seep into every corner of it, like Leonard Cohen. While some artists manage to do both without blinking an eye. Enter Tom Petty. There is one reason that Petty was able to be a part of almost every decade that followed his emergence, and that is because the music of Tom Petty always seemed to be coming right from the soul.
From the girl chasing her dreams in ‘American Girl’ to the boy who broke her heart in ‘Free Fallin’, every single one of Petty’s songs has its little world to play in, where the sun always shines, and his characters are free to roam wherever they please.
Across 16 LPs, Petty and his band the Heartbreakers delivered some of rock’s defining moments, some of its most heartbreaking songs and perhaps one of the more definitive versions of the story of Americana. It ranks as one of the most comprehensive and yet understated works ever. While Petty and his band spoke with their emotions, they delivered their sermons with incredible technical ability. Not every Heartbreakers classic has that level of skill put into it, however, and Petty freely admitted that one of his biggest hits from the ‘80s wasn’t exactly heartfelt.
When assembling the Southern Accents demos, Petty had planned to create a double album before discovering that the rest of the band was out of their minds. Outside of not being practised after years away from the road, the band’s dependence on drugs and alcohol affected their judgement in the studio, leading to sessions where nothing got done. After consulting with his longtime producer Jimmy Iovine, Petty thought to pair the album down to a double record, with some songwriting help from one of The Eurythmics.
To fill up the rest of the record, Petty was fascinated by Dave Stewart’s approach to songwriting in the electronic duo. After meeting him during a writing session with Stevie Nicks, Petty stole the song they were working on, turning it into ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’. As he started assembling his own batch of songs with Stewart, one of them wasn’t cutting it.
In Conversations with Tom Petty, Petty had a major negative reaction to the song ‘Make It Better (Forget About Me)’, which became the follow-up single to ‘No More’, saying: “It’s just trash. It was Dave just trying to get me to knock a song out. Just write a song for the sake of writing one. And I think that’s what it sounds like to me. It’s one of the few that I just don’t like. That one was the result of some misguided people. We didn’t know what we were doing”.
While Petty was harsh on the song, there’s still much to dissect on this tune. Outside of the fact that it only has one actual chorus, the song is indebted to the sounds of soul and Motown, one of the prominent influences that Petty heard growing up. Instead of just singing his pastiches of old country and rock and roll, this sounds like a soul giant like Otis Redding in the ‘60s could have sung it.
Then again, the video looks like the band had run short on ideas, featuring the group playing inside the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ girl’s head before being dug out with a Q-tip. As much as the band might have been having fun then, Petty was about to enter some of the darkest days of his life, including almost being burned alive after someone lit his house on fire.
For the next few months, all Petty knew was the road, crisscrossing the world on tour and only wearing the clothes that Annie Lennox had provided his family. With every hard time comes something even better, though, and Petty entered his career renaissance towards the end of the ‘80s, becoming a member of The Traveling Wilburys and turning in his career highlights like Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers. They can’t all be winners, though, and this is the one time Petty sacrificed integrity for a hit.
