The only musician to ever walk out on Tom Petty: “Leaving the whole thing”
Any band should feel like family at the end of the day. Since you have so many shared experiences and have to put up with each other on the road, it’s probably a good idea to make sure that you’re at least on speaking terms with the rest of the members before committing to a lifetime of rock excess. Tom Petty may have already been in it for the long haul before he even started the Heartbreakers, but Ron Blair wanted no part of the group once he found out what everything entailed.
When Petty was first putting his band together, his initial outfit, Mudcrutch, had already collapsed. While he may have been convinced that guitarist Mike Campbell needed to stay with him, the rest of the group fell by the wayside, leaving pianist Benmont Tench to form a new act that was supposed to be called The Drunks.
Though the world may have been deprived of one of the most aptly-titled dive bar acts in California, Petty knew that he had to steal the band as soon as he heard Tench playing with Blair and drummer Stan Lynch. Compared to the Southern-fried music he made in Mudcrutch, Petty sounded like an Americanised version of the British Invasion with the new group behind him.
Compared to the guitars, though, Blair wasn’t going to just hold down root chords. He was interested in making textures and wasn’t afraid to solo, either down to the opening few seconds of ‘American Girl’ or at the end of ‘The Waiting’, where he plays the guitar line on the bass towards the end of the song.
Even though Petty had gone through hell making Damn the Torpedoes, Blair wanted to get off the rock and roll rollercoaster immediately after Hard Promises. Looking back on it, Blair couldn’t take the pressure of having to work in the business, especially with the band’s business side and Petty breathing down his neck as to how the bass should go.
Blair was not willing to keep up with it, telling Runnin’ Down a Dream, “I seemed to have a lot of issues with the music business. I thought it was a little sleazy and funky and full of people with egos, and I was right, but I found out that the world is just like that.” This wasn’t just about the Heartbreakers…this was a much greater problem.
When Petty talked about Blair leaving, he said that the guitarist never went to another group, explaining, “We could get very hard on [Blair]. I think he just wanted to do it the way he was going to do it, and Mike and I had a good idea about how we wanted the bass to go. Which led to him quitting the music business, not just going to another band. Leaving the whole thing.”
Although they soldiered on with Howie Epstein for decades, it wasn’t long until Blair got the call to rejoin. After Epstein passed away in the 2000s from a drug overdose, Blair eventually stepped to return to the band, having spent the last few years opening up a bikini store in California.
Petty even thought that Blair breathed new life into the group when he came back, saying that he would have broken the group up if he hadn’t come back. The heartland rocker was much more of a seasoned veteran by that point, though, and he was going to make sure that this version of the band would last.
