How Jimmy Iovine ruined a Tom Petty album
Every album that any artist releases has to be a little bit of a compromise. No one is meant to get their way all the time when they walk into the studio, and some of the biggest stars in the world need to be knocked down a couple of pegs when their head starts getting just a touch too big. Even though a band called ‘Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ should defer to Tom Petty, the heartland rocker thought Long After Dark was ruined by producer Jimmy Iovine.
Then again, any band that had Iovine in their corner was usually a shoo-in for making a classic album. Outside of his role these days as one of the gods of the music industry, Iovine’s beginnings as a hot-shot engineer resulted in him overseeing projects by everyone from Patti Smith to Bruce Springsteen to John Lennon during his time.
It’s not like he didn’t get results with Tom, either. From the first time he started working with him, Damn the Torpedoes wouldn’t become his finest work by accident. Whether it was the ballads or the uptempo rockers, Iovine was the perfect person to take the basis of Petty’s sound and turn it into something that sounded unstoppable on the radio.
Compared to the success of Damn the Torpedoes, Hard Promises was a far more haunted album experience. Petty had lost his mother, and the world lost John Lennon during the making of the project, and you can hear that restless grief on many of the songs like ‘You Can Still Change Your Mind’ and ‘Something Big’.
The money was still rolling in, so Iovine was still the right guy when Long After Dark started. When the band started performing with new bassist Howie Epstein, though, Petty thought that some of the best material for the album was getting nixed by the producer in favour of the uptempo material.
When talking about the project in Runnin’ Down a Dream, Petty believed that Iovine stuck his nose where it didn’t belong, saying, “Jimmy Iovine and I didn’t see eye-to-eye. He thought it sounded too acoustic, therefore didn’t put them on the album, and I think it hurt the album.”
Considering where Iovine was then, there’s a good chance that Petty wasn’t his top priority anymore. He had just started producing for Stevie Nicks outside of Fleetwood Mac, so it sounds like Petty’s disagreements may have been from Iovine taking his foot off the gas a little bit in favour of working with Nicks.
Eventually, Iovine even admitted that he had fumbled the album a little bit, explaining, “Looking at where we went from Damn the Torpedoes to Hard Promises, we didn’t go the same distance on Long After Dark. After three albums, you should shoot your producer.” Iovine did part ways with Petty later, though, only coming back to Southern Accents when Petty wasn’t physically capable of producing the whole thing himself.
Even though Long After Dark is far from the best Tom Petty album, it’s still a pretty solid collection of tunes. Outside of singles like ‘You Got Lucky’, the band are still in prime form, and the addition of synthesisers on tracks like ‘A Wasted Life’ is a lot more interesting to hear from Petty’s rootsy sound. Considering how Southern Accents was supposed to be Petty’s love letter to his home, the acoustic album that Long After Dark was intended to be may have bridged the gap between both sides of his sound.
