The one song Tom Petty thought couldn’t be improved: “It’s the perfect single”
Tom Petty never minced any of his words when performing his material. No matter what flavour of heartland rock his fans were getting at the time, no one could deny that whatever he was singing came from his soul whenever he got in front of the microphone. Petty did acknowledge that some songs were easier than others, though, and when he came up with ‘You Got Lucky’, he admitted that everything fell into place.
By the time Petty actually entered the studio to make Long After Dark, he had already gone through enough hardships than musicians twice his age had to go through. Outside of losing his mother on the album before, Ron Blair’s abrupt exit from the group meant they were flying blind with new recruit Howie Epstein, who Petty admitted to stealing from Del Shannon’s band when making his latest record.
Although Epstein fit like a glove, Long After Dark isn’t really the fireworks show that many people hoped it would be. Petty was still in recovery mode, and considering this was the third go-around with the same producer, the frontman likened the album to treading water most of the time, thinking that he didn’t really take his sound as far as he hoped he could.
Then again, ‘You Got Lucky’ is nearly flawless for the time. Being one of the first songs where Petty breaks out the synthesisers, it’s definitely a change in the usual formula, but almost every single melodic line could be a different hook, from Mike Campbell’s opening guitar fill to Benmont Tench’s opening synth line.
Despite his feelings about the making of the album, Petty knew he had something special with ‘You Got Lucky’, telling Paul Zollo, “It’s nice. It was a hit single for us. It’s just kind of a love song. You know what that song is? It’s the perfect little single. When I hear it on the radio, I think, ‘Wow, we really just filled every little space the right way.’ And the groove was so good.”
If the synths weren’t a big enough clue, this was also Petty’s first proper introduction to the 1980s by being the first MTV video he made, featuring him and the rest of the Heartbreakers wandering across a desert landscape in what looks like the kind of rejected outfits from a Mad Max movie.
The song worked; it became one of Petty’s most enduring classics, but it was also one that he didn’t really want to repeat again. If you listen to the outtakes from the music video that were featured in the documentary Runnin’ Down A Dream, even Petty mocked the song during the shoot, saying that the synths were bullshit and that they wanted some more textures on the next record.
While Petty did have the final say in getting the song on the radio, ‘You Got Lucky’ is more than just a catchy tune in his catalogue. If anything, this was the kind of perfect pop song that felt like he was adopting the kind of Phil Spector-style texture to his own music on one of his hits.
