The 1990 album Tom Petty initially couldn’t stand working on: “Anything but this”
Tom Petty wasn’t the kind of artist who suffered fools gladly whenever he entered the studio.
He wanted the chance to get the best songs that he could out of every performance, and if someone got in the way of that, it was best that they stood aside or else he and the rest of the Heartbreakers would bulldoze right over any of their ideas. But there were many times when even Petty felt that he got a little bit out of line when he started working with some of his heroes behind the scenes.
Because even when Petty was working with some of the greatest artists in their field, he didn’t want to mess around whenever they made the record that they wanted. When he showed up to a Johnny Cash session, he knew more than anyone that it was about getting the best songs for ‘The Man in Black’, and even if the rest of the band didn’t want to go along with whatever they were doing, Petty was willing to cater to whatever the main artist wanted.
But there were more than a few times when that didn’t seem to work out the way he wanted it to, either. He had already caused a bit of a stir when working on one of Del Shannon’s records and ended up stealing away his bass player for the Heartbreakers, but even if Shannon ended up getting over it, Petty had a lot less tolerance when the suits tried sticking their noses into places where they didn’t belong.
Petty loathed the corporate side of the industry, and even when he was working with Roger McGuinn of The Byrds on his solo record, seeing one of the men from the label in the control room talking about the songs that McGuinn should be making was enough to put him in a foul mood. And while his hero had the final say in what he should do, Petty wasn’t going to be able to live with himself if he saw one of his favourite artists of all time compromise his sound.
During those sessions, Petty remembered getting into an altercation with the label representative halfway through the recording, saying, “I would rather hear him record anything else but this. I could smoke a joint and come up with better lines. Why don’t we just get him another song? This is the man who wrote ‘Turn Turn Turn’. This is a great man here.” But even if Petty regretted getting into that fight, McGuinn knew that it was absolutely necessary for him to change the song.
If he had gone through and recorded the track, it would have ended up sounding way more cartoony than what it ultimately became. If you look at the song that Petty sang on, ‘King of the Hill’, the whole thing sounds a lot more fluid and much more in line with where McGuinn was in the moment. And if he bothered to make the call and record a “current” song, who knows where the label would have taken him next.
Because all you need to do is agree to something once before the label starts thinking that they can push you around and treat you like a toy. And given that it was the late 1980s, it’s not unreasonable to think that McGuinn would have eventually had to wear all these pastel colours in an attempt to get him to fit in with the other cheap rock and roll bands that were clogging up MTV at that time.
And that was never going to happen on Petty’s watch. He wanted the chance to get the best out of every artist he worked with, and even if he was the special guest on some of his heroes’ songs, he was still going to offer up that kind of sage wisdom, even if the suits may have been sick of dealing with him.
