The 1990 lyric that changed Tom Petty’s career for good: “I never played it again”
When Duff McKagan was talking about his bandmate Axl Rose, he said that one of his biggest issues was that he lacked spontaneity.
In McKagen’s mind, it’s not enough to just be a good musician when it comes to making rock music, but you need to be able to latch onto an idea and run with it the moment it presents itself. When Rose’s Chinese Democracy album was taking so long, the bassist said that it was likely this quality (or lack thereof) that was proving to be the issue.
“Well, you know, spontaneity and rock ‘n’ roll go together. And chemistry. It comes back to the old adage: If it takes you more than five minutes to write a song, then just scrap it,” he said, “I don’t know. Axl Rose is a very fickle guy, and he changes his mind all the time. So, who knows?”
Someone who almost certainly agrees with McKagan is Tom Petty. One of the defining moments of his career was the by-product of spontaneity, firstly in the writing of a song, but secondly in how he recorded it. By not overthinking either of these aspects, Petty was able to essentially take his career to new heights, all without really breaking a sweat.
Firstly, the writing element. Petty never liked to overthink his songs that much; in fact, he once described the writing process as a “stream of consciousness”. He said as much when he was talking about the track ‘Wildflowers’, as, despite it being one of his most famous songs, he got his head down and wrote it all without really worrying about it.
He said, “I mean, I just played it into a tape recorder, and I played the whole song, and I never played it again. I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song. So I’d come back for days playing that tape, thinking there must be something wrong here because this just came too easy. And then I realised that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”
This is how Petty wrote a lot of his songs, so we can assume he did something similar for the track ‘Yer So Bad’, as when he found a new potential collaborative partnership, he already had these iconic lyrics ready to go. However, once again, it wasn’t just the words that worked out for Petty, but the spontaneity with which he recorded them, and, most importantly, who he recorded them with.
You wouldn’t really put two artists like Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty together. Their styles were a lot different, and the means by which they wrote songs also varied. However, the two of them threw logic to the wind when they were both introduced and decided to begin working together in an instant. Spontaneously, you might say. Petty already had the lyrics, but it was Lynne who helped him fully craft the track. While it may not be one of his most famous, it’s a pretty undeniable listen, and it established a solid relationship between him and Lynne, which would blossom into a truly wonderful creative partnership.
The two of them worked together a lot, most notably as a group in The Traveling Wilbury’s, and this may not have come to fruition were it not for this song, and Petty already having the lyrics to ‘Yer So Bad’ on hand. Who would have thought Petty’s career was fundamentally changed because of a line like: “My sister got lucky / married a yuppie / took him for all he was worth”.
