The album Tom Petty said made the Heartbreakers resent him: “I could see him looking very annoyed”
It’s hard to think of the story of Tom Petty without acknowledging the rest of the Heartbreakers.
Petty may have been the star of the show every single time they played together, but the chime of Mike Campbell’s guitar and the textures Benmont Tench created on the piano were as essential to his sound as Crazy Horse is to Neil Young or the E Street Band is to Bruce Springsteen. But even though the Heartbreakers could always be a band of brothers, Petty knew there were more than a few times when he was watching a band that wanted nothing to do with him.
Then again, a lot of those internal tensions were a lot worse than others. Most of the band knew to never take any of Petty’s decisions all that personally, but when Stan Lynch started to get called into question more and more often, he was going to be walking on eggshells for the rest of his career before he was finally asked to leave when he said that Wildflowers wasn’t what he wanted to be doing.
What the boss says goes, but it’s not like the rest of the band couldn’t throw out their opinions whenever he performed. Petty was the one writing all the songs, but even he remembered multiple occasions when his bandmates would say that a song was well below his usual standards and that he should come back with something better. But if Petty thought there was some magic to be found in one of his songs, he wasn’t going to rely on his bandmates’ approval, either.
Because when he first started working on Full Moon Fever, there were more than a few bruised egos happening along the way. The tunes clearly weren’t meant to be Heartbreakers songs, and the album was simply an excuse for Petty to hang out writing songs with Jeff Lynne. There was always an open-door policy for any member of the band to work on a solo project, but when you’re already the face of the group, making a record on your own was always to ruffle some feathers.
Even when Petty asked some of his bandmates to help him out on a couple of songs, he remembered getting severe pushback from people like Howie Epstein, saying, “I could see him looking very annoyed. I said, ‘We’re going to get to the bass in a minute.’ And he said, ‘It’s not that. I don’t like this song.’ And I said, ‘Well, if you don’t like the song, then you don’t have to play on it’ and he just goes, ‘Right, bye.’ It was ‘Free Fallin.’”
That must have stung once the album became one of the biggest hits of Petty’s career, but that didn’t stop the rest of them from grumbling their way through some of those songs, with Petty recalling later, “There was resentment, but they got over it.” If they were going to truly move on, though, the next few records needed to have a lot more weight behind them than what Lynne was doing.
Into the Great Wide Open was a great way of integrating the band into Petty’s new sound, but Wildflowers was really where they were always meant to be. Every song was about trying to capture a specific emotion, and with Rick Rubin at the helm, every session focused on getting the right take and everyone working together and letting the music flow through them rather than striving for perfection.
Lynne definitely worked wonders when working with Petty, but that was a lot different than what everyone else was used to. The songs still sounded great whenever they came on the radio, but if Petty wanted to truly get his band back, he was going to need to make records that sounded like a bunch of guys playing together in a room again.
