The bandmate Tom Petty never wanted to talk to again: “No one was with me”
It was going to take a lot more than a few rough edges for someone to piss off Tom Petty.
The heartland rocker didn’t suffer fools gladly, but even if he did have a bit of patience, it didn’t take him long for him to be absolutely furious when someone tried to exploit him at any point, whether that was taking his songs away or trying to raise the price of his albums. No one was going to mess with his music if he could help it, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t have a few fights between his bandmates as well whenever he got the wrong person on the bandstand back in the day.
Because as much as Petty liked to make rock and roll with his friends, not all of them managed to see eye-to-eye with him. The Heartbreakers all understood that their job was to make Petty’s songs sound better at every opportunity, but sometimes getting the right sound often meant having someone like Stan Lynch having to eat some humble pie whenever he worked on a record like Damn the Torpedoes.
But long before the Heartbreakers were an idea, Petty already started to flesh out his songs when he was working in Mudcrutch. The entire idea for the band stemmed from him, Mike Campbell, and Benmont Tench having the same drive to make something work, but there’s a good reason why the other members of the band don’t have ‘Heartbreaker’ next to their name when they are interviewed. Tom Leadon and Randall Marsh weren’t looking at music the same way that Petty did, but in the context of their story, no one got the short end of the stick more than Danny Roberts.
Then again, Roberts’s story has a lot more to do with the problems that were arising before the band even recorded their tunes. They had already drummed up some interest from some labels when Petty and Campbell sent demos around Los Angeles, but once they got to the studio, getting the right sound for the drums was the first time that Roberts suggested getting rid of Marsh altogether.
It might have been a good idea in hindsight, but after the band shut him down, Roberts felt that they were never going to click like they should, saying, “Had that one issue been dealt with, I wouldn’t been very happy to stay in the band and just do the thing, because it was really cool. But no one was with me, so I said, ‘Well, then I guess I’m going to go back to Florida for a bit.’ And that was it.” But the rest of the band almost seemed to make up their mind when it came time to cut Roberts out of everything else.
Petty did eventually find time to get nostalgic and bring his old band back together, but even then, Roberts was never a member of the new group, either. Almost all points of contact had been dropped at that point, and when looking at the various documentaries on the group, Petty’s management has almost done everything they can to make sure that he wasn’t a core part of the story.
The four-hour Runnin’ Down a Dream documentary? Doesn’t mention him once. The reformed version of Mudcrutch? Never discusses him at all. Hell, even Campbell’s biography goes into a little bit more detail of what Roberts was like as a bandmate, but Petty seemed content to leave that piece of history in the past and not ever bother checking up on it ever again.
Who knows what kind of bridges were getting burned back in the day, but sometimes those petty fights that happen when people are starting out are irreparable. There might have been that one thing that one of them wasn’t going to be able to take back, and even if Petty was free to work on his own and make a career for himself, it took a lot more than a few fights for him to airbrush him out of Mudcrutch’s publicity shots.
