The era Tom Petty called “the toughest period of my life”
The music business has never been known to be kind to its artists. Many acts have horror stories of being dumped by their label as if they were a piece of trash, and it’s not like there’s some sort of HR department for musicians who just want to make the music they think will be suitable for their audience. Tom Petty never had such a problem telling his label what he was going to make, but he did start to feel himself lose the plot going into the recording of the album Echo.
Considering how much great material was on Wildflowers, though, fans were probably right to expect a little bit of a comedown. There had been so many technical marvels on that record, but Petty wasn’t going to the studio just to have fun. It was to get away from the problems that were awaiting him back home.
Despite going to therapy during the making of Wildflowers, it was clear that Petty’s marriage wasn’t working out, and once they finally called everything off, he was a broken man for a few years. Compared to the cocksure attitude of his best records, that kind of confidence seemed completely drained from his body when working on the next album.
Outside of his depressing songs, his daily activities didn’t give the Heartbreakers hope. In his downtime, he had started living in a chicken shack, and if that wasn’t enough of a drop in prestige, hearing rumours about him possibly starting to use heroin cast a dark shadow on the album before it was even released.
And it’s not like Petty doesn’t leave it all out there on the table, either. Being one of the longest albums he ever made, Petty takes every other song as an opportunity to talk about his pain, whether that was the resentment at being alone on ‘Free Girl Now’ and ‘This One’s For Me’ or the raw heartache he still felt after leaving on ‘Room at the Top’.
Even when recounting his time on the album, the heartland rocker considered it one of the low points in his life, saying, “That Echo album was one of the dark times. I can’t even play it. It scares me because I was so down when I made it. It was the toughest period of my life. The character in that song [‘Room at the Top’] is really desperate. It was the time of my divorce and the aftermath, when I was having to rebuild a lot of relationships, including those with my daughters.”
There had already been the tragedy of losing his wife, but there was something even more heartbreaking happening in the background with bassist Howie Epstein, who would pass away from a drug overdose following the making of the album. It’s one thing to deal with heartache from a lover, but losing a bandmate is the kind of casualty that none of them realised was on the table.
Any band like that comes back stronger having survived their ordeal, though, and all you have to do is listen to ‘Like A Diamond’ off of The Last DJ to realise that Petty was in a much better place with his new wife, Dana. He had gone through a certain darkness no one should have to face, but when he came up for air, he had turned his entire life around.
