The iconic Tom Petty song his bandmate hated: “I was shocked”
Around the turn of the 1980s, Tom Petty was entering somewhat of a career renaissance. After becoming friends with his fellow Traveling Wilburys, Petty started writing songs from a much happier place and wanted to use his next album to document that happiness with producer Jeff Lynne. Though Full Moon Fever would become one of his most celebrated albums, not everyone was happy with the new shift in direction.
The change was subtle on paper but seismic in spirit. Petty was trading the road-worn democracy of a band for the streamlined clarity of a studio partnership, and that inevitably altered the chemistry. What felt liberating to him did not necessarily feel inclusive to those who had helped build the name in the first place.
For the first time since their inception, Petty decided to make this next record without the help of most of The Heartbreakers. Outside of lead guitarist Mike Campbell, who played on most of the tracks, most of the work was done by Petty and Lynne, who would often run through entire songs in just a few days.
As they spent more time working on the record, though, pianist Benmont Tench remembered having a horrible feeling about not being able to work, recounting in Runnin Down a Dream about getting an awkward phone call about the album, saying: “I remember calling our offices and asking what day we were getting started because I figured we’d get started on like a Wednesday or whatever. And I heard, ‘uh… they’re doing it by themselves, just Tom and Mike.’ And I was shocked”.
Though some of the band got called into work on the songs, not everyone was jazzed about not contributing their parts. When running through some of the tunes, Petty remembered assembling the track and making bassist Howie Epstein wait to record it. By the time the song was ready, Epstein was too happy, as Petty remembered: “I could tell that something was bothering him and I said, ‘give us a minute Howie, and we’ll be ready for you’. Then 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 it.’ And he said, ‘Right, bye'”.
After storming out, Epstein would find out that the song he turned down was ‘Free Fallin’ which became one of Petty’s biggest hits, being a staple of his live shows until the end of his run.
Granted, Epstein wasn’t the only one not feeling the vibe of the record, with Tench also remembering: “When I got called in, they just said ‘could you go ding-ding-ding-ding-ding?’ And the feeling of the record was so bad that I couldn’t even do that very well”. By then, drummer Stan Lynch was all too happy about not getting a call. He said: “There were more than a few songs on that record that I just didn’t like”.
It is one of rock’s more bittersweet ironies that a song so effortless in tone arrived through such fractured circumstances. ‘Free Fallin’’ drifts by with sunlit ease, yet behind it sat tension and wounded pride. The disconnect between sound and situation underlines just how complicated the making of even the breeziest classics can be.
Though the damage might have hurt the Heartbreakers, it would only get worse for Lynch as the years went on, thinking he was in a cover band and eventually kicked out in the mid-1990s. While Epstein made it through the following sessions, he wouldn’t come out of the decade in one piece, succumbing to heroin addiction and passing away in the early ’00s following their induction into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Epstein may not have been up for playing ‘Free Fallin’ at the beginning stages, but it must have been tough having to play the song he didn’t like at every show, too.
