“Never ceases to blow my mind”: the one Heartbreaker that left Tom Petty in awe
Any great frontman knows that they are only as good as the people surrounding them. It takes a small army to get any people in the stands listening to your work, so that means having the best players at your disposal and being able to have that kind of unspoken relationship where everyone instinctively knows where to go with any song. Although Tom Petty could have steered the ship with the Heartbreakers with ease by himself, he knew that some of his bandmates could play him under the table at any opportunity.
Then again, Petty didn’t need to be one of the best players in the world to be a songwriting genius. Part of his genius was about taking a handful of chords and making the kind of songs that could make people cry, even if he was taking a lot of notes from bands like The Beatles and The Byrds during his early days. When he disassembled Mudcrutch, though, he knew some people were too good to let go.
From the minute that the band broke up, Petty immediately went to Mike Campbell and told him not to leave, thinking that they always worked better together than apart. Campbell was the producer who would oversee everything when working with people like Jeff Lynne on Full Moon Fever, and he could always be counted on to add the perfect complement to Petty’s writing, whether it was the backing track for ‘Refugee’ or turning in a solo worthy of George Harrison on ‘I Won’t Back Down’.
But the real reason why the Heartbreakers even existed would have to come down to Benmont Tench. Even though the keyboards weren’t necessarily considered cool in the same way the guitars were, Tench had a way of approaching his craft that was unlike anything fans had ever heard, always blending in perfectly with what Campbell was doing on guitar in tracks like ‘Here Comes My Girl’.
“He’s not using nothing but a Hammond organ and a string machine.”
Tom Petty
Granted, Tench’s craft was always in playing the piano, so when he was given a synthesiser on Long After Dark, he wasn’t exactly thrilled. Despite the band themselves making jokes during the filming of the video for ‘You Got Lucky’ that they were not going to put synths on their albums ever again, ‘A Wasted Life’ is a great example of him using the instrument tastefully, eventually creating a whole world for Petty’s vocal to sit on top of by the end of the tune.
Although Petty could claim to have the basis for the tune, he knew he could have never taken it to the places Tench could, saying, “There’s a song on Long After Dark called ‘A Wasted Life’, where he played that live. He’s playing all those keyboards live in one take. He did overdub one thing, but it was a very insignificant thing. He’s not using nothing but a Hammond organ and a string machine. He never ceases to blow my mind.”
And, really, without that keyboard line, a lot of the mystery behind the song gets lost. Petty is singing about the dangers of someone throwing their life away and not being able to achieve everything they want to, and those sparkling keyboard lines may as well be the hand he’s placing on this person’s shoulder as he’s reassuring them that their best days are still in front of them and not to throw it all away for nothing.
Despite Full Moon Fever being one of Petty’s most celebrated albums, it’s moments like this where you start to realise why people may have been pissed off to see the Heartbreakers be put on the back burner. Because when you have musicians who can play this well, why the hell would anyone not want to show them off?
