The one singer Tom Petty said was always perfect: “He’s such a pitch freak”
Tom Petty didn’t get into the music business to make the most pristine records ever made.
He certainly put everything he had into those early Heartbreakers records, but the beauty behind a lot of his best work is the fact that you can hear the band playing in the room rather than being locked to a grid. Rock and roll wasn’t supposed to be perfect anyway, but there were always going to be a few people there to help whip his butt into shape when the time called for it.
His first few records had been reasonably successful, but if they wanted to reach the upper echelon of rock stardom, Jimmy Iovine was going to need to crack the whip a little bit. A song like ‘Refugee’ demanded a better performance than your average full-band take, and everyone has more than a few stories about wanting to get everything right from top to bottom by the time they entered the studio.
It might not have been everyone’s favourite practice, but Petty wasn’t going to settle for ‘good enough’ either. He had been crafting songs that were bound to become his best work, and while Damn the Torpedoes is a masterpiece from front to back, it’s not like the band could have gone back to cutting loose all over again. Petty wanted to have better control over the songs he made, and the best way for him to flex his muscles was to get a break from the rest of the Heartbreakers after a while.
It was nothing personal, but by the time he started working on songs like Jeff Lynne, his approach was a lot different. These were pop songs that the Heartbreakers wouldn’t have been able to do justice to, and after having been through the Traveling Wilburys, Lynne was practically his musical brother, usually filling in every little piece of a song with him on ‘Yer So Bad’ and ‘Free Fallin’.
But when Petty was behind the microphone, Lynne could be as meticulous as Iovine about getting every single vocal exactly right, saying, “I’ve never heard Jeff sing out of tune. Out of all the recordings and harmonies that we’ve done over the years, I never once heard him go off key (laughs). He’s such a pitch freak that he would drive George and I crazy. We did a lot of singing together, the three of us. With Jeff, we always had to sing perfectly in pitch.”
Then again, it’s not like that hard work didn’t pay off when you heard the records. ‘Free Fallin’ is still one of the finest songs that Petty ever made, and even when working with the Wilburys, the harmonies on everything from ‘Not Alone Any More’ to ‘New Blue Moon’ work so well because of the hours that Lynne put into making them perfectly in tune.
And it’s not like Lynne was ever afraid to share his opinion, either. It was one thing to help the Wilburys tune their voices up perfectly, but as a Beatles fanatic, he had to have been pinching himself when working on tracks like ‘Free As a Bird’ and getting asked by Paul McCartney and Harrison to check the harmonies to see if they were in tune. But, really, Lynne may have been the perfect foil to someone like George Martin after he bowed out of the Anthology project.
The ELO frontman was never going to make anything if he didn’t think that he could make it perfect, and even if he had more than a few records that weren’t as successful as his mainstream hits, it’s hard to think of any of his songs being rough around the edges or a bit too lo-fi for people’s tastes.
