‘Room at The Top’: The one song Tom Petty never wanted to hear again
When you’ve amassed as many hits as Tom Petty has, there’s bound to be a few that don’t have the same kind of fire to them as they did back in the day.
Even though a tune like ‘Breakdown’ is what helped put him on the map when he first got started, chances are that the mellow groove sounded a little more juvenile compared to the sonic masterpieces that turned up later on, like on Wildflowers. But when Petty talked about the peaks and valleys of his career, there were bound to be a few tunes that stood out in the wrong ways whenever he tried to listen back to his classics.
Then again, Petty wasn’t necessarily a magnet for drama whenever he played music. He was known as one of the most laid-back humans on the face of the Earth through most of his career, and even if he had some choice words for a few of his contemporaries, chances are he would have put John Lydon in his place if the punk god ever got in his face about not being truly authentic.
But that didn’t mean that drama didn’t follow him every now and again, either. The thought of anyone wanting to burn down Petty’s house or go out of their way to hurt him might have sounded insane, but he always managed to turn all of his pain into great music. The anger inside him is what drove him out of Gainesville in the first place, so it wasn’t that hard for him to use that same fire that he had in his belly and look at the brighter side of life on albums like Full Moon Fever.
And for all of the great tunes that turned up on Wildflowers, there was something sinister going on in the background. There were more fantastic songs than he knew what to do with at the time, but with his marriage slowly coming apart back home, the studio might have been his only way to get through all of the emotional trauma that he was dealing with. When he eventually hit rock bottom, though, Echo was always going to be a bitter pill for any fan to swallow when they first heard it.
Petty’s songwriting was still great, but there were more than a few tunes that seemed too melancholy compared to his usual sound. And if you couple that with rumours about him being strung out and living in a chicken shack throughout the making of the record, it’s no surprise that Petty wanted to wash his hands of this period of his career the minute that he married his second wife, Dana.
He could only be honest when he made his records, but that didn’t mean that he wanted to go back to every one of his classics, saying, “[‘Room at The Top’] is one I haven’t wanted to do. I haven’t wanted to even hear it since I did it, and I don’t think I have. You never know. Sometimes you go back to something and it’s different than you thought it would be. But that’s one I didn’t try this time.”
Which is a shame because ‘Room at the Top’ is one of the finest songs to come from the album. It’s hard to see him wearing his heart on his sleeve this outwardly, but it’s beautifully heartbreaking at the same time, especially towards the end of the song where he pulls down the veil and practically begs his ex-wife to take him back after all of the wrong that he has done.
That might have been a lost cause by that time, but that didn’t mean that Echo deserved to be forgotten the minute that he moved on to The Last DJ. It’s certainly a dark chapter in the history of Petty’s career and an even darker chapter in the Heartbreakers’ story considering this would be Howie Epstein’s final release with the band, but the lower lights are always interesting because they make up the full picture of an artist’s career.
