The one song Tom Petty should have never rejected: “It was a huge mistake”
Any songwriter like Tom Petty has those moments where they have to reject their own masterpieces.
Not every song is meant to find a place on an album, and even if it’s one of the best things that you’ve ever created, it’s usually better to have a well-rounded record than to try to shoehorn in something that you think might be able to work. But even when Petty was cutting most of the fat from his records, there were bound to be a few songs that should have never been left on the cutting room floor.
Then again, Petty had a lot to learn before he was ever ready to sequence one of his albums. Denny Cordell had helped show him the ropes when he first started making his records, but when working with Jimmy Iovine, the rest of the Heartbreakers had to be put through their paces. He wanted to make sure that Petty got it right from top to bottom, so he wasn’t going to let a few bum notes get in the way of making songs like ‘Refugee’ into classics. He wanted to push them to the brink, and it was usually well worth the wait.
But Damn the Torpedoes was the first and last time that Iovine ever said that Petty didn’t need any more songs. That record was practically aces from back to front, but when working on their next records, you could tell that the band were spinning their wheels a bit. Hard Promises had songs that were as good if not better than his masterpiece, but since Long After Dark was them treading water, it made sense for Petty and the gang to produce the next record on their own.
And they would have been able to make it work, too, if not for one little friend called cocaine. The premise of an album all about life in the American South would have been a slam dunk for anyone else in Petty’s position, but since everyone was out of their minds on coke, it was hard for them to get anything done. Southern Accents had Petty sacrifice his time, money, and even his hand to get it done, but after Iovine was brought in to clean things up, the double album idea went out the window.
The band simply didn’t have enough material to justify making a double record, and when working with other songwriters like Dave Stewart, it’s not like ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ was exactly the most Southern-inspired song in the world with its sitar sounds. But even though some bones of the concept album survived, Petty was always pissed off that ‘Trailer’ never got its due.
The whole project was about the kind of lives he saw back in Gainesville, and for him, the trailer lifestyle was too big to ignore, saying, “It was a huge mistake not to put it on the album. I don’t know why we didn’t. That just shows the amount of confusion going on at the time. Between broken limbs and whatever. But it should have been on that album. I think it was an important song, and part of that trip. It should have been on the album, but it got put on a B-side.”
In all fairness, the country feel of the song does lend itself well to an album that was supposed to be indebted to Americana music, but it does make sense why it didn’t fit amongst the other songs. If you look at the other thematic tunes on the record, the title track and ‘The Best of Everything’ do a much better job at romanticising the idea of the band’s upbringing a lot better than talking about life living out of a trailer.
While the song did eventually get a redemption of sorts when Petty’s childhood band Mudcrutch did a version of it, it’s not like the record was meant to be a masterpiece of heartland rock. It was simply a good song that got left off of the record, but since Petty’s idea revolved around his childhood, having him play it towards the end of his life with his original band was a much better way of bringing the tune full circle.
