“I don’t think it’s offensive”: the Tom Petty lyric Rick Rubin hated
Rick Rubin tends to have this musical spider sense every single time he goes into the studio to make a record.
This is someone who doesn’t know how to play an instrument in that much detail, but even if he only plays a little bit whenever he walks into the studio, he’s much more comfortable being a songwriting coach for a group rather than worrying about whether or not they’re able to play the most complicated stuff in the world. What’s important to him is the feeling above everything else, and he felt that some of the greatest artists in the world could aim a bit below their normal standard every once in a while.
Then again, it takes a certain amount of guts to tell anyone that they are working with something that wasn’t worth revisiting. Anyone else would have been happy enough to stand in the same room as someone like Johnny Cash back in the day, but having to tell him that his voice isn’t in good shape and that he should come back to the studio tomorrow would be enough for people to hate you with a burning passion before any record comes out.
But the greatest artists of all time tend to appreciate what Rubin is doing for them in the long run. At the end of the day, Rubin was always going to let the musicians do whatever they wanted since their name was on the record, but when Red Hot Chili Peppers took his advice to heart, they ended up walking away with some of the greatest songs of their career, like ‘Under the Bridge’ and ‘Give It Away’. It’s not like Rubin doesn’t know what he’s doing, and that no-bullshit attitude is what resonated with Tom Petty the most.
Having the same guy who worked on Beastie Boys suddenly move over to Heartland Rock was definitely a strange call at the beginning of the Wildflowers session, but Petty and Rubin were practically seeing eye-to-eye on everything. The music was all about embracing the more natural elements of the mix, but even if the album stood up as one of Petty’s all-time greatest albums, they could feel something missing when they first began working on the album Echo.
Petty was already out of commission halfway through since he was working on the aftermath of his divorce, but he wasn’t going to beat around the bush when it came to his heartache. He was never going to get into the gory details of everything that he did wrong, but when working on a song like ‘Rhino Skin’, Rubin remembered that there was no way that he wanted his name on an album that used the phrase ‘elephant balls’.
The lyric does come out of nowhere and is pretty funny for what is, in essence, a relatively serious song, but Petty wasn’t going to let Rubin dictate what he sang, saying, “I didn’t find it offensive at all. Rick couldn’t stand it. He wanted me to take it out. I couldn’t take it out. I tried taking it out, and it didn’t sound good to me. So I just said I was gonna have it in. I’m gonna have it in because that’s the way I sing it, it sounds right to me, and I don’t think it’s offensive or anything. And he couldn’t tell me why he felt it was offensive.”
The track isn’t necessarily worse for having the one line in it, but the damage was already being done behind the scenes. Petty and Rubin were already having a touch-and-go relationship at this point, but when the singer named himself and Mike Campbell as co-producers of the album, the producer did get more than a little bit perturbed about where things were going, hence why they stopped working together for a while.
Then again, that’s how any great working relationship is supposed to go after a while. Even though Rubin might have the best interests of the artist in mind whenever working on his tracks, sometimes it’s better for him to give his favourite artists some space rather than pestering them about what should or shouldn’t be on one of their albums.
