The reason why Tom Petty sued his own label
Tom Petty didn’t take up a career in rock and roll for the money. Just like so many rock star poets before him, like Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones, Petty got into the business because he had a song in his heart that needed to get out, which would go on to impact generations to come on tracks like ‘American Girl’. When he eventually came up for air in the late ‘70s, Petty realised that his money had run out.
Like so many naive young rock stars, Petty had signed a bad deal with his label MCA, who had threatened to cease the rights to his songwriting royalties. After being blindsided by his original producer Denny Cordell, Petty was ready to go to war for his songs, declaring bankruptcy so that any of his contracts didn’t matter.
When talking about the lawsuit in Runnin Down a Dream, Petty mentioned not realising how much he had been screwed over, recalling, “I swear to God, I thought that publishing meant putting my song in a songbook. I had no idea that it meant owning the copyright and that I would never see a dime for it”. All while the legal disputes were happening in the background, Petty was hard at work making Damn the Torpedoes, which would be one of his most successful records off the strength of ‘Refugee’ and ‘Here Comes My Girl’.
If the record were to come out, though, it would have to be on Petty’s terms. After meeting with some of the suits about renegotiating his deal, Petty notoriously pulled out a pocket knife during the meeting and started cleaning his nails, making it abundantly clear that he wasn’t paying attention to a damn thing they were selling him. After a run-in with an industry veteran, Petty refused to buckle, remembering: “He said to me, ‘Look kid, here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna make this record, and you’re gonna shut up’. And I told him, ‘I’ll sell you fucking peanuts before I give you another song”.
Petty was so strapped for cash that the band went on a mini tour to raise money for the case. Dubbing it The Lawsuit Tour, the band wore bitterness on their sleeves, even selling shirts to fans that read “Why MCA?” across the front.
Even when the label thought they could seize the tapes for the new record, Petty got crafty with storing them somewhere else. After the label got permission to seize the recordings from the studio, Petty convinced one of his guitar techs to hide the tapes in an undisclosed location. That way, when Petty was asked about the whereabouts of the tapes in court, he wouldn’t be lying when he said he didn’t know.
As the trial was wrapping up, MCA finally buckled, knowing that Petty would never back down from getting his songs back. Instead of welcoming him back to MCA, the label gave Petty his imprint, Backstreet Records, where he could release his albums without worrying about any of his royalties falling into the wrong hands. Any artist that goes against their label is in for a David and Goliath story, but Tom Petty was one of the first rock veterans to speak out against his label and win.
