The song Tom Petty refused to perform live
Throughout his time on this Earth, Tom Petty was always the ultimate road warrior. Although he may have been able to lay down a solid groove on his own, he felt most at home when working with The Heartbreakers, never liking the idea of being a solo artist with a bunch of hired guns. While Petty could throw down any song in the book when performing live, he knew that one song was never meant to meet the stage all that much.
Granted, the Heartbreakers had turned themselves into a well-oiled machine by the mid-1990s. Coming off the massive success of Wildflowers, their various shows at The Fillmore saw them going through a massive string of tunes every night, whether that was showcasing their hits or playing a handful of rarities from their back catalogue.
While Petty would have enough songs written for a completely different album with the soundtrack to She’s The One, it would all start to crash around him when working on Echo. Outside of the massive amount of tunes on the record, Petty was still reeling from his recent divorce, not knowing where he would end up emotionally when writing the songs.
Even though the band insisted that a good portion of Echo contained some phenomenal material, Petty would insist that the song ‘Room at the Top’ was far from perfect in a live setting. Compared to the rest of the songs on the record, the opening track puts the listener in the middle of the action, with Petty not holding any emotion back as he pleads with his lover to take him back despite all the pain he’s brought upon her.
While the music video featured the band delivering a brilliant performance in an intimate setting, Petty said he never planned to perform the song for much longer. When discussing the different songs that float in and out of the setlist, Petty had a particular disdain for ‘Room at the Top’, recalling, “Last year we went out with the Black Crowes and every night Kate Hudson would go ‘please play ‘Room at the Top’. I never said it to her, but it would be a cold day in hell before I play that”.
Despite the fantastic melody behind the song, Petty would go on to say that many parts of Echo were too close to the bone for him. When discussing the album in Conversations with Tom Petty, the singer would talk about how he deliberately avoided listening to the album for the longest time, only to find that there were more than a few songs that documented his state of mind in a way he never could have imagined.
Regardless of the power behind the songs, though, Petty had no desire to play any tunes from the album in the years that followed. When talking about his connection to the songs, Petty explained, “Sometimes it is easier to say things if you can slide into someone else’s character. I’m sure novelists do it all the time; they can invent characters and say all sorts of things. It wasn’t like that with ‘Room At The Top.’ Things were so bad in my life when I was making Echo that there’s songs I don’t even remember writing”.
The pain of the album’s production would only be punctuated in the following years, with bassist Howie Epstein passing away of a drug overdose in 2002. While Echo may be a good look into Petty’s state of mind at the time, it’s also a perfect example of when the art is pulled too close to the artist’s soul.
