The Tom Petty song Jimmy Iovine said “turned out incredible”
Tom Petty was never someone who put a lot of effort into being the next Freddie Mercury. He knew his strength was about making the kind of record that would appeal to a lot of people, and that normally meant telling a story with his voice rather than trying to push into areas where he couldn’t reach. He was still a world-class vocalist, though, and producer Jimmy Iovine was stunned when he heard him play ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’.
Granted, Petty was always going to have a bit of a fire in his belly when making Damn the Torpedoes. He had already faced some of the biggest headaches trying to get his second band off the ground when his initial vision for Mudcrutch fell through, but seeing his label try to steal the copyright of his songs away from him wasn’t helping matters.
That meant he would have to record by night and spend his days in a courtroom trying to fight for the rights to his songs. If anything, the fact that upcoming songs like ‘Refugee’ and ‘Here Comes My Girl’ were shaping up to be some of the biggest of his career, Petty was right to want to save them from falling into the wrong hands.
As much as the singles dominated radio, one of the biggest hits from the record dated back to before the Heartbreakers started. Back when Mudcrutch was finding its feet, Petty found the song when driving in his car and was so determined to get it down on tape that he rented a studio for an hour and hashed it out on the piano.
Compared to the rest of the songs on Damn the Torpedoes, there’s a lot more soul in his delivery. Whereas the rest of the album is dominated by straight-ahead rock and roll and maybe a dash of country here and there on tracks like ‘Louisiana Rain’, Iovine liked it immediately because it reminded him of various Southern soul projects.
When talking about Petty’s singing ability, Iovine thought the song was a perfect showcase for Petty’s voice, telling Classic Albums, “It turned out incredible. The record kinda has a Booker T feel to it a little bit. Benmont [Tench] is a real star on that record. The drums sound fantastic, and Tom sang the shit out of it. He did a real sort-of Wilson Pickett kind of vocal on it. It’s just fantastic”.
Those soul elements weren’t put in there by mistake, either. If you look at the covers the Heartbreakers would sprinkle into their live set, there was a lot more reverence for everyone from Booker T and the MGs to Bo Diddley, always focusing on the rhythmic aspect of everything before trying to play the best rock guitar lick.
While ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’ is still far from the most adventurous song that Petty ever sang, it might be one of the best tracks that will help you understand what the Heartbreakers were about. ‘Free Fallin’ may be the popular choice and might even technically be the better song, but the Heartbreakers were still always a rock band before anything else, and this track is what they were all about in a nutshell.
