The classic Tom Petty song that caused Mike Campbell to walk out of the studio
For the length of Tom Petty’s career, Mike Campbell has always been the co-captain every step of the way. From his early days in Mudcrutch to even his solo albums, Campbell’s knowledge of a good hook and his delicate touch on slide guitar made him one of Petty’s go-to musicians to consistently fall back on. When the band got their sound together on their third outing, though, Campbell went MIA in the middle of the sessions.
Going into Damn the Torpedoes, the entire band had to put themselves through their paces to get every single song right, with Jimmy Iovine using the band as his own workhorse. While the band usually could whip anything into shape, Iovine encountered a problem working with the drums on the song ‘Refugee’.
Taken from a song idea that Campbell had originally come up with and sent to Petty, Iovine was floored the first time he heard Petty play the song on acoustic guitar. Considering his love for the song, Iovine was determined to get perfection but always had a problem with drummer Stan Lynch.
When talking about the drum sound later, Iovine talked about there always being an inconsistency, recalling in Runnin’ Down a Dream, “I think that the way Tom sang and Stanley played was always off. The entire band sounded great, but with Tom and Stanley, I always thought there was a rub there.”
Lynch wasn’t too happy to be put in his place, either, recalling, “[They] took me drum shopping. [Engineer] Shelly [Yakus] said, ‘Your drum sound is punk-ass because your drums are punk-ass’. And Jimmy was more like, ‘get the drum tracks and get out of my way.'”
Looking to capture the feel of the song in the room, the band were determined to get the song right from top to bottom was impossible. When talking about the recording, Benmont Tench recalled how frustrating it was to deal with one take instead of building the song from the ground up, saying, “I don’t think anyone ever said during the recording ‘Why don’t we just edit two takes together, which every band does.”
The pressure got the better of Campbell a few days into the project, remembering, “We’d been in there for three days, just hitting the drum, trying to get the right sounds, and then when you get the right sounds, you don’t have the spirit to play. I just left the studio one day. I left town, saying, ‘I’m outta here, I can’t take the pressure’. I just cooled out and went to Santa Barbara for three days.”
Regardless of the pressure on everybody, the song became one of the driving forces behind the album, catapulting the band into superstardom for the first time. Even with a lawsuit breathing down their necks, Petty was determined to make sure that every aspect of the song could stand independently, explaining, “We were hypnotised by it. It was all about getting that one perfect take that did the song justice.” It took a world of trouble, but the Heartbreakers could finally rest easy knowing they had made something that would outlive them all.
