“I don’t think it would have been good”: Tom Petty on the secret weapon behind the Heartbreakers
It takes more than some kid with a guitar to create one of the greatest acts in rock and roll. It takes a small army for anyone to launch a single, so imagine what it would take to keep it going for a long-term career, let alone one that spans decades at a time. Although Tom Petty could normally get people onboard through just the strength of his songs, he felt that without the help of this producer, the Heartbreakers may not have left the ground.
But no one gets to that kind of success without knowing what failure tastes like. After Petty had started cutting his teeth with his band Mudcrutch, their first stab at becoming the next Southern rock band fizzled out before they even got a proper album out. The label was interested in Petty and not the band, but that didn’t mean that the heartland rocker couldn’t pick who he brought into the fold.
Petty did manage to rescue Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell from the ashes of Mudcrutch, but before they got to work on any of their deals, Cordell was the one to first take a shot at them. He had been onboard since the Mudcrutch, and considering his work on Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, he was already a living legend amongst rock stars by that point.
Although Petty was responsible for putting all of the songs together, Cordell was a songwriting coach for a while. For all of the self-confidence that an artist needs in the early days, Cordell became the only person who could tell Petty that something wasn’t good enough or that he needed something stronger if he wanted to have a hit single.
According to Petty, Cordell was responsible for whipping them into shape, saying, “He was the secret. He signed us, and he let us play in the studio for a year before we put our record out. If we had just shown up in town and were told to cut a record, I don’t think it would have been that good. We were allowed to grow.”
That’s not to say that Cordell was exactly subtle about it, either. During one heated exchange during the recording of one of their first records, bassist Ron Blair remembered Cordell cornering Petty when he said that he didn’t have any songs left, saying in Runnin’ Down a Dream, “[He] kinda in a nice way sort of read him the riot act. Like, ‘Look, son, you need to have songs.’ At that point, I think Tom’s songwriting doubled.”
Like every person in the industry, though, Cordell did have a greedy streak. His relationship with Petty was on the rocks by the time he started suing his record company, and since Cordell knew about the internal problems with Petty’s copyright, the fact that he said absolutely nothing to him regarding his issues, that’s not exactly something an artist just shrugs off.
Still, it’s hard to deny what Cordell brought to the table when looking at the track record he had. They definitely needed to part by the time they got to work on Damn the Torpedoes, but while Jimmy Iovine helped push heartland rock even further, it wouldn’t have happened if Petty hadn’t learned the lessons he got from recording ‘American Girl’.
