Was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers a solo project or a band?
There’s having your cake and eating it, and then there’s whatever Tom Petty was trying to do by “going solo”.
In April 1989, Tom Petty released his first solo album, Full Moon Fever. In any other situation, this would be a perfectly reasonable move for a rock star of Petty’s level. He’d had several hits in his day job, was a globally beloved icon, and he’d also just shifted a metric shit-ton of records in the Travelling Wilburys with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. Stands to reason he’d release a few records under his own name, too, so what’s the catch?
Well, as anyone with even a modicum of understanding about the career of Petty will tell you, he’d been releasing records under the name “Tom Petty” for over a decade before that. That “day job” I was talking about earlier? It’s a day job called “Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers”. As far as anyone was concerned, the man had made hits like ‘American Girl’, ‘Breakdown’ and ‘Refugee’ in a solo project already, so what separated Full Moon Fever from that?
After all, Bruce Springsteen might make records with the E Street Band, but they are Bruce Springsteen records. Purple Rain is credited on its very cover as being made by “Prince and The Revolution” but absolutely no one in their right minds would tell you that the secret heart of that album was actually keyboardist Doctor Fink. So what set the Heartbreakers apart? Were they actually a more democratic unit than one would expect?
Well, kind of. The core trio of the Heartbreakers, Tom Petty, Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench all cut their teeth in hard rock also-rans Mudcrutch, but even then, Petty was the songwriting hub of the band. While every member got an input on the songs, Petty was the source of them, so much so that when Mudcrutch split, he remained signed to their record label, ironically enough, as a solo act. Yet when he formed the Heartbreakers with his two lieutenants, his name may have been on the marquee, but they more or less stayed with the same dynamic.
So, was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers a solo project?
One can see this if you take a closer look at the writing credits of hits by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Most of the time, Petty has the sole songwriting credit. However, on some of their biggest hits like ‘Here Comes My Girl’, the aforementioned ‘Refugee’ and their Stevie Nicks collaboration ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, Mike Campbell was listed as a co-writer. Clearly, Campbell was more than just a guitarist, as we can see by the fact that, left to his own devices, he wrote most of Don Henley’s breakout solo hit ‘The Boys of Summer‘.
However, the best sign that there was a big difference between Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the titular Tom Petty comes from the fact that the Heartbreakers themselves weren’t massively happy with Petty for going off and doing a solo record. Not so unhappy that they didn’t contribute to the record, but there was some bad blood behind the scenes.
Not that you’d know it from asking Petty about it. In an interview with The Gainesville Sun, Petty talked about his solo record coming together as if it were an accident, that it wasn’t a Heartbreakers album because they weren’t available when he made it, so he just pressed on by himself.
According to him, the idea of a solo record hadn’t really occurred to him before. He said, “I’d never really taken [a solo record] seriously. I probably won’t do one again. It was more or less just something that was happening before there was time to really think about it. Once it had happened, I was having too much fun. I thought, well, 13 years, I think I can make a record on my own if I want”. The ultimate proof that this was a different beast from his work in the Heartbreakers came after the record was released.
In a spectacular failure of reading the room, Petty presented his solo songs to the Heartbreakers with the intention of playing them during their shows. The band hated this so much that drummer Stan Lynch ended up leaving the band because of it. A sign that yes, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were a real band, no matter whose name was on the marquee.
