Tom Petty‘s approach to songwriting was easy: Stay humble and write what you like.
“I do not think that I can sit down and pick, ‘OK, one other classic,’ you already know, or ‘All the pieces I write is an epic,'” he said in a January 1983 interview, lower than three months after the discharge of his fifth album with the Heartbreakers, Long After Dark. “I hate that attitude.”
The best way Petty saw it, there was a middle ground between tradition and transformation – a technique to write honest songs that may stand the test of time regardless of once they were written. “I wanna be free enough to jot down ‘Tutti Frutti,’ to jot down that because I like that,” he said. “I like those old low-cost rock songs. I actually do, as much as I like ‘Born to Run,’ but I just had this theory that if it’s an excellent song, whatever that’s, it is going to endure. I believe any songwriter that stands up and plays the guitar and really thinks that he’s changing the world and singing to tens of millions needs a tomato within the face.”
This was the attitude Petty carried into the ’80s, which began turbulently after Petty went head-to-head with MCA Records. The label wanted to lift the worth of his 1981 album, Hard Guarantees, from $8.98 to $9.98; Petty refused to release the record unless the worth remained the identical. MCA eventually relented. “If we don’t take a stand, one in all nowadays, records are going to be $20,” Petty said on the time.
The standoff became a first-rate example of a big-name artist pushing back against the profit-driven nature of the music industry. It also led some observers to consider that Petty was a part of the old guard and oblivious to the swiftly changing music industry’s march to the longer term. But that is not completely accurate. Petty’s roots were grounded in ’60s rock ‘n’ roll, but that did not mean he wasn’t inquisitive about recent ways of recording and releasing music.
“You Got Lucky,” the primary single from Long After Dark, was written to a drum loop that guitarist Mike Campbell had put together. The loop was recreated within the studio as a template for the band to follow, a practice that was becoming more mainstream on the time but was still something of a foreign concept to rock musicians accustomed to traditional recording methods.
“The drummer [Stan Lynch] would actually exit and play, then we might cut the tape and tape the loop together,” Campbell recalled in a 2003 interview with Songfacts. “We ran it across the room over some mic stands and thru the tape heads, after which printed that for 3 or 4 minutes after which recorded the song over that drum loop.” The key ingredient, as Petty later recalled, was Lynch tracking his drum part again with the loop playing, making for an additional sturdy groove.
Watch Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Perform ‘You Got Lucky’
After which there was the predominant riff, performed on a DX7 synthesizer by keyboardist Benmont Tench, who wasn’t exactly excited to achieve this. “He begrudgingly played it,” Petty recalled within the 2005 book Conversations With Tom Petty. Tench had grown up taking classical piano lessons, and even when his attention shifted toward rock ‘n’ roll and he began playing electric keyboards, he never understood the appeal of synths. “I hear people do great things with them, and I cannot make them do this,” he said in 2017. “Mike will sit down at a synthesizer and write ‘You Got Lucky,’ and I’ll sit down at a synthesizer and it’s … ‘You Got Ugly.’ I haven’t got loads of fun or patience going, ‘Here’s how I get a sound.'”
Petty desired to be certain that using the synthesizer was strategic. He’d heard albums by other artists during which synths were used barely enough to make an impact but not enough to change into a distraction. “I didn’t need to use synthesizers simply because they are a neat toy. You possibly can create a large spectrum of textures within the music, but I don’t love it when synthesizers sort of wash out the entire record,” he told Hit Parader in 1983. “I’m fascinated by the technology, all the brand new instruments which are coming out, and despite the fact that a few of my purist friends think they needs to be avoided in any respect costs, I believe they’re the instruments of the times. One in all my favorite albums of the yr was Roxy Music‘s Avalon. There have been things on there that just blew my mind.”
The video for “You Got Lucky” further emphasized Petty’s willingness to move forward while staying true to his vision. The Heartbreakers had spent loads of time on music video sets before, mostly lip-syncing for promotional clips. It was merely one other technique to get their music on the market. “We made videos before we knew they were videos. … And we actually thought the term ‘video’ was weird, because they were on film,” Petty later said. “They weren’t serious, big, huge projects.”
Watch Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ ‘You Got Lucky’ Video
“You Got Lucky”‘s video wasn’t necessarily an enormous, huge project either. Within the clip, the band members arrive within the desert via a spacecraft and come upon a cassette player containing the song. Petty drew inspiration from old westerns.
“I’ve all the time admired those Clint Eastwood movies, with the music by Ennio Morricone,” Petty told the Gainesville Sun in 1983. “That is what the song jogged my memory of, so we made the movie ourselves.” The song’s guitar solo borrowed from those film scores, too, Campbell remembered. “Form of a surf guitar with a tremolo arm, like a Clint Eastwood movie,” he noted. “A Good, the Bad and the Ugly sort of thing.” A near-silent intro that lasts greater than a minute was included within the clip and was a novel idea on the time. “It really modified every thing,” Petty said. “Nobody had ever – even Michael Jackson – done a prelude before the video. A little bit of business before the song began.”
The video arrived just in time for the rise of MTV, which debuted a bit greater than a yr earlier in August 1981. “That is when everybody knew who you were. Like, you already know, even grandmas knew who you were. Since you’re on TV all day long, you already know?” Petty later said. “MTV was this incredible promotional device. … There was this whole recent thing happening, and we were right within the front of it.”
The only, released in October 1982, only a couple of weeks before Long After Dark got here out, made it to No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. However the song didn’t make it to his set lists too often, admitting in 2005 that “You Got Lucky” was never one in all his favorites. But he also confessed that the song had grown on him over time. “It isn’t about rather a lot,” he said. “It’s just sort of a love song. Nevertheless it doesn’t must be about rather a lot to be good. ‘Tutti Frutti’ will not be about rather a lot, but I prefer it.
“You already know what that song is? It’s an ideal little single. … Once I hear it on the radio, I believe, ‘Wow, we actually just filled every little space in the correct way.'”
The Best Song From Every Tom Petty Album
There’s a typical thread running through Tom Petty’s catalog, and it is the Heartbreakers.
