This page is inspired by the box set, "Playback," which covers the first 12 of 17 albums filled with real, down-to-earth rock and roll! Alone, as well as with the Heartbreakers, this unique voice carries some of the most memorable songs written over more than 25 years. I am referring to Tom Petty. Here is the Petty discography, in order. Click each cover to pop up a bigger version of each album.
Playback
1973 - 1993NOTE: The following is part of the booklet that accompanies the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers "Playback" box set.
When the first album by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers appeared in 1976, it seemed to have come out of nowhere. Literally nowhere. Listening to that record - which sounded shockingly alive and immediate in a time full of disco and Kiss and mellow Californians remaking oldies - it was very hard to figure out where this band came from. The airy vocal harmonies and bright guitars suggested the west coast, but the gutsiness edging into nastiness seemed like what was happening in New York. The songs had an economy that was right out of England, but the voice in the lyrics was unmistakably American. When articles about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers started appearing in the rock press, it made perfect sense that the band was from Florida - the closest thing America's east coast has to a California environment, though considerably grittier than 1970's L.A.
If you want to understand the contradictions that make up Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the first thing you must get straight is that their hometown of Gainesville is in northern Florida, up near Georgia, and is very much part of Dixie. It is nothing like southern Florida, down near Miami, which is culturally Caribbean. Surrounded by farm country and southern accents, Tom Petty might as well have grown up in Alabama.
When Petty was becoming a musician, in the late 1960's and early 1970's, redneck ways were battling hippie culture for the soul of southern youth. For all the obvious contempt between Ku Kluxers and draft dodgers, there was in the middle a vast population who might not agree on the relative merits of Merle Haggard and the Rolling Stones, but who could share a common sympathy for gettin' wrecked, skippin' school, and chasin' girls. Eventually that common ground spawned Southern Rock up in Georgia and Country Rock out in Hollywood. Teenage Tom Petty got in fights for having long hair, played Beatles songs in Gainesville cover bands and studied the whole social/musical evolution going on around him with considerably more interest than he spent op his high school work.
Stan Lynch, the Heartbreakers drummer from 1976 until 1994, once said that Petty was in many respects a redneck "in a real good way." Lynch meant that Petty is tenacious, straight-ahead, impatient with fools, and able to fight to the death for a cause he believes in. Petty also has in him a whole lot of hippie, not just in his green politics or relaxed attitude toward convention, but in his taste for musical experimentation. Most people think of Petty as a mainstream American rock and roller in the Dylan tradition. And he sure is that. But he has also made forays into psychedelia (for example, "Don't Come Around Here No More"), hard rock ("Let Me Up, I've Had Enough"), big ballads with horns ("Best of Everything"), tons of short, melodic British Invasion-style numbers ("Breakdown" could be the Animals, "Listen to Her Heart" the Searchers), side trips into country ("Trailer") and R&B ("Cry to Me") and some tracks that are just so nutty that they sound like he made them up in his sleep ("Wasted Life").
Once, talking about being lumped in with Springsteen, Mellencamp, and Seger in rock critic shorthand, Petty said, "I think that I'm a little more - dare I say - eccentric than those guys. I know all those people quite well and I think that they're terrific.... I was into that straight rock thing for a long time. However I don't think that's the whole ball of wax. I think there's more to it than that."
The Heartbreakers' meat-and-potatoes approach and Petty's own distinctive lazy phrasing spreads an illusion of consistency over all his stylistic variations, but that's part of his art, too. The Heartbreakers mix all sorts of ideas into their music and make it come out sounding not just logical, but perfectly accessible. Petty maintains that he just does not understand why anyone who would play rock and roll would not want to have big top 40 hits. Big top 40 hits, after all, is what rock and roll has always been about.
It is sure what rock was about when Petty was a teenager, bringing home so many rotten report cards that his angry father finally smashed all his records to get him to pay attention in class. It was too late. When Petty was 10, in the summer of 1961, his uncle had brought him to get a look at Elvis Presley, who had come to Florida to shoot the movie "Follow That Dream." The King came over to say hi to the locals who were hanging around the set, met young Tom, and infected him with the rock and roll bug. Tom told a friend about meeting this cool famous guy and the friend gave Tom a box of Elvis 45s that his older sister had left behind when she got married. Petty played those Presley records over and over. When Tom was 13, the Beatles arrived in America and it occurred to him that he could get together a band and do this himself. By the time his poor father realized that rock and roll had captured his son's faith, there was no knocking it out of him. "I remember seeing 'A Hard Day's Night' and thinking, That's obviously the way to go'," Petty said. "You know, you've got farming over here and on this side - the Beatles."
It might not have been obvious at the time, but Gainesville was a good place for a kid infected with rock and roll to grow up. Because the Univeristy of Florida has a large campus in Gainesville, there were lots of pubs and dances and fraternities that brought in live music. The first band young Tom Petty saw in person was the Continentals, a surf group led by local guitar player Don Felder who impressed Tom by having both a blond pompadour and a Fender Stratocaster. Tom even got a job in Lipham Music, the instrument store where Felder worked, and during down time the older boy taught him to play piano. After a while, Felder hooked up with another hot Gainesville guitarist, Bernie Leadon, to form the Maundy Quintet. What's a "Maundy"? Petty never did find out. Some parts of rock and roll were meant to stay mysterious.
Petty snuck into college frat parties to see big stars such as Del Shannon and the Shadows of Knight. He went to rec center dances to study the local groups, the best of whom was the Escorts, a Beatles cover band led by Duane and Gregg Allman. Even when Petty and his first group started playing out, they never considered themselves equal to the Escorts and the Continentals. Tom's schoolboy band was called the Sundowners, later changed to the (more sophisticated sounding) Epics. Tom's partner in that group was Tom Leadon, a school pal and younger brother of Bernie Leadon, who had outgrown the Maundy Quintet and headed west to try to make it in California. Such ambition was in those days almost beyond the imaginations of the two Toms - they just wanted to be able to play in a group and hang around the music store with the big shots. After a few years, the Epics were one of the top bands in town and Petty was starting to look like a local big shot himself. The slightly younger Benmont Tench recalls going into Lipham Music and being impressed by Petty, the blond guitar player with the Brian Jones haircut.
Petty graduated from high school in 1968 and tried college for a year. It has been written that he told his father that if he'd just leave him alone and let him play music instead of going to school, he'd be a millionare by the time he was 35. "I may have said that, yeah," Petty smiles. "I certainly thought that way that I could pull that off. I had no doubt about it, I was sure I could do it. And I didn't really care, honestly If I could just play and be left alone and make a living at it, I would have been really happy."
By 1970, the Epics had evolved into Mudcrutch, a name chosen (Tom Leadon told Goldmine magazine) "because it just sounded sort of dirty and decrepit." Petty (now playing bass) and Leadon (guitar) were looking for a new drummer and drove to a shack outside of town to audition a fellow named Randall Marsh. They jammed for a while and decided that Marsh was real good. They mentioned that the jam would be more fun if they had a second guitarist. Marsh said his roommate played some guitar, and went off to wake him up. He came back with a thin, quiet kid named Mike Campbell. Petty asked Mike if he could play 'Johnny B. Goode." Campbell mumbled, "I think I can handle it," and then proceeded to burn the two Toms' ears off with his picking. Petty and Leadon looked at each other, looked at Campbell and said, "You're in our band!"
Campbell wasn't so sure; a Jacksonville native, he was in Gainesville to go to college. But he had no choice, he was dratted. For a while, Mudcrutch had a lead singer named Jim Lenahan, but he left to go to school in another town. (He wasn't gone forever, though - Lenahan would come back to be lighting designer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.) Petty and Leadon shared the singing.
Mudcrutch built a big local name in the early 70s, playing covers at Gainesville bars and their originals at campus pubs and at concerts in the parks and college green and even at the drive-in theatre. Sometimes they split the bill with another up and coming local band, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Sometimes those two bands together couldn't fill the tap room.
They called Mike and Randall's shack in the woods the Mudcrutch Farm, and took advantage of the fields around it to stage the first Mudcrutch Farm Festival in 1971. They got other bands to come down and play, put up posters around town, and pretty soon so many thousands of hippies showed up that the highway closed down. Mudcrutch caught all kinds of hell for it, but after that they were real famous in Gainesville. So they did it again in 1972 and that got them evicted from the farm. Well, since they were evicted anyway, they did it a third time and by then the bands and the fans were coming in from Alabama, Georgia, and all over Florida.
Mudcrutch were flying high. They went up to Capricorn Records in Macon, where the Allman Brothers Band were kings of the world, and auditioned. They were told they sounded too English and their songs were too short. Which was actually a backhanded compliment. Unlike every other southern band at the time, Mudcrutch saw no sense in getting two drummers, learning some guitar harmonies, and doing a half-assed version of the Allmans. "That was really prevalent at the time," Petty says. "Everybody was turning into slide guitar jam bands and though we really loved the Allmans, we thought it was really boring that everybody else was trying to do the same thing not nearly as well."
Mudcrutch had their own music and it combined the influence of the British invasion bands and the 50s rockers then out of fashion with the California country rock of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and their biggest influence - the Flying Burrito Brothers. Tom Leadon's older brother Bernie had found the big time in California, playing with ex-Byrds Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman in the Burritos. To say that Petty was impressed would be an understatement. It was as if he'd been wandering in the desert for years and someone had just handed him a map.
Benmont Tench recalls being home in Florida from prep school and his friend Sandy inviting him down to hear Mudcrutch, for whom he was readying. Benmont says, "The first night I saw them at this little club in Lake City they played the shit out of 'Dizzy Miss Lizzy' That night I thought they were a really good band, but it was Randall the drummer that completely knocked me out." Benmont was impressed that this local group did Gram Parsons songs. As big as the Burritos were to the two Toms, they were pretty obscure in Florida. Benmont then heard a song called "Unheard of Kind of Hero" and when he asked where it came from was heard to exclaim, "Petty wrote that?" (continued ...)
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