Playback
1973 - 1993Page 2 Continued ...
Mudcrutch decided that it was time for them to start making records, whether any- body else thought so or not. They went to Crtiteria studios in Miami because that was where Eric Clapton had made Layla. They had borrowed enough money from a friend who owned a pepper farm to record two songs twice each. Bernie Leadon (who had now graduated from the Burritos to a new group called the Eagles) had given his younger brother a lecture about how to record, which was a lucky thing because no one in Mudcrutch had ever seen the inside of a studio before. For their money they got to record two tracks, "Up in Mississippi" and "Cause is Understood," they got to press up several boxes of 45s, they got their own label stuck on, and they got the producing and engineering services of Criteria's Ron Albert - who had cut Layla and lots of other big records. That was a lucky break for Mudcrutch, who didn't know that getting a big name producer was not par for the course when you bought studio time.
The prestige of having any sort of record out landed Mudcrutch at the pinnacle of the north Florida club circuit. In fact, they were playing all over the region. But when Petty got to what he had thought was the top, he discovered he was not sat- isfied. That would become a.lifelong character trait. Benmont Tench had finished high school in June of 1971 and started college in New Orleans that fall. When he was home in Gainesville, he sat in with Mudcrutch quite a bit. The first time it was because the band was bored playing five sets a night, six nights a week at a top- less bar called Dub's, their main Gainesville gig, and bringing in a piano player shook things up a bit. By the second time Ben sat in, Mudcrutch was down to three members: Petty on bass and vocals, Campbell on guitar, and Marsh on drums. Tom Leadon had been kicked out of the band for starting an argument that got them fired from Dub's. (Leadon followed his brother Bernie to California, where he found work in Linda Ronstadt's band. Tom noticed how well things seemed to go for Gainesville musicians who headed west.)
"Mudcrutch was a real interesting band," Benmont recalls. "There was a good deal of Burritos in it, a good deal of country It was a rock and roll band but there were also these beautiful pieces of instrumental music that would go maybe ten minutes that were orchestrated and largely worked out that were pretty wild. My friend Sandy would call me and say, 'Come down, Mudcrutch is playing this fraternity arty tonight.' and I'd go down and they would play something just out of this world that sounded very strange - not an instrumental along the lines of (the Allmans') 'Memory of Elizabeth Reed', but somewhere between the Beatles' 'And Your Bird Can Sing' and the Grateful Dead. There was one long piece that was absolutely gorgeous - and when I joined the band it was a bitch for me to learn how to play Tom Leadon's part on the piano and work out the harmonies with Mike. Mike was pretty impressive. Mike was pretty scary"
As impressive as Mike Campbell's guitar playing was, it was equally unusual that - contrary to the trends of the early 70s - he was not concerned with showing off his chops. Campbell aspired to the taste, melody and economy of the soloists of southern soul music. He liked the sound of Otis Recfding and Wilson Pickett records, where all the players worked together to support the singer and the song.
"It was very strange," Benmont says. "Mike would just stand there and play beautifully and he wouldn't show off and he wouldn't try to sound like Duane Allman. You could hear some Garcia in him, you could hear some country in him. He was really really good and he wasn't flash. Even on the long instrumental pieces, it was never about flash. It might be about excitement but it certainly wasn't about Look how fast I can play. It was just about fun."
Benmont would sit in with the band, then join the band, then leave the band to go back to school. He was in his finals in his second year before Petty hit him at a particularly vulnerable moment - cramming for an economics exam - with a speech about how he was wasting his musical talent in college. Ben saw the light, but before he could quit school Petty had to convince Ben's father, Circuit Court Judge Benmont Tench, that young Ben had a promising future in music. Petty successfully argued his case before the judge, who granted Ben permission to drop out.
By this time, Mudcrutch had also added a guitarist named Danny Roberts who had graduated from a local power trio called Power. Danny wrote songs and sang, as did Ben. Danny's songs were not terribly compatible with Petty's. Danny was coming out of the Johnny Winter tradition. Still, having swelled from a trio to a quintet, Mudcrutch was at full power in 1974 when Petty loaded up Danny's Volkswagen van and headed across the USA on a scouting expedition to the promised land. Clearly California was the place to be; Bernie Leadon's band the Eagles were having national hits and Bernie had gotten his Gainesville partner Don Felder into that group. The Maundys were now Eagles! Even Tom Leadon was making records out there! Petty didn't need to have a cinder block dropped on his head to see that his old running partners were getting rich in California doing the same thing that earned a band starvation wages in Florida. "We had really hit the pinnacle of success in Gainesville," Petty says now, "and we were kind of going around for the fifth time."
Mudcrutch made a demo tape of their best material on a borrowed tape recorder in Judge Tench's living room. Armed with proof of their ability Tom, Danny Roberts, and roadie Keith McAllister pooled a few hundred bucks and drove west to find their fortune. Mike was left in Gainesville to protect the homestead and look after the womenfolk.
Petty has often said that what stunned Mudcrutch most about Los Angeles was that it was just what they had imagined. He told Dave Marsh in 1981, "I remember the first time, going through Hollywood, driving down the street. We were goin', There's one! Goddamn! There's another. Another! Look, a record company! Look!' We thought, well, hell if we go in all these places, a few of 'em have gotta go for it. Cause there must be a hundred. And it was true, a few of 'em went for it. It was great." Within a week of arriving in California and knocking on record compa- ny doors, Mudcrutch had several offers of record deals. They decided the best bet was with London Records. They couldn't get over how easy it was!
Petty says, "I remember calling Mike the first day that we'd been out looking and saying, 'Hey I think this is going to work out. I got us a record deal!' Mike said, 'Jeez, that was quick.' He sounded a little skeptical."
Petty, Roberts, and McAllister broke the land speed record driving back to Gainesville (with a pitstop in New Orleans to pick up Benmont) and then set up a garage sale to unload all of the belongings they could not carry. It is an indication of how significant the moment was for Petty that it was in the days between coming back from Hollywood and returning there that he and his girlfriend Jane Benyo were married. Then the whole extended family formed a wagon train - Randall's car, Danny's van, Benmont's station wagon, and the Mudcrutch equipment truck - and lit out for the territories.
Except.... there was a phone call as they were heading out the door. It was from an English entrepreneur named Denny Cordell who had listened to the tape Tom dropped off at his label, Shelter Records, in Hollywood. Cordell thought Mudcrutch was good and wanted to talk to them about recording. Sorry Tom said, we're going with London. Cordell asked if they'd signed anything yet and was told no. Well, he said, listen. I have a studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma - half way between Florida and L.A. Why don't you stop there along the way, we'll meet and hang out, put you up, do a little recording, see if we like each other and take it from there. That made sense to Mudcrutch. Hollywood, California and London Records would still be waiting - and the offer of a free place to stay along the highway had a certain economic weight behind it. The caravan departed on April 1, 1974 and didn't slow down till they hit Tulsa.
It turned out to be a significant sleep-over. Mudcrutch and Cordell's Shelter crew hit it off like old pals. They recorded in Shelter's studio in a converted church and luckily for the broke band, were offered some cash to complete their trip. By the time the caravan got to L.A., Mudcrutch had thrown over London Records and were Shelter artists. That was a pretty hip thing to be in 1974. Shelter had been built by Cordell around Leon Russell, the piarlist/singer/guitarist/producer who had worked with Delaney and Bonnie and Eric Clapton, stolen the show on Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour, and who by the time of 1971's Concert For Bangladesh was keeping on-stage company with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, and Ringo Starr. Russell was the hottest thing going, and Shelter had used his cache to build an impressive roster - including J.J. Cale, Phoebe Snow, and Freddie King.
Petty loved going over to the Shelter office and listening to Denny Cordell's records and his big plans. "He was my guru," Petty says of Cordell, who died in 1995. "I would go to his house in Malibu every Sunday and every day when the end of the work day came I would sit in his office and out would come the records. The office was closed and we'd sit there until eight or nine o'clock and he'd play me everything in the world. Just everything. Lloyd Price, reggae stuff, Rolling Stones, everything that had ever turned him on, or me. We'd bring them in. I'm forever indebted to Denny Cordell. Because we couldn't afford that many records. We were so hungry to hear anything. In Gainesville you could only hear what you owned and we didn't have enough money to have stacks of albums. So running into somebody who had just unlimited access to records was incredible, it was just a bonanza of information."
For all that Petty was picking up from Cordell and Russell, Mudcrutch's progress in the studio was painfully slow. The band was having a tough time figuring out why the approach that served them so well in bars did not seem to communicate on tape as those great records in Cordell's office did. "We were all over the map," Petty recalls. "One weakness Mudcrutch had was that they didn't know what the hell they were. There were three people writing between Ben, Danny and me, and we were all so vastly different and we didn't work together at all. It was really weird."
A single called "Depot Street" was culled from the sessions and released, Ben remembers, on the same day as EIton John's "Philadelphia Freedom." One of those two songs zoomed to the top of the charts. It wasn't "Depot Street."
The efforts to finish the Mudcrutch album dragged along. "The sessions went on and on for a long time," Petty says. "We couldn't make the transition from live group to the studio. It was really hard. We were always shocked. We'd play and then go into the control room and it didn't sound anything like we thought it was going to sound. And Cordell had to slowly teach us that it didn't really have anything to do with the way you did your gigs. It's another art and you have to learn how to make the mike receive the sound you want it to."
The tracks Cordell picked to focus on were songs written and sung by Tom Petty As producer of the project Cordell wanted Mudcrutch to devote itself to Petty's work, not Ben's and not Danny's. Benmont Tench could live with that. Danny Roberts could not.
"Danny didn't dig that at all," Petty says. "Danny was very upset about that and immediately left the group. He was gonna do it on his own." Mudcrutch sent back to Gainesville for a bassist named Charlie Sousa and Petty moved over to rhythm guitar. Cordell decided the band needed to be submerged in the studio without distractions if they were ever going to get past their blocks. "Denny sent us back to Tuisa and left us there for six weeks without anybody just an engineer," Petty recalls. "He said, 'I'll see you in six weeks.' He just left us there and let us fuck up and get bored and get inspired again. And then when he came back he listened to everything we had done and said, 'Okay, these are the best things,' and we focused on those."
The Oklahoma sessions produced some pretty good work, including "I Can't Fight It" (later recorded by the Textones), but it still wasn't close to what Petty heard in his head. Back in Hollywood, the band plodded along for about another month, still advancing by painful inches. Then Charlie Sousa started lobbying to record some of his songs. That was it for Petty When the new bassist came in and announced that Mudcrutch should record a song he had written about a spaceship called "Brother in the Sky," Tom Petty quit the band. He invited Mike Campbell to join him in making a solo album and Mike said okay. So ended Mudcrutch.
"Mike and Tom," Benmont says, "you can't split that up."
At about the same time Petty left Mudcrutch, he began to be invited into ritzier circles. Leon Russell heard a song Petty wrote and said he wanted to record it. "I was living in Hollywood at the Winona Hotel, kind of a hooker's place," Petty told writer Mark Rowland. "The phone rings and it's Leon. He said, 'Do you feel like writing?' And I said, 'Yeah, Buddy, I'm ready right now!' He came over to the Winona in a Rolls Royce. I got in the car thinking, 'Whoa, shit!' as we were driving through town."
Russell was impressed enough with this bright-eyed kid to let him move into his mansion and write with him. Petty jumped at the chance, and spent a considerable amount of time hanging in the back ground, studying how Russell made records in his home studio and observing how he worked with famous friends such as George Harrison and Brian Wilson." Tom was getting out of a bar band mentality he was learning how the big boys did it.
Denny Cordell was probably relieved when Mudcrutch died. He had Petty signed to a songwriting contract and held him to it as the peg upon which to hang a solo recording deal. Now he was free to bring in session players and make a Tom Petty album in no time. It is one example of Cordell's insight that even while he was pushing everyone to focus on Petty, he encouraged Petty to co-write with Campbell, in whom Cordell sensed untapped creativity Mike and Tom began collaborating on songs, cementing the creative partnership that would sustain them for the next twenty years.
"Denny always had this incredible overview of what was right and what was wrong," Mike Campbell says. "We'd bring a song in and he'd go, That song is bull- shit! Look at this one, this one is what you should be doing. This song is real. I believe this, I don't believe that.' And at the time he was pointing that out to us we didn't know, we were trying to find it. And he found it for us. When I first got my four- track I was making demos, just fooling around, and he came over to me and said, This is really good. If you keep doing this you'll have a million dollars some day' I said, 'Wow, I wasn't taking it that seriously' He gave us a lot of confidence."
Recording began on Tom Petty's solo album, with Mike on guitar and an all-star team of session musicians (Jim Gordon, Emory Gordy, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Al Kooper). They did some fine work, including "Since You Said You Loved Me" and an early version of "Louisiana Rain." But Petty had always been in a band - he loved the whole idea of bands - and he was more than a little uncomfortable with the detached professionalism of the studio pros.
"I didn't dig that at all," Petty says of those sessions. "I thought the music sound- ed pretty good, but I said, 'Man if I do this, we'll be in Las Vegas in three years.' I was band-oriented. And the sessions guys were all great and really nice guys but it was too weird to me that they'd turn up, learn it, play it, and say goodbye. Though Al remains a friend to this day. He was very encouraging and supportive all the time. And Jim Gordon, what a great drummer, just amazing."
Benmont remembers going over to Tom and Jane's apartment and hearing some of the new work. "I heard 'Since You Said You Loved Me' and I was completely shattered," Ben says. "I thought, 'Great! He's got Al Kooper, who's terrific.' I knew then that I was permanently out of a gig."
Thus inconsolable, Benmont decided he had better get going on a demo of his own. He was barely making ends meet with a gig in a soul review, and was commiserating over Kraft Macaroni and Cheese with Stan Lynch, another Gainesville musician who had migrated west in the wake of Don Felder and the Leadons. Lynch was a couple of years younger than Ben and full of enthusiasm. He said he'd play on Ben's demos, and suggested they ask Ron Blair - yet another Gainesville refugee - to play bass. Aside from being a terrific musician, Blair had the distinction of being the brother-in-law of Gregg Allman. (Yes, Gainesville sometimes seems to have been the rock and roll version of Mayberry.) A friend of Ben's named Tim Kramer who worked in a studio promised them some free time after hours.
A plan began to appear. Lynch and Blair wanted to bring in guitarist Jeff Jourard, from Blair's Gainesville band RGF. (Try to keep this straight: Jourard's brother Marty had been guitarist in Lynch's Gainesville band Road Turkey. Road Turkey often played shows with Mudcrutch, and. Lynch had sometimes played drums with Mudcrutch when Randall was out of commission. There was even one outdoor Florida gig where Mudcrutch and Road Turkey combined into one stage-filling supergroup, an experience apparently more fun for the musicians than for the audience.) Benmont was fine with all that, but he also insisted on asking Mike Campbell to play guitar. Then, perhaps not wanting to leave anybody out, he invited Randall Marsh to play drums on a track or two and Tom Petty to stop by to either blow some harmonica or coach Ben on his vocals.
If that traffic jam had worked out, we might be holding the box set of Benmont Tench's Mad Dogs and Floridfans today. But something better happened. Petty came by the session and heard a new combination of his old friends. He heard what a band sounded like with Mike Campbell on guitar, Benmont Tench on piano, Stan Lynch on drums and Ron Blair on bass. (It also had, at that moment, Jeff Jourard on guitar but that was not destined to last.) Petty realized that he had found the band he was looking for, but he didn't say so right away.
Benmont remembers, "A few days later I got a phone call from Jane saying, 'Tom wants you guys to come down and play on something.' They already had Jim Gordon and Emory Gordy but he wanted to try recording with that band. I went and played on something. They took the keyboards off of whatever I played on but they kept wanting us to come back. I got the impression that Tom wanted to have a band but that he wasn't committing. As it turned out, on the first Heartbreakers album there's one Mudcrutch song - 'Hometown Blues' - and one song with Jim Gordon and Emory Gordy - 'Strangered in the Night.'" (continued ...)
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