TOM PETTY & The HEARTBREAKERS: LESS IS MORE, MORE OR LESS

“She hit me, Daddy!”

“I did not.”

The two Petty girls are having a little disagreement somewhere on the grounds of the family estate. It’s a sprawling but unpretentious spread nestled in the hills of Encino, California—a section known to Petty and his bandmember/neighbors as “Gainesville West,” in reference to their common point of origin in northern Florida. The girls appear over the rise, and the older one, embarrassed when she sees that her father has company, says, “Sorry, Dad.”

The sibling squabble fails to put a damper on Petty’s sunny disposition on this balmy spring afternoon. He’s tanned and relaxed, looking more like the blond rock star of the late ’70s than the sallow studio rat he became from ’83 to ’85 as he worked on the grueling Southern Accents project. That experience resulted in a broken hand and a nearly broken-up band for Petty. While he toiled endlessly in his home studio, the four Heartbreakers—guitarist Mike Campbell, keys player Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Howie Epstein—scattered far and wide in search of the musical action they weren’t getting at home.

But when they got back together in mid’85 to tour behind Southern Accents, the five players found that the old chemistry was still very much in evidence. The only problem was, the band was jammed into the middle of an overblown stage setup that included a horn section and a female vocal trio. The presence of these extraneous elements obscured the fundamental strengths of the band on the tour (and Pack Up The Plantation—Live, the double album that documented it). And that was unfortunate, because with the apparent abdication of the Rolling Stones, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers were among the handful of contenders for the title of World’s Best Rock ’n’ Roll Band. All they had to do was prove it.

Their status got a boost when Dylan chose them to work as his backing band, first at Farm Aid in ’85, then on a concert tour last year. Ironically, some of the most impressive segments of those shows occured when Dylan and his female vocal trio (not that again!) left the stage, leaving Petty & The Heartbreakers to show what they could do as a no-bullshit fivepiece unit. Those fire-breathing mini-sets indicated that the pairing with Dylan was pushing them to another level altogether.

“I learned a lot of new stuff from working with Bob,” Petty says, as we walk through the front door of his rambling one-story house. ‘‘You pick up new work habits and things you can do. As a unit, we had a sense of payin’ attention and gettin’ a song down real fast. You may only have one or two times to get it down. That helped a lot, ’cause you gotta be pretty sharp—you just don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

With that, Petty demonstrates some of the obscure hand signals that Dylan used with the band during the tour. With Dylan, a raised finger, a nod or a wink could convey worlds of musical meaning.

‘‘But more than the tour, I think it was the rehearsals for the tour that inspired us,” Petty adds. ‘‘They were long rehearsals—five hours sometimes, where we played a hundred songs in a night. We played so many songs every night—it was really inspiring. ’Cause Bob was excited—everybody was excited. We were just havin’ a great time. And then, when we started realizin’ how to drive that thing, we really started gettin’ excited.

‘‘That was good for us, ’cause it gave us an amazing communication in the studio. We only had to set up and look at each other. I think most of the lyrics were whatever made Lynch laugh. There’d be a different set of lyrics for every take, mostly ’cause I couldn’t remember from take to take. And slowly, the best stuff would filter out.”

Petty’s talking about his new studio album, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), a stripped-down affair that TP & The HBs performed and produced all by themselves; i.e., with no outside help (or interference). There’s no gospel chorus, no Jimmy lovine, no Dave Stewart. If nothing else, this album will serve as a clean-cut demonstration of what Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers are capable of at this point in their 11-year existence.

We stroll into the rec room for a listen to a test pressing of the just-mastered album. “I love playin’ it for people,” says Petty, lighting a Marlboro and dropping the tone arm on “Jammin’ Me,” which turns out to be a crushing rocker that recalls “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Brown Sugar.” Frankly, it’s pretty exciting to hear a stunner like this one while the guy who made it sits by waiting for your reaction.

It turns out that Petty and Dylan collaborated on the song. “We wrote it with just an acoustic,” TP explains. “Bob and I just sat there—somebody’d start a line and somebody’d finish a line. It’s really hard to figure out exactly who wrote what, although I remember some lines Bob absolutely wrote.”

The absolutely Dylan-authored lines include the following provocative verse, which seems to describe a media overdose:

Take back Vanessa Redgrave Take back Joe Piscopo Take back Eddie Murphy Give ’em all some place to go

“I changed it a great deal from what we wrote orginally,” Petty continues. “I didn’t change the lyrics, but I changed the music a lot. And then Campbell came up with this idea and completely changed the whole thing, but it worked like crazy.”

“Jammin’ Me” was cranked out during the same writing session that produced “Got My Mind Made Up,” one of two palatable tunes on Dylan’s disappointing ’86 album, Knocked Out Loaded. The Heartbreakers backed him on that one. “He wound up usin’ the rough mix,” he says with a short laugh. A deliberate recordist, Petty’s amused by Dylan’s impetuosity. “We still had ‘Jammin’ Me’ left over, and I thought it was a pretty good song. I said, ‘Maybe we oughta cut it.’ Bob said OK, so we did it. I played it for him and he went, ‘Wow!’ ”

For the most part, Let Me Up turns out to be the kind of disc rock fans have been waiting for the Stones to make since Tattoo You, and it’s the most spontaneoussounding music Petty & The Heartbreakers have come up with since their self-titled debut album (“American Girl,” “Breakdown,” “Fooled Again”) way back, in ’76. The new album came by accident, according to Petty.

“I had booked some time at Sound City for something Dylan wanted to do—he was makin’ a record. Then it turned out he wasn’t gonna be ready at that time. And so we had about three songs—I had one or two and I think Campbell had one. And we said, ‘Well, let’s just go in and try these songs out.’ We wound up stayin’ there a month a least, right up until we left again (to tour with Dylan). And when I left again, not only had we gone on tour, we had a double album. Nobody could believe us. It could’ve been a lot like Exile On Main Street (as early reports had indicated), but it was gonna be too vast a job to try to get the two albums done.

I knew I could get one done—it started dawning on me right after I got back. But (not getting all of the good songs on the album) really hurts. Then again, I think I could put this stuff out later. I still have the unused stuff from Southern Accents, too.”

After the grueling deliberation that characterized the Southern Accents project, Petty was shocked to realize that he was capable of writing and cutting so quickly. In a month-long burst of inspiration, the band cut over 30 tunes, “and out of that, maybe 15 or 20 serious songs. There was a lot of stuff.” Engineer Don Smith and his assistant were often the only non-band members in the studio, and Smith knew enough to keep the tape rolling non-stop. “The tape was rolling like 15 minutes before we’d get there,” Petty cracks. “Because this ain’t the kind of people that can do it again—it’s gonna happen once. Some of these songs might’ve been 15 minutes long originally, and I wound up editing them down to the best three minutes, where it was groovy. That’s why almost everything on the album fades.

“This record was like Polaroids at one time,” says Petty, still betraying some ambivalence about the difficult decision to make Let Me Up a single LP. “Benmont felt strongly that the record should’ve been put out in the rough mix stage, which he and Mike didn’t see. I said to him, ‘Look, we did this album in six weeks; let’s take a few more and make it sound really good.’ I still can’t it across to him that it does sound better now—it’s better that we mixed it and finished it. I understood what he meant, and I could feel it in my heart when he he was going, ‘Aw, make it a double Don’t do anything to it! Just put it out iike it is right now!’ I put it on and listened and I just couldn’t get through the whole thing. It was too long; there was simply too much stuff. And I couldn’t find the handle—I’d still be tryin’ to sequence it.

“So what got finished the fastest got on the album* pretty much. There was some stuff that we could see was gonna be good, but we were gonna have to study it and figure out how to do it, and nobody felt like doin’ that very much. Most nights it was, ‘Let’s get some more songs going.’ Nobody wanted to go back—although we did on a couple of things.”

The tracks that received the most elaborate treatment during the overdub stage were the Petty-Campbell collaborations “Runaway Trains” and “All Mixed Up.” The impetus came primarily from Campbell, a perfectionist who spends much of his non-band time working in his home studio. “Runaway Trains” bears certain sonic similarities to Don Henley’s recording of “The Boys of Summer,” which Campbell co-wrote—originated, actually. Petty decribes the structure of “All Mixed Up” as a modernized take on “One of those old soul songs—it’s just a finger-poppin’ thing. We had to shuffle a few things out to get those two on, ’cause they were done in the later stages of the game.

“On ‘All Mixed Up,’ we were all knocked out by Benmont’s magic fingers,” TP goes on. “Benmont had this thing that sampled horns on his keyboard. It’s like so cool! Benmont played like five things at once. He’d have everything on—his organ, his piano, just a circle of stuff. All through the tracks he was just changin’ around. He’s got this hotel key that he can stick in the organ and hold a note down, turn around and play somethin’ else. The engineer’d be goin’, ‘Where’s all this shit cornin’ from?!’ ”

The music of Let Me Up is grainy, muscular and timeless, in the tradition of The Band, the Stone’s Sticky Fingers and the Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday. On the level of sheer musicianship, it’s in another league entirely from the work of most contempo roots-rock bands (more on that subject in a minute). Petty’s singing, frequently bolstered by the deft highharmony work of bass player Howie Epstein, contains echoes of such greats as Jagger, Dylan and Graham Parsons. In these days of robot snares, this music is a breath of fresh air, to say the least.

“It’s a good car album,” Petty boasts. “In fact, we made a lot of heavy decisions in cars about this album. I’m excited ’cause I just wanna hear rock ’n’ roll on the radio again. A rock ’n’ roll record that ain’t from the ’60s that doesn’t insult your integrity.. .as our credo goes.”

He points at the vintage jukebox that sits in the corner of his rec room. “I’m always changin’ the records on there,” he says. “I tend to listen to a lot of old records. It’s not very fashionable to listen to the ’50s anymore, but I still do. I still listen to Elvis a lot; I really love Elvis’s voice. It still fascinates me—even on his later stuff, when he was supposed to not have it, it’s pretty amazing. ‘It’s Now Or Never’ is one of the best-sounding records ever on a jukebox. And ‘Such A Night’ is just the most amazing track—I don’t know how you play like that.”

With classy new acts like Crowded House, Timbuk 3, World Party and Robert Cray cracking the charts, the Top 40 seems to be on the verge of another renaissance. Does Petty ever put any current singles on the box?

“Every once in a while, but most of the new ones don’t hold up. I put on a Hank Jr. now and then. I just like music done well, pretty much.”

What else has he been listening to?

“My kid’s got Beatles For Sale on CD—she plays it over and over. I’m sittin’ here and I can hear it through the wall. Is that record perfect or what?! ‘I’m A Loser’ is heavy shit—that’s heavy shit. Here’s this guy just completely layin’ it on the line for you, and you’re missin’ it. It’s so simple you can walk right by it. And ‘No Reply’ may be the best song ever written—it may be the truest moment ever. Just AHHH. God, I can’t stand it! I’m a sucker for that riff. ‘No Reply’ into ‘I’m A Loser’—that fucks me up. It didn’t matter what they did after that.

“There was good records then,” Petty continues. “I wonder why that doesn’t go on anymore—why there aren’t some new bands as good as there was back then. You’d think there would be, but I guess there’s such a diverse amount of tastes now. That’s what’s depressing about all that ‘new music’; it’s kind of a hype. I can see wanting it as an alternative to all the drivel that’s on the other side of the coin. At least this stuff’s recorded rough. But I’m.afraid we’re being duped there a little bit.

“I’ll just be honest: Some of that stuff just isn’t any fuckin’ good. There’s no groove. It’s essential to have a groove. I’ll go as far as anybody wants to go with experimentation—go ahead and blow my mind—but at least have a groove. There’s a few good things, but I don’t think there’s that much. I mean, like Husker Du doin’ The Mary Tyler Moore Theme’—why don’t they play ‘No Reply,’ y’know? Maybe I’m just old, but I’d rather hear a real song.

“The songs do it all, you know. You can’t fuck up a good song. These modern records just don’t have enough songs on ’em. Even if the groups come up with one or two, it usually tends to drift out pretty fast. I don’t think they’re consciously tryin’ to make filler, but they just don’t seem to be able to sustain it for a whole album.”

So what does Petty think of R.E.M., the ’80s band that now draws all the comparisons to the Byrds, as the Heartbreakers did in the ’70s?

“I don’t buy that band, man,” he answers, with more candor than you’d expect. “I think they mean well, but I don’t think they’re very good on the guitar, you know? That ain’t the Byrds to me. . .or whatever it’s supposed to be. Whistle me one of their songs—that’s what I say about all this stuff. Maybe they’ll be good one day, but right now they’re just not very good on their instruments.” He pauses. “Maybe they’ll get better,” he reiterates, then laughs at his own cop-out. “I don’t wanna knock R.E.M. and then have all these people tellin’ me R.E.M.’s great. But it isn’t what / listen to.

“I hate to say bad things about a band, but I will about that one, ’cause they said bad things about me,” he continues. “One of those guys in R.E.M. criticized me for using the Confederate flag; he said it was stupid. I didn’t mean it in any racist sense at all; I just used it to represent the character of the song. So I’ll criticize them. I just was really irritated by what was said. I don’t think it’s a good policy in general to criticize other artists in the paper, ’cause we’re all guitar players and we’re all on the bus. It’s just not done. I thought it was real tacky.

“But maybe it’s good they said that,” Petty says, reconsidering. “It made me question it. And I’m not gonna use the flag anymore anyway, because now I see all these white power Klan-type people using it as a symbol, so maybe there’s a point there. But at the time it was, ‘This guy’s callin’ me stupid here!’ Wondering if I’ve got racist values. Well, no, I don’t. I’m glad to report that I’m not a racist... I don’t even drive!” he quips.

So what contemporary artists does he like—other than Hank Jr.?

“Prince is really fuckin’ good—he’s one of the good ones. I think the Talking Heads are absolutely great—they don’t get their due. That’s just a real good group. Let’s see, who else do I like? Dave Stewart does some pretty good records. And I heard a song by Miami Steve that’s amazing—it’ll blow your mind. There’s a lotta good girl singers around now, too. The Bangles—Susanna Hoffs is a great singer. I love their vocals. I like everything that’s good; I just kinda go song to song. I like Crowded House, and then I like Muddy Waters, too. I don’t try to filter it out.

“/ tend to listen to a lot of old reoords, IVs not fashionable to listen to the ’50s anymore, but I still listen to Elvis a lot,19 —Tom Petty

“And the Everly Brothers are so good. I’m s’posed to give Phil a song for their next album. I think I’m gonna give ’em one of those leftover songs—’cause I like ’em. I know Don, too—he may be one of the best living singers.”

We’re on a roll here, so I ask Petty for an opinion on John Fogerty and his ongoing battle with Fantasy Records President Saul Zaentz.

“That’s boring,” he responds. “I really like John Fogerty, and I hope he doesn’t stay bitter forever. It’s hard when you’ve been fucked around like that—I know exactly what he feels like.”

Petty’s spent some time in court himself, most recently when B.F. Goodrich came up with a new jingle for its TV commercials that sounded suspiciously like Petty’s “Mary’s New Car.” After he lodged a formal complaint, Goodrich pulled the spots.

“But not playing the old Creedence songs—that’s just silly. It doesn’t serve any purpose and it doesn’t make any difference. It’s not gonna hurt Saul Zaentz, or even sting him. Maybe it’s just a personal matter, and I can understand that. But if I went to see him, I’d sure as hell wanna hear ‘Proud Mary’—why did I come?

“But damn, those (lawyer) guys can really get you if you don’t watch ’em. When we did Damn The Torpedos, just blocks of my time was all legal stuff—day in, day out. You can get pretty mad about it, ‘cause you wrote those songs... dammit! ‘I wrote this fuckin’ song, and this guy sittin’ across the courtroom is gettin’ a million dollars for it! And I live in a little shithole, and I can’t fix the brakes on my car! And I’m gonna kill him!’ That’s basically what it is.”

Petty remains down-to-earth in his attitude toward his place—and that of his band—in the scheme of things.

“You’re in your band, you know? That’s the way we used to look at it when we were in Gainesville. There was the top band, and the next top band, and you gotta do better than this band. We were just one of the bands. We were always glad to be one of the bands. That’s all you can do.

“There were times when it was really touch-and-go,” he admits. “Like, ‘Is this band together or not?’ I wanted us to stay together, for the reason that... it’s so rare to hear music now that has much personality—especially in the instruments. It’s what I like about Fleetwood Mac—it’s all those people and it makes that sound. This album we made makes this sound. It’s a modest experiment; all we wanted to do was get that across.

“We’re just tryin’ to hone it down— whatever it is that we are. Which I don’t wanna put any parameters on—I don’t see any reason to. It’s not a glitzy thing. Like Phil Everly says about this job: At least there’s no heavy lifting.” ®