Shindig! Issue #180 – Mudcrutch / Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Fifty years ago, TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS’ self-titled debut album launched a long, spectacular career rooted in then-unfashionable mid-60s rock ’n’ roll values.
On the eve of an early years box set, TIM STEGALL corrals Heartbreakers Ron Blair, Stan Lynch and Benmont Tench in the first of our exclusive two-part deep dive.
“They didn’t like it, especially in The Deep South. You could get your ass kicked if you were in the wrong spot”
“We recorded a lot of demos, but all they ever released was a cassette-mixed single that nobody was very happy with,” was Tom Petty’s 1977 summary of Mudcrutch’s Shelter contract, the single being the vaguely reggae-fied ‘Depot Street’. Then Shelter forced their dissolution, keeping only Petty under contract, putting him in the studio to track with the cream of LA session aces like Jim Keltner and Booker T & The MGs bassist Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn. “I didn’t dig that at all,” Petty groused to Dadomo, “because good as they are, it wasn’t a band. So that never really got off the ground because I couldn’t really get behind it.”
What happened next depends on whose memory you’re standing in, which is itself the most interesting thing about it: three men who were all in the room that night still can’t fully agree on it, five decades on.
Benmont Tench claims it began with him owing a favour. “I had a friend who was an assistant recording engineer at Village Recorders,” he says. “They’d let you have studio time during off-hours if you brought in friends to record. He pestered me while – I’m lazy – and finally I gave in.” Tench called Lynch, who brought Blair, his neighbour in Laurel Canyon and his “fantasy bass player”. Tench also called in Mike Campbell, with whom, per Lynch, he shares “special DNA”
“Ben’s hands go to the exact right place on the keyboard,” insists Lynch. “Mike’s hands go to the fretboard at exactly the right place at the right time.”
Both Lynch and Tench agree they discussed starting a boozy, good-time band à la Faces, called The Drunks. For now, the plan was simply to cut Tench’s own songs, including one called ‘Once Upon A Time’, featuring a guitar solo Lynch says he can still hum to this day. “Mike played this one-note kinda ‘bagpipe’ solo where he just finds the money note and strangles it. It put me in tears as a kid.”
Petty showed up almost incidentally, by Blair’s memory, simply to watch. “After about an hour watching him behind the console, it shifted,” says Blair. “‘Wow, he’s staying?’ It was becoming something cool right before our eyes and ears.” Lynch remembers Petty sitting in on harmonica without much ceremony, then the phone ringing the next morning: “He said, ‘You want to be in a band with me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to.’”
Tench’s version runs through Petty’s then-wife Jane instead, a phone call the following day relaying that Tom would rather use the band than session players. “I was like, hallelujah, I’m home,” Tench says.
No ex-Mudcrutcher still in the picture – Petty, Campbell and Tench – felt Blair and Lynch muscled in on something already finished. Instead, Blair indicates it “felt like real music”.
“It wasn’t completely new, but it was something we’d been doing all those years anyway,” he says. “You’re trying to catch a groove and do something that feels right.” Tench agrees the Gainesville shorthand did the rest of the work: “We came from the same soil.”
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