Hey, Bo Diddley! The final conversation

Bo lived in the country, not far from the Gainesville city limits. I first met him in the early ‘80s, and over the years, I’d check in with him to write this or that story for the newspaper. He was always surrounded by family, but I always had the feeling that he was lonely, like the neighbor kid who’d beg you to stay and play just a little bit longer. He loved to show off his electronic equipment out in the barn – he was usually hot-wiring some amplifier, soldering a guitar body or overdubbing a rhythm track with an old tape machine. He’d say “Check this out,” and grab a handy microphone, hit the playback button and rap over the track. Live. Smiling the whole time. He was always demonstrating something new.

I did this career-spanning story for Goldmine in 2003. I wanted to cover it all, for posterity, and as it turned out, this was the last time I ever spoke with him. He died, at home, five years later.

At age 74, Bo Diddley may not be a spring chicken, exactly, but he’s hardly courting the rocking chair. Although Bo and his wife Sylvia live a relatively quiet life on 80 acres in Central Florida, six nights a month you’ll find the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer on a stage somewhere in America, wailing on his rectangular guitar, pounding out the most intoxicating of primitive rhythms, and singing with all the energy and fervor of a man half his age.

Bo Diddley, he’s a man. Spelled M-A-N.

He’d rather be retired, casting for bass or tinkering with an old car engine, but this is how he makes his living. He receives no publishing royalties, having sold his great songs many years ago to clear up some debts. The terms of the record contracts he signed in the 1950s afford him very little money – if he didn’t perform today, he says, he wouldn’t have any steady income.

He’s been an entertainer all his life, though, and nothing gives him more pleasure than making an audience happy.

And those audiences, they know who he is. He likes that.

“I was first, man,” Diddley said. “Wasn’t nobody doing nothin’ until I thought of it. I was about a year and a half before Elvis Presley. And I don’t like it when they jump up and say Elvis started rock ‘n’ roll. That’s a lie. He didn’t do it. He was really good, a fantastic entertainer, but he didn’t do it.”

Bo Diddley’s great contribution to rock ‘n’ roll was as an innovator. He did things with rhythms that nobody in blues or country & western music had thought of. He figured out how to snake in and out of the breathy rhythm of a tremelo guitar. He introduced a toughness, a pride, into rock ‘n’ roll during its infancy, stitching in the naked, howling urgency of urban blues. Songs spoke volumes with just one chord. The rest – swagger, humor, lust and cool – was all Bo Diddley.

He likes to refer to himself as The Originator. “I think all the time,” Diddley explained. “I’m always sitting somewhere trying to put something together that somebody else ain’t did.”

In his 70s, he’s still as sharp and straightforward as that skinny, nearsighted cat in the checkered jacket and bow tie, crowing about a stripper named Mona, trading musical jibes with a rubber-faced dude named Jerome, or asking a woman named Arline, flat out, who do you love? “I’m just 23 and I don’t mind dyin’,” he boasted.

He still writes music, although he doesn’t realistically expect Snoop Dogg or Eminem to call him for advice. “They’re not breaking down any doors to get cats my age,” Diddley said. “They think that I’m finished. And I’m a tricky son of a bitch. I’m not finished, I just learned what to do.”

He was born Ellas Bates on Dec. 30, 1928, a black Creole, in the southern Mississippi delta land between McComb and Magnolia. Just about everyone in the extended family picked cotton for a living. His teenaged mother wasn’t able to raise a child in that impoverished climate, so at age eight months Ellas went to live with his mother’s first cousin, Gussie McDaniel, and her husband, Robert.

“That’s the way things was in those days,” Diddley recalled. “Everybody raised everybody else’s kids. I knew it as uncles and cousins and all that kind of stuff. There was quite a few of us. We shared everything.

“It ain’t like it is today. If your parents were next door and you didn’t happen to be a relative, if your parents had run out of some cornmeal or flour or bacon or whatever, if your mother was trying to cook, all she had to do was go across the field and ask Miss So-and-So could she borrow something? No problem.”

Robert McDaniel’s death in 1934 meant Gussie had to look for better work; she decided to join the flood of emigrants heading north.

So at age 7, Ellas relocated, with Gussie and her own kids, to the South Side of Chicago. His name became, legally, Ellas Bates McDaniel. They rented a house at 4746 Langley Avenue and joined the congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

He loved the urbanity of his new digs and he fit right in. In Chicago, “treatment of black people was better. In the South, things were really screwed up. It didn’t have to be that way, but I guess that’s the way it was.”

It was here, in grammar school, he got his lifelong nickname. “The kids there started calling me Bo Diddley,” he said. “I still don’t know what the hell it means … but I know what it means in German!” (It’s a vulgarity.)

Initially, the kids had called him “Mac,” because of his surname.

Young Ellas announced he wanted to learn to play violin with the Ebenezer Sunday School Band. “I wanted to do what I’d seen some dudes doing, with a stick draggin’ across some strings and makin’ music,” Diddley said. “The church took up a collection, and the violin cost $29 at that time. And they bought me one. The lessons was like 50 cents a lesson. Are you ready for that? You can’t even talk to nobody on the phone for that today.”

He took lessons from Rev. O.W. Frederick – squinting at the dots on the page through his Coke-bottle glasses – and was soon proficient enough to play his instrument in church. He also sang in the choir.

One December five years later, Ellas was out shopping with his sister (technically, his first cousin) Lucille. “We went to this music store to buy some candy,” he recalled. “And they had the ol’ raggedy guitar hangin’ up in there. And I looked at it, and I told my sister ‘I want one of them.’

“I remember her saying ‘You want everything you see.’ I’m the same way today, man, if I see something that looks weird, I want to try that dude out.

“She bought it for me. It cost $29 or $30, almost the same thing with the violin. It was a old Kay guitar with two strings on it.”

Frustrated at trying to play blues and jive music on his violin – he never got it to sound quite right – Ellas was immediately comfortable around the guitar. “When I liked what I heard John Lee Hooker doing, I said if this cat can play guitar, I know I can learn,” he said.

“I tried to play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ running up and down them two strings. And I finally got enough pop bottle money. Strings were like 12 cents apiece. You’d buy one string at a time, until you got all of ’em.”

Bo Diddley never learned how to properly tune the guitar; to this day, he still doesn’t know the names of the strings or their proper pitch.

“I tuned it by accident,” he said. “I liked what I heard. I tuned the thing, didn’t know what the hell I was doing. It was said that Lonnie Johnson used to tune his guitar that way. I said ‘Who in the heck is Lonnie Johnson?’

“This was before my time. I was a kid, a youngster, dealing with the same things that kids are dealing with today.”

In 1940s Chicago, you had to learn how to fight. “We had a little neighborhood thing; we called ourselves the Golden Gloves,” Diddley recalled. “We beat up on each other, you know? But I wasn’t really what you’d call a boxer. I was what I would call a slugger, something like Mike Tyson.

“Mike’ll hurt you, if he ever gets ahold of you. So the smart thing is to stay away from him. Because the cat is so powerful, he could break something on you real easy. And that’s the way I was. As long as I kept you away from my head, I had it made.”

Briefly, he considered training to become a professional boxer. “I didn’t want to get into it,” he said. “That was just to protect myself from gangs and all the stuff I grew up with. I never ran with a gang. I think a gang of boys jumpin’ on one person is a very cowardly action.”

Around the neighborhood, Ellas was known as the Fix-It Kid, because he could take virtually anything apart and put it back together again, good as new. He attended a vocational school and briefly thought about a career as an auto mechanic.

Music, however, was in his blood. “I started doing this and everybody thought I was the misfit in the family,” he said. “There isn’t anybody else doing it. I’m the only one that’s got any musical background.

“My brother started in the ministry, but he could have played in some big-name baseball teams. They were after him. And he also has a talent for spreading the gospel.” (Bo’s half-brother is Reverend Kenneth Haynes of Biloxi, Miss.)

Ellas was constantly told that music – especially the “Devil’s music” that he so enjoyed – would lead him down a path of destruction.

“I had to find out what I wanted to do,” he said. “I had no idea I was gonna end up Bo Diddley.”

Along with guitarist Jody Wilson, harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold and school chum Roosevelt Jackson – playing a washboard bass that Ellas himself constructed – he started playing the three or four songs he knew on street corners, the way blues musicians did, to get coins out of passers-by. They played them over and over again, and made new songs out of schoolyard rhymes.

At first they were called the Hipsters, then the Langley Avenue Jive Cats. “We did that and passed the hat,” Diddley said. “I was too chickenshit to steal.

“I did it because my mother didn’t have nothing. And everything that I wanted as I was growing up … it meant ‘let me work so I can earn some money, so I can buy a pair of shoes, buy a pair of socks. A handkerchief to go in my shirt.'”

The origin of the famous Bo Diddley beat has been in contention for years; it incorporates elements of the old “shave and a haircut” rhythm, the early ’50s shuck-and-jive hit “Hambone,” Chicago blues and the open-tuning, hard-hitting guitar chords of Bo himself – heavy on the tremelo, once Bo got off streetcorners and went electric. “They didn’t have no electric guitars down there,” Diddley said. “I made my first electric guitar. I built the first tremelo – I actually did it. I built it with some points out of an old Plymouth distributor, and a big wind–up clock. I sat down and I put it all together to make the music go whop/whop/whop/whop/whop. Because every time they made contact, you’d get a sound.

“I figured out how to do this, and a company was building one at the same time. I never went to Toledo, Ohio in my life, but somebody there was doin’ one.”

Then, as now, he was always tinkering. “I used to play by tapping into the audio tube in the back of a big radio. Got shocked a few times before I figured out which of the plugs on the back was the one.”

By the time Ellas was 15, he and the guys were playing 20 street corners every Friday night, after school let out. “People would say ‘There’s them three dudes again,'” he recalled.

“We did something worthwhile, man; we didn’t go out robbing people and all that. The police would sometimes take our little tip money, because they said it was illegal for us to try and make a living to buy bread.”

Ellas left home, and school, at 16 and briefly went to vocational college. He married and divorced a young girl named Louise inside of a year. “She wanted to juke me around,” he recalled. “All she wanted to do was get away from home.”

Eventually the group came to include Jerome Green on maracas and vocals. Jerome would become Bo’s onstage foil during the hit years, and an important part of the sound.

“I met Jerome when I was with my second wife, Ethel Smith,” Diddley said. “I met Jerome when I used to go over to her house to see her. He came up the back stairs with a tuba wrapped around his head, from school. They let him bring it home.

“I talked him into going with us on the street corners. He said ‘Man, I ain’t goin’ out there,’ and I said, ‘Come on man, we’re gonna pay you the same. We’re gonna split up the money.’

“I stole my mother’s cake bowl, and went out there and filled it up (with money). We came back with $15 apiece, for three of us. And the next weekend, Jerome was looking for me: ‘Hey man, are we goin’ back on the corner again?'”

Once the boys had turned 18, they left the street and getting booked into clubs. The next step was to get on record.

“I had an old Webco recorder,” Diddley recalled. “And we made a dub, and I took it to Vee-Jay Records first. They looked at me and said ‘What kind of crap is that?’ I said I don’t know, I just play it.

“They said ‘Well, we don’t know what to do with it,’ because they was strictly into blues. John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed and all that kind of stuff.

“Nobody inspired me. I just wanted to be me. That’s what I wanted to do, me.”

“I figured I had something good enough to make a record. ‘Cause the people on the streetcorner, they was jumpin’ and clappin’ their hands. I said ‘Hey …. I’m making ’em jump.’ So I figured this must be it.”

In early 1955, Bo Diddley was signed by Leonard and Phil Chess, owners of Chicago’s Chess Records (Bo was to record for the subsidiary label, Checker).

The idea of being on the same label as Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters and the rest of his heroes from the Chicago club scene “didn’t excite me. It’s just that I knew I was different from the rest of ’em. I was different from the other bands that I heard.

“I played a different type of music, and people were trying to figure out what the hell was I doing? Because I sounded like 10 people, rather than just three.”

Momma Gussie and the others did not approve. “They said that I was playing for the Devil,” Diddley remembered. “My aunts and uncles, everybody said ‘Why don’t you put that talent of yours to good use and play in the church? I said well, why do you all tell me to do that, and then you tell me I’m God-gifted?

“I said, you all can’t pay me the money that I make in clubs, for playing in the church, no. I’m not gonna do it. I’m just doing it to try and make a living. I’m not hanging in clubs, getting drunk and fighting and cutting up people and cussing. I don’t do no drugs, never have, never will. I’m scared of what the doctor gives me. I have no idea what the hell it is. I’m just what you call chickenshit.”

“Bo Diddley/I’m a Man” was released in the spring and reached the top spot on the national R&B charts. The A side introduced the Bo Diddley beat to the world, syncopated in a blustery onslaught with Jerome’s maracas and tribal tom-toms from drummer Clifton James.

Diddley’s original version of the song went “Uncle John’s got corn ain’t never been shucked/Uncle John’s got daughters ain’t never been … to school.”

At Leonard Chess’ suggestion, he re-wrote the lyrics as a song about himself … about this character he’d created. Bo Diddley. Bo’s legend would become a recurring theme.

“I’m a Man” was another ballgame altogether. Here, Diddley dealt a straight hand of Chicago blues, punctuated by Billy Boy’s wailing harmonica.

“Muddy Waters came up with ‘I’m a Rolling Stone,’ or ‘I’m a King Bee,’ one of those songs, saying ‘when I was 26 years old,'” Diddley recalls. “And I said well, if you’re a rolling stone, I’m a man. You understand? Willie Dixon wrote those – and I thought if he’s that bad, I’m a man.”

Not long after, “Muddy copied it and wrote ‘Mannish Boy.’ There’s only one word in ‘Mannish Boy’ that I never understood. He uses the line ‘woe be.’ I ain’t never figured out what ‘woe be’ means.”

The record was like nothing heard before. There were no complex changes, just gut-busting emotion on “I’m a Man” and shuffling energy on “Bo Diddley.”

The success of the single meant live appearances, and Diddley’s group hit the road, getting farther from Chicago with every performance. On Aug. 20, he played the legendary Apollo Theatre in New York City. “And destroyed it,” he recalled. “People was trying to figure out, how is three dudes makin’ all that noise?”

In those days, Diddley said, the national speed limit was 45 MPH. “I mostly drove with my band. I had a 1941 DeSoto station wagon; they called it a Stagecoach. It had a rack on the top, and we used to tie all our stuff up on top of it. And away we went.”

In November, the band returned to New York to appear on Ed Sullivan’s TV show. This story has become an integral part of the Bo Diddley legend; this is the artist’s own version:

“Ed Sullivan heard us in the dressing room practicing ‘Sixteen Tons,’ Tennessee Ernie’s song. He said ‘Can you guys play that on the show?’ and I said ‘Yeah, we can play it our way.’ But I was there to do ‘Bo Diddley’ by Bo Diddley. So I did two songs, and he got pissed.

“But it was their mistake, the way that they had the program written up. I did it the way that the program said: Bo Diddley and ‘Sixteen Tons.’ As far as I’m concerned, that’s the name of the song – and, ‘Sixteen Tons.’

“Ed Sullivan said I was the first colored boy that ever double-crossed him on a song, or something. And I started to get on him, just to tell this old man the truth, right in his fuckin’ face. Because I hadn’t ever been said nothin’ to like that, and I didn’t double cross him. They made the mistake, and I lived with it for a lot of years.

“He said I would never work again. And I got 48 years of rock ‘n’ roll. I’m not happy that he’s dead, you know, but I had something that I perfected. And I did my best. And I think that’s the reason why I’m still here.”

History always seems to contrast Diddley with his Chess labelmate Chuck Berry – the two even issued a patched-together duet album in the early ’60s – but Bo Diddley sees this as an apples-and-oranges thing. “We were writing different,” he said. “He was writing about school days and stuff like that, which was very interesting. And I wrote comical-type tunes. He couldn’t be funny; I could. I could make you laugh.”

Berry also crossed over to a white audience in those heavily segregated days, something Diddley never really managed. Although he made a respectable showing on the R&B charts, only one of his singles, 1959’s “Say Man,” made a dent on the pop side.

“Say Man” was a series of good-natured back and forth insults between Bo and Jerome, what they used to call “signifying” back on the streets in Chicago.

He considers “Who Do You Love,” first released in the summer of 1956, a “funny” song. “Well, it was serious and funny at the same time,” he said. For the record, there never was a woman named Arlene in his life. He just made it up.

As his fortunes faded in the United States, as Presley, Berry, Holly and so many others brought rock ‘n’ roll to an insatiable audience, Bo Diddley struggled. “Say Man,” “Crackin’ Up” and “Road Runner” were major hits, but by the early ’60s, it just wasn’t happening.

The live show continued to generate excitement. Guitarist Norma Jean Wofford joined his band in 1961 (following a short stint by another woman stringbender, Peggy Jones). Wofford became known as The Duchess; it was whispered that she was Bo Diddley’s sister.

“We told that lie so much that it started sticking,” Diddley said. “But we’re actually no kin. I had started adding different people to the group. It was just guys at first, and I said ‘I need some glamor on the stage,’ so I started putting the girls in the group.”

Novelty had always been important for Diddley – his classic 1960 album, Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger was inspired by the movie The Magnificent Seven and had a Western theme – and his act had always included a little comedy, a little dancing. “Didn’t none of us stand still,” he recalled.

Diddley was surprised to learn, during a 1963 trip to Great Britain, that he was held in high regard by the young, rhythm ‘n’ blues worshiping musician crowd. The Rolling Stones, one of the tour’s opening acts, dropped all Diddley covers from their set as an act of respect.

The young Stones viewed Bo Diddley with awe; Brian Jones, Diddley remembered, had an insatiable curiosity about the rhythm and the blues. And “Mick (Jagger) is like a loner; he stays by himself all the time. And you don’t impose on a person like that – if that’s his way, that’s his way. I don’t fault him for it.”

Diddley’s relationship with the Stones continued over time – in the ’80s, Diddley and guitarist Ron Wood toured Japan together, and Bo joined the band onstage in Miami on the 1994 Voodoo Lounge tour.

In 1965, he appeared in the legendary TAMI Show, and four years later played the Toronto Rock ‘n’ Roll Festival, on a bill with the Plastic Ono Band. Diddley can be seen in D.A. Pennebaker’s film Sweet Toronto.

Overall, though, the ’60s were rough. Diddley continued to record and perform, but his records had little impact. The British Invasion, followed by the psychedelic and hippie movements, left little room for the pioneering rock ‘n’ rollers.

Diddley watched attitudes and fashions change all around him. “My generation wasn’t into that shit,” he laughed. “So I’m sitting outside going what the hell’s going on? I’m starving in my own world, my music world. But I found out something: If you can’t beat ’em, you gotta join ’em” (see the Chess albums The Black Gladiator; Another Dimension).

Strapped for cash because of an investment scheme gone wrong, Diddley sold his publishing in this period.

And like many artists who rode in on the first wave in the ’50s, he got paid a ridiculous royalty rate. He was never a math whiz, so he signed whatever contract had been put in front of him. “The Chess Brothers were very secluded about telling an artist,” he said. “It looked like to me that they were afraid somebody would step out of place and start asking for more money. I was just interested in playin’ for the people. I had no idea about the business, how it worked and all this.

“They were beginning to set up little things here and there that would elude you from the right things – in other words, while you sleep, we’ll figure out how we can not pay you something.”

The winter of Diddley’s discontent began in the glory days and has yet to blow over. He remembers precisely when he first realized he’d been short-changed:

“When I started to asking about royalty checks and all this kind of stuff, my stuff started getting played less and less,” he said. “And I didn’t understand. And after a while it looked like it was set before me so that I could plainly see it, that I was becoming a troublemaker because I started asking about royalty checks. This meant that I was going to cause problems. And the easiest way to shut you up was to pull your records off the airwaves. It’s called blackball.

“When the people buy your stuff and make you earn the name ‘So-and-so is really great.’ But when your record company don’t acknowledge that you got a contract with ’em, and so much revenue come in that they’re supposed to give you this and that … this didn’t happen with me. Instead, they put the money in their pocket. I guess because I was a little country black boy in Chicago, I got ripped off. Because they figured I didn’t know what time it was.”

Then, as now, the only real money that came Bo Diddley’s way was from live shows. And if somebody’s making money off those classic records, it’s not him. “I ain’t seen shit,” he said.

And so he works, flying hundreds, thousands of miles, equipped with only a guitar and a suitcase. Although he has a semi-regular group for big shows, he does most gigs with a pickup band, hired by the local promoter in each town he plays.

After Chicago, he lived in Washington, D.C. (the Gunslinger album was recorded on a two-track Presto machine in his basement), then Los Angeles and, ultimately, Florida (he spent a year or two in Las Lunas, N.M., too, where he was deputized and walked a sheriff’s beat). He was married to Georgia native Kay Reynolds for 20 years, and bought his first Florida property from her dentist.

Every few years, some music business sharpie with a few bucks in his wallet signs him up for an album; without fail, they make little or no commercial impact.

Diddley cares very little for the 1973 The London Bo Diddley Sessions, which paired him with a contingent of hip young English rock players. “When you turn your back, they do whatever they feel like doing,” he said. Since the end of Chess in the mid ’70s, he’s drifted from label to label.

In 1996, producer Mike Vernon put out the Bo Diddley album A Man Amongst Men, which featured “collaborations” from the likes of Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Richie Sambora.

Trouble was, Vernon assembled the tracks from pieces; Bo was rarely in the same room with his guest stars. “It just never occurred to them that maybe Bo doesn’t want it that way, you know?” Diddley said. “So it would be my mistake if I fucked up. But they fucked up, and I still bear the cross of them messing up. And the public don’t know that I had nothing to do with it.”

He has a handful of bedrock songs that continue to reverberate today (“Who Do You Love,” “I’m a Man,” “Before You Accuse Me,” “Mona”), and the “Bo Diddley Beat” is a cornerstone of rock ‘n’ roll (see “Not Fade Away,” “I Want Candy,” “She’s the One”).

His 1987 induction into the Rock and Roll of Fame was logical – and, perhaps not surprisingly, Bo Diddley took it with a grain of salt.

“The way I look at it, the attention is really great,” he said. “But the reward in what I have done is not a plaque sitting on my wall, because I can’t do anything with it. They’re worth a lot of money to a collector, but to me they’re not worth anything.

“It doesn’t really mean anything to me. It don’t pay none of my bills. Take the actors who got the Oscars and the Emmys, they don’t mean nothin.’ It’s just that people can come to your house and see ’em and go ‘Wow, you got an Oscar.’ What does it mean? Is it worth a thousand dollars? $400? $200? Or worth a million dollars?

“What is it worth in dollar bills, because this is what you need to survive. Not a medal with your name on it.”

Back surgery slowed him down in the ’90s – he had to sit in a chair onstage for a while – and a recurring bout with high blood pressure caused him to cancel a few dates in 2002.

Otherwise, hell, he ain’t slowing down.

“I figure I got 15 or 20 years, maybe longer than that,” he said. “If I take care of myself. But it’s winding down. I might as well face it. I don’t look to kick off, but when you get to my age you start getting’ scared and you start realizing that the day is coming, and that’s a guarantee. We’re all gonna leave out of here.

“As you get older, things become more clear to you about everyday existence. Am I going to be able to wake up in the morning? Am I going to sleep and … you don’t know that you’re gone? That’s the way I feel.

“That is the most scary thing in the world. You take me, traveling on the road by myself, and getting a hotel room. Go to bed, go to sleep, and I don’t know if I’m gonna get up and go catch the plane in the morning. I used to not worry about that.”

This story appears in the book I Need to Know: The Lost Music Interviews (St. Petersburg Press).

 

The story of River Phoenix and Aleka’s Attic

When Josh McKay’s friends learned that the 22-year-old guitarist was considering moving to Florida to play in a band with teenage actor River Phoenix, they suggested he might be crazy. Movie stars, they said, can’t make music. You’ll be back in Texas in a month.

But in 1988 Denton, a suburb of Dallas, was nowheresville as far as Josh McKay was concerned, and the primitive recordings he’d received from Phoenix were encouraging. “It was really nice, these really tight jam-box garage tapes,” McKay remembers. “It definitely struck me that, ‘This is about music. It’s not about some hobby trip.’” He’d had a couple of long, deep phone conversations with the young actor, about music, and creativity, and what they meant. He hadn’t seen any of River Phoenix’s movies.

River Phoenix, 1988 in Micanopy, photographed by John Moran.

Phoenix, who was not yet 18, had recently moved to a farmhouse near Micanopy, Florida – a rural town outside of Gainesville – with his family. At the time, he was onscreen in Running on Empty, which would bring him an Academy Award nomination.

River was passionate about music. He’d been playing guitar since the age of 4, and wrote his first song when he was 8. As a teen, his obsessions were punky singer/songwriter Elvis Costello, Ireland’s deep-thinking U2 and the feisty British pop band XTC.

On the basis of his original songs, Phoenix had secured a development deal from Chris Blackwell, president of Island Records, which had U2 on its roster. Island laid out funds to put a band together, to rehearse and record demos, and – provided the music was good enough – they’d promised to record a proper album at the end of the two-year deal.

So when the Phoenix family relocated to Florida from Eugene, Oregon in 1988, the first thing River did was claim the detached garage behind the house as his rehearsal room. He called it the Attic.

One of Blackwell’s A&R reps knew Josh MacKay and his (defunct) Texas band, Joshomisho, and thought she heard a similar, free-form element in River Phoenix’s songs.

Phoenix was making his home tapes with Josh Greenbaum, also 17, who came up from South Florida just to help his friend start the band. Greenbaum’s mother had grown up with Arlen “Heart” Phoenix, River’s mother, in the Bronx, and the families stayed close through the years.

Greenbaum had drummed for a metal band – after he left, the group changed its name to Saigon Kick and got famous – and he had to learn a whole new way of playing, softer and with complex rhythm changes, to jell with River.

Greenbaum’s fondest memories are of the days he and his friend sat on the trampoline in the Phoenix back yard, working out songs.

Out in Texas, McKay was half-heartedly taking anthropology classes and wondering what to do next. He found himself drawn in by the songs on the cassette tapes, and began inventing basslines around them, although he was a guitarist by training and hadn’t ever seriously played bass.

Still, he was intrigued, and once he discovered that he shared other interests with Phoenix – a vegetarian lifestyle, and a strong belief in animal rights – he decided it might not be so strange after all.

“I left as soon as my finals were done; I wasn’t really thinking about it too much,” McKay recalls. “I just said ‘this is a very unusual thing to fall down from out of nowhere’; some people down in Florida, in Gainesville where I’ve never heard of, want me to come out and hang out, and maybe play together. I didn’t have anything in Denton happening that looked like a musical forward motion.”

Included in the development deal was a retainer fee for the chosen musicians, so McKay’s room and board was picked up as long as Island remained on the line. Both he and Greenbaum lived with the Phoenix family for the first year.

Josh Greenbaum and River picked him up at the Gainesville Airport, and McKay loved the area, the home and the family – River, his parents and his four siblings – as soon as he got a look at them. It was very much a ‘Yes,’” he says, smiling at the memory. “Really, really good feeling together immediately.”

McKay was accepted into the extended family; he and River hit it off and furiously began writing and singing together. Sister Rain Phoenix, two years younger than River, was recruited to play keyboard and sing harmony, and the band was completed with the addition of 17-year-old Tim Hankins, a Gainesville native, on viola.

Hankins met Rain through a mutual friend. A member of the Gainesville Chamber Orchestra, he’d never before played pop music – a good thing, because the band wasn’t about to do things in the usual way. The key word was experimentation.

 

Toys in the attic

Clockwise from left: Tim Hankins, River Phoenix, Rain Phoenix, Josh McKay and Josh Greenbaum.

Aleka is a poet and philosopher. The Attic is a meeting place where he lives, and he has a secret society. They come and visit him and read his works.

He then dies, and they meet regularly and continue the readings of his works, and from that learn their own, and become filled with this new passion for life.  And they express it through our music.

River Phoenix, 1989, interview with the author

Following a two-week tour of east coast clubs in early ’89, the band – now called Aleka’s Attic – joined the Gainesville music scene. River, his bandmates agree, was dedicated to his craft and paid little attention to those who said Aleka’s Attic was nothing more than a vanity project.

“He was the most annoyingly committed guy you’ve ever met in your life,” says Greenbaum. “Nonstop, every moment.”

Adds McKay: “For him, everything that mattered, he would cram in at the same time. So each limb was independent, because his time was precious. His time to enjoy was just as precious as his time to be creating music.”

The pattern began almost immediately: River was off to Los Angeles to make another movie, and then another, and each time Aleka’s Attic sat dormant in Gainesville for months at a stretch. The two-year development deal was frozen each time he left on a film assignment.

“There was a lot of change and readjustment of lives,” Greenbaum remembers. “It became a problem at times, it definitely did. Never to the point where there were big fights or anything.”

McKay: “He was at the mercy of a lot of other forces, and we were second generation from that.”

Greenbaum: “We were kind of at the mercy of his career.”

Tim Hankins, in particular, grew to resent the interruptions. “We’d practice for six or eight months, and we’d kind of reach this apex … and then he would go off for three months and do a film,” he says.

“It was like coitus, you know? It was like we worked toward something that never came to fruition.”

Hankins says River went out of his way to be nice to fans, to distance himself from the 40-foot-tall guy on the movie screen.

“He always took this posture of trying to dissolve this myth that had been created,” Hankins explains. “If you saw the way he dressed … if you didn’t know him, you’d think he was a homeless person.”

Likewise, he didn’t play bossman with his bandmates. “River was one of the most diplomatic people I’ve ever known,” Greenbaum says. “He had a way of making things flow – of taking energy from one place and driving it in another direction. He was constantly trying to keep things peaceful.”

In 1991, the Phoenix/McKay composition “Across the Way” appeared on Tame Yourself, a benefit album for People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals. A multi-layered, stream-of-consciousness piece about hypocrisy, it is the only Aleka’s Attic song ever to be officially released in River’s lifetime.

That year, Phoenix made the films Dogfight and My Own Private Idaho back-to-back. “After we did two-and-a-half months’ touring, up the East Coast twice, then we came back and  did the ‘Here’s where we’re at’ demos,” Greenbaum says.

“But as soon as we finished it, River went off to do press stuff for three months. And so Island was just sitting there with the demos. That was really the big period of change.”

Tim Hankins says he “just couldn’t get along” with River any more, and by late spring he’d left the band.

In August, Aleka’s Attic re-convened as a quartet, with the intention of really getting their album into gear. River returned all excited, McKay recalls, because he had ben offered the big-budget movie Sneakers.

“We started talking about going to L.A.,” the bassist says, “and instead of making the record the band would practice when he wasn’t doing the film. And I just sort of crumbled under that concept.”

Remaining in Gainesville, McKay and Hankins put together another band, Emperor Moth.

Greenbaum went to California with River and Rain; with T-Bone Burnett producing, they cut a couple of demos for Island while Sneakers was in production, using guest bass players.

“Those two demos that we did in L.A., those were pretty much the crux of the deal,” according to Greenbaum. “This was it. We had already gone over the two-year thing, and we had got to the point where we had to make a decision. It was overdue.”

Island heard the tapes – and passed. “It wasn’t like they just dropped us; they heard the demo and it wasn’t – in my opinion – marketable enough for them.”

A man possessed

River was actually relieved; he decided to finance and record the album on his own, at his own pace.

Today, there are 20 or more incomplete songs “in the can” at Pro Media Studios in Gainesville, the result of several furious months of recording in 1992 and ’93. Those who were at the sessions say River worked like a man possessed, as if he knew his time was short.

River Phoenix played his last two Gainesville shows in October 1992, with Rain, Josh Greenbaum and a bassist named Sasa Raphael.

“We still considered ourself a band – it was Rain, Sasa, River and I,” Greenbaum explains, adding that the group billed itself as the Blacksmith Configuration.

“It was rawer, and I think more nitty-gritty than ever. We became the tight garage band that we’d started as. We came full circle, in a way, but more mature.”

Hollywood beckoned again, and this time River accepted three movies in a row. “At that point, I began to look for things to keep myself busy,” Greenbaum says. “I decided I just can’t live for this one thing any more. I gotta make stuff happen.”

Greenbaum joined the jazz group Scarf & the Happy Dragons (later renamed Mindwalk) and Big White Undies.

River died Oct. 31, 1993, two months after the last session at Pro Media. A lethal combination of drugs killed him on the sidewalk outside L.A.’s Viper Room nightclub; he was expecting to jam that night with the house band. He was 23.

Josh Greenbaum maintains his friend didn’t abuse drugs. “I know that the time I spent with him was spent trying to be as healthy as we could,” he says. “Not only physically, but in lots of other ways, mentally.

“He was totally pro-life, and pro-happiness, and was constantly trying to make himself and everyone around him better.”

He wasn’t an angel – name one musician who is, Greenbaum asks– but he wasn’t a junkie. Josh believes River simply got run down on the Los Angeles fast lane.

“L.A. is a swamp, it’s a pit,” he says. “And I think it was just one night of … having too much fun. Simple: Young person making a mistake.”

Tim Hankins had settled his differences with River – he even played on some of those last sessions – and was chummy with him again before leaving in the spring to study music at the University of Miami.

“I spent three years of my life devoted to this thing, and we had some pretty amazing adventures,’ Hankins explains. “Some pretty difficult times, and some pretty great times. It was just a really amazing journey to be on.”

Josh McKay was two weeks into an extended tour of Indonesia when he got the news. On Nov. 5, he was scheduled to check in with his brother in Gainesville, for the first time since he’d left. His travels were taking him through jungles and over mountains, away from telephones and newspapers.

Before he left Bali for Sumatra, Josh intended to give his brother a forwarding address – River had expressed an interest in joining him, and McKay was hoping to spend some “quality time” with his former bandmate and songwriting partner.

Over dinner in his hotel, McKay struck up a conversation with a man from Finland, a musician and composer. They talked about music, mostly.

“Our conversation was just a real nice exchange,” McKay recalls. “And it ended up turning very abruptly and very unexpectedly, with him mentioning having read an article about some young American actor who died.

“And instantly, the hammer struck.”

@1994 Bill DeYoung/The Gainesville Sun

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Let’s go out there and be a bunch of bros’: Ron Blair and the Heartbreakers

@1990, Gainesville Sun

As the bass player in Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, Ron Blair went from the nightclubs of Gainesville to the coliseums of the world in just a few years.

He was one-fifth of a wildly successful rock ‘n’ roll band, and just at the apex of his hard-earned career — at the time most people would’ve been content to lean back and count their money — he threw it away and started over.

In the early ’70s, Ron Blair had left Gainesville for Southern California, where the women were beautiful, the beach was nearby, and the music business, in which he hoped to make a buck or two, was a way of life. He was 23.

Four fellow Hogtown expatriates convinced Blair to join their band. The band didn’t have a name, but it did have a record deal, due to the singing and songwriting talents of its frontman. Blair knew Tom Petty well, respected his talents, and joined his group without reservation.

Within five years, the band — dubbed at the very last minute Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers — was the biggest act on the road, selling out arenas from coast to coast and tearing it up in Europe and the Far East. Critics called them the American Rolling Stones. In 1980 alone, the Heartbreakers sold over three million albums; Blair, like his bandmates, amassed a sizable bankroll.

And then, abruptly, he quit.

“Some days I’ll think, ‘Couldn’t I have put up with it?'” the 41-year-old Blair says in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he still lives. “At the time, it was really a gut decision. That’s kind of what I regret, that it wasn’t a real thought-out decision.

“I physically and verbally tuned out on an emotional level, rather than really thinking it out.”

Purely and simply, he says, it just ceased to be fun. That’s why he broke with the band.

Today, Blair owns and operates a swimwear shop called Shapes, on a busy downtown street in Tarzana, a Los Angeles suburb. He bought the business in 1982, just after he told Petty he “couldn’t get back on the bus” and on on another tour.

“The first couple of years we were open, there was a rumor that Tom Petty’s wife had opened the shop,” Blair says with a chuckle. “We didn’t do anything to squelch it.”

Ron Blair’s father, a career Navy man, moved his family around the world and eventually put down roots in Macon, Ga., where Ron was born.

In 1969, he chose the University of Florida for his alma mater simply because a girlfriend expressed her desire to go there; Blair was only interested in a college that “didn’t have compulsory ROTC.” On the advice of counselors, he chose engineering as a major, but what he really wanted to do was play music. He dropped out in his junior year.

Eventually Blair became part of a rock band called RGF (the initials stood for different things on different occasions). The group — which also included guitarist Jeff Jourard, later to form the Motels — was “like the Who, or a little nastier,” Blair reports. RGF was Gainesville’s resident loud and sloppy “hard rock” band. Its polar opposite, Mudcrutch, played country-tinged rock ‘n’ roll, with the kind of vocal harmonies that RGF wasn’t at all interested in.

“We used to play a lot of the same gigs,” Blair remembers. “Or even throw gigs – we used to rent the University Auditorium, split the gig and split the money.

“They were into a different kind of rock than the band I was in. But they were real good, and they had their own following around there. We did, too, but maybe a little more of the degenerates.”

Mudcrutch’s lead singer and chief songwriter, Tom Petty, was a year younger than Blair. “Tom used to impress me because he had kind of a beard, he was a real scraggly guy,” Blair says. “He looked like he drank a few beers, just really loose onstage. He looked like he was on the edge of looseness – like ‘this guy’s gonna fall off the stage!’ but then he’d keep it together and rock the whole set.”

It was obvious to Blair and everyone else that RGF and Mudcrutch were about the best things going in Gainesville. Both groups had large local followings. “But I didn’t understand what their band was about. I didn’t quite know what they were trying to do, because it wasn’t a straight-ahead thing, (and) it wasn’t a Southern Blues thing.”

In early 1972, RGF made a run for the big time. “It just came to a point where we’d played all the gigs you can play around Gainesville, and then everybody started thinking about leaving,” Blair recalls. “Tom and them were pretty smart — they were making tapes and thinking about going somewhere they could record.

“The band I was in, we just took off to Boston on a kind of a wild hair. It was either New York, Boston, or California. We ended up gettin’ froze out. It got to be October and the band split up and everybody went back home.”

Blair dawdled briefly in Gainesville before returning to Macon, where he spent a year and a half without a steady band — and, in his words, went “stir crazy.” He hung around with the Allman Brothers Band and their Macon legions for a spell (his younger sister married Gregg Allman in 1972) and, with the encouragement of friends, traveled to Southern California for a visit in early ’74.

He never went home again.

Soon he was playing bass in three different club bands, just making ends meet. It wasn’t long before Mudcrutch appeared on his doorstep.

“Tom and a couple of the guys came over,” Blair remembers. “They had just driven across the country in a truck with their cats, dogs, women and whatever, and they just showed up.

“Most of my friends had already moved out here and were trying to get something going on, and I said ‘All right, everybody’s out here now!'”

The members of Mudcrutch had made the trek with the promise of a recording deal with Shelter Records, Leon Russell’s company. But after one single, the band began squabbling internally, and the album was never finished. A year after pulling up in Petty’s truck, Mudcrutch dissolved. Shelter retained Petty, and he started recording with studio musicians.

Stan Lynch, a Gainesville drummer who’d also headed west looking for “the big gig,” called his old buddy Blair in early ’76 and asked him to sit in on some late-night demo sessions for pianist Benmont Tench, who’d been in Mudcrutch, and, like the rest of them, was now taking whatever work he could find. The studio sessions weren’t costing Tench anything; he had a friend who worked there and had invited him to record after hours.

Guitarist Mike Campbell, Petty’s songwriting partner in Mudcrutch, came along, and so did Petty. “I forget the songs,” Blair says, “but it just seemed to be real natural. It was kind of easy. I think we played pretty late into the night, for a couple of nights.

“I think it was just a natural thing. I guess everybody’s roots were similar, I don’t know, it was really kind of a magic thing. Nobody was getting in the way of each other. I don’t think anybody was trying to take over or dominate.”

It took a little record-company convincing, but soon Petty’s solo career became Petty’s band: Petty, Campbell, Tench, Lynch and Blair. After the first few sessions they worked together, it felt too good to everyone to consider bringing in more studio guys.

Blair says it was the “cause” – getting Petty started successfully on his record career – that motivated them all in the beginning.

The first two Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers albums did zero to little business in the United States, although the band got to be huge in England. But when Damn the Torpedoes appeared in mid-1980, they went from club dates and opening slots to headlining arenas in a real hurry. The album reached No. 2 on the national charts and went several times platinum. Suddenly, Petty was big business; the adulation, and the money, started rolling in.

“It used to be a lot of fun,” Blair explains. “The first two records were a lot of fun, and then touring up to there – even though it was a real strain – it had that kind of cause feel to it, ‘let’s go out there and be a bunch of bro’s, doing it.’

“When we started doing the third record, some heavy kind of producer guys came in and really tried to professionalize it. And from that point on, it entered the uptight era. It just got uptight from really that moment on until I wasn’t with the band any more.”

Success, Blair feels, really tested the Heartbreakers. There was a lot of pressure on Petty, too, to “keep up the good work,” and the inevitable fissures appeared between Petty and the bros in the band.

Torpedoes was the biggest record the band ever had, and there were a couple of really cool tours, but something happened,” Blair explains. “It was like the band got tense; the band as a unit got stressed.

“It seemed like everywhere we were playing was an upside-down bathtub, the sound was bad, and the bass sounded especially bad. For me, it got to be almost depressing — we’d have soundchecks, and it would be like bad group therapy.”

“He was just slowly and slowly fading away, it seemed, fading far away from us,” Petty told the Gainesville Sun in 1985. “We’re all pretty close, and we didn’t see him socially, ever. I don’t really know what it was. He was just disillusioned, I think. Big business rolls into the picture, and I think Ron was just a pretty casual person.

“It wasn’t like we were sad to see him go, either, because it’s no fun having somebody in the group who isn’t really into it.”

Blair played on half of the platinum Hard Promises album in 1981, and on the subsequent world tour. By then, he was traveling to and from the concerts separately.

“I was still there trying to do everything that was asked, being a soldier and everything, but I made a little bit of a tuneout and it sort of wedged the whole thing apart.”

Howie Epstein replaced Blair on bass in 1982, and is with the Heartbreakers to this day.

Blair and his wife designed Shapes with a “rock ‘n’ roll vibe” in mind; he says they wanted the front of the store to look like an album cover. When the couple divorced in 1985, Blair became the sole proprietor of the shop, which from all reports is very successful. Blair manages a staff of eight; at home, he has a 9-year-old son, James.

Every once in a while, he gets a longing for that rock ‘n’ roll rush. He has a pair of platinum albums on the wall, but that’s not enough to bring it back.

“Sometimes I regret it a little bit,” he explains. “I’m not a quitter, and I don’t like to think I left something unfinished. But it was like some voice told me, ‘You’re gonna go crazy. Do something else. Be independent.'”

 

The Boy Who Would Be Stills

Two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Stephen Stills went to a dozen different schools in his youth. The ones he remembers most fondly, however, were in Gainesville.

Stills spent two years at Sidney Lanier Elementary School in the mid 1950s, moved away and returned for a year at Gainesville High during the 1962-63 school year. He came back again to briefly attend the University of Florida.

“I remember the humidity,” says Stills, 56. “The Spanish moss. Paynes Prairie. I remember Frances Murphree diving at the Gainesville Country Club, where the college now has its golf course. She was the star of the pool.

“I remember the KA’s blew up the SAE lions. They had some guy from the ROTC get about a dime’s worth of C-4, and they blew them to smithereens. Nobody told forever. It was much too big of a charge, and it blew out all the windows across the street.”

Stills was just 18 when he left school forever to pursue a career in music. As a founding member of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills & Nash, he made some of the most significant and lasting music of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Stills was born in Texas, and his parents, Otie and Talitha, moved the family to Illinois and Louisiana before settling – for the first time – in Florida.

“My father was basically one of those entrepreneur types that would just start up stuff, make a bunch of money and then get bored,” Stills recalls. “It would fall apart, then we’d be broke and he would start again.

“We didn’t get to the beach, but we stopped in Gainesville. He thought that was the prettiest place he saw.”

The family’s first home was at Northwest 6th Place and 22nd Street, in a new subdivision called University Court. Otie Stills built the house himself.

“The Dean of Men from the University of Florida lived next door, and he hated us. He almost kept me out of school, I had formative years there. Sold Coca-Cola at the stadium, and I fell in love with the Gators then.”

The dean, Lester Hale, had a daughter young Stevie’s age, Cindy. Today, Cynthia Hale Gross says her father actually liked Steve and his two sisters. Everybody did. “The Stills family built a brick wall around their house with the bricks from the old First Presbyterian Church,” Gross remembers. “And everyone was intrigued by that.”

Gross, who lives in Jacksonville, never forgot her tow-headed neighbor. The families often carpooled to Sunday School. “I always thought he  had one of the most infectious laughs I ever heard,” she says. “You couldn’t hear him laugh without laughing too.”

Stills: “I remember being able to ride your bicycle to school and not worrying about anything. I remember the black people being incredibly friendly. And Mama Lo’s, Jesus, to this day I still have not tasted its like.”

After a stint in the Tampa area, where Stephen attended public schools and a military academy, the family landed in San Juan, Costa Rica. He was enrolled at Colegio Lincoln, a tony prep school.

They weren’t done with Gainesville, however.

“When my father was in one of his flopping around, figuring out what to do periods, I moved back to Gainesville and went to GHS,” he remembers. “I’d gone to Costa Rica, and I came back to Gainesville High School to see about getting out early, and also to see what it was going to take to get into college.”

Stills is pictured four times in the 1963 GHS yearbook. Along with his senior picture, he’s seen playing a bass drum in the band, be-robed in the front row of the chorus, and as part of a folksinging group called the Accidental Trio.

“We were going to be the next Peter, Paul, and Mary,” says Nancy Ruth, the “Mary” of the trio (she was Nancy Willingham in those days). “I always had a feeling Steve would go far with his talent. My mom actually bought him the Goya guitar he played in the trio—I don’t think he could afford a good one—and boy, could he make that thing sing.”

On the back cover of the landmark 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again, one of the many names listed in the “thank you” section is Peanuts Willingham, Nancy’s mother.

Ruth, who now works as an accountant in Gainesville, remembers that her mom actually knew someone in the music business, for whom the Accidental Trio auditioned. The man was most impressed with Stephen’s guitar playing.

He’d fallen in love with the guitar during that first tenure in Costa Rica. “When I started getting good enough to play, there was nothing to do but play acoustic guitar in the bathroom at night, until my sister came and yelled at me,” he says.

Otie Stills was a land developer, among other things, and he called his teenaged son back to Costa Rica to help him with a project. Stephen finally graduated from Collegio Lincoln in 1963, and that fall he enrolled at UF.

Stills describes his family life as “chaos” and he was determined to get away.

Stills’ first rock ‘n’ roll outfit included his Accidental Trio buddy Jeff Williams, and Gainesville native Don Felder, the resident “hotshot guitarist” in town.

“Me and Jeff got this band called the Continentals, and we got Felder to come in,” Still explains. “He would only show up for gigs. He didn’t rehearse—we never saw him except for gigs. He was too cool to rehearse, and we were just kids. It was a real hoot. Jeff’s big brother was an SAE, so we played fraternity parties.”

Stills had to borrow an electric guitar to play with the band. “I was the drummer first, but Jeff couldn’t play anything. But he could keep time. And he was the one with the car and the mom that was really understanding.” He bunked at the Williams house and taught Jeff how to play the drums.

Felder would achieve superstardom, just a few years after Stills, as a member of the Eagles.

It was during his Joe College days that Stills began to appreciate rhythm ‘n’ blues music; professional soul bands were all the rage on Fraternity Row. There was somebody cool to see every weekend.

Although he attended classes religiously, Stills was not destined to graduate from UF.

“The University of Florida was not the Harvard of the South that it is today,” he says. “It was a step back from that rough-ass prep school in Costa Rica that I went to. That thing was the best school in the area. Presidents would send their sons and daughters to the school because it was so good.

“I came back because I liked it. I wanted out of the house, away from the family. I moved in with friends, and then the college told me that despite my good grades they basically couldn’t accept me because all the records were fucked up. I was there—I know I went to class!

“So I just split and went to New Orleans, then to New York—and the rest, as they say, is history.”

Along with Ohioan Richie Furay, Stills joined a harmony-singing folk group, the Au Go Go Singers. Eventually they found their way to California, where they put Buffalo Springfield together with Canadian singer/guitarist Neil Young.

Buffalo Springfield lasted just 18 months, but the band’s folk, rock and country blend laid the groundwork for so much that was to follow, including Crosby, Stills & Nash (and, sometimes, Young).

Today, Stills has homes in Beverly Hills, California, and in Florida, where he’s registered to vote. He is a lifetime member of the University of Florida Alumni Association.

Stills was the first musician inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice on the same night, for his work in Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills & Nash.

In 1968, just five years after he’d left Gainesville for good, Stephen Stills performed in Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.  Buffalo Springfield was opening for the Beach Boys.

“I remember what I wore,” he says. “I wore a green Pierre Cardin suit, and a paisley scarf as a tie. I was very much the ‘British pop star.’ Most people didn’t know that I was there, and nobody paid any attention, and there was no review. Nobody cared. It was a Beach Boys show.

“I think some of my running buds were in Vietnam, and a couple more were off in other colleges, or had moved away. But I was a townie.”

 

@2001 The Gainesville Sun

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead (1990)

Thomas Earl Petty was born and raised in Gainesville, Florida, a small town that thinks it’s Something Big because, for 50 miles east and west, there’s no culture, no big downtowns, no nothing; just pine forests and peanut farms, cattle ranches and cabbage patches. It’s smack in the middle of the skinny peninsula; pass through tiny, Andy Griffith–type cities with quaint names like Melrose, Newberry and Keystone Heights, and after 50 miles each way you hit water.

What separates Gainesville from its neighbors is the University Of Florida. The hallowed home of the Fightin’ Florida Gators is sprawled across half of Gainesville, and every year, when school is in session, the population swells by 30,000 people. In the summer when the college is relatively empty, Gainesville looks like everywhere else in northern Florida.

Other times of the year, though, the place is packed. What with all the students running loose, spending Daddy’s money, it was inevitable that Gainesville–of all the redneck bergs in the area–would be the place to get shopping centers and car dealerships, nightclubs, network TV affiliates and rock ‘n’ roll radio. Subsequently, it became the cultural hub for all of its satellites, the place where things happened.

If you lived there, however, and you wanted to try for the brass ring, Gainesville was as dead as they came.

“One thing I’ve noticed from traveling, whatever town you’re in, somebody will say, ‘There’s nothing going on here,'” Petty says. “Whoever you ask, they say, ‘this place is dead.’ So we always wonder where it isn’t dead.

“I’ve never had anything against Gainesville,” he adds. “I just wanted to make records. The other thing was, we were young and we wanted to do things, to make records and be on TV. And play places other than we’d played a dozen times. Or more.”

From an early age, Petty was sure that rock ‘n’ roll was going to be his ticket out. Ambitious, single–minded and stubborn as a gator on a sandbank, the tow–headed son of an insurance salesman literally never thought of anything else.

In the ’60’s, when rock ‘n’ roll came to town, many young Gainesville boys who would otherwise have wound up driving a truck or a tractor took up guitars–and those that could play them found plenty of work, gigging for fraternity parties or for the endless stream of students that frequented local bars.

Petty was in junior high school when he saw his inevitable future. It came via a chance encounter with Elvis Presley.

The King was in Ocala, 30 miles south of Gainesville, in the summer of 1961, shooting a scene from the film that would eventually be titled Follow That Dream. Petty’s uncle, who ran Gainesville’s camera–supply store, was assistant prop man for the movie shoot. He invited Tom’s mother–his sister–in–law–to bring Tom and his little brother down to watch Elvis work (they were present during filming of the “Elvis looks for a parking place” sequence).

Petty was deeply affected at the sight of Presley, in his white karate robes, breaking boards on the lawn outside his trailer. Behind the ropes, girls were squealing and sobbing Elvis’ name.

That quickly, Tom Petty knew he was finished with Midget League baseball and cowboys and Indians. He was 10 years old.

He traded a slingshot to a friend for a stack of Elvis singles (the friend had inherited the records from his college–bound older sister). He played them night and day, learning every word, and soon persuaded his father to buy him a cheap electric guitar. He taught himself to play a few chords.

The first Tom Petty band, the Sundowners, featured Petty on bass and guitar, with three of his friends from school on guitars and drums. As soon as Petty heard his first Beatles record, the Sundowners were transformed into mop–topped, Beatle–booted hipsters.

The Sundowners became the Epics when Petty was in high school; by that time, he didn’t do anything but play music. All his friends were musicians.

His father, who’d left school to join the Air Force during World War II, saw what was happening to Tom and demanded he ease up on the music. He thought Tom, who had a gift for drawing, could be an architect. A good, solid trade, as opposed to the iffy promise of show business.

Tom graduated from Gainesville High School in 1968, then tried junior college for a year. He came back to his father with an ultimatum: Daddy, he said, if you’ll just leave me alone, I’ll be a millionaire by the time I’m 35.

The Epics were one of the top bands in Gainesville; a good portion of their music consisted of songs that Petty had written.

In 1970, the band changed its name to Mudcrutch. According to Tommy Leadon, the group’s lead guitarist, “I think we liked it because it just sounded sort of dirty and decrepit. We thought it was funny–sounding; I don’t think it really means anything. It just projected a certain image, and we liked that.”

Leadon’s older brother Bernie had left Gainesville for California in the mid–’60s; by the time Mudcrutch was ready to cut its first record, in mid–1971, Bernie had been in the Flying Burrito Brothers and would soon become a founding member of the Eagles. He and Tommy conferred long–distance on how to go about recording.

“Bernie told me exactly how to do the basic tracks, the overdubs, how to mike my acoustic guitar,” Tommy Leadon says. “We set up in this club we were playing in and spent whole afternoons rehearsing the instrumental tracks. When we went down to Criteria, we nailed the first song, ‘Up In Mississippi,’ on take one. The guy (producer Ron Albert) was really surprised! We wasted no time, and got both songs done in one day.”

Mudcrutch knew Criteria studios in Miami because some of their favorite records, like Layla, had been recorded there. Their single–”Up In Mississippi” and “Cause Is Understood,” both written by Petty–was financed by a bell pepper farmer from the little town of Bushnell, Florida, named Gerald Maddox.

Maddox’ son was a friend of Mudcrutch drummer Randall Marsh, and he’d convinced his father to use the proceeds from a good crop of peppers to bankroll the Mudcrutch session. When the single was delivered, 500 copies, it was on the Pepper label; Maddox was listed as Executive Producer.

Mudcrutch had changed guitar players the summer before. During Marsh’s audition, his roommate, a wiry, curly–haired kid from Jacksonville named Mike Campbell, sat in on guitar. Ostensibly, Leadon was the lead player, and Campbell was auditioning for the rhythm guitarist seat (Petty was playing bass almost exclusively).

Campbell dutifully learned all of Mudcrutch’s original material, playing along as Leadon and Petty called out the chord changes. But when he took a searing, note–perfect solo on a jam of “Johnny B. Goode,” they knew he was a born lead player, and a potential asset. Henceforth, Leadon and Campbell would alternate between rhythm and lead guitar.

In those post–Woodstock days, the four–piece Mudcrutch appeared at innumerable free concerts in Gainesville, often playing for nothing. “We’d get up on the stage wherever we thought there’d be a good crowd that would be receptive to us,” Leadon remembers. “And in doing that, we’d get a lot of other jobs out of it. And we built up the name.”

Early on, Mudcrutch made a conscious decision to play original material almost exclusively. It made getting work in bars difficult.

“We used to say, ‘Here’s one by Santana! And just play one we wrote,” Petty remembers. “We used to call out whoever was popular at the time. They don’t know; the club owners don’t know. People’d go, ‘Oh, I dig Santana,’ and they’d hit the dance floor.”

On several occasions, they played “host band” for a weekend–long festival, held at the isolated, ramshackle farmhouse Marsh and Campbell shared on the north edge of town (the whole band lived there off and on, surrounded by girlfriends, chums and hangers–on).

With people camping in the woods, doing God knows what through all hours of the night, Mudcrutch and the other top Gainesville bands would play, one after the other, their amps turned up to maximum. The house’s official tenants, Marsh and Campbell, were evicted after the third “Mudcrutch Farm Festival.”

The band’s steady gig was at Dub’s, the concrete bunker of a rock ‘n’ roll club that was just a mile up the road from the “farm.” Often Mudcrutch pulled a six–week stint at Dub’s; the only thing they disliked was playing for the topless go–go dancers. It made them feel sleazy and unappreciated.

Once or twice, they played a regular “sit–down” concert at the university’s venerable old auditorium. Lynyrd Skynyrd, visiting from Jacksonville, would open. And whenever Mudcrutch played Jacksonville, they opened for Skynyrd.

Leadon dropped out in 1972, replaced by singer/guitarist Danny Roberts. The band also added organist Benmont Tench.

Tench, the son of a Circuit Court Judge, had spent his high school years in New Orleans. Upon returning to his hometown, he started hanging around with Mudcrutch. Petty took an instant liking to the shy younger musician and his creative keyboard work. His organ and piano playing added a layer to his songs that he’d never dreamed of.

Petty was determined to get Mudcrutch out of Gainesville. Between road gigs, when they’d pile in a van and drive south to Tampa, or north into Georgia and Alabama for a few nights’ work, he and the others worked on their promo pack. They also cut a crude demo tape.

After an unproductive trip to Capricorn Records in Macon (“They weren’t interested because it didn’t sound like Marshal Tucker or whatever”), the band started sending tapes out. They received the usual number of rejections. Petty: “We were pretty different from what was going on at the time–extended guitar solos…it was, well, the ’70s. Say no more. It was the mid–’70s.

“And the stuff we were doing, if you hear those first (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) albums, was pretty crude. Snappy. I remember they used to say, ‘But all the songs are so short; they’re too short!’ They didn’t understand it.”

In 1974 Mudcrutch got two responses from record companies that liked what they heard on the tape. One came from London Records, which none of the guys in the band took too seriously because the label didn’t have any contemporary artists, other than ZZ Top. And London requested a tape of cover songs! They knew it was far from prestigious.

The other–and it interested them greatly–came from Denny Cordell of Shelter Records. Cordell, who’d managed and produced Joe Cocker in his Mad Dogs And Englishmen period, had co–founded Shelter with Leon Russell in 1970. Cordell also produced classics by Procol Harum, and all of Russell’s albums. Shelter’s offices were in Tulsa, where Russell lived, and its studios were in Los Angeles.

Cordell was intrigued by the band’s short, snappy songs, a far cry from the long and rambling “free–form” guitar bands that were coming a dime a dozen out of the south during the period. He saw a tough, determined little band, possessed with a drive to succeed on its own terms, with untapped potential.

Cordell invited Mudcrutch west, an invitation they leapt upon. New York, their other option, was too cold a place to be starving musicians. On the way to California, they stopped in Tulsa and auditioned. In L.A., they did a session at the studio. Largely on the strength of Petty’s songwriting, Mudcrutch was signed to the label.

In 1975, Shelter released its one and only Mudcrutch single, a sloppy, reggae–country number called “Depot Street” (Depot Avenue is a large thoroughfare in Gainesville), backed with “Wild Eyes.” Both were Petty originals. The single didn’t chart, but Cordell encouraged Mudcrutch to continue.

“We started an album, and we floundered a lot because we couldn’t get the sound we wanted,” Campbell recalls. “We kept writing new songs and throwing the old songs out. We’d think we had an album, listen to it for a while and say, nah, and throw half of it out.”

Meanwhile, Petty was playing more guitar and less bass, leaving the latter to Roberts, who wasn’t crazy about the idea. Campbell says they were simply “trying to find the best approach. Then after a year or more, Tom started writing some better songs.”

Their future in limbo, Mudcrutch fell apart. “There were personal things, and musically, we were very frustrated,” says Campbell, “especially the rhythm section.” We sort of became a burden to the label after a while, spending money in the studio on an album that wasn’t working.”

When the band members went their separate ways, Cordell retained the contract in order to keep Petty, who he realized was the one with the talent. He’d signed Petty to a publishing deal and meant to keep him in the fold. The question was, would there be a solo career, or another band? He had Petty cut some demos with studio musicians.

At this moment, Tench, who like the others had stayed in L.A., taking gigs with Top 40 bands to pay the rent, accepted a friend’s offer of some free studio time. It would be after hours, from midnight until dawn, but all Tench had to do was buy the tape.

One afternoon, he literally ran into Stan Lynch, an old pal from Gainesville, on the street. Lynch had been the drummer for Road Turkey, another popular band in the university city, and had subbed for Mudcrutch’s drummer many times. He had also come west to seek his fortune. But Road Turkey has split up even before they reached California; now Lynch was drumming for a metal band and working the day shift at Tower Records.

Tench recruited Lynch to the ad hoc group he was assembling for his studio session; Lynch asked along bassist Ron Blair, yet another Gainesville alumnus, and Blair in turn called his friend Jeff Jourard. Guitarist Jourard was in a band called RGF with Blair back in Gainesville; his older brother Marty happened to be the guitarist in Lynch’s Road Turkey.

Lastly, Tench called Mike Campbell, who wasn’t doing much of anything, and Campbell invited Petty. Tench thought Petty could play a little harmonica, maybe add some guitar.

What happened surprised them all. They quickly fell into a pattern of Petty songs, the sound largely that of Mudcrutch, but with Blair’s solid bass and Lynch’s punchy but restrained drumming giving it the power and drive it had always lacked. Petty was learning to sing with a wild, new looseness. They all had a great time. Petty called Cordell in Tulsa; he had found his band.

The year was 1976. Elton John was on top with his Captain Fantastic album, disco was starting to happen, and Denny Cordell, who’d inherited all of Shelter’s Los Angeles holdings when he and Russell had parted company, was masterminding a quirky little rock ‘n’ roll band from Florida.

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers was released in December 1976. Just under 30 minutes long, the album contains some of the cleverest and most concise rock songwriting of the era. Petty wrote most of it; on some tunes he added words to Campbell’s music (they work this same way today, writing a good half of the Heartbreakers’ material jointly).

“Breakdown,” “American Girl,” “Strangered In The Night” and “Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It)” were structured like early Beatles songs: punchy, hooky and to the point. They were performed, however, like the Rolling Stones: gritty, loud and snarling. It was honest rock ‘n’ roll, young with an attitude.

Cordell’s gift was taking Mudcrutch’s somewhat twangy, country–rock sound and condensing and compressing it into a tight little fist of sonic rock ‘n’ roll.

Still, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers owed much to Petty’s other major influences–the Byrds, with their chiming guitars and lush vocal harmonies, and Buffalo Springfield, with their taste of playfulness and experimentation.

Critics, for the most part, loved it, praising it as a shot in the arm during the dog days of disco. What most American DJ’s concentrated on, however, was the cover, a photo of a sneering Petty in a black leather jacket, a belt of bullets draped over his shoulder. The photo clearly said, punk, and at the time punk was little more than ugly stories coming out of England about the Sex Pistols swearing on TV, and people putting safety pins in their noses. The album didn’t get airplay.

(Jeff Journard played on early sessions for the album–he doubles Campbell’s signature lead on “Breakdown”–but he was dropped from the final lineup because Petty felt there were already too many guitar players. He and his brother Marty went on to form the Los Angeles band the Motels.)

The Heartbreakers took a long stint at Hollywood’s famous Whisky A–Go–Go; they weren’t making money, but they got to be one of L.A.’s most popular club bands, opening for the likes of Blondie, Al Kooper and Nils Lofgren.

It was during a British tour with Lofgren, in fact, that people started paying serious attention to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. By the end of the brief visit, the crowds were responding more warmly to the Heartbreakers than to the headliner.

The British knew the Heartbreakers meant business, that Petty wore his heart on his sleeve begrudgingly. He was an angry young American. “It was happening in England,” Petty says. “We’d been there and seen the punk thing come down. We’d already seen it before America got a look at it. So when we came back to Hollywood, all of a sudden we were playing the Whisky and there started to be a real club scene again. People started coming, and from there, it slowly built.”

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers earned a silver record in England, where “American Girl” was a major hit; back in L.A., the band was still an opening act, a club band with a growing legion of rabid local fans.

Roger McGuinn, who was being informed more and more often that some blond guy from L.A. was singing just like him, checked Petty out–and recorded “American Girl” for his album Thunderbryd. Petty and Campbell sent McGuinn a new song called “Magnolia,” but McGuinn “couldn’t get behind it” and it was never released.

In early 1977 Shelter recorded the band at Paul’s Mall in Boston, and released four of the live tracks on a 12–inch disc to radio. Official Live ‘Leg contains in–concert versions of “Luna” and “Fooled Again” from the first album, plus a rousing cover of Chuck Berry’s “Jaguar And Thunderbird” and a nine–minute “jam” called “Dog On The Run.” In a shorter form, this song had been recorded in the studio, but was left off the album.

At the end of ’77, the Heartbreakers were well into recording their second Shelter album, provisionally titled Terminal Romance, when fate intervened.

Irving Azoff, who was then managing huge careers for the Eagles, Steely Dan, Boz Scaggs and Jimmy Buffett, included “Breakdown” in the soundtrack to his movie FM. The film, a forerunner of WKRP In Cincinnati (but not as funny), barely made a ripple when it was released. Its soundtrack album, however, was a bonanza for programmers across the country.

There on the wax were Steely Dan, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt…and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (Petty, as himself, appears in the film in a laconic cameo).

Within weeks of the movie’s release, the sinewy “Breakdown” was all over the FM airwaves. It didn’t matter that the LP it was taken from was over a year old, or that the band’s sophomore effort, now titled You’re Gonna Get It, was released almost simultaneously. Shelter re–released “Breakdown” as a single; it went to #39. The Heartbreakers were Top 40!

They went on tour, opening for Patti Smith, who was then all the rage with her Springsteen–penned “Because The Night.” More often than not, half the audience left after their set. It was destined to be their last tour as an opening act.

Petty got on well with Jimmy Iovine, the one–time engineer (John Lennon’s Mind Games, Springsteen’s Born To Run) who’d produced Smith’s breakthrough. Iovine, in turn, heard so much in the Heartbreakers–potential he didn’t feel was tapped on the Cordell albums–that he agreed to produce the third effort. It would not appear without a fight.

In 1978 Shelter’s distributor, ABC, was purchased by the conglomerate MCA. Petty, who was stinging from what he perceived as chintzy deals with Cordell, saw it as the perfect chance to get out of his Mudcrutch–era contract once and for all.

MCA knew the next album was going to be the one to put Petty over the top; Petty knew it too, and the prospect of making lousy money didn’t appeal to him at all. But the company wouldn’t renegotiate.

Balking at the prospect of being “bought and sold like a piece of meat,” Petty claimed, the contract was invalid because he hadn’t been consulted via the switch to MCA.

The company, in turn, hauled him into court for breach of contract, and the resulting legal wrangling took more than a year. The band was forbidden from performing live, and in May 1978 it filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Immediately, MCA was legally stopped from further prosecution until the matter could be resolved. But Petty had no label to release his (still unfinished) record. It seemed a stalemate.

In the summer of ’79, Petty and Cordell settled their differences out of court, and MCA, as weary from the proceedings, as Petty, offered a compromise; a new subsidiary, Backstreet Records, on whose (small) artist roster Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers would be in top standing. There was also a sizeable increase in the terms of Petty’s recording contract and publishing royalties.

Recorded in stops and starts during the year of legal hassling, Damn The Torpedos was released in the fall of 1979. It was immediately hailed as a great work of rock ‘n’ roll, its themes of rebellion and overcoming adversity made more raw and more real by the tough year Petty had spent in the courts, fighting for what the believed was right. (Of course, the same theme–Petty as the underdog who will fight to his last breath–was all over the two Shelter albums, too.)

Iovine’s production–and the dynamic boardwork of engineer Shelley Yakus–turned the muddy mixidown of You’re Gonna Get It into a sonic wall of sound. The sound got bigger, more expansive; Lynch’s drums, Tench’s organ and Campbell’s guitar seemed to share the wide front of the mix with equal space. The album was clean and melodic like its predecessors, but burst forth from the speakers with a crackling energy they simply didn’t contain. It was as if the Heartbreakers were being released from an iron grip after being held still for too long.

On top of it all was Petty’s voice; thin and reedy, bursting with anger and impatience on “Refugee.” “Here Comes My Girl” and “Don’ Do Me Like That,” each in turn a hit single (the latter went to #10 on the Billboard chart, and remains the highest–charting Heartbreakers single to date).

Disco was fading at last, but the rock ‘n’ roll scene was dominated by “corporate” rock entities, faceless bands like Styx and Kansas, with sterile and synthetic sounds that tended to blend together. Damn The Torpedos, an all–out rock ‘n’ roll guitar album, with intelligent lyrics and ballsy production, couldn’t have come at a better time.

Damn The Torpedos stayed in the Top 10 throughout the first half of 1980–it was kept from the top slot by Pink Floyd’s The Wall–and in time became Petty’s first platinum album. The 1980 arena tour, with Tommy Tutone in the opening spot, was a phenomenal success. (Petty came down with tonsillitis early in the tour, and a few dates were shuffled.)

In September, the band appeared at the “No Nukes” concerts in New York. They’re included on the soundtrack album, performing Solomon Burke’s “Cry To Me,” but they’re not in the film. It could have been an important career move but Petty getting sensitive about his public image, thought they’d played badly and insisted his footage be cut.

MCA got in Petty’s face again before the dust over Damn The Torpedos had even been settled. Announcing that all 1981–and–afterward “superstar product” would be list–priced at $9.98, a dollar more than was standard at the time, they told retailers the first release under the new price structure would be Tom Petty’s follow–up to Damn The Torpedos.

Petty, of course would have none of that. Proclaiming that he would not be held up as an example, he threatened to sit on the album indefinitely–or he might let them put it out, but call it Eight Ninety Eight. MCA, tired of duking it out with its temperamental star, gave in and released the album at the lower price.

For a while, the album was called Benmont’s Revenge; ultimately Petty titled it Hard Promises (on the cover, shot in a California record store, he stands next to a crate of albums under a sign reading $8.98).

The LP’s title came from “Insider,” a duet with Stevie Nicks that almost didn’t make it onto the sequence at all. Nicks, a great fan, had asked Petty for a song, and he’d giver her “Insider,” a taut, emotional ballad about fighting for what you think is right–the classic Petty theme. But “Insider” showed a vulnerability Petty hadn’t displayed before.

Nicks, in turn told Petty that he was obviously giving up something very personal and she couldn’t bear to take it from him.

A grateful Petty then gave her a rocker called “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” and he sang it as a duet on Nicks’ Bella Donna album, with the Heartbreakers providing the music. It remains her biggest solo hit, topping out at #3 in August ’81. A year later he wrote and sang “I Will Run To You” on Nicks’ second album The Wild Heart. Tench completed a world tour as Nicks’ keyboard player.

Hard Promises went platinum soon after its release. It spawned two singles: the Byrdsian “The Waiting,” and the moody “A Woman In Love (It’s Not Me),” which featured old friend Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass.

Ron Blair had been growing progressively more tired of the Heartbreakers’ non–stop touring schedule; halfway through the album he told Petty he would do one more tour, and that was that; he just “couldn’t get on the bus” again.

Dunn auditioned as a new heartbreaker bassist, along with a dozen more of L.A.’s finest players. But the one who got the nod was a virtual unknown, and a guy who had almost nothing in common with the Floridian Heartbreakers. He was Howie Epstein, a Jewish kid from Wisconsin who’d played in John Hiatt’s band, and on a bunch of sessions for some minor artists like Cindy Bullens. He was a fine singer and songwriter in his own right.

When he met Petty, Epstein was playing bass for Del Shannon. The year was 1981 and Petty, a longtime admirer, had agreed to produce Shannon’s comeback album, Drop Down And Get Me. The album stiffed, but the Heartbreakers came away with Howie Epstein.

Epstein’s first appearance with the band was on Sept. 1, 1982 at the Santa Cruz Auditorium. Four nights later, he played before 250,000 at the US Festival outside of San Bernardino.

The fifth Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album Long After Dark, appeared in October. Thematically bleak and shadowy, it was far less buoyant than its predecessors, yet still contained several Petty classics: “Straight Into Darkness,” “Change Of Heart” and the moderate hit single (#20) “You Got Lucky.”

Petty and the Heartbreakers toured for nearly a year after the release of Long After Dark (the promo video for “Change Of Heart” was filmed live in West Germany). Epstein’s harmony vocals were giving their live sound an extra dimension. When the tour was over, Petty took a long break.

“I just hit a point at the end of that tour; although it was a very enjoyable tour, musically. I just was ready to stop,” he says. “I wanted to stop everything for a year and try to resume living again. Because it was dawning on me that it’s impossible to write about things if you’re not out there living a fairly normal life; if you’re in a plane, or a car, or a room for year on end, then things to write about leave you.”

Petty hung around his Encino home (affectionately known as “Fort Petty”), taking his daughters to school, trying to be domestic. He and Lynch went to England to Las Vegas, home to Gainesville for a weekend, just to do something other than play and sing. He got bored very fast.

Ultimately, he built a studio in his basement, and the Heartbreakers assembled there to begin working on a new album in mid–’84. Petty had written several songs with titles like “Rebels” and “Southern Accents,” that described growing up in the south, yet included that patented Petty ingredient–fighting the odds. In many of the songs, just being southern stacked the odds against you.

He decided the album would be a concept piece about the south; ultimately, the band recorded 30 songs for it. They did a dozen in straight country arrangements. The plan was to make it a double album.

Another track recorded in the basement at Fort Petty was Nick Lowe’s “Crackin’ Up.” Lowe and his band had opened some of the American Long After Dark shows.

During the period the Heartbreakers were recording the Southern Accents album, Petty met David A. Stewart, the eccentric writer and producer behind the Eurythmics. Together, they wrote three songs for the album, including “Don’t Come Around Here No More” and recorded them with the Heartbreakers in record time.

With its ringing sitar, stuttering drum machine and mock–psychedelic atmosphere, “Don’t Come Around Here No More” was a single,” Petty says. “It was made like, say, ‘Good Vibrations’ was a single. We wanted to make something that was very different, that was gonna come on the radio and sound real exciting and different.

“I never worked so intensely on the production of a record! I would’ve liked to just send it out as a single; eventually I did get it out about a month before the album.”

But “Don’t Come Around Here No More” hardly fit in with the all–southern theme. Likewise, “It Ain’t Nothin’ To Me,” another Petty/Stewart number, owed more to Manhattan dance clubs than to the glorious confederacy of “Rebels.”

So the theme was rethought, and the album was scaled back to a single. One southern song, “Trailer,” was replaced at the last minute by “Mary’s New Car,” and Southern Accents was ready for a release in April 1985. (“Trailer” became the B–side of “Don’t Come Around Here No More.”)

The Stewart songs “It Ain’t Nothin’ To Me” and “Make It Better (Forget About Me”) were dressed up with sprightly horn charts; Petty loved the idea of putting out a record that wasn’t all “12–string guitars and organ.”

Likewise, Robbie Robertson had taken a vintage ’80 track, “The Best Of Everything,” and given it a horn arrangement and a harmony vocal by Richard Manuel. Robertson and Petty had intended it for the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy, but MCA had refused to lend the track to Warner Brothers, which was issuing the soundtrack.

“The Best Of Everything” was about a Dixie gal; she’d stayed down south while the narrator, her boyfriend hit the road. Petty loved Robertson’s arrangement because it seemed such a fitting coda to his album about leaving the south for bigger and better things. He saw “Rebels” and “The Best Of Everything” as bookends.

The sessions were not without their moments of conflict. Out of frustration, Petty smashed his left hand into a studio wall during the final sessions; so many bones were broken, a steel pin was surgically inserted into his hand to hold it together. His doctors doubted if he’d ever play guitar again.

Petty put the lie to that when the Heartbreakers hit the road in July for another extended trip. It was an elaborate show. The band was joined by a three–piece horn section and two female backup singers. The set was built like the front porch of an antebellum southern plantation home.

On one of the first dates, in Florida, old pal Roger McGuinn showed up to join the band for “So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star.” The song, which had been in their set on an earlier tour, became a staple of all the ’85 shows.

They appeared at Live Aid in Philadelphia, the first act (at 5 p.m.) to perform after the emotional finale from London had ended.

Campbell, Tench and Epstein had contributed to Bob Dylan’s spring ’85 LP Empire Burlesque. In September Petty’s manager, Tony Dimitriades, was approached by partner Elliot Roberts with a thought about the impending Farm Aid concert. Dylan, Roberts’ client, didn’t have a steady band at the time; he’d done Live Aid acoustically (with Keith Richards and Ron Wood). Maybe a Petty and the Heartbreakers/Dylan matchup would be a cool thing.

All parties agreed, and after a few weeks of rehearsal the ensemble played Farm Aid, the Heartbreakers barreling through breakneck versions of “Straight Into Darkness” and Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny,” along with several songs behind Dylan, including “Maggie’s Farm” (they were all joined on that one by a befuddled–looking Willie Nelson).

The final concerts of the Southern Accents tour, at Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theatre, had been recorded and filmed. The film–which was scaled down from a potential theatrical release to a long–form home video–was a pretty straightforward souvenir of the concert. But the album–titled, like the film, Pack Up The Plantation (something the roadies did after each show) was something else again.

Petty pulled out live tracks from as far back as 1978 (the Animals tune “Don’t Bring Me Down”) and ’81 (a version of “Insider” with Nicks) and sequenced them alongside the selections from the Southern Accents tour.

Nicks was featured singing harmony on the Searchers’ “Needles And Pins” from the ’81 tour; Petty later confessed it had been the one and only time they’d performed the song. And original bassist Ron Blair was included on no less than five of the LP’s selections, alongside the Howie Epstein material.

MCA released a promo video for “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” to MTV, but issued “Needles And Pins” as a single instead. It went nowhere. (Petty had lobbied for “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” as a single–it was upon the album’s release, the #1 AOR track in the country–but MCA didn’t agree.

Petty and his bandmates were especially prolific in 1985. Petty and Campbell gave “Ways To Be Wicked” to the L.A. band Lone Justice; he and Tech wrote “Never Be You,” Roseanne Cash’s #1 country hit, and Lynch co–wrote “Drivin’ With Your Eyes Closed” with Don Henley. Tench recorded and toured with the Eurythmics.

Campbell made the biggest score of them all. He gave Don Henley and instrumental track that Petty had elected not to write words to; Henley turned it into “The Boys Of Summer,” and his recording, featuring Campbell’s melancholy guitar, became one of the year’s biggest hits.

At Christmas time the Heartbreakers backed Dylan on short tours of Japan and Australia (where the “Hard To Handle” video was shot), then brought the show to the States for a series of concerts. The Dylan/Heartbreakers concerts were three–hour marathons of re–worked Dylan chestnuts and a healthy dose of obscure material. The band played several short sets without Dylan, too.

While in Australia, Petty produced a Dylan/Heartbreakers single, “Band Of The Hand” (the theme for Miami Vice director Michael Mann’s feature film of the same name). It appears only on MCA’s Band Of The Hand soundtrack album.

In the spring of ’86, Petty’s friend Timothy Hutton badgered him into making a cameo appearance in director Alan Rudolph’s fantasy film Made In Heaven. Neil Young and Ric Ocasek, both handled by the same management firm as Petty, were also given small roles.

Petty starred as Stanky, a disreputable nightclub owner robbed at gunpoint by Hutton and Ellen Barkin. His onscreen time totaled about three minutes.

It was also during this period that Petty became acquainted with country star Hank Williams Jr. Along with Willie Nelson and Reba McIntyre, Petty took a verse on Williams’ cover version of Hank Sr.’s “Mind Your Own Business.” The record became a sizeable country hit later in the year.

Petty and Dylan wrote “Got My Mind Made Up,” for Dylan’s album Knocked Out Loaded, released in the summer of ’86. Petty recorded a version too, with slightly different lyrics.

After the first round of Dylan commitments, Tench, who’d gigged on Elvis Costello’s King Of America, joined Costello’s Confederates Band for a swing through Europe. He was back for a Heartbreakers session in no time, however.

In late 1986 and early ’87, Petty and the group ducked into the basement to record tracks for their seventh studio album, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough).

Issued in spring 1987, the album was recorded in short bursts, and some of the songs–”The Damage You’ve Done,” “A Self–Made Man,” “How Many More Days”–were literally written as they were recorded, then embellished with overdubs later. Petty said they’d learned “the joy of throwin’ some chaos in” from Dylan.

“Jammin’ Me,” another song co–written by Dylan and Petty, was issued as the album’s lead–off single. It was then announced that Petty and the Heartbreakers would headline a “Rock ‘n’ Roll Caravan” tour during the summer, sharing the bill with the Del Fuegos and the Georgia Satellites. Petty told the press the multi–bill reminded him of the rock ‘n’ roll tours he’d known as a teenager in Florida.

Other highlights on the album were “Think About Me,” a bouncy rocker in the manner of the old days. “It’ll All Work Out,” featuring Campbell on mandolin, and the dreamy synthesizer ballad “Runaway Trains.”

Only days before the tour was set to begin, someone set fire to the back porch of Petty’s Encino home. Petty, his wife and daughters, plus a housekeeper, barely made it out before the blaze engulfed the two–story structure. All the fire department could do was spray it with water and stand back.

In the end the house was a total loss. Petty’s basement studio–where many of his master tapes and unreleased material was stored–was ruined from smoke and water damage.

In a state of shock, Petty left on his road commitments. Before, he’d introduce a solo version of “The Waiting” with a story about how he’d fought his doctors when they said he’d never play guitar again; he’d beaten the odds. This time, he talked about the somebody who’d torched his house. “You didn’t get me,” he’d call out. The case remains unsolved to this day.

During the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Caravan” tour, Petty heard a radio commercial for the B.F. Goodrich tire company that sounded suspiciously like his own recording of “Mary’s New Car.” The company had asked to license the song earlier in the year. Petty had refused, and now they were using a sound–alike song, and a sound–alike Petty! Furious, he threatened to sue B.F. Goodrich. The ad was quickly withdrawn. Once again, Petty had seen his artistic integrity on the line and had refused to back down.

Originally, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) was going to be a double album. Petty was really hot for it this time. But the constant touring with Dylan made such a commitment to recording impossible.

The Dylan/Petty/Heartbreakers axis finished up ’87 with a swing through Egypt and the Mid–East (with Roger McGuinn as opening act) before moving on to Europe and finally England, where it played a multi–night stand at Wembley Stadium.

It was backstage at Wembley that Dylan introduced Petty to George Harrison, and he in turn introduced Jeff Lynne. The two Englishmen were coming off a great season with Harrison’s Cloud Nine album. Lynne was about to leave for America to produce a comeback LP for Roy Orbison.

A month or two later, just around Christmas, Petty was sitting in his red Corvette at a stoplight in Hollywood when he looked over in the next lane and saw Jeff Lynne waiting for the same light. It being the holidays, with no one in town, he was as bored as Petty. Shouting through their car windows, they made plans to get together.

Later, Petty showed Lynne a song he was working on, “Yer So Bad.” Lynne suggested a chord change, one that Petty hadn’t thought of, and together they finished the song. The next day they wrote, “Free Fallin’.”

Hot to record, they rushed over to the nearest studio–at Mike Campbell’s house–and proceeded to lay down the tracks. Phil Jones, who had been Stan Lynch’s drum roadie and Heartbreaker percussionist on a couple of tours, was brought in to play drums. Before they knew it, they were making a record.

“We’d done a couple, and I said to Mike, ‘Well, it ain’t the band, is it?'” Petty says. “He said no, it ain’t. I said, well, I don’t want to cut these again and try to bring the band in. I’m just gonna call everybody up and say, ‘I’m gonna make a solo record.’

“It was a period of time when I don’t think the Heartbreakers were planning to work anyway. So I’d say, ‘Come on Jeff, let’s do just one more.’ He’d say he had to go back, and I’d say, ‘Aw, one more…’ through the whole album, really. ‘You can do two more, can’t you?’ We wanted to get all we could drag out of Jeff really.

“It was really incredibly easy with Jeff there; he has this amazing knack for arrangement. He showed us tons of things that we’d never come across, and by the same token, I think he learned a bit from us. I think that’s why it was such a pleasurable experience, because it was all new guys hanging out together.”

By the spring, they had laid down nine tracks, including “You Got It,” co–written by Orbison and destined for his own album. Harrison played and sang on several of the tunes.

In April, Petty’s manager played the finished songs for Billboard magazine, announcing the imminent release of Songs From The Garage, the fist Tom Petty solo album. Some radio stations received an advance cassette of a song called “Runnin’ Down A Dream.”

Warner Brothers asked Harrison for an extra song to serve as the B–side of a European single. He started to polish up an unfinished tune, “Handle With Care.”

Together Harrison and Lynne found themselves in Petty’s living room, finishing off the song. They had a great time. Bitten by the recording bug, they drove to Dylan’s Malibu home–and the four of them tossed ideas around, finished up “Handle With Care,” and cut the rhythm track in Dylan’s home studio.

Somebody thought of Orbison, who was doing a concert in L.A. that night. He came over and his vocal provided the finishing touch that “Handle With Care” needed. Right then and there, both the Petty and Orbison albums were put on hold. Harrison nixed giving Warner Brothers “Handle With Care” as a B–side. He knew it was too good.

Without thinking about it too much, the fivesome–dubbed the Traveling Wilburys –became a working unit.

Together, acoustic guitars in hand, they wrote nearly 20 songs, each contributing lines. Whoever wrote usually sang, but there were exceptions. On the finished album, Traveling Wilburys Volume One, Petty sang lead on one track, “Last Night.”

“All the Wilburys songs, people want to think that we wrote them individually, but we didn’t,” Petty recalls. “I think Dylan wrote most of ‘Last Night.’ We sat on the floor, the five of us, and wrote, literally, all those songs.”

“It’s even hard for us to believe, really. When we stared that record–this is another thing people don’t really understand–we had been hanging around for quite a while, all of us except Roy. But Roy had been around the sessions for my album.

“The core band then was me, Mike, Jeff and Phil Jones. George was around a lot too. We’d say, oh, Randy Newman’s coming in today–let’s do one for Randy. So it wasn’t like it was just the whole bunch of us together for the first time.”

The Wilburys’ album is unassuming and fun; it’s as if all the participants took off their serious caps for a spell. “It was 10 days to write them, if you don’t count “Handle With Care,” which was done first. Then 10 days to write nine more. We did the basic tracks and went to England and worked for another month, I guess, finishing up.”

Petty says the Wilburys loved what they’d done from the outset. “We were like little kids, leaping on each other’s backs. We were just so thrilled. When you could finally put it up and hear it all going by, that’s when I started to think, hey, this is a pretty good album. We didn’t think about it much until then, because we were so busy. It was a frantic pace we were keeping.

“(But) we set out to make a great album. We didn’t want to do it if it wasn’t going to be real good. And we knew we’d get a bunch of shit if it wasn’t real good.”

Traveling Wilburys Volume One appeared in October, to ecstatic reviews. Many critics commented on how good it was to hear Dylan and Harrison enjoying themselves for a change. And Orbison, it was noted, was in better voice than ever. Two months later, Orbison died of a heart attack. “I’m just glad that I knew him,” Petty says. “I’m honored that I got to spend that much time with him, and work with him. I think the last conversation we had, a few days before he died, he was just over the moon. They’d just finished his album. Roy had a good idea, I believe that things were really about to go his way; we all wish he could’ve seen the great success he’s had ’cause boy, he would’ve loved that.”

Orbison’s Mystery Girl, with contributions from Petty, Lynne and Campbell returned to the studio and finished the solo album, now called Full Moon Fever. Petty thought Songs From The Garage might be construed as a throwaway title, denoting garage rock or just playing around, and that was definitely not the point.

Released in April 1989, Full Moon Fever was cleaner and more accessible than the recent Heartbreakers albums; Lynne’s gift as a producer seemed to know when to bring Petty’s reedy voice up to the front.

Four hit singles came from the album: “I Won’t Back Down,” “Runnin’ Down A Dream” and “A Face In The Crowd” made the Top 20, “Free Fallin'” went to #7 (Petty’s highest–charting single to date). A fifth single “Yer So Bad” was released a full year later after the album appeared, but did not chart.

Petty left two completed songs in the can: One, “Don’t Treat Me Like A Stranger,” appeared on the British CD single of “I Won’t Back Down.” The other, “Down The Line,” was issued as the B–side to “Free Fallin'” in the United States.

Full Moon Fever turned into the Album That Wouldn’t Die. Eventually, it sold over four million copies and stayed in the Top 10 for the better part of a year. With the Heartbreakers, Petty toured the country twice in support of the album, in summer ’89 and again this winter.

During the first leg of the tour, Petty invited the radical environmentalist group Earth First along to distribute literature. As he approached his 40th birthday, he felt a growing concern over the sorry state of the planet. The dedication–in public and in private–to the environmental issue was carried over into 1990, and the second leg of the tour, on which the band returned to Gainesville for the first time in seven years.

In 1976 his onstage raps were usually “Let’s hear it for rock ‘n’ roll,” “Are you feelin’ alright?” and things of that nature. On this tour, he talked about saving the earth, every night, just before breaking into Thunderclap Newman’s 1970 song “Something In The Air.”

The Traveling Wilburys’ version of “Nobody’s Child” (an old country song by Mel Force and Cy Coben) was scheduled for release as Wilbury/Warner Bros single in mid summer. The song was supposed to be included on The Romanian Angel Appeal, a benefit LP (organized by Harrison’s wife Olivia) for the orphans of revolution–torn Romania.

The Wilburys reportedly were finishing up their second album, with no one replacing Orbison, in early June.

Mike Campbell is producing much of Springsteen paramour Patty Scialfa’s first solo disc; in ’89, he and Don Henley collaborated on “The Heart Of The Matter,” which became another hit for the one–time Eagle. Howie Epstein was behind the board for Carlene Carter’s forthcoming comeback LP.

Stan Lynch and Benmont Tench are in the studio with other artists; last year, Lynch co–wrote Henley’s solo hit “The Last Worthless Evening” and other tracks on Henley’s The End Of The Innocence album. Tench most recently appeared on Elvis Costello’s Spike and U2’s Rattle And Hum, among others.

Inevitably, they’ll all regroup as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and cut another record. They’re brothers; they’ve lived and breathed each other for nearly two decades. And to the member, they couldn’t name another band they’d rather play with. Each of the four Heartbreakers name Tom Petty, unequivocally, as their favorite songwriter.

In a career that’s spanned 14 professional years, Tom Petty stands out as an artist fiercely dedicated to his own freedom of expression; he saw what he wanted as a boy back in Gainesville, and he’s fought–and won–many a battle to make sure his dream happened the way he wanted it to.