Tag: Stan Lynch

Don’t do me like that: Stan Lynch after the Heartbreakers

 

“It was very offensive to be 30 years old and playing in a ‘pop’ band.”

Nov. 21, 1995/The Gainesville Sun

CRESCENT BEACH – The other night, Stan Lynch went to see some friends perform in the Jacksonville Coliseum. “It’s very nostalgic to walk into a big arena full of people,” he says, shaking his head with wonder. “I feel like I’m supposed to be going to work.”

For nearly 20 years, Lynch sat in the drummer’s chair with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, making a bucketful of classic rock records and playing thousands of concerts in countries all over the world.

He left the band a year ago, to concentrate on writing and producing, something he says he wasn’t encouraged to do in Petty’s group. It was not an entirely amicable split.

“Am I a fool to let it go?” he asks. “Maybe. But look what I get. I have this whole life that now is my own. I can do whatever I want with it.” He hasn’t touched a drum kit in ages.

Lynch, 40, grew up in Gainesville. At 19, he’d moved to Los Angeles and almost immediately got in the music business fast lane. In 1989 he came back to Florida for good, buying the very beach house where, as a high schooler, he’d go to visit his Mom after his parents were divorced.

“Twenty-five years ago, all I wanted to be was a rock ‘n’ roll drummer,” he says. “I remember playing in the Westwood Junior High Band, walking home for miles convinced that my destiny was to one day be a big time rock ‘n’ roll drummer.

“Now I have the very same commitment to a new dream.”

The fruits of his most recent labors arrive in record stores today. Actual Miles is a greatest-hits record by sometime Eagles member Don Henley; Lynch co-wrote and co-produced four of the album’s 13 songs, including the stunning, apocalyptic single “The Garden of Allah.”

The first Henley/Lynch collaboration, “Driving With Your Eyes Closed,” appeared in 1985. Last year, they co-wrote the Eagles hit “Learn to Be Still,” on an album that sold more than seven million copies.

“We have very full lives without each other,” Lynch chuckles, “but I find being around Don is pretty invigorating; it’s exciting for me. I think he’s an intelligent, humorous character. I think he’s hysterical. He’s a real source of entertainment for me.”

Henley, reached by phone from Tokyo, where the reunited Eagles are touring, says much the same around his sometime partner. “He’s one of the funniest people I ever met,” Henley explains. “And that is very important when you’ve been in the studio for two or three months. Things get a little grim after working 14-, 15-hour days in a little room with no windows, hearing the same song over and over again.”

“It’s good to have some laughs, and Stan always provides those.”

Henley, Lynch counters, “is a complex guy. He’s my senior by eight years, and he’s like my big brother; so everything I go through it seems like he’s already been through.”

“I know it’s been a rough year for him, and I think he’s handled it very well,” says Henley. “And I think this project has helped him to cope with it.

“I remember how I felt when my group broke up — I went through an entire gamut of emotions, from anger to fear to hurt to panic.”

“The Garden of Allah,” more than seven minutes long, is a narrative in which Satan comes to L.A. (“Gomorrah-By-the-Sea”) and discovers that it’s too depraved, even for him. Henley’s voice rides a wave of gritty and incessant electric guitar riffing and eerie background vocals by Sheryl Crow.

Henley calls Lynch a “brilliant” guitarist and arranger, and says a lot of the “Allah” track sprang from his creative well. “He also provides a lot of knowledge about recording techniques, about microphones and instruments. He brings a lot to the party.

“And I’m watching him blossom and grow before my very eyes. He’s really got a lot of talent in there from all his years in the Heartbreakers.”

Ironically, a six-CD box set, featuring more than 100 Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers songs, is also released today. Playback 1973-93 includes hits, album tracks, obscure B-sides and songs that were left in the can for one reason or another.

It’s a bittersweet package for Stan Lynch, who remains “incredibly proud” of his band’s accomplishments, but still hears the echo of the door slamming shut.

The seeds of dissent were probably planted around the time of Full Moon Fever, Petty’s first “solo” album. All of the Heartbreakers were invited in to play cameo roles.

Except Lynch, who was in Florida, renovating his house. “I felt it was lame for the whole band to be there and not be ‘Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers,'” Lynch says. “If you want people’s input, and their creativity, you should credit them. That’s my impression. It becomes a bitter issue for a guy like me.”

The original Heartbreakers had all been friends in Gainesville, and the band’s distinctively raucous sound had been forged collectively. By the time of “Fever,” Lynch thought Petty’s music was going from rock to pop, and that he was being asked to “put on the plow harness” and drum along to songs he found “embarrassing.” He wasn’t afraid to say so, either, and the chasm grew wider.

“I had such a long history and investment that I wasn’t prepared for the changes that came,” he says. “I couldn’t accept it. It felt like a bad deal to me.

“Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers started out as a very rebellious rock ‘n’ roll band. We were noisy and obnoxious; I thought we were fabulous.” Over time, he grew to dislike the changes in Petty’s music. “It became sissy to me,” he says. “It was very offensive to be 30 years old and playing in a ‘pop’ band.”

By the time Petty made Wildflowers, his second non-Heartbreakers album, Lynch (who was writing songs at the time with the Mavericks, James House, the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Toto guitarist Steve Lukather) was making no bones about his displeasure. Words were passed. When he refused to tour in support of the album, everyone agreed it was time for a parting of the ways.

“Stan’s a very talented guy and has that double plus of being a really nice guy,” Petty says in the liner notes to the box set. “But we’re happy, too. Things have worked out for both of us. It really hurt us deeply when he left, but it wasn’t going to go any further.”

Says Henley: “It’s difficult to collaborate with people if the only time you see them is when you get together to write a song. Because a lot of songwriting happens when you’re not trying to write songs. When we’re just hanging out together, or joking around, something will come up.

“So a partner has to be a buddy as well. And that’s what I like about Stan, we have a lot of common interests, and we can hang out together outside the context of work.”

Withdrawal from something big is never easy, but having friends like Henley – and collaborating on successful songs – takes a lot of the sting out.

Anyway, Stan Lynch is trying to be philosophical. “I would rather,” he shrugs, “be a struggling songwriter than a successful rock drummer, at this point in my life.”

Stan Lynch, the Homebody Heartbreaker

Stan Lynch can have anything he wants. Cars, women, drugs, you name it, any of the trappings that rock stardom has to offer, Stan can get ’em. As the drummer for Tom Petty’s critically-and-commercially potent Heartbreakers, he’s been around the world seven times, owns an apartment high above Santa Monica bay in sunny California, can boast of two platinum and three gold albums, and nearly as many hit singles as Michael Jackson.

What Stan wants most of all, he says, is a nice house on Little Lake Geneva, where he can water-ski, and the chance to hop into Gainesville when he pleases for an exciting night on the town.

This is not merely a rock-star retreat for Stan Lynch, a place to get away from it all. He’s a Gainesville native, like three of the other original Heartbreakers (Tom, too), and he’ll tell you he hangs out here, lives in Keystone Heights half the year, because he wants to. It’s the only nice he clings to stringently.

“I feel comfortable here,” he says, “my roots are here. Really, I come back because I can. I don’t have to be defensive, I don’t have to have my guard up, to have a rap, or a glad hand. It’s comfortable for me to be here, that’s all. I don’t feel like I’m lazy if I’m not working. In L.A., if I’m not working I feel very upset about it.

It’s been 10 years since 19-year-old Stan Lynch, who’d attended every high school in Gainesville and deigned to graduate “because that was one thing I could do for my parents,” stuffed his drum kit in an old Volkswagen and headed, without any real goal, for California. Ostensibly, he was going to hook up with guitarist Marty Jourard, his cohort from Road Turkey, a popular local group, to try for a recording deal. Jourard bailed out at the last minute and Stan, with the $100 his father had given him, went to see what would happen.

He lived, for a dollar a day, in a friend’s basement, without kitchen or bathroom. He took a job in a record store, and by night drummed in a Heavy Metal band. “This was around the Bee Gees and disco time, and there wasn’t a big audience for what we were doing,” he remembers. “I had to beg the record store to fire me so I could get unemployment.”

Enter pianist Benmont Tench, a friend from Hogtown, who’d also gone West with his band Mudcrutch (along with guitarists Tom Petty and Mike Campbell). He and Stan literally ran into each other on the street, and Benmont told Stan he was about to record some demo tapes in a 24-track studio, would he want to come and play? Without much else to do, Stan said sure, and he brought along bassist Ron Blair, another transplanted Floridian, to the sessions. Benmont showed up with Mike Campbell.

Road Turkey and Mudcrutch had shared billings in Gainesville for much of the early ’70s, and the reunion was something of an old home night. They got along fabulously well, played together famously. Benmont then invited Tom Petty, who was working on a solo recording deal since Mudcrutch hadn’t clicked in L.A., to the sessions.

“Then Tom invited me to Tulsa, where he was working on his record,” Stan says, “and, I guess, on the way back, he made the commitments in his mind that we were gonna be the band he worked with.”

So were Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers drawn together. Their self-titled first album, recorded in six weeks in 1976, did nothing untl “Breakdown,” the single, was included on the “FM” soundtrack two years later. “You’re Gonna Get It,” the second album, was a critical smash. “Suddenly we were getting on the radio,” Stan recalls, “and they started checking out the albums. And then we went to England.”

The group was ecstatically received in Britain, the albums having sold there in large quantities already. Stan remembers screaming fans and his first taste of “big hotel rooms and lots of women. And then it was back to California, and I was back living in the basement.”

It took another year for TP and the band to really hit it big in America. After a bout with bankruptcy, numerous hassles with their record company, and their share of personnel problems (Stan admits he’s been fired from the band several times, only to be invited back quickly) they scored a direct hit with “Damn the Torpedoes” in 1979. Platinum album, three very big singles. They had made it.

At 29, Stan Lynch looks more like a lanky kid from Gainesville than a fast-living rock star. It’s a contrast that baffles him sometimes, for while he’s grown quite accustomed to money and notoriety, he’s never outgrown some of the awe of his almost daily experiences.

“That’s a real twilight zone, when you walk on the stage and the lights are down and it’s ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…’ time. I don’t know what happens at that point, if I’m five years old or 50. I’m literally lost on that stage before they turn the lights on. It’s like, ‘How did I end up here? What’s going on? How come there’s only five of us and 20,000 of them?’ This music stuff, it’s really cool.”

But he likes being able to turn it off. “When I’m onstage, people know me — I’m the drummer in the band. As soon as I walk off, that’s it. I can almost, at my own gig, walk in the front door.

“I wouldn’t miss it if it ended today. I’ve been to Japan, I’ve seen that adulation is like. It’s like being a football player — you put that uniform on and you’re seven feet tall. But I couldn’t go to sleep with that thing on. It’d drive me nuts.”

Stan Lynch is a creative, rather than just hard and loud, drummer – lean, subtle and bombastic as Petty’s eccentric arrangements warrant. He’s proud of his band, proud of his contributions to their music, and he’s proud of Tom Petty’s songwriting. He’s careful to take each song, one at a time, and give it what he feels it needs.

“When Tom plays you a song, it’s usually just on acoustic guitar or a rough demo. Really in a seed-germ form.

“Our job, my job as drummer, is to listen real close and decide what I could do to add to it or if I should walk away from it. As a drummer my job is not to get my nut off and put as many drum licks on the record as I can, it’s to make the song work. To make Tom be heard. I don’t want people to notice, particularly, that I’m doing something different with my kick drum. I just want them to know that the song flows, the chords are big and it explodes, and it’s memorable.”

It’s taken a while, but Stan’s developed an ear. “It’s really sophisticated to make an unsophisticated-sounding record. I know some people who’ll walk in and hear 20 different takes of the same song and go, ‘They all sound alike.’ Tom, or me, or someone will go ‘Yeah, but take 15 is the one.'”

The Heartbreakers are all close friends, but, as even Stan admits, that’s a bit of a grey area. Tom is not the easiest person to get to know. “We travel together, and he trusts me,” Stan says. “If there’s a jam, it’s ‘Lynch’ll get me out of it.’ You know, I don’t point to him and yell, ‘Hey, I’ve got Tom here!’ We look out for each other.”

And, on the Heartbreakers stage, Stan sings all the main harmonies with his boss, not a pedestrian task given Petty’s idiosyncratic style. “Tom’s always been a style singer. He’s never gonna do Pavarotti, but he’s a style man. Singing with Tom is a riot, because you have to fake him. You’ve got to, otherwise you stick out like a sore thumb. Tom has his own way of thinking, walking, talking, and just doing it.”

He has nothing but praise for his bandmates, too. “They’re the only people who’ll put up with me,” he says of Benmont, Mike, and newcomer Howie Epstein (Ron Blair left the group in 1981), “When you’re making a record or you’re on the road, they’re your friends. They’re the only constant you’ve got.”

Currently, the Heartbreakers are working on LP number six at Petty’s home studio in Los Angeles. Stan says they’ve already recorded “probably 30 songs,” with some done up in a country groove, some as Heavy Metal. Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics has been co-writing with Petty, and adding horn charts to the recorded songs. “It sounds great,” Stan reports enthusiastically, “but I won’t know what songs’ll be on it until they send me the album.” Stan also drummed this year on Rank and File’s second LP, and is helping out on former Eagle Don Henley’s work-in-progress.

He returns to Gainesville every few months, while the band takes a breather. Tom came with him earlier this year, and the pair, hyped up from their studio work, couldn’t sit still at Stan’s Keystone home, so they played, unannounced, at The Islands before a stunned audience. “The whole visit really had an effect on Tom,” Stan says (since his first make-or-break departure, Tom had never come home for a holiday). “He still talks about it.”

Although he loves California, loves his black Jaguar and his high-rise over Venice Beach (“It looks like the building in the Bob Newhart show”) he always makes it back to Gainesville, to see his father (a Santa Fe Community College instructor), to water-ski, to hang out. He’s gone drug-free for a good long while, a fact he’s understandably proud of, and thinks the women in Gainesville are more beautiful than California girls. He lives there; he lives here. He likens it to one of Tom’s song titles: between two worlds.

He’s looking for a bigger house on the lake, “where I can have a music room, a big junk room I can make a lot of noise in” and entertain his buddies. “This town has a lot of really talented musicians, and one of my goals is to get some of these guys out there. They’re a little in awe of the physical dynamics of getting to California, or they’ve got families and can’t just pick up and split. But maybe I can be a spark, and help them to do something – and help me, too.

“And I’m getting to that funny age where I’m starting to think a little bit about children, and not letting them grow up in L.A. They’ll grow up in a place where they can have bicycles and stay out after it gets dark. I want my kids to grow up where there’s creeks, and where they can learn to drive a boat. I don’t want no city kids!

“That’s my ideal, anyways. I’m not gonna drop dead if it doesn’t happen. I didn’t even know what a Mazuratti was or a Jaguar was until I was 25 years old, and I’m glad.”

1984, The Gainesville Sun

 

 

 

Shine On: A Tribute to Pete Ham (liner notes)

SHINE ON : A TRIBUTE TO PETE HAM

Look at every existing photograph of Peter William Ham and you’ll see it – a deep sadness behind the eyes, a sense of longing for something as intangible as the wind, a gossamer dream, always in his thoughts but just beyond his grasp.

It’s a face that declares, with its world-weary gaze, that he knows there’s something better out there. It says, as Brian Wilson once declared, “I just wasn’t made for these times.”

That feeling runs through Pete Ham’s music, too, even the high-octane rockers and sublimely melodious love songs. As a key component of the Welsh/English band Badfinger, he gave us nearly 100 songs that reached for the skies, even as they explored the depths of the soul.

He was a rare bird, was Pete Ham. And when he left this world, on April 24, 1975, just three days before his 28th birthday, he left a hole as big as his Swansea-sized heart.

The musicians who’ve come together to salute this lost genius chose the songs they wanted to cover, as Pete Ham, along with the legacy of Badfinger, continues to move and inspire every generation.

“The more I learned about Badfinger,” says longtime Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch, who contributed to three of the Shine On tracks, “the more upset it made me, because they were so rich with promise. It’s not just a cautionary tale – it’s truly heartbreaking.”

As part of the Speaker Wars, with vocalist Jon Christopher Davis, Lynch turns “No Matter What” – Badfinger’s power pop anthem – into a gently swaying, country-rocking declaration of devotion.

And a second version of the song, with Davis and Indian vocalist Susmita Datta, re-imagines it as a psychedelic Hindustani dream.

With ex-Georgia Satellite Dan Baird, Lynch put together The Chefs; the band contributed a raucous rave-up version of “I Can’t Take It,” one of the few full-tilt rave-ups in the Ham catalog.

“That stuff was so infectious and fabulous, so obviously good,” Lynch says. “I never saw them live, but at the time when you heard those songs, you knew they were a cut above. The vocals were just so emotional. They weren’t showbiz. ‘Day After Day’ ripped my heart out.”

That song, perhaps Pete’s most indelible gift to the world, is interpreted on Shine On by singer/songwriter Shelby Lynne, who masterfully found the emotional core and gave it a blistering body that brings to mind nothing less than Dusty Springfield alongside the 1960s Wall of Sound.

That sort of inside-out happens time and again on this collection, from the sweet heartbreak of Mary Lou Lord’s bared-nerves take on “Baby Blue” to Amy Rigby’s spellbinding “Midnight Caller,” from Melanie’s heartbroken “Without You” (written by Pete with his Badfinger bandmate Tom Evans) to the love-has-no-limits rendition of “We’re For the Dark” by Mary Karlzen.

Each of the artists on Shine On – a true labor of love – would agree. We are all the better for however briefly sharing the planet with him.

Bill DeYoung

June 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Heartbreakers interview: Satan Eats Cheese Whiz (1987)

billdeyoungcom Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers Let Me Up I've Had EnoughTom Petty and the Heartbreakers have come full circle. They began, more than a decade ago, as a ragtag quintet of friends from North Florida playing uncluttered rock ‘n’ roll, and eventually came to experiment with diverse and wide-ranging sounds and ideas. With Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), their seventh studio album (to be released Monday by MCA Records), Tom Petty and his group — a little less ragtag, and a little more worldly-wise — have come back to the future. It took them 12 years, but they’ve finally made a great uncluttered rock ‘n’ roll record.

Gainesville natives Benmont Tench and Stan Lynch, keyboards and drums, respectively, both agree that the last two years — much of the time spent touring with Bob Dylan — were positive for the band. Today they feel as sprightly as they did in their salad days. Over a four-week period last spring, sandwiched in between tours of the Far East and the United States with Dylan, the five musicians recorded more than 30 songs. Many of them, they only played two or three times, and were recorded to capture the spontaneity.

“Most of the record is like that,” Tench says. “‘The Damage You’ve Done,’ ‘Think About Me,’ ‘A Self-Made Man,’ ‘Let Me Up,’ most of this record is from that month of doing live tracking. The second side is mainly that stuff, and the first side is mainly stuff that was worked on more.”

Petty and guitarist Mike Campbell produced the 11-track album, and there are no musicians other than the five Heartbreakers present. Overdubbing, even by the band, was kept to a minimum. Bass player Howie Epstein laid on harmony vocals to a few of the completed songs.

Most of the numbers are straightforward rock-type songs (in 1987, “Petty-esque” is probably a good enough way to describe the band’s brand of guitar-based rock) with an ensemble sound, rather than lead guitar or keyboard, prevalent. There are very few solos.

The exceptions: “It’ll All Work Out” is a ballad in waltz time, with an Oriental sheen. Campbell is featured on the koto, a Japanese stringed instrument.

The score to the melancholy “Runaway Trains” is reminiscent of the synthesizer band Tangerine Dream, hypnotic and dreamlike. It’s also one of Petty’s most strikingly poetic lyrics (Campbell wrote the music, and Petty the basic melody. Lynch remembers that the song existed for several years without lyrics).

With its moody synthesizer and sparkling electric guitar fire, “Runaway Trains” recalls “The Boys of Summer,” the song Campbell co-wrote a few years ago with Don Henley. It was a big hit for the former Eagle.

“Everything he writes now sounds a little bit like ‘Boys of Summer,’” Lynch says with a snicker. Tench gives him a questioning look, then they both laugh. “Ah, print it, I don’t care,” Lynch says, on a roll. “Hey, why not? ‘The Boys of Summer’ been berry, berry good to Mike Campbell. Once a hit, always a hit.”

Tench interrupts his stream of humorous observation. “‘My Life/Your World’ is Mike’s, too, and it doesn’t sound like ‘The Boys of Summer.’”

“It does if you play it backwards,” Lynch says.

With “My Life/Your World,” Petty sings wry social commentary over a dance-club beat. The song sounds like the heir to “It Ain’t Nothing to Me,” from 1985’s Southern Accents album. “I think it’s a better song than ‘It Ain’t Nothing to Me,’” Tench says. “It’s the Heartbreakers play ‘Billie Jean.’”

Otherwise, “Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough)” rocks. It’s not overtly literate (a good sign if one is on the lookout for genuine rock ‘n’ roll), but it’s not without its uplifting emotional moments. For every song like the title track, an all-out screamer (literally), there’s another like “Ain’t Love Strange,” that puts focused lyrics (“It can make you string barbed wire/Around your little piece of ground/For emotional protection/Oh but it’s too late now”) next to an exhilarating, seemingly spontaneous arrangement.

“‘Ain’t Love Strange’ must have meant something to Tom,” Lynch theorizes. “I’m guessing, but I’ve seem that kind of reaction out of him, when we were doing that song ‘Insider’ a few years ago. Good, bad, or indifferent, he made psychic communion with that song. He had made an attachment to ‘Insider.’ He loved it.

“And I think ‘Ain’t Love Strange’ had that same biological reaction. There’s a couple of things Tom is always unwavering on, and that was one of those songs that it didn’t matter if we got a good or a bad version or not, it was going on the record.”

Both Lynch and Tench say this is the first album that all the band members have been completely satisfied with before it’s released. They think it’s an honest record, true to Petty and Campbell’s vision of an all-band effort, circa 1987. “It doesn’t feel overly autobiographical to me,” Lynch says. “This isn’t Tom’s Nebraska. It’s not Okahumpka.”

“It’s not Alachua,” offers Tench.

“No,” Lynch adds. “He said to me, ‘It’s a good rock ‘n’ roll record. We did our best.’”

Campbell co-wrote half the LP’s songs with Petty. Bob Dylan contributed some of the lyrics to “Jammin’ Me,” the album’s first single, which decries the media’s “information overload,” according to Tench.

“I don’t have any idea which parts of it Bob wrote,” he adds, “but I think you can take a wild guess… ‘Take back Pasadena….’ The blatantly cynical and sarcastic stuff is probably Bob’s.”

Typical of a Heartbreakers album, there’s 20-second snatch of gibberish between two songs on the second side. It’s the band engaged in a brief tribal chant, complete with hand claps, ending in laughter and a quick joke. Listen closely, Lynch laughs, and it says “Satan Eats Cheeze Whiz.”

“I like that stuff,” Tench comments. “I think it’s funny. There isn’t anybody who’s any good who’s funny any more. Bruce is great; he’s not funny. U2’s a good band; they aren’t funny. The hell with ’em.”

(The LP’s cover, a favorite among the band members, is a composite face — screaming — made up of pieces of each of their own mugs. On the inner sleeve is a Los Angeles Herald-Examiner news photo, showing a small plane that actually went nose-down into a woman’s backyard swimming pool. near the studio where the Heartbreakers were recording. Petty wrote a verse in “My Life/Your World” about it. They all think that it’s a great picture, too.)

Following last summer’s American tour with Dylan, while Petty and Campbell were cooking up additional songs for “Let Me Up,” Tench went to England for a month-long tour with Elvis Costello. He played piano in Costello’s Confederates. The high point, for him, was a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where Van Morrison sang a few numbers with them. A fanatic for popular music, Tench had long admired the reclusive singer.

Recently, Tench has been recording with the band X, Rosanne Cash, and Ferghal Sharkey. The latter two have recorded new Tench compositions.

The Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers tour, in support of Let Me Up, begins in late May in Arizona. Rehearsals start in two weeks.

“There’s no band,” Lynch says. “It’s a figment of everyone’s imagination unless they’re together. We don’t all live in the same house — it’s not like we’re young kids, we’ve all got lives, we’ve all got creative projects, so it (a tour) re-confirms to us that indeed, there really is a band. That’s what a band does — they play live. So the question of ‘Are we gonna tour?’ is really ‘Are we pro-band this year?’ They’ve decided that they are.

After seven weeks of touring (with no stops scheduled for Florida), the Heartbreakers will take a month off and then connect once again with Dylan, with whom they’ll tour Canada, the southern United States, and Europe. They’ll also play Israel, Egypt, and several other countries in eastern Europe. Dates in the Soviet Union are still being mulled over. There’s prestige in playing there, Lynch and Tench admit, but no money. And that’s something to be considered.

“Nobody knows any specifics, because it changes daily,” Lynch says. “Egypt and Israel are going to pay for the whole thing, so they’re critical in working the tour around. The Israeli dates will pay to bring a 747 full of equipment to that continent.

“Those dates are going to coordinate with the start of the Jewish New Year, so they’re critical…the other stuff is being discussed. It changes all the time.” A southern American swing will reportedly bring Dylan and the Heartbreakers to two, or three, Florida cities.

A Dylan/Petty show is never the same on any two nights. Lynch says that while any one member of the Heartbreakers can be the “backbone” of a song in concert, driving it from start to finish, with Dylan “he’s the backbone, the frontbone, and the whole skeleton. All we can do is embellish. He throws in all the curves.”

Tench says it’s a unique experience. They just hold on tight and ride wherever it goes. “Bob will reel it in and it’ll be under control. It’ll go in whatever direction he feels like taking it in. That’s what you’re doing, the guy’s up there singing what he feels like singing that night, that minute, and you follow it. And this band’s been together long enough that we’re good at that.”

That attitude of Dylan’s made them remember the joy of spontaneous combustion, and its practical application to rock ‘n’ roll, and they were full of that joy when they went into the studio for Let Me Up during a lull in their tenure as his touring partners.

“Any record, whether it’s good or bad, turns out to be a document of the time when it was recorded,” Tench says, “of ‘Here’s what it was then.”