Tom Petty and the Creation of “Wildflowers”

00:00:08 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Just a quick note here. You can listen to all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist, which you can find a link to in the show notes for licensing reasons, each time a song is referenced in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect. All right, enjoyed the episode. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Broken Record. This is the final episode of our first season, and it's a special episode because it's about Tom Petty. Every now and again there is an artist who provides the soundtrack for his or her generation. I think Tom Petty was one of those people. He died in October twenty seventeen after a fortieth anniversary tour with his band The Heartbreakers. Only a few weeks after his passing, Rick Rubin and I met at Rick Studio to talk about Tom Petty, in particular about the contrast between that effortless, laconic California sound and the man behind it. We didn't think of this at the time as something that we would turn into an episode. We were just sitting in the old Bob Dylan tour bus at Shango La, drinking tea. I was never really a Tom Petty fan growing up. I liked more aggressive music before that, punk rock and harder things. He was a little melodic for my taste. And then The Full Moon Fever came out. I remember I bought it after I heard maybe the third or fourth single, which was a lot of singles in a row to be really good, to think, Wow, there's something here. It's like, this is beyond just a good song. And I bought the album, and I remember I listened to it every day, over and over. It was the only CD I had in my car for probably a year. It's perfect driving music. It moved Ricks so much that he wanted to work with Tom Petty, and when Petty signed a new deal with Warner Brothers Records, Moe Austin, the head of Warner Brothers, made that happen. Between nineteen ninety two and nineteen ninety four, Rick and Tom Petty recorded a mid career masterpiece and one of Petty's favorite records, Wildflowers. We started making Wildflowers, which is the album in question, and part of him getting out of his MCA deal a record early was to deliver a greatest hits record, and part of delivering the greatest hits record was to add two new songs to it, and it's hard to write a song to fit in with the greatest songs you've ever written. It's just a difficult task. Almost every time that happens, it doesn't work out well. And we were already working on Wildflowers, and Tom very wisely said, you know, I feel like what we're making here is a very specific body of work, and even though we're in the middle of this, if we have to do songs for the Greatest Hits album, I'd rather do them separately in a separate studio and kind of think of it as its own thing. So while we were set up it Sounds City working on Wildflowers, we set up at Oceanway with slightly different band. The original drummer of the Heartbreakers was in that session, not in the Wildflower sessions, so it was the entire original Heartbreakers, and we did two songs, one of which was Last Dance with Mary Jane, and that was on the Greatest Hits So it was like to write a hit to order for the Greatest Hits album was an unbelievable feat. And then we also recorded at that time with those with that band. Maybe I want to say we probably recorded about fifty songs, just because there was such a machine of a band. They had been a band their whole lives. Have you seen the Peter Bugdanovich documentary, Yeah, really worth seeing. It's like four hours long, and when you watch it you're owed by how many great songs he has, Like one after it's like, how can there be this many good songs from one person? You don't put it together that it's all. So the band had been a band since they were in high school together. All knew each other, they knew a million songs. They used to play cover songs. So because we had the band in the studio and I think Tom was kind of having fun. Once we got the heavy lifting out of the way of getting the song we needed, he said the second song would be a cover song, and he thought it would be this thunderclap Newman song, which it ended up being. But we recorded, as they say, about fifty songs to choose from fifty. Probably how unusual is that it's not a lot of bands can do it. It's like it's you have to be really good to be able to do that. But those songs, many of which ended up there was a white box set called playback. Most of those songs were on playback, so it wasn't just for I mean we didn't know that. We didn't know they'd ever come out. It was just sort of having fun. But while they were in there, we thought, let's take advantage of let's just play a bunch of songs. What was How did they write music? Was it very collective? No? It was usually Town with an acoustic guitar. More often than not, would write a song by himself. Then he would often make homemade demo with a drum machine and put on the parts that he wanted, So more often than not, there would be a demo that sounded like a less professional version of the final that we would bring to the band, and then that would be the starting point that we'd work. He's writing music and lyrics, everything, everything, everything. Now the other members of the band contribute a tremendous amount, but the initial framework was always set by Tom First. On occasion, Mike Campbell would bring in a guitar, a guitar idea first, or maybe even a guitar bassed song, and then Tom would take that, rework it and make it into a Tom Petty song. But probably one or two an album. Maybe, is there anyone you've worked with who is who compares to Petty and so terms of how prolific they are, I don't know that he was always so prolific. I think he would go through phases because I remember there were a couple of years where songs were not coming so quickly, and when we recorded the fifty songs, they weren't all necessarily new songs. A lot of them were songs they remember from growing up. Some may have been old songs of theirs that they never recorded. Some of them may have been Elvis songs or just songs they like. How long were you in the studio in that for the Wildflowers album, we were in for around two years, but it wasn't every day. It'd be like whenever there was stuff to do. So he'd like, he'd have five songs and he's like, let's record these five, and we'd go in and it would be a couple of weeks of work or maybe a month of work to get those five, and then he would go back to writing, and then maybe two months later there'd be another batch. It wouldn't do the same thing, and then at the end we would take it all and kind of do whatever it took to get him done. So you get him in one of his fertile periods. Yes, and I had very good fortune in that. The full mun Fever album, the one that I loved, he made with Jeff Lynn, who's from Electric Light Orchestra, who's a really brilliant musician and songwriter. They did the Traveling Wheelberries together, and Jeff Lynn really was a hard ass about the songs. The songs had to be good and sort of pop song power. So for several years before I got to work with him, he'd been sort of whipped into the song is the most important thing in the world shape. And then our styles of production are very different, so jeff is more methodical. Everything has to be in time and in tune. He won't record a drummer playing the drums. He'll record a drummer playing one drum, so like for the whole song, he'll just play the kick drum the whole song. He'll just play the high hat the whole song. He'll play the toms, so everything is very controlled and meticulous and perfect. I try to make more, at least in this case, it was more about the organic moment where it felt it felt more live and more human warts and all, not to make it sound I would call it like hyper real. So it was. It sounded real, but real on a particularly good night like not not randomly, they're just playing it. It was a very good version, that precision of jeff Lynn. Yeah, you can hear it in Full Moon Fever. But you but you responded to that you liked ful? Yeah, I loved it. I loved it. I wouldn't make it in that way, but it's got great power. When you go back and listen to full moviever, can you detect the Jeff Lynn influence? Absolutely? What's the thing? Can we play it? Can we play a song? Absolutely? So there are a couple of Tom Petty songs that are anthems. Yes, they get played it like that gets played in sports, and that's very it seems very counter to the ethos. But now I understand why. The precision of it is what gives it its its anthemic martial quality. And of course it's going to be played at football games when they are but I think I think the leason they played at football games is also I won't back down. I know, you know, I mean no, but it's that. But it's it's the lyric, but it's overlaid. The song is is it's like a marching down the road. Very it's disciplined and absolutely but it's at odds with his image as a kind of hippie yeah, mellow, and this is not his hippie window of music. And that's another interesting thing about the times. It's like Tom was able to manage the changes of the styles of music that happened, still sounding like Tom Petty, but being of the moment as well. So like his earlier music, like he came out first when it was kind of more punk rocky and it had a little bit more of a punk edge. And then that time in music, drum machines were getting popular, so everything on the radio sounded much more like that, even though rarely was it a rock band, but it had that sort of formality. So he was able to morph with health. Do you think he was doing that consciously or is he just so in tune with the kind of zeitgeist that he moved along. I think it was a combination of combination of being in tune and picking the right people to work with at the right time for what was going on. And I don't think he did that consciously. I think he did it based on who he liked. I know. The way he started working with Jeff was, from what I understand, was just sort of a mistake. I think they saw each other in cars driving down the stream, just like, hey, why don't we get together and do some really Yeah? I think so. So now play me something from Wildflowers he did with him, the one that came out. Yeah, okay, so I can, and I want to understand the difference between the Jeff Lynn and the feel Yes, just the production stuff. Do you remember anything specific about about the making of that song. Yeah, I remember I suggested that we try a song using that beat. The song was already written, but I said, let's try it with this beat. And it was sort of inspired by the beat the boom boom boom boom ca, which was inspired by Steve Miller. Oh, Steve Miller. Yeah, Oh that's it makes the feels like, why don't we do it kind of in a Steve Miller kind of a rhythmic vibe. Was he very open to suggestion, absolutely more so than other artists. Not unusual, I mean especially I will say it was the first album we made together, and the nature of my experience with him is the first time anybody works with him, he's on his best behavior. He's the most receptive and willing to do the most work. And then maybe on the fifth album we made together, he may not have been as willing to go that extra distance. I think he liked to impress the people who but I feel like he already did that, so he didn't need to do that anymore. Did you which iteration did you prefer? Early? Early? And I like what not, Not that he was trying to please me, but that he was willing to do whatever it took for it to be as good as it could be. That's always the most fun. Do you consider Wildflowers to be his kind of creative high watermark? It's one of he's had. He's had probably probably three. Damn the Torpedoes would have been the first one, and then the Jeff Lynn and then Wildflowers. I think those are probably the three peak moments. We'll be back with more on Tom Petty's Wildflowers with Rick Rubin after this break. We're back with more on Tom Petty's Wildflowers. Petty and Rick Rubin recorded dozens of songs during the two year sessions for Wildflowers, but only one disc ever came out. There's still an entire disc out there that's never seen the light of day. Rick actually played it for me in the most Rick way ever. He just called it up on his iPhone and it was amazing. But I'm afraid we can't share it with you. You'll just have to wait for its official release. So tell me how it came to be that you had these two records. Well, we recorded over this two year period. We recorded probably twenty sick between twenty six and twenty eight songs, and we didn't really know what was going to be on the album. And then at the end of it, we thought, wow, this is all good. Let's this is This could be a great double album, and we put it together as a double album and we brought it to the record company, and the record company suggested it be a single album, not because they didn't like the double album, but they just said, commercially in the marketplace, having a double album wasn't necessarily a great thing to do. And it was their first it was his first album with Warner Brothers. They just wanted what was best. They really wanted what was best for Tom and surprise. You know, Tom historically was very anti anyone saying anything about anything. He's very He did things his way always. It would always fight the power of authority from any direction. He had a fight with MCA for years where they raised the price of music a dollar and he wouldn't put out a record unless they sold his at the old price, and they wouldn't put it out. And I think he went two years without putting out any music because he he wanted it the way he thought was what he thought was right. And he kept his prices ticket prices, Lola, because he wanted people to be able to see the show a lot he had a lot of He cared very much about his audience and and doing what he thought was right by them. I was a little surprised that he decided, but I guess he thought, well, this may be better for the audience, which is why he went along with it. I mean, how do you decide if you have twenty four you come forward with twenty four songs or what have you, how do you decide which ones to drop and which ones to go forward with? Just experimentation. A lot of it was Tom's instinct and some of it was we'd play them in a sequence. We'd come up with a sequence. Each one of us might come up with a sequence that we like and then play it for each other and then say, okay, well this. You know, these three sound really good together, these five sound really good together. And then after hearing these you want this feeling. It doesn't really do that yet, what do we have that could make it feel like that? So kind of looking at the arc of the picture. So there might be like, let's say there are six songs that we'd say, no matter what, these six need to be on it, or these eight, whatever it is, and then the balance of it is more what makes the journey. You wouldn't We wouldn't do that today, would we? If we recorded twenty eight songs with an artist today, we would have the choice of either putting out all twenty eight without thinking about it. Because there's no such thing as a singular double album anymore. We might say in today's world, the nature of the speed of digestion, that people's attention span is there for maybe five or six songs at a time, So maybe it's better to break it up into four projects and put them out every form of five months, six months, depending on what happens. It didn't break you, did it break his heart or break your heart? About these songs that never got heard, I remember feeling a little bad about I loved the album, so it wasn't like what we were putting out wasn't good. I mean, I thought what we put out was. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. This is the thing about musicians versus writers. I've never understood the amount of the wastefulness of the musical process is just compared to writing. If I write a sentence, it will be printed somewhere. I don't weigh sentences like every single thing I've ever written has found the lad of day somewhere, Whereas you guys will leave things on the cutting room floors endless. You have no idea. You have no idea that doesn't drive you. Your screenritter is the same way, where you know you can be a screenwriter of your whole career and nothing ever get made. So the end, there's all this stuff. I'm always fascinated by the relationship of the artist to this unknown It's private work. This lost Tom Petty album is private work. Basically, you and Tom Petty, who's not even with us anymore, and no one else does the guys in the band who all love it, who worked, who labored months over these songs that never got released to get them to where they are. Is there any of those unreleased songs in retrospect that you think we really blew it with this song? No, but they're great. I mean I feel like Wildflowers did exactly what it was supposed to do. People really love it, stood the test of time, and these other songs are When I heard them for the first time, Tom came over and played him for me, probably maybe two years ago, two two and a half years ago, and I was floored by I had like a vague memory of them, but some of them just hit me, like, Wow, what a great song. How did we ever? How did we miss this? So he came by here too, Did you come here in my house or your house? Yeah? With the explicit intent to play the Yeah. He's like, I've been working on the rest of Wildflowers, and I've been fixing some stuff that wasn't done at the end, like a couple of mixes and things, and I want to play it for you. And he came and he played it for me. Did he want to re release it. Yes, he did. The issue was he very much wanted to re release it. He thought it was really important because the legacy of the Wildflowers album loomed large in his career and he knew that the second half of Wildflowers was an important statement. His issue was he didn't want to put it out as a new Tom Petty album because it's not a new Tom Petty album. It was recorded twenty five years ago, and he didn't want to release it as an old catalog album because he didn't he thought it deserved more than being a catalog album. He felt like it was too good to just put out and was sort of looking for the right story where it would have the exposure that it deserved, and he never came up with it. Why couldn't he is a naive question, But why couldn't he just put it as a new Tome Petty album. There's something about the artist's work that has a little bit of a diary like aspect. You know it. The work reflects a time in someone's life, and you'll hear when if I were to play you Tom's last album and then play you Wildflowers Too, or whatever it's called, it's it's very different. So I think that was his thing, was like I have changed as an artist since then. I love that. I think I might have told you this. He told me wildflower scares him because he's not really sure why it's as good as it is. So it has this like haunted feeling for him. What does that mean? He's not like he loves it, but it he It's not like he could turn that on again. He could. He couldn't make wildflowers to today. That was the point. The point was I can't do this now. This was then, and it was where I was then, and it was a prolific period. This is an extension of that moment. Did he mean I can't make something as good as that again? Or just that just that just what that is, what that is, and that scared him? Those were his words. I was surprised. I was surprised when he said it was he as artists go unusually introspective about his own work. I wouldn't say so, but how many artists would say, would listen to something from twenty years ago, play something from twenty years ago and say to you, it scares them. I've never heard anything like that before. It was unusual. But the closest thing I can remember, and it wasn't said to me. I just heard it in an interview was Bob Dylan talking about his early records, saying I didn't write those, like I don't know who wrote those. I couldn't write those. It was like that. It was like something magic happened in that moment, And now looking back on it, it's a little scary to me. We'll be back with more broken record after this break. We're back with more on Tom Petty's Wildflowers with Rick Rubin. Why did you guys not just Reese say I can have two years later? I have no idea. I don't know. Again, it goes to this waste you're so accustomed to, how wasteful the process is. Yeah. The next thing he did was a soundtrack album, and there were a couple of songs on the soundtrack album that were from those sessions. Oh is that the soundtrack? Where? Wait, that's really a really interesting story. It's a yellow album. Somebody comes to him and says, I want to use one of your songs from my movie. Yeah, it's a really small isn't it an Ed Burns movie? Yeah, it's an Ed Burns movie and he says she's the one. She's the one. He's like, I'll write a whole new album about it. It's just kind of insane, active, creative bravado. Yeah, that's where he was in that moment. Yeah, and I think a couple there are a couple of Wildflower songs that weren't on the original Wildflowers that ended up on that hearing that is that? First of all, does that trigger memories of when you guys were working on it? Not on that, but it reminds me of the whole time. Yeah, I can't remember like being in the studio, but it wasn't like, oh, we were recording that song. But I can't remember the feeling of that time. So is so what is tie that song to that period in Tom Petty's career. Well, it has the leftover remnants of the Jeff Lynn song influence, so it's very It really works well lyrically and melodically strong like song power song. We did that one very in a straightforward way, kind of almost Jeff Lenny drum wise, very straight suited, and that we probably played that a bunch of different ways before we decided, oh we like it. This way probably played it more like band style, and then it's like, oh, this lends itself more to the kind of hypnotic locked in sound. It's a more you know, down tempo, moody piece, sort of the sarcastic time I hope you never fall in love with somebody like you? Is a song like that coming out of his personal experience? Is he? It might it might be coming out of his personal experience, or it might be the idea, like he might have had that idea of like I hope you never fall in love with somebody like you, and I should write a song like that. I don't know. He would never say yeah, Oh, he wasn't a He wasn't kind of emotionally confessional in his no no. And I once saw one time he was playing me demos and he would always sit with the guitar in his lap and kind of hunt around while while we were talking. And one time he started playing me a song and he plays this song and it's and sings it first verse, chorus, sings the whole song and uh, and it's great. And I say, wow, that's a great one where that one's when's that one from? He's like, I just that's just now. I said, you mean, I said, you didn't write that before I got here, and he's like, no, that just came out just now. And I said what's it about? And he's like, I have no idea And it was like ornate, intricate lyrics. He channeled it. Did you did you tape it? And like, h so that became a real song. Yeah, absolutely, It's probably a song on wild Flowers. I can't remember which song it was, but I got to see firsthand, and I remember the conversation of what's it about? Because it was like the story seemed really intricate. It's like, oh, that's interesting, where's that? Like? No idea? How much of that did you understand before you met him? Did you understand like, oh, this guy is sort of something special or was a lot of it revealed to you when you started working with him more? When more? When I worked with him, I knew he was really I knew he really was a song craftsman, which which he was, but I didn't realize the the connectedness that he had beyond that. It's like there was an the emotional quality beneath it was very strong. He didn't he never struck me as an emotional person, but in the work it was there. Yeah. How many albums did you do with him? I think we did four or five something like that. Yeah, but in your mind, the most successful, the best of those was the first. It's my favorite. Yeah, it seems the one that resonated the most with people. And then there was a period after that where after the divorce, he sort of fell into a dark period. And there's some interesting thing that came out of that period, but I don't think he was he was at his peak. Yeah, why did you guys stop booking together? I never knew why, but I was told something that he wrote, or something that was written in the autobiography that was done on him. It's not an autobiography, the biography that was done on him. That whatever. The last project we worked on together. At the end of the project, while we were mixing, it was time for me to start my next project, which I think was a Red Hot Chili Peppers album, And I started the next project, and I think he felt like I abandoned him, which I don't think was the case. I think we had already done what we were supposed to do, But he never said that to me. I didn't know anything about that. Yeah, yeah, but you guys remained on good terms. Absolutely. Yeah. Do you think it's a good thing for artists to move from producer to producer? Can it? Can? It can be very productive, especially based on the story I told you earlier of he wanted to impress me in the beginning, So if there was someone knew that he wanted to impress, he would work harder, So that would be a good thing. Yeah, yeah, does. Then again, George Martin did all the Beatles records and they're really good. So it's like it's hard to say, like, no one knows. Yeah, no one knows. No one knows. That's a very rick way our first season, you know. When we began with our first episode of Broken Record earlier this fall, a massive wildfire was threatening both Rick's home and his studio, the historic Shangolaw in Malibu. Many of you have asked about what happened to Shangolow. The answer is, miraculously it survived. The fire burned all around it, but that bit of musical history escaped unscathed. Maybe that's an omen for all of music in the coming year. We'll be back in the spring with new conversations and performances from some of our favorite artists Pentatonics, Questlove, Lawyer McKenna in Nashville, Ezra Canning, E, Vampire Weekend, and many many more. Who knows, we might just drop in a surprise in the meantime. Thank you for listening. Broken Record is produced by Justin Richmond and Jason Gambrell, with help from Bruce Headlam, Mia Lobel, Jaquita, Pascal, Daisy Rosario, Jacob Smith, Julia Barton, Jacob Weisberg, and of course el Hefe Rick Rubin. To hear the songs featured in today's episode, check out Broken Record podcast dot com. This show is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm maconglat them