Tom Petty's Wildflowers II with Adria Petty

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. Enjoy the episode. It's been twenty six years since the release of Tom Petty's mid career masterpiece Wildflowers. On an early episode of Broken Record, Rick Rubin, who produced Wildflowers, recalled how Tom recorded more than twenty five songs for what was originally meant to be a double album. Those extra ten songs had been shelved and definitely until now. That's Lee Virginia alone, one of the brilliant newly unearthed Petty songs from the box set Wildflowers and all the rest. Along with those ten extra tracks, the box it also includes dozens of never before her demos and live recordings. The comprehensive collection was championed by Tom's daughter, Adria Petty, an accomplished director who shot music videos for Beyonce, Coldplay, and Regina Spector. Adria was born right around the time her dad formed The Heartbreakers, and she remained incredibly close to him until his death in twenty seventeen. In today's interview, Rick sits down with Adria, who's known for a long time together. They listened to some of the demos that were found in Tom's closet after he passed, and she shares intimate details about her dad's creative process. This is broken record Liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmondton. Here's Rick Rubin and Adria Petty. The interesting thing about the podcast for me is that for people that I know, I get to ask them about stuff that we just never comes up in normal life. So like, what was it like growing up in the house with Tom and your mom? Was that? Like? It was weird? I mean, it's been a lot of time to reflect on it. At the beginning, it was really exciting because I was born right when the Heartbreakers were born. So there were, you know, times when we all lived in motels together. There were times when we all traveled together, or there were group houses that everybody lived in and you know, my recollection doesn't quite go back that far, but there was definitely an exciting camaraderie and community of people around us, and they sort of treated me as an equal from the time I was six, so I was just kind of like another person in this gang of friends and artists. It was always like a lot of music, a lot of music playing, a lot of reggae, and a lot of like just kind of great energy coming from the stereo all the time, or from Dad's acoustic guitar. Can you remember when you first realized that everybody's life was not the same as that? Yeah, when was that? There was a time when I was about seven, when Damn the Torpedoes came out, and you know, leading up to that, we really kind of lost Dad, like to Jimmy Ivy and like that. You can see that in a lot of documentaries and stuff where they were literally on the phone day and night or in the studio day and night trying to perfect that record and bring it somewhere. And after that record came out, my father's mother died and he didn't go to the funeral, and I remember him sitting by the window just looking like just he just changed, like something changed in him. And I was like, why didn't you go? And he was like, because I'll just be a distraction. I can't go, and distraction because of music or distraction because of their relationships in the family, because he was famous, because it was he would have overshadowed, you know, her life as a churchgo or her life in her community. Like the world that they had in Gainesville, which was very very I mean Kitty, Kitty Avery Petty, our grandmother. Kitty was like magical and compassionate and sweet. And I got to meet her before she died a few times and I remember her, but um, she loved my dad, I mean the sunshine out of my dad and his brother for her, and she was very loving person. But he changed after she died, and damned the torpedoes came out and people started like shout shooting our windows and stuff like doing weird stuff in the eighties, like and we started having a lot more a presence of like security, or a presence of handlers or people who cleaned our homes or things like that. That just wasn't normal at all, and it kind of I think that kind of got worse and worse, like does in terms of like living in the house with them, you know that feeling of like wow, the room is getting further and further away, and there's an intercom and there's there's all these other people that do basic functions that other people can do for themselves. And I think that there's this sort of mythology that if you're successful, you're isolated from people. You're up a long driveway, and other people do all these things that are so annoying to do. But when you stop doing those things for yourself, I think you get really disconnected and aimless about your own existence. Like you don't understand how much mess you're making around the house, or you don't understand what groceries you actually need as opposed to what this random person goes and buys for you, or you know, there's just a sort of disconnect that starts to manifest in depression. And the successful people that I've grown up around and with, and my dad was so down to earth that we would go to Florida every year and now have no one for a few months and we clean our own house and be with my uncle and normal people that they grew up with. And he would sort of isolate enough with normal people to stay pretty pure, cool guy. Yeah, did he enjoy those times. He loved it. Yeah, he loved that. And you know, there was a lot of songwriting and a lot of inspiration drawn from that time at the beach in Florida, and we still have that house, Like, that's a really special place. I remember when he got it and being really excited about it. Yeah, I mean we had been going there renting for years. And like you know, he was a very pragmatic guy, my dad. You know, he didn't like to live beyond his means. He didn't extend credit, he didn't take mortgages. He just he liked to keep things simple. But things got less simple after he became famous. How much time do you spend on tour when you really live all the time, all the time, all the time. Did you ever go We didn't have enough money to take the families with us until the late eighties when my house burned down and we went on the Dylan Petty tour. And that's actually when me and Jacob met was on that tour and we traveled the world together for most of the year, and we went to Egypt and Israel. Together. It was wild. Yeah, I mean being a Carni folk or whatever it is that you know, the child of a musician becomes, you learned how to deal with transitional lifestyle like living out of a suitcase, having her bag packed every day and unpacking it every night, or so different from being the military, like you know, just being it's not and there's a camaraderie and there's a bro code, and there's a sort of you know what do we call it road etiquette, so where they used to us as kids, like you know, you don't walk certain places on stage, you don't trip over wires, you don't get people's way if you can help, you help. You know, there's a certain road etiquette to watching a road crew work. And my dad's road crew, you know, he famously had multigenerations of people that would just like replace themselves with their sons, and it was like forty years of taken care of those people. So once we started going on the road, that road etiquette and that sort of ability to be able to transition into any situation. I think for me and some of my friends that have grown up similarly, that has not changed, Like we always want to be on a plane, or like I became a director so I could shoot all over the world and have these little stints and I would be living in a hotel and here I am again, Like it's a different it's a different sense of feeling settled. But you can kind of feel settled anywhere, which is kind of nice. Gift, really nice. That sounds great. Do we know how the house that your dad wrote Wildflowers in burned? Do we know the story of that? It's a crazy story telling the story. I wish I could. I wish I could. The answer is, I have suspicions, but I can't. I can't publicly say them. I'm curious that I always wondered, like, yeah, I mean it was Losing a house like you did is a super emotional thing, and I know a number of men in particular who really took it hard when they lost their family home where they had their children, etc. Because I think it just is a symbol of something. It's a symbol of really being able to take care of your family. And I think it's it's a sacred wound. It feels really, even if you weren't that attached to the house or whatever, you know, it just feels like really have the rug pulled out from underneath you. In our case, it became a very important nexus of the journey of my father's career and his life. And without it, I don't believe he would have said he would be a backing band for anyone. I think the necessity of just let's get us on a bus and we'll figure this out. He was at a really interesting point in his career and I don't want to get the dates ru but it's like post Southern accents, and they'd gotten really sober. They'd have been trouble with the drugs and sobriety before that, and he was sort of reinventing himself and had this opportunity to go out with Bob and have the band really put through its paces in a cool way. And that was the birth of meeting George and the Wilberries coming together and sort of elevating not just the music but the consciousness and just feeling a certain amount of like you're not the only one dealing with this man. It's really hard to be a rock star. It's really confusing, and actually rock and roll has sort of been something on the fringes since the seventies, and this is like he found he found his soul mates through being thrown out into the world and not just staying home. And that was for us. That fire was regenerative. It was definitely it elevated him to the next level as opposed to knocking him down. Yeah. Do you think that those relationships with George and Bob and Jeff were the first time he had that sense of community beyond just the guys in the band. I definitely feel like he had it with certain people, like there were there were certain magical people to my dad, like Del Shannon or Roger mcgwin that he had really deep connections with musically, but he was sort of reverential to, like he didn't feel he was on the same footing with I mean, they were his heroes and and he didn't feel that way about Georgia, Bob or Jeff either. I mean he thought the world of them. He was in all of them, probably until he died, you know. But he he felt like he was responsible for the band and their families and the crew and keeping the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers organization running and seeing that other people handled that different ways and that they had already gone two decades deep into this experience, or him trying to fathom what it was to be a Beatle or to live with that sort of scrutiny that Bob had lived with for so long, and the intensity I mean, we saw a lot of crazy people on those tours with Bob, and there were bomb threats, and there were crazy fans that had changed our last name to Dylan and have like figured out how to pull their idea out and sneak into hotels, and like there were there were sort of like really really weird people around on that made our life look like so uneventful. I think it definitely changed perspective. Yeah, and I think he liked not being the frontman for a second. It gave him a perspective on what a good frontman he was in certain ways. And also like just sort of like digging off of, you know, Bob's energy that that tour. I mean, I still think as a fan and Jacob too, I think I think we all feel that that music it was really important that they made during that tour. In my dad before he died, one of the last things he took me in the studio and played, because he would always get giddy and take me stadium play stuff was Dylan petty stuff and then playing with Roger mcgwinn and some things that were special from that tour that he had in his archive. But yeah, he definitely changed after that. He saw a bigger, brighter picture, a simpler picture, and I think that that got him to Wildflowers. I mean that got him to the point of wanting true independence. And there were different stages in that. There was fulm and fever as the first step of going, hey, I really am not stuck in this swamp rock world at all. I'm a songwriter and I'm in the car with my kids listening to Top forty and I my dad always listened to everything. People would not have believed with the kind of influences he had. But I mean, we had an eight track of Yello, for example. I remember when we were poor, like really poor before down the Torpedoes in the seventies, and you know, I remember that ll eight track going in and snapping into that deck and listening to that until it broke. The thing you mentioned about him liking not being the frontman for a minute, I got to see the same thing when we did the album with Johnny Cash, where he loved being in the band and not having to be the bandleader and not having to sing the songs, but just get to make music and play different instruments on different songs and just be in the creative experience with no sense of pressure. You know, there was no pressure on him in this because his face wasn't on the cover of that album, and he just felt like he was free to just play and he loved it. He loved that projects so much. I mean, he loved John. John and June were always around. There were fixtures at shows and would show up and he just loved John so much. And you know, they're such a special family and such kind people. But I know that when my dad could be a bass player, he would come in from like those unchanged stations or whatever and like bounce in the room like I got to be the bass, Claire, I'm just playing bass, like you'd tell you multiple times, and he would be so proud that, like, hey, I'm free and free. They just tell me when to do things and I do them, you know. And I think he felt like that when he worked with the Shelters and mentored them. I think he felt like that whenever he got to just sort of like be a part of something groovy like that. But it wasn't often he would let go of the rains, as you know. Yeah, from the outside, most people think of the rock star lifestyle as one of excess in terms of parties and people and being out all night and my experience of him, and I want to ask if this is correct or accurate, but he would watch TV and read and be home and other than that he was either on tour or writing music. Yeah, pretty much. I mean he wasn't doing any normal stuff. He wasn't doing any social stuff. No, I've been here. I mean friends, there were eras of you know, being social. I think you know, in the early eighties, the band still all hung out together, all their families would come over. There was still this sort of like camaraderie around us that was very social, but it was still just within you guys. It was a very heavily vetted group. I mean, my dad was married really young, he had kids really young, he had responsibilities. A lot of the other guys didn't have My cad a daughter year after him, so you know, he was in a similar groove. But you know, Jane and Tom did not have normal childhoods where they had sort of a reference for what a normal life would be. So, you know, he had a room that he would go in and he would write, and that was like when I was like five years old on roblar near Owner Valley Vista where we lived when my dad was probably writing like Breakdown and all those songs or whatever. You know, even in those times and they didn't have any money, they would make sure they had a little scrappy room and that discipline was his. That was his sort of practice, like that was his existence. Was every day, no matter what, I pour my coffee, I go in this room, I drummed this guitar. And would he usually be right when he woke up, like coffee it was first thing after coffee. I think it would be like in the afternoon when he was like very awake and very like much like through with whatever first impressions of the day. And then he would be in the room by himself with the door clothes. Oh yeah, yeah, it's a private process. And even now hours would you say that would typically be It would vary. Sometimes he'd go in for a little bit and sometimes he'd go in for weeks, like you just did not even see him. I remember one time he got really stuck on All or Nothing, which is a song on Into the Great Wide Open. It's a really cool song that has a great wailing guitar on it, and I was just like, God, he's got to solve this one. We had hearn this song for like months, is like, and it was it was like he was haunted by it. And it was one of the few where I just saw him like going, I can't figure this out. But he ended up obviously making it into a really beautiful song. But I think that these things they seemed to come easy to him, and he liked them to seem simplistic and like they came easy to him, but they were so kind of crafted and cared about and instinctive and by wrote, and he would listen and listen and listen and play until he would get this really sort of essence of something and the soul of something, and then he'd laid it down and know that it was good enough. And I think, you know, his discipline in reading was like amazing. He read all the time. He watched every film, he watched every classic film, every new film. He was a great lover of art and had a diverse knowledge of anything he was interested in. And he would go and like get every book on all of every book on JFKs fascination, every book on you know, you know, he never really got to like Google like he kind of was like, Google's a little too much for me. But he loved to sit down and just read three hundred pages on anything that vaguely interested him. No, he didn't hit. In the Wilbury years, they socialized a lot, they went out a lot. Yeah, they pushed boundaries that tried new things. Yeah. That also might have been Jeff's influence, because I think Jeff liked to be out more. Not Jeff George, Joe George. Yeah, Jeff's like that. Jeff was like just wants to be either in the studio or just chilling, you know. I think I thought it was more of a pub a pub guy. He might be. I don't know, I've never been down the pub with Jeff, but I'd take him as a pretty serious, disciplined creator of music absolutely, you know, absolutely, and it keeps his head in those clouds. That's one of the things that I think really benefited our experience together working on Wildflowers was the fact that he had just worked with Jeff for two albums. Right, Because Jeff was it seemed to be a real song disciplinarian and got your dad into really good, simple, super well crafted songs. Not that your dad didn't always have that ability. He always had that ability and would do it sometimes, but with Jeff it was like it was always that or it was nothing. And there was a side to your dad's music that was more blues based. That like, if you think of what it was like going to the film war shows, it might not be as song song song based, but more on great musicianship and playing great songs and great grooves and great vibes. And your dad resonated on that stuff too, But Jeff really hammered home the power of the melody and the concise songwriting. And I think the strength of Wildflowers is having that kind of rigor in the songwriting influenced by Jeff, and then taking off the shackles of that kind of production that Jeff does, which I also love, but it's much more perfect, it's less organic. He's a recording artist, he's someone who really his music is based in studio. Yeah, it's not based in the room. Yeah. But the difference between you and Jeff and the evolution of coming from Jeff to you, which I think is a really interesting part of me discovering Wildflowers and going back through all this stuff, is that my dad always kind of hid in the Heartbreakers. He was always in this sort of like full octane rock band, Let's rock, you know, and they just kind of wear this incredible sound, and they had this incredible shorthand, and they all came from the same place and they had this thing. And then when he went with Jeff, it was all sort of stripped down, and all that technique and all that ability was compartmentalized, almost like it was into a computer, right like it was. It was organized through a board, through this like little stems, and the process of creating much more automated, and this sort of yeah, you needed a machine in order to execute this vision and this sort of duplicating voices and all of the stuff that makes those big free fall in and I won't back down sounds with the beautiful jangle that Dad could do. But when you look at Wildflowers, and this is what's so cool about this box set, it seems like the journeying boys for him to trust you to bring him back to himself, and the poetry of Wildflowers and the song Wildflowers, I believe is that sometimes what's deep inside of us is just allowing ourselves to be free and respect ourselves, not to feel shame, to know that our first instincts are the best instincts, and to prioritize ourselves, prioritize how you feel. No one else is going to do it. And when you're someone who takes care of a lot of people and you have a lot of people depending on you, and sometimes you have the hard decision to say, you know what, you can't work for me anymore. And you know that's going to really hurt people or make them, you know, not have an income that year or whatever, and they feel like they're part of your tribe. It's really hard to permit yourself to let go of them and do something as honest and pure as he did in the studio with you. And I think looking at it from my perspective, which you know is only one perspective, and his wives might have a different perspective, or somebody else might. We had a pretty close relationship and it was like, you know, me talking about the Beastie Boys to like a year later, he's sitting in a room with you, and you know, we didn't hear Wellflowers along the way much. And he brought me and my sister to the studio that day for the string recording, and you could tell he was just so proud to show us the mirror of himself. Here, this is really me, you know. And it was like, oh, wow, this is really you. This is you without the heart prickers. It was just him and what he came up with his guitar, just a little bit plussed, and he figured out in that process personally, I'm not going to leave a few things behind here. I'm going to change the personnel in this band. I'm no longer going to be with my childhood sweetheart from high school. I'm going to move on and allow myself a little bit more agency over my own life, because I've been saddled with crippling responsibility since I was twenty one, you know, and at that point I was off at college. My sister was older, you know, and like he could do that, there was there was a room to be able to say and it wasn't easy, and there was no snap of the finger, but the songs conveyed the purity of where he wanted to go and where the destination was going to be. And it was the future, and it was magic, and it was falling in love and it was it was I'm going to just put some acceptance into this journey and go. And I think that's been you know, listening to this music. Kind of the magic behind it, kind of the bottled sunshine. Is that that's real, that's really from him. We'll be right back with Rick and Adria Petty after a quick break. We're back with Rick Rubin and Adria Petty. I never asked him about this, but do you hear anything in the lyrics that from being there you saw coming from a self reflective place, like, where are there any of the story of what was going on in his life? Impactful on the lyrics? There were. There was one song that I thought was so much cooler and demo formed than what ended up being recorded multiple times, which was California. And the demo is so shit hot. It's so amazing and it's so much less pop than the final I love that song too, and I love this super uplifting like beauty and simplicity of that song. But there's an edge to it in the demo, it has an extra verse and it says, I forgive my past, I forgive my enemy. I don't know if this will last. Guess I'll just wait and see and it was a level of acceptance going, I'm in this really difficult situation, but my eyes have been opened to the fact that things aren't always just conflict for conflict's sake. Sometimes you can be the bigger person and walk away and go I'm going to reap the bounty of just being able to let this roll off of me. And him and Jane fought a lot when we were kids, only were kids themselves, and I think that he had gotten no place. Knowing George and getting to know Yogananda and starting to do transidental meditation, starting a whole different perspective on life came with George in our lives, and he was such an angel as we're his wife and child who are just angelic and beautiful, magical people too, and that sort of hey, hey, we don't fight like that, like, hey, does not you don't go there, You don't go to that really early dark place even if you're right. Just let's make a left turn here and look for forgiveness. Let's look for a redemption and forgiving people and being an acceptance of the fact that yes, sometimes things are super messed up and they're not changeable for us, or it's not worth it for us to abandon all our responsibilities to invest in this super messed up thing, which I think we've all been through at one point in our lives or another. I mean, and when you are dealing with fame, you're dealing with green you're dealing with envy, You're dealing with people thinking that there might be an opportunity for them to grift something. They're also dealing with drugs, and you're dealing with mental illness sometimes too. There's all kinds of factors that come into creative communities and fame, and there's this isolation we discussed earlier, and they are a perfect cocktail for powerful people to feel really lost and really unable to have any control over their lives. They may seem powerful, they may have a big bank balance, they may own a lot of stuff, they may be the boss of a lot of stuff. But they can't just say, you know what, I'm turning my phone off for three months or I'm going to the park with my kid now. They can't do that. They don't have the ability to do that. And I think my dad got to the point where he was like, I want true freedom, like I want freedom from I don't want to have to make a Heartbreakers record. I don't want to have to take care of all these people. I don't want to have to live with someone I'm fighting with all the time. I don't want to have to do that that would actually be success to me. And I think this record is such a beautiful reflection on making that life decision. I don't even know if I ever heard the California Let's hear the California demo, Let's hear that? So beautiful, so beautiful, I don't even know if I've ever heard that before. I'd never heard it before. And just the idea that he's saying, sometimes you got to save yourself. Yeah, it plays right into everything we're talking about. Yeah, because that's really where it was. Yeah. You know, it's interesting because sometimes he would be very attached to a demo and he would bring the demo and he's like, okay, let's learn the demo. And other times it would be he would have a demo, but he would never bring it up, never talk about it, never, and he would just sort of play the guitar, play the song on the guitar for the for the guys, like okay, this is how those and That was one that I don't remember ever hearing that version before. So beautiful. It's really special, and I feel like it's like the it's the first I always felt was missing, Like I always liked that song, but it always just like what a goofy song, you know, And then when you hear it complete, it's really to me much deeper. Because Californias where he reinvented himself. It's where he left an abusive father behind. It's where he started his own family, surrounded by friends. It's where he had wild success on him and my mom were tenacious and crazy enough to be successful here and make it work. And I think he had a lot of appreciation for being a resident here, Like he felt very lucky that Los Angeles existed, and yet, like you said, he never went out or hung out with anybody. He just really liked like being on his little plot of land and making his art and having the whole machine here to be able to make a living doing what he was good at, you know. And he would reference, you know, living in Recita and like there were always local references you were real. Yeah, Yeah, Ventura Boulevard, Yeah, we lived out there. Yeah, do you know where these were found because I remember for a long time the demos were missing. They were in his closet. It's amazing they were there in his closet. Yeah, we pretty much found everything, amazing because I can remember even when he was around, nobody could find these. Yeah, what's the other demo you suggested we listened to. Oh, I think There Goes Angela would be an interesting one, just because you guys never attract it, okay, and he might find it interesting. Yeah, beautiful, crazy right, Yeah, never tracked it. Yeah, that's no memory of it. It's his eight tracked demo mixed on the demos. Did he have dates on things or no? Sometime? Are you kidding me? Just like demo on it or something. You know. It's like he was just wondering when like the order of events. As disciplined as my dad was, he was still a stoner that didn't label his tapes at times. But I think that song so cool. I think he probably didn't do it because it's let your Heart Be Free, and it's so similar to the lyric than Wildflowers or the other. Yeah, it's like it was kind of a competing sentiment or something. I'm so glad that people finally get to hear it. Me too, me too. I mean, one thing was interesting was talking to one of the rock writers that was contributing to our liner notes, Jan Hulinsky, and she was saying, he finally gives these girls names. You know, there goes Angela or whatever. It's likely she was an American girl raised on promises. What was her name, girl? She loves her Mama. Really interesting. Mary Jane had a name kind of but it's a double on toonder, right, yeah, because we don't know if it's just some kind bud or a lady. But essentially the second half of all the rest coming out and the demos, he started to find names for these girls, like Somewhere under Heaven, which something here recorded a little later. It is talking about Jenny dancing in the rain. I mean, he so rarely gave his characters actual names. Yeah, and I guarantee it was an unconscious change. Yeah. Absolutely, Yeah, we just re released that. You don't know how it feels with the line from h crawling back to you and it has that I'm so tired of being tired of line in the original demo. He had kind of pulled it out. That was the first song we recorded for Wildflowers, and we recorded it that the take that's on the album was Steve Ferroni's tryout to see if Tom wanted to play with him. Oh wow, yeah, from that, from that, from that first take, from that performance, like, oh, this is the guy, and he ended up being the guy until forever. You guys were like great perfumery, like a nose or something. You guys were like sniffing out, like the perfect vibe, the perfect drummer, the perfect everything. I mean, I often wonder what it was like for you because at that time, I mean, for some reason, you've always seemed like a grown up to me. I was like eighteen when I think I first met you, but you were really young, you know, and you had a lot of responsibility thrust on you really early, and that I always I'll tell you that the beauty of working with your dad was he was such an expert that in some ways he was the producer, you know, Like honestly, it's like I definitely helped support him in being his best self and doing what I believe his best work, but so much of it, like the things like you guys picked the drummer, he picked the drummer. He almost all of the good decisions that were made were made by him. I guess I allow you allowed the space for him to be his best self without getting in the way and if anything supporting him, and you know, there were there were. It was rare that we even had a disagreement about something. Yeah, you know, I can remember one time we had a disagreement about a line in the song and I told him, you know, I thought that this line in this chorus was a little weak, and he's like, you're crazy, that's the best line in the song. It's got to stay. It's like, okay, But that that was the only time I can remember this song. It was You Wreck Me and it was the line, the last line that the tagline is yes you do right, And I thought it's kind of a throwaway. It's like you have four lines to say everything you want to say. Yes you do is like h you're not There's no content there. So I thought it was like a waste of real estate. And he was like, no, that's the whole His dialect is so interesting to me because he's you know, the ants and the oh yes you do or the oh hell yes, or the you know the way he would use words and dialect was very um exciting and very interesting and very pure to him and very much influenced by the way that he grew up, and it's influenced by black culture in the South, because his dad had a supermarket in the black neighborhood in Gainesville and dry goods, and they would be there all day. They're just playing with other kids that worked in that he worked and lived in that neighborhood. But he you know, like, oh, yes you do. It's like it's kind of the throwaway. It's the it's the sort of special sauce. It's the herbs and spices that he would bring to something. As I didn't know that that originally was you Rock Me Baby, either, because I remember he was reading about it in the track by track he was struggling with trying to find that chorus for a really long time. Apparently I don't remember that. Yeah, I think I think it was just called Mike's song for a really long time, you know. And I remember he was really excited about it, really excited about it's like this is and he always said he's like Mike always brings in a couple of really good ones. Really good ones. And he's like really good ones that I would not have written otherwise, you know, I would not have done. Yeah, Mike, Mike is a very underrecognized, super mega magical songwriter. Yeah. And his guitar playing is as good as it gets. Yeah, he's he's a magical being. We'll be right back with Rick and Adria Petty after a quick break. We're back with more from Adria Petty. When Wildflower was originally recorded, we were in our minds we were making a double album and we were ordered all the songs with the same belief that these are all this is all the A material, and this is all coming out and this is one big batch. And I remember your dad. This was your dad's first album for Warner Brothers Records after being unhappily at MCA for a long time, and he had battled with them in the past. Remember, they wanted to raise the price of the list price of one of his records, and he refused, and then he didn't record for years because or refused to refuse to release an album for a couple of years because of the pricing. He was always really wanted to give good value to the audience. He cared about his fans. He didn't want to price his material out of anyone's reach. Same with ticket prices. He always wanted to make make it accessible because I think he thought of himself as the person in the audience, because he was for so much of his life until he started doing it, until he died. He was the fan until he died. He always saw himself as the kid at the record store buying the records. And our responsibility now with carrying on his business, which without him making music and making live music, is to really protect the fan experience. It's weird. That's something that you almost can't explain to someone now, right when they're like, oh, we want to capture these emails, I want to do this one, and it's like, hey, you know, one reason people really liked him and really like, you know, transacting with him as an artist was because he wasn't constantly stealing from his fans, and he wasn't sort of devaluing or debasing the songs and commercials or making them unspecial to line his own pockets. He wanted to keep them in this really special place. And you know he did that right down to the very end. He left a lot of money on the table all the time, to not be part of this fabric of consumerism, to make rock and roll a sacred place, and we revere that music. We protect that music. And when you start, you know, making that about hot pants and pepsi and whatever, you know, it ruins everything. You know, to him, it was never really like it was his business. But he never had this like lust for business success, Like he just wanted enough enough to be able to do fun stuff and whatever. But I mean, we weren't like private jet people. We weren't you know, done any of that stuff. He didn't need that. And that actually is going to play interestingly into it's giving me possible insight into a decision that always confused me that he made, which was when we played all of the material of Wildflowers for his new record company. Who are my friends? And new I knew. I knew them before I knew your dad. Actually, Austin was the one who introduced me to your dad. I believe Lenny Warnaker, who was the president of Warner Brothers, said, you know, Tom would be better to do a single album than a double album, and that double albums don't sell as well, and that this is your first album in this new environment, and let's do everything we can for it to do. It's the best that it can do. And would I would have guessed, knowing how obstinate your dad was about creative choices, because this was a creative choice, I would have assumed he would have said, no, I've made a double album. I'm putting out a double album. But instead he said, okay, let's do the single album. And maybe also part of that, and relates to what we were just saying, is that for the fans it's half as expensive. You know, It's like it's it's a more realistic and that's the reason double albums don't sell as well as because they're more expensive. That would have resonated with him, for sure. First, I've never made that connection before, just now having this conversation. Yeah, neither. It always seemed like that's not like him to fight for the creative right right along with anything right. Sometimes he would, but I mean he you know, he was obstinate about the art, and you guys this I still wish if we go in a time machine, I sit down and beg him to put the double album out, because I still can't find that original double album sequence. I've found versions, but I can't find the one he played for me and my uncle and then I had in my car at college. Never, I will tell you, honestly, it was never firmly established of these are the songs and this is the double album. It never got that far because the choice to make it a single app and album happened before we really got to sequencing. So there may have been, and there was probably there were probably multiple sequences that we were listening to as possible ways to go. He had, you know how, my dad had his notebook, Like he'd start a record and he'd do all the songs in that same notebook, and then he'd have like a legal path that he'd started. He'd write down everything to remember things like dumb things. It would always be like a coffee ring and like gross stuff all over it on the front page, and then like go through it. And he had a sequence. He had a sequence for the double album, and he had these gold discs made, and he had sent them back east to me and to my uncle, and we had them. And what I would give to have not thrown that on the floor of my car as a eighteen year old, But I I listened to it all the time, and it was half you know, hung up and overdue and songs that had ended up on She's the One, But really a lot of it was all the rest which we're putting out now. And it ended with girl and LST. That's all I remember. We both remember that was the last track. That was the sort of like joke at the end of the odyssey, you know, to lighten up, wake up time or whatever. But I wish it had been a double album that he had sequence because he was so good at sequencing and he cared so much about telling a full story and balancing a beautiful album side spent a lot of time on the timing between songs and you know, in mastering the way each song level wise came after the song before it. There was a lot of detail going into that final phase of crafting the sequenced album. Yeah, and the keys that the last song ended in and the key that the next song's beginning in. Him and Micer Mike's always like, just go to the back end in the front end and let me hear that, you know, But I think we would do both. We would do that. It was called the Tops and Tails, and we would make it on tape on you know, at that point it was half inch tape, and they would be the last thirty seconds of a song, and then the first thirty seconds of the next song, yea of the whole album. Yeah, they had a toolbox. They had learned. I think, I really think making Damn the Torpedoes was such a huge learning experience for Jimmy, for Dad, from Mike, for Stanley, for all of those guys. It was like, no, this is real now. This is not just like you're at the whiskey and you're cool as hell and young as hell, and it was like, this is real discipline times is recording process for you and the pre jeff Right. They're all learning what are the criteria for what we think is actually really good, really good recording of our playing really relevant really of the moment, and how do we tell this story? And there were you know, there's just the normal noises in here. You hear Marcy Campbell in the shower, or you could hear like tape speeding up and slowing down, and that sort of Beatles influence, which later you brought back in actually by bringing in the off white demos to Dad. Before you started wildflowers. But like that sense of going on the ride with the record. You turn on the record, you want to listen to the whole damn thing. I want to be on that ride with my dad, likely in your car, you know, and just kind of hear the whole thing from beginning to end and trust him even if there is a little long or a little songs the album in the car, because we would work on the mix in the studio and then we would go out and it was Richard Dodd had rented a little Toyota, tiny little Toyota, and that became the reference sound system for this album. And we would sit in the car and if it didn't sound good in the Toyota, the mix was not done yet, and we'd be running in and out all day, just car test, cartest cartest over and over again. Yeah, it was never work. It wasn't a job. I mean it was a job, and that he had to show up at a concert when it was booked. But it was always the creative process, always stimulated him, and it seemed like it was the most important thing in his life. It was, and so were those shows. Yeah, he practically died on stage. I mean he wanted to be there communing with people and connecting with them and lifting the vibration. And he knew my dad was more perfect person by any means, but he knew he had this power. Like you could walk up to my dad and if he would smile at you, there was no way you were having a bad day. There was just no way, Like he could light you up with a look, you know. And he wasn't the most attractive man on the planet. He wasn't the most this or that or the other, but he had a lot of soul, Like he had this really dynamic soul, and he protected things that allowed for soul. He was just so awesome. It's so hard to have to sit here and speak about what he may or may not have done or thought or whatever, because I don't really know. But really what he put into me as a father was be on time, be prepared, be creative, feed your brain, always look for more art. And he got to point after the internet came, you know where he was just like you know what, adra like, I really just want to watch to turn in classic movies, and I want to listen to the radio and do my radio show. And now I'm rediscovering new and old bands and new bands that I'm really turned on by. And he would feed the well with only this really really good information and take all of the rest away. I mean, he didn't really take a lot of negativity and noise into his diet anything. He could avoid it at the point real early in his career so that he could keep communing with that soul. Yeah, you know, so which other songs we're going to listen to? We should talk about something could happen? Maybe? Okay, would that be cool? Yeah, let's hear a little bit of it at least. Okay, here's something could happen? So cool? What does it bring up for you? It's something it happened. I mean, it's such a great like look at the contradictions and my dad, like, the artist side of all of us is full of contradictions, and it's full of messiness, and it's full of all these subconscious thoughts and things influences on us coming out on the page or into the instrument of your choice. And you know, I'm sure of who I am unless I feel like somebody else. You know, it's I'm not easy to know. You know. It's like it's hard for him to get to know himself. Yeah, it just it plays more into these themes of this self discovery. And it's like, I mean like I was torn in two is a is a brutal line and it sung so beautifully that that that you don't you know that that's that's a really heavy thing to say I was torn in two. But I actually know I'm going to heal. I actually feel this sense of hope, actually feel this possibility. It's interesting to me, you know, just sitting here with you and thinking about the undecedent to this record being Echo, where it was like, Okay, I'm not going to make it. This is just too much to bear. This change has been too much upheaval for me. And I'm a sensitive soul, you know, And there's there's just the next Echo wasn't next. It feels like a world apart. There were completely different universes that he was living in at that time, and Echo was a very isolating post divorced moment for him. But I remember also he was going through some personal dark stuff apart from all that. Yeah, yeah, he was definitely using drugs at that time, yeah, and alone and struggling. He often didn't seem like himself like he seemed like a different character arriving. No, he wasn't himself. There was no he was walking with a cane and wearing dark glasses. It was a very unusual time. He is not He was not a good place, and I think he has so many, I mean regrets about that era of his life. He had just descended into such a dark place. But you can see he could see it could go that way. He didn't look at this song. He was like, hey, things could get really weird or maybe they'll just be great, you know. But they did. They got weird, and then they got much better, much much better, thanks to many good friends like you and other people. But one thing I can't I should know, but I can't remember what we decided to put in the lyric sheets. But I think he says, I walked the mall, come home, and fall down, like like a guy that goes to the mall. Do you know what I mean. They were sort of arguing with me back in at the ranch, saying, oh, it's walk them all like I walk all the streets or something like that. But I think he's saying I walk them all, go home and fall down. For him would be kind of like normal because he thinks of that is the normal American experience, you know, like I'm just what would a normal guy that's not Tom Petty, that actually gets in his car when he's bummed out and go and do or whatever writing exactly, which is why I had them draw like a little guy in an astronaut's outfit walking through a shopping mall. Um, you know, with the with the words I'm not easy to know, because I thought that was so like him. You know, he would have been like the I stick out like a sore thumb here. I've never been to a mall excepted in my music video. You know. Okay, how unrealistic, you know. But um, he was so proud of the song, like when he found these tapes and rediscovered um all the Rest and wanted to put the outs you know, first Wildflowers too. Then he talked to you and decided to call it All the Rest. Um. This was the song that was sort of like that Christmas that he dragged my uncle into the studio to listen to, And this was the song that he really thought was an undiscovered piece of magic for him. It's so interesting that we had the second half of this amazing album, and because we just moved forward making this stuff, we just sort of forgot that. It's almost like we forgot it existed. It's amazing. I think you guys were so focused at the time, based on going back and talking everybody, that you were so in the moment of creating at the highest level on each track you were finishing for Wildflowers, including these tracks, which you obviously got to a finished place. You know, It's amazing how when you're like, I've experienced this on a very low level as a director, when you have this great crew around you and you all are aiming at the same thing and everyone on the crew is elevating it. There. He had the perfect environment. He was accepted, He had a younger producer that respected him, but he had respect for you because he didn't know your world, and he knew you were of the current world, and you were his ambassador to the current world, and you give him permission to be himself. This is the beauty of this stuff to me, is that you two had that connection and you know, I've known you for years and I know how he's spoken about you, and it's not like you guys were like, tell me all your deepest, darkest like secrets, or you were like the closest friends of all time that know everything about each other and each other's families. It was a real deep mutual respect in a dialogue of yes, trust yourself here, let's think about it. You know, you were this really magical barometer for him. He really enjoyed it. I knew the whole time he was with you, he just enjoyed it so much. He had fun. We had fun, and it was again it was like and I'll say, while it was hard and long, because while Wildflowers sounds like it was recorded in a weekend, it was two years. I think of grueling labor trying to make it sound like we weren't trying so hard. Rick, It does not sound like it was recorded in a weekend. It sounds pretty masterful and has a casual sense about it. It's casual if being casual as being absolutely perfect, you know, but it's not perfect like Jeff's records, like Jefs records are really perfect. It's different. It's a different thing. It's more oxygen in the room, oxygen in the room. It feels born of the miking, the live recording, and really selectively overdubbing, but really kind of you were able to go, Man, I've got players, I don't need to overdub, so I can do live recordings. I mean, And it really was about taking the time to get the performances and the starkness and the truth in those performances. That's everything was rooted in that. Yeah, a pleasure speaking to you, Such a pleasure for me. Thank you so much again. Thank you for protecting this art and sharing it with the world in a new way and expanding people's experience of this beautiful music. Oh, it's time, magic time in my life. It was a magic time to be on the very far periphery of it. And it is just such an honor and a privilege to be an ambassador for you and for Dad and for the band. And I'm so overjoyed to bring it to people at a time when I think they really need it. And there's a lot of love and understanding and beauty in this music that will carry people and uplift people, and I think that that's the most exciting part for us. Thanks to Adrian Petty for sharing memories of her dad with us. You can hear Wildflowers and all the rest along with our favorite Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker songs on a playlist at broken record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast. There you can find extended cuts of past episodes along with new ones. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler and his executive produced by Mia LaBelle. Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries and if you like Broken Record, please remember to share, rate, and review our show on your podcast to appen. I'm justin Richmond.