Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

Featured Album

Essential Albums

  • Into the Great Wide Open
    Into the Great Wide Open
    Into the Great Wide Open

    Though one was a Heartbreakers album and the other wasn’t, 1991’s Into the Great Wide Open felt more or less like a companion piece to Petty’s 1989 solo hit Full Moon Fever. Both were produced by Jeff Lynne, who gives the band’s rootsy, naturalistic sound an airbrushed sheen—a contrast that sowed some internal discord among band members, some of whom preferred live takes to Lynne’s brick-by-brick approach. But Lynne’s studied studio wizardry trumped all, resulting in an album that become one of Petty’s biggest critical and commercial hits—making the Heartbreakers one of the few groups to release multiplatinum albums across three decades. Much like Full Moon Fever, the perfectly polished and calibrated Into the Great Wide Open sounds less like rock ’n’ roll than a stylized simulation. Not that the album lacks soul: The group could still perform anthems about hope (“Kings Highway,” “Learning to Fly”), bitterness (“All Or Nothin’”), and bleakness (“Out In the Cold”) with romantic conviction. But Into the Great Wide Open also finds the band members, in their own catchy way, playing around with meta-explorations of American myths: There are songs about Hollywood casualties (“Into the Great Wide Open”), dueling desperados (“Two Gunslingers”), and, just in case you forgot where they were coming from, a track about the simple salvation of rock ’n’ roll itself (“Makin’ Some Noise”). Petty would soon scale back and strip down his sound, but Into the Great Wide Open found him pushing himself in the studio in an all-or-nothin’ attempt at rock-and-roll dominance.

  • Hard Promises
    Hard Promises
    Hard Promises

    With 1979’s Damn the Torpedoes, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had finally achieved mainstream success. And on 1981’s Hard Promises, the band members struggled on how to deal with their hard-fought new fame. By the time of the album’s release, Petty had famously gone toe to toe with his record label, opting to file for bankruptcy rather than serve out what he saw as an oppressive contract. But Petty was also butting heads with the music industry as a whole, using his new fame as a platform to rail against a proposed “superstar pricing” tier that would raise the price of a new Heartbreakers album from $8.98 to $9.98—a significant hike at a time when the minimum wage was $3.35. The battles were good publicity, good politics, and good fortification for the stories Petty wrote and sang. On Hard Promises, Petty laments the mess his ex got into while saving a little sympathy for himself (“A Woman in Love (It's Not Me)”), lives for the moment, in spite of not knowing what comes next (“The Waiting”), and feels funny about the newfangled outfits the guys are trying to sell him in London (“Kings Road”). If Springsteen fashioned himself as a voice of the people, Petty often just seemed like, well, a person: cranky, jealous, yearning, and amused. And as for the Heartbreakers? The band members come off as less jittery than usual on Hard Promises. They’re still fundamentally geared to rock, but they’re also comfortable leaning back a little, as proved by the Dylan-in-the-desert ballad “Something Big,” or the light funk workout “Nightwatchman”—songs that lyrically and musically forsook the boldfaced immediacy of “The Waiting” for something more nuanced and indirect. That doesn’t mean the group’s songwriting was getting obscure—after all, this was still Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. But Petty and the band had gotten comfortable enough to fan out and experiment a little. Before Torpedoes, they’d always known where they were heading; with Hard Promises they started to draw their own map.

  • Damn the Torpedoes
    Damn the Torpedoes
    Damn the Torpedoes

    Six months before he released his third album, Tom Petty filed for bankruptcy. Six months after, he was one of the biggest rock stars in America thanks to a handful of radio staples that would prove as enduring as any ever written. In between, he and his band were put through the wringer by a producer who would go on to become a mogul, determined to spin Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ bar-band charm and penchant for classic hooks into platinum. “It was not an easy record to make, but it paid off 'cause it came out and it really has an amazing sound and it jumps out of the radio when you hear it,” Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell tells Apple Music. “We didn't have our studio chops, and that was very frustrating because we kept thinking we had it. We went through a lot of tuning the drums endlessly, trying different guitars and amps—getting so nitpicky about every little nuance of the sound. And that's why it sounds so pristine, but it wasn't fun.” The nitpicker-in-chief was producer Jimmy Iovine, who made the band work and rework songs over and over—Campbell claims they may have spent two weeks on the snare sound for “Refugee” alone, but the result was a breakthrough hit from the moment the final version was played back in the studio. “I remember even everybody in the room, like the whole crew, staff, and the girl at the front desk all came in. They were going, ‘You guys have done it now. Just watch that one go.’ ‘Refugee’ is one of the first songs that Tom and I wrote that really, really was huge. We'd written a lot of songs before, but that one just had some magic. I wrote the music pretty much as the record stands and gave those tapes to Tom, and he wrote these incredible words and made the songs what they are.” It was the embryonic demos of “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl” that made Iovine so excited about producing the album to begin with, and so confident of the band’s impending megastardom. “In fact, he said, ‘I don't need to hear any more songs, we've got the two we need, the rest doesn't matter,'” recalls Campbell. “Which I don't agree with, but when I hear them on the radio now, I'm really proud of the recording and the songcraft and the timelessness. Hopefully, that's the beauty of good music. And I think the songs are not in any kind of genre—it's not New Wave or grunge or whatever, it's just rock 'n' roll done really well. We didn't get pigeonholed into a genre or a fad; the songs hold up to me and still sound true.”

  • Tom Petty And The Heatbreakers
    Tom Petty And The Heatbreakers
    Tom Petty And The Heatbreakers

    1976

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About Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

If someone wanted an audio capture of the everyman themes, the guitar licks, and the head-nodding grooves that are what rock 'n' roll is all about, a Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers record would fill the need. Born in Gainesville, Florida in 1950, Petty spent his youth soaking up rock verities from first-gen rebels like Elvis Presley and '60s British Invasion legends like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. By 1976 his roots-rocking Gainesville gang Mudcrutch had moved to L.A. and evolved into Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, whose self-titled debut LP delivered instantly timeless tracks like the pealing, Byrds-influenced riffs “American Girl” and unimpeachably cool, bluesy “Breakdown.” The nuance and dynamism delivered by bassist Ron Blair, lead guitarist Mike Campbell, drummer Stan Lynch, and keyboardist Benmont Tench made The Heartbreakers a band to be reckoned with. And as songs like "Don't Do Me Like That" and "Refugee" from 1979's blockbuster Damn the Torpedoes saturated '70s airwaves with a fresh take on vintage ideas, they were defining what would come to be known as heartland rock alongside the likes of Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen. Starting with 1982's Long After Dark, Howie Epstein replaced Blair, and by the next LP, Southern Accents, the band were working with producer Dave Stewart and experimenting with swirling psychedelia ("Don't Come Around Here No More"), brass, and beyond. After 1991's Into the Great Wide Open, Lynch was replaced by Steve Ferrone, and 1999's Echo was Epstein's final Heartbreakers album before drugs claimed his life in 2003; Blair then returned to resume his old role. Even as Petty earned elder-statesman status, he and the Heartbreakers never relinquished their ties to each other and their love of raw, honest rock 'n' roll. They kept the faith until Petty's death on October 2, 2017, just a week after the band finished a tour celebrating their 40th anniversary.

ORIGIN
Gainesville, FL, United States
FORMED
1976
GENRE
Rock

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