Petty raced out a “hell, yes.” Watching footage, you can see him smiling his head off, ecstatic to not be leading the show. “In any other life situation I’m terribly retarded.” Petty got a call from Dylan asking if the band would back him on a tour. “The road and the studio are the only places I’ve ever felt completely OK,” says Petty, lighting another Marlboro. Off the road, everyone was a mess – some members dealing with substance issues, some just dealing with real life. By 1986, the band had toured relentlessly for a decade. “It eats up the whole day and we’d argue, and then you’d come back and the sound would be completely different with a crowd.”
“About 20 years ago, we stopped doing soundchecks,” says Petty. Tench, Campbell and Petty attribute the group’s longevity to two epochal moments: one logistical and one creative. You can argue that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are the most successful and longest-running American rock band in history, the Beach Boys be damned. “Bringing in someone new wouldn’t have worked.” “I don’t think the band continues without Ron,” Tench tells me. This proved fortuitous when Epstein died of heroin-related complications in 2003. “I had half a dozen of those nightmares, so I started learning those songs so I could get a night’s sleep.” “I’d dream I’d be walking to the stage, and be like, ‘I don’t know “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,”‘ ” remembers Blair.
He opened a bikini shop in the Valley and was replaced by Howie Epstein, but the band loomed in his subconscious. Petty, Campbell and Tench formed the nucleus of Mudcrutch, which morphed into the Heartbreakers in 1976, after adding San Diegan Blair on bass and Stan Lynch on drums. When Tench used to go on one of his tirades, a roadie would slide a dog bowl of water under his piano. In a Peter Bogdanovich documentary on the Heartbreakers, 2007’s Runnin’ Down a Dream, Tench can be heard screaming at his bandmates to take things seriously. Tench wears suits and went to Exeter, but he’s the fiery one. He soon met Benjamin Montmorency Tench III, a prep-school kid and piano prodigy. “I felt like I had to go down a dark tunnel and coax him out,” says Petty. Petty would be in the front room, and the bedroom would be dark except for the pilot light from a Fender amp. (How close are they? Multi-instrumentalist Scott Thurston recently sold his house to Campbell.) That’s when Petty met Campbell – then painfully shy – at a friend’s house in Gainesville, Florida. What keeps the Heartbreakers together is simple: The band has been their life since 1976. “And if you’re not really experienced, you will fall.” “Unless you’ve done it, you can’t understand what it is,” says Petty, brushing his scarecrow hair out of his face.
Petty is defiant about the hyper pace of the tour, which hits 30 cities this spring and summer.
#Tom petty documentary series#
Someone suggests Bloodline, a noirish series set in his native Florida. “I need a new Netflix show, does anyone have any suggestions?” he asks just before his assistant ducks out of the room.
#Tom petty documentary full#
Backstage is no longer the den of iniquity it used to be, no longer full of starlets, hangers-on and good drugs. The band now travels like pashas: playing shows in weeklong bursts, flying privately to the gig and then returning every night to a hub city like Denver. This may be because he is chain-smoking, alternating between Marlboros and vaping, perhaps as a concession to the Denver Ritz-Carlton’s smoking policy. To be honest, he looks more jittery offstage than on. The crowds are still there, something Petty is clearly proud of when we sit down in a hotel room on an off day. “I’ve been hearing that for 15 years,” says guitarist and original Heartbreaker Mike Campbell. There’s been a valedictory feel to the Heartbreakers’ 40th-anniversary tour, which Petty says is the band’s final country-spanning run – the “last big one.” Everyone else is a bit skeptical. The Heartbreakers are shooed into the catacombs of Red Rocks, and 9,000 fans head for cover.
0 kommentar(er)
