In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: Benmont Tench

  • Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers- Damn the Torpedoes

    Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers- Damn the Torpedoes

    “We did over two hundred takes on ‘Refugee’. We never thought that we had ‘Refugee’ as well as it should be. I hope I never have to go through that again!” exclaimed the late Tom Petty to me in my classic rock interview documenting Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ breakthrough third album in October 1979, Damn the Torpedoes. “The Heartbreakers were always arrogant enough to write albums in the studio. They never were a very cost-conscious bunch.”

    “Damn the Torpedoes was an important album for me in a lot of (songwriting) ways, because it opened up what I was doing,” Tom Petty revealed. “I’m very proud of the Heartbreakers. They haven’t gotten too honky over the years. They’re a real rock’n’roll group, and they don’t do beer ads. They just wanna play rock’n’roll music. We don’t have our eyes on The Movies or anything,” Tom laughs heartily. “We just want to make rock records and play rock’n’roll shows. It’s just such a simple thing. We’ve always been a simple unit. We’re not simple people, necessarily,” Petty cautioned. “Maybe simple-minded,” he chuckled, “but we’re just a band. We write songs and try to play ’em. It’s harder than it sounds.”

    The backstory behind Damn the Torpedoes is a modern day pulp fiction thriller complete with intrigue, heroes, villains, intimidation, brawling, and courtroom drama. The Gainsville Gator revealed the personal battles that Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers had to fight just so that we could enjoy one of the most important rock albums of the last half century. -Redbeard

  • Tom Petty- Into the Great Wide Open 35th Anniversary

    Tom Petty- Into the Great Wide Open 35th Anniversary

    “It’s very hard living your life as we have, in tour buses and airplanes, for all of this time.“

    With his sudden and way-too-early passing in Fall 2017, my special times with Tom Petty have become increasingly precious to me. Such is my interview at his newly-rebuilt house after an arsonist torched it with Tom’s family all inside, to reveal Into the Great Wide Open by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakersin1991.

    So here In the Studio we are honored to share it  for the stories behind “Learning to Fly”,”The Dark of the Sun”,”All or Nothin’ “,”Out in the Cold”, the knee knocking “Makin’ Some Noise”, and “Into the Great Wide Open”.

    The topics Tom Petty broached in my classic rock interview were indeed “wide open”: war as a foreign policy; security in an uncertain world; gun violence; greed, both individually and that of multi-national corporations; and his sincere concern for rock ‘n’roll, that dominant Twentieth Century invention, now and in the near future. As you will hear from the late Tom Petty, two significant events informed the songwriting on 1991’s Into the Great Wide Open , Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ first post-Traveling Wilburys/Full Moon Fever   effort with his own band. First,Tom Petty turned forty. “I’ll probably look back at this as some kind of mid-life crisis album,” Petty chuckles ,”and go ‘God, I should’ve just lightened up ! Should’ve had a drink and forgot about it!’ But I suppose I’m just working a lot of things out. It’s very hard living your life as we have, in tour buses and airplanes, for all of this time. I think when I turned forty I kind of did , as most people do, get a little reflective about ‘Where have we been? And where are we going?’ And you do kind of realize that, ‘Gee, twenty more and I’m outta here !’ So you do take stock of that, you do.”

    The second significant factor was that the songs for Into the Great Wide Open  were written with a pre-9/11 perspective during Desert Storm Gulf War 1, which disturbed long-dormant feelings in Tom Petty as well as many others who came of age during the nation’s lengthy, deadly, ill-advised Viet Nam War. “As I wrote this album  we went to war, and there were a few anxious moments there when you feel very vulnerable to people who are running the planet. Can those people just blow me up? Yes they can! And it was a very hard, painful thing to go through, the war was. I had extremely mixed emotions, I never felt good about it. And of course I support the troops, but I felt terrible about the fact that, in this day and age, that we’re still barbaric enough to roll out and kill thousands of people…’Dark of the Sun’ was one written during that period of the (Gulf) war. When I watched the oil fires in Kuwait, I had the image of the dark of the sun…imagining if it had been Indianapolis where the oil fires were burning.  Or Cincinnati. Or Los Angeles instead of Kuwait, on CNN.”-Redbeard