Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Damn the Torpedoes (1979)

From pitchfork.com

Damn the Torpedos is the peak of Tom Petty’s songwriting with the Heartbreakers. Slick, big, and immutably classic, the album is a front-to-back feat of production and songwriting.

Before he was the American bard of the wandering, willful, and stoned, Tom Petty was an ornery Southerner who migrated from a Florida college town to scrape together a record deal in the rotten heart of the Southern California record business. Four years after signing with Shelter Records, and in the midst of recording the third Heartbreakers album for the label, it all went bad.

When MCA bought Shelter’s fledgling parent company ABC in 1979, Petty tried to opt out of his contract—in which he’d naively ceded all publishing royalties—and MCA and Shelter sued him in L.A. Superior Court. Refusing to be “bought and sold like a piece of meat,” Petty threatened to shelve his band’s new album, and MCA counter-threatened to confiscate the band’s session tapes—legally, their property. Petty then privately told a studio assistant to hide each day’s reels in a secret location without his knowledge. Petty’s final blow was filing for bankruptcy, which opened his current contracts to renegotiation and signaled that he wasn’t about to flinch. Remarkably, MCA and Shelter caved. MCA kept Petty on contract, but it was now far more lucrative with significant creative latitude. They also returned to him all publishing rights and gave him his own boutique label, Backstreet. It was a rare victory in a cutthroat business: a musician called a major label’s bluff and forced them to fold. The album the Heartbreakers released that October, a day before Petty’s 29th birthday and four months after his Chapter 11 filing, was appropriately titled Damn the Torpedoes.

”We didn’t sit around and talk about making an album about that experience,” Petty told Rolling Stone in 1980, “but we knew we were. They get you pinned in a corner, and the last thing you can do to keep your sanity is write songs.” Especially for someone who specialized in songs about losers trying to get by, Torpedoes was a positively triumphant moment. Thanks in large part to the studio wizardry of producer Jimmy Iovine and engineer Shelly Yakus, “Refugee,” “Don’t Do Me Like That,” and “Here Comes My Girl” sounded massive on FM radio. After two studio albums, after “Breakdown” barely cracked the Top 40 and “American Girl” didn’t even chart, after four years in the industry mines and a few months of court battles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had finally conquered the pop world.

Torpedoes sat at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart for seven weeks—kept from the top spot by Pink Floyd’s The Wall—and would eventually sell nearly three million copies. The band’s stardom was actually validated through MCA’s own blinkered corporate logic. Having learned no lessons from testing Petty’s will, the label determined that the Heartbreakers now qualified for its unscrupulous “Superstar Pricing,” an increase from $8.98 to $9.98 already applied to big sellers like Steely Dan’s Gaucho and the Xanadu soundtrack from ELO and Olivia Newton-John. Yet again, Petty threatened to withhold the LP—arguing that his label was trying to price-gouge his fans—or title it Eight Ninety-Eight. MCA decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Petty won again, and named the followup Hard Promises.

The Heartbreakers—guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Lynch, and bassist Ron Blair—split the difference between a lot of styles: They weren’t massive UK art-rock or the arena-sized metal of AC/DC and Van Halen. They were an L.A. band, but without the slick, expensive sound of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. They fit somewhere between spiky new wave, the blue-collar rock of Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen, and the emergent crop of critically-beloved, acerbic UK traditionalists Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Graham Parker, and Joe Jackson. In the previous few years, the Heartbreakers had opened for everyone from Blondie to Bob Seger, the Kinks, Al Kooper, Rush, even the jazz-rock ensemble Tom Scott and the L.A. Express—but had never headlined their own tour. Their second album You’re Gonna Get It! had gone gold, but Petty was tired of being a support act. He wanted the third album to be different, and definitely bigger. Enter Jimmy Iovine.

Four years earlier at 21, he’d stumbled into engineering Born to Run and studied Bruce Springsteen’s studio perfectionism during some long sessions at New York City’s Record Plant. Springsteen’s insistence on perfecting Max Weinberg’s drum sound on the album—three weeks’ worth of insistent tracking and re-tracking—even forced Iovine to quit on one occasion. A few years later, Iovine signed on to produce Patti Smith’s third album Easter while he was engineering Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. Knowing that Smith’s long-delayed third LP had no lead single, he coaxed Springsteen into giving Smith a skeletal tune he’d shelved—just a chorus, really—called “Because the Night.” Smith finished the song, and her scenery-chewing romantic mini-opera was easily her biggest hit. It sounded great, too, thanks in large part to veteran engineer Shelly Yakus, whom Iovine loved. The Heartbreakers loved “Because the Night”—I mean, everyone loved it—and Lynch was particularly fond of Yakus’ drum sound on the record. Shelter brokered an introduction between Petty and Iovine, and when Petty played him the demos of “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl,” Iovine was instantly sold. “It’s the first and last time I’ve ever said to anyone that they don’t need any more songs,” Iovine later recalled. “I’ve never said that to anyone since.” According to Petty, after he played the songs, Iovine looked around the room and exclaimed: “We’re all going to be millionaires!” Iovine signed on to produce Torpedoes and showed up in Van Nuys’ Sound City studio with Yakus as his engineer.

The first single released from Torpedoes, the roller-rink R&B of “Don’t Do Me Like That,” was the band’s highest-charting yet, reaching the Billboard top 10 and saturating rock radio playlists through 1980. The song dated back to demos from Petty’s first band, Mudcrutch, and packed significantly more Gainesville choogle than anything else on Torpedoes, or either of the first two records, for that matter. Petty was planning on giving it to the J. Geils Band, which made perfect sense—their 1981 hit “Centerfold” would borrow its bounce—until Iovine insisted that the Heartbreakers re-record it. It’s a unique single in the band’s discography, as close to the proto-MTV new wave as the Heartbreakers would get. Tench’s piano plinks and tangy organ licks play tag with Campbell’s chicken-scratch riffs and Lynch’s tumbling fills, while Petty spits admonitions in a sprechgesang that owed as much to Stax R&B lifer Rufus Thomas as any contemporaneous rock frontman.

The Heartbreakers were more used to gigging as a group than playing separate studio parts, and Iovine and Yakus put the quinet through its paces during the tumultuous Torpedoes sessions, which Petty was regularly leaving to meet with MCA’s lawyers a half-hour south on the 405 in Century City. Iovine’s meticulous studio M.O. chafed against the Heartbreakers’ lackadaisical approach. “We would sit back and get stoned and discuss it for a while, and then jam for a while,” Campbell remembered. After several days of Iovine’s and Yakus’ obsession over the album’s drum sound, particularly during the recording of “Refugee,” which, according to the band, took between 100 and 200 takes, Lynch and Campbell reached their breaking points. Iovine nagged Lynch to break free from his style of playing to the point that he actually quit the band (and was coaxed back by Petty). Pushed to the edge by the constant bickering, Campbell disappeared for a bit as well. Yakus’ preoccupation with Lynch’s drum sound led him to tune his heads much looser, resulting in a muffled tone similar to what he achieved on Easter. It might have driven Lynch nuts, but it sounded great on record and radio. Entire music recording messageboard threads are devoted to trying to match the gear, mic positions, and tunings that Yakus perfected on Torpedoes.

Released in January 1980 as Torpedoes’ second single, “Refugee” was the best-recorded and hardest-sounding song the Heartbreakers had yet released. For an album recorded in L.A., “Refugee” sounds incredibly New York—more alleyway than highway, which the band recognized in the song’s music video. It was certainly anthemic, but in place of “Because the Night”’s Orbisonian romanticism was a searing, metallic sound, no less menacing for its exquisite mix; a blend of Tench’s keyboard stabs with Campbell’s blues-derived minor riff (which he’d taught himself from listening to late-’60s John Mayall albums). Petty did not boast Smith’s or Springsteen’s poetic inclinations but offered a variation on a spoken/sung verse. The shift from his laconic, stonerish Southern drawl on the verses to the in-the-red adenoidal yawp on the chorus is still thrilling, and peaks at the last word of the middle-eight, when he shreds his vocal cords before Campbell’s solo: “One of those things you gotta feel to be truuuuuue!”

Like most rock lyrics, “Refugee” is best read as a composite of ideas and characters. It’s certainly, at some level, Petty’s translation of his unsettled state as the creative ward of a corporation during the song’s composition. Yet he maps this frustration onto his favorite theme: a wayward soul looking for a home. A couple years after the titular character of “American Girl” sought “a little more to life, somewhere else,” here was another girl, or maybe the same one, rootless and worse for wear. Indeed, the clearest predecessor to “Refugee” from a narrative standpoint isn’t “Because the Night” or anything from Born to Run or Darkness on the Edge of Town, but Steely Dan’s gloomily empathetic 1974 ode to a troubled transient making her way through L.A.’s Chandleresque underbelly, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.”

If “Refugee” was the perfect outcome of the Heartbreakers-Iovine mind-meld, then “Here Comes My Girl” added some twists to the band’s jangle-pop arsenal. Ever the traditionalist, Petty was a fan of ’50s throwback and CBGBs mainstay Mink DeVille, and on the verses of “Girl,” he tweaks the speak-sing into the dejected persona of a hard-luck nobody, a worn-down iteration of DeVille’s streetcorner hustler archetype. Petty’s voice morphs into a rasp on the pre-chorus, before coming to full bloom on the chorus, when the streetwise greaser lapses into a romantic stupor at the mere sight of his beloved. Petty’s dead-on imitation of Roger McGuinn’s gentle tenor is backed by Tench drizzling piano notes on one edge of the song and holding a sustained, dreamlike organ chord on another. Petty’s career is defined by his mastery of effortlessly pretty medium-tempo grooves, and the “Girl” chorus stands out among them: It’s both the most genuinely sweet and unexpectedly psychedelic moment in Petty’s extensive canon of hooks.

Speaking of choruses, is there a single six-word phrase more humbly aligned with rock’s zero-to-hero mythos than, “Even the losers get lucky sometimes”? Not released as a single but later included on the band’s over-10-million-selling Greatest Hits package, “Even the Losers” shows Petty in his American Elvis Costello mode, equal parts snarl and self-deprecation, and features a killer Chuck Berry-derived solo from Campbell, who’d come into his own as a sideman while Petty developed his songwriting chops. His fiery solos on Eddie Cochran-style deep-cut rave-ups “Century City” (Petty’s snide take on the corporate L.A. enclave where he battled his label) and “What Are You Doin’ in My Life?” showed his old school chops, while his slide work on album-closing ballad “Louisiana Rain” displayed his capacity to channel Beggars Banquet-era Keith Richards.

Torpedoes’ hits can overshadow the fact that the album—far from the singles-and-filler approach of so many contemporaries and predecessors—is end-to-end great. Beatles acolytes that they were, Petty and Campbell urged Iovine to keep random bits of studio noise in the tracklisting, including a trippy drum loop that segued into Campbell’s wife yelling, “It’s just the normal noises in here!” which Petty grabbed from the four-track demos Campbell cut in his living room. Torpedoes-era Heartbreakers deserve to be in the conversation with the critically-adored post-Beatles studio-rats generally referred to as “power pop”: Todd Rundgren, the Raspberries, Badfinger, Dwight Twilley, the Flamin’ Groovies, and Cheap Trick. Consider the breadth and confidence of the band who gave the world the album track “You Tell Me,” which opens as slick, urbane L.A. pop (which Sheryl Crow would later unconsciously plagiarize for “My Favorite Mistake”) before segueing into the kind of nerdy, nasal hook-fest that lesser-known power-pop contemporaries like Shoes and 20/20 would’ve killed for. Or the nod to the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby” that opens “Shadow of a Doubt,” a breezy Americana romp that, with hindsight, predicts peak Wilco by a couple decades.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers made music that still befuddles critics: they were too chill to be punk, and too famous to be underdogs. Petty was too unassuming a superstar to be Springsteen, and though he was equally gnomic and cantankerous, he was far too lyrically judicious to be Dylan. They were a singles band who made great albums and a “heartland” band from L.A. via Gainesville. In the year that Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks took top honors in the Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, Torpedoes finished eighth, which the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau chalked up to votes from conservative daily paper rock critics, and though he was happy Petty beat Supertramp and the Eagles, he snorted, “If Tom Petty ends up defining rock and roll heaven, then Johnny Rotten will have died in vain.” Of course, Petty himself knew more than anyone that the very idea of a “rock and roll heaven” is ridiculous. There are players and songs, producers and albums, labels and gigs, fans and critics, and his job was not to aim toward redemption or salvation, but to keep a little bit of pride, get lucky sometimes, and always move forward, full speed ahead.