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Tom Petty didn’t sign up for the life of a solo artist when he first put the Heartbreakers together.
He did have his name slapped on the front of every single one of their records, but when listening to all of those early records, you can tell that Petty was just the singer in the midst of one of the greatest heartland rock bands that the world had ever seen. The band were un-expendable whenever they made a record, but Petty didn’t realise that he had an issue with his bandmates until he realised that one of his greatest friends was conspiring against him behind his back.
Then again, it’s not that hard to see why any number of the Heartbreakers would have built up resentment over the years. The idea of playing second fiddle to Petty alongside four other guys was going to be a bitter pill for everyone to swallow, but even if Mike Campbell was bummed about not being given the same status as his singer, he was more than happy to have had a few songs that he would submit to every record they made and see them transform into tunes like ‘Refugee’.
But that didn’t mean the rest of the band was exactly happy when Full Moon Fever came out. Campbell was still accounted for, but Benmont Tench remembered he and the rest of the band talking trash about the album before it even came out. It might have all been a bit of jealousy, but there was a lot of genuine anger behind what Stan Lynch was saying about being left out of the group.
Lynch had already been taking shit from Jimmy Iovine when they were making Damn the Torpedoes, but whereas Petty stood up for him back then, Lynch felt like he wasn’t being given the same attention that he deserved. Into the Great Wide Open saw him laying down his tracks and then immediately leaving, so he wasn’t exactly happy about not contributing as he should have. It’s not like he couldn’t find time to write his own tunes when he wanted to, either.
He had begun writing with Don Henley and even produced some of the biggest hits from the album The End of the Innocence, but it turned out that the old joke about the drummer’s songs not working did have some weight in the Heartbreakers. And since Lynch was a lot more extroverted than everyone else in the band, he wasn’t going to be subtle when he talked about how pissed off he was about being shackled to Petty.
The rest of the band had already been hard at work making Wildflowers without him, and when Petty played the Bridge School Benefit with Lynch, he figured that it was time to cut ties with him when he started badmouthing the new material, saying, “Stan did everything he could to get fired. I’d hear that he was auditioning for another group. Then I heard him at a gig talking to a guy in another band. He described us as not his main gig. And I thought, ‘Okay well, you’re being paid like it’s main gig.’ I had a feeling that the dough was the only reason he hadn’t walked off yet.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And while Petty was about to experience his own problems, when Howie Epstein began slipping away to heroin addiction, getting Steve Ferrone in Lynch’s place with a gift from the gods. Ferrone was already a session legend, and being able to know that the drums were in place every single time he made a new record gave him a sense of ease he hadn’t had in decades with Lynch behind the drums.
Lynch was still more than happy to turn up when the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but his relationship with Petty feels like watching two friends from high school fall out. Neither of them were doing anything wrong per se, but they were clearly growing in vastly different directions, and it made no sense for them to stick around if they weren’t going to be happy with the other.
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