(Credits: Far Out / Ирина Лепнёва)
Sat 8 November 2025 19:30, UK
Not everything that Tom Petty ever laid down in the studio was supposed to be terribly difficult to play.
He was always looking to make straightforward rock and roll, and he was not going to get caught in the same trap as everyone else from his generation by trying to stretch his songs out wherever he could. The point was to keep things fairly simple, but you’d be surprised how much hard work goes into making a song sound that simple.
Even on some of The Heartbreakers’ first albums, it’s not like everything is a walk in the park half the time. The pre-Damn the Torpedoes era of the group was a great way for everyone to cut their teeth, but in between the garage-rock-esque production on a few of the tunes, getting the right groove on a song like ‘Rockin’ Around With You’ or capturing a guitar solo as chaotic as ‘Too Much Ain’t Enough’ takes a lot more than a bunch of kids trying to figure out what working in a studio is like.
And by the time the band reached the late 1980s, it was more about creating textures with sound than playing everything live in the room. Wildflowers could be played on acoustic guitar and still sound powerful, but if you’re listening a little closer, there’s a practical symphony going on behind Petty’s vocals, whether that’s the beautiful piano that comes in and those slight additions of percussion that accent every word he’s saying.
But if you look at any great rock and roll record, you need to start by getting the drums right first. That’s the pulse of what the song is going to be, and if there’s not a strong foundation from the word ‘go’, there’s going to be problems when it comes time for everyone to start adding their own parts to the record. Then again, it was always going to be in safe hands when you get someone like Ringo Starr to sit in on the session.
Starr has always been the definition of a perfect drummer in many people’s eyes, but when he was first brought in for the session, he remembered getting thrown for a loop more than a few times, saying, “When I played on Wildflowers, I said, ‘I’ll play on four tracks Tom, that’s it’. And then after three I said, ‘I’m going’, and he goes, ‘Trickier than you thought, aren’t they.’”
But when looking at the way that the Heartbreakers work, a lot of it comes down to the percussion. The rhythm guitars are roaring throughout every one of their classic tracks, and while there are more than a few times where they keep things straightforward, there’s always the odd song that could throw a drummer for a loop if they aren’t paying attention carefully.
Take a song like ‘To Find A Friend’. The pulse is as consistent as a metronome half the time, but you need that certain push and pull to make everything work, and the verses are already a bit of a handful to deal with. Everything stays in 4/4 time, but hearing Petty change chords so quickly at the top of the verse can be downright disorienting if someone is looking to get the kind of pulse they’re looking for.
But if you look at the final results of what Starr played on, he was a part of something more than your average rock and roll record. A song like ‘Hung Up and Overdue’ is beautiful on its own, but by adding Starr on drums and bringing in Carl Wilson to sing a few backing vocals, Petty had a damn supergroup rallying around him to make sure that the record came out sounding exactly right.
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