{"id":364523,"date":"2025-11-08T12:36:19","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T12:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/364523\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T12:36:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T12:36:19","slug":"tom-petty-the-heartbreakers-refugee-the-story-behind-the-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/364523\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers\u2019 Refugee: the story behind the song"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sandwiched between punk<\/a>, the first moans of goth and the flagging first wave of New Wave<\/a>, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers<\/a>\u2019 track Refugee took a defiant step in reasserting the dominance of guitar rock at the butt end of the 70s.<\/p>\n

Not only did this prickly anthem propel the band into the US Billboard chart and help make them a household name, with the anxious minor key menace of Mike Campbell<\/a>\u2019s opening guitar shot it also helped banish the lingering malaise of a world afflicted with disco fever.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It was a dark, dangerous sound that came to the guitarist late one afternoon while he sat listening to John Mayall<\/a>\u2019s version of Oh Pretty Woman which featured a very young pre-Rolling Stones Mick Taylor<\/a> on guitar. It was Taylor\u2019s playing that was the real inspiration for Refugee.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI love that album [Crusade, 1967],\u201d Mike Campbell says. \u201cI\u2019d just put it on and practise guitar along with it. I love the way Mick Taylor plays, and maybe some of it\u2019s rubbed off. I had a Gibson guitar that I wanted to try, and I wanted to come up with some chords that I liked that I could play some lead over.\u201d<\/p>\n

He recorded a few other guitar ideas on a four-track tape recorder, and eventually, without having given it a title, gave a cassette of it to Petty to listen to.<\/p>\n

By 1979 the two friends hadn\u2019t written much together, but then-producer Denny Cordell suggested it might be a good idea. Campbell and Petty wrote a single song together on TP&TH\u2019s debut album, and two on the second. But something shifted when Campbell bought the four-track.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Tom\n<\/p>\n

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers in 1980: (from left) Stan Lynch, Tom Petty, Benmont Tench, Ron Blair, Mike Campbell (Image credit: Koh Hasebe\/Shinko Music\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s where Mike\u2019s talents really took off,\u201d Petty remembered in 2011. \u201cHe was always fiddling around with these tapes he was making at home. On Damn The Torpedoes<\/a> was when he came in with those incredible songs: Refugee and Here Comes My Girl. That was when it really blossomed.\u201d<\/p>\n

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So had Petty. It took him just 10 minutes to come up with the words to add to the untitled music on the cassette that Campbell had given him. But that\u2019s the last thing that would be easy about Refugee.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll I remember is giving him a cassette, telling him: \u2018Here\u2019s some demos\u2019,\u201d Campbell smiles. \u201cI didn\u2019t think much about it. Then the next rehearsal we had he said: \u2018I worked on your tape and I got some words to this song.\u2019 I said: \u2018Oh, really?\u2019 He played it to me, and I was just blown away. The band tried to learn it, and that was a whole other movie. Trying to capture that demo with the band live took a while.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Heartbreakers had managed to persuade wunderkind producer Jimmy Iovine \u2013 the engineer on Bruce Springsteen<\/a>\u2019s Born To Run, producer of Patti Smith<\/a>\u2019s Easter \u2013 to work with them.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe were still pretty green in the studio, and we were getting used to Jimmy Iovine and [engineer] Shelly Yakus who were both very meticulous with the drum sounds,\u201d Campbell remembers. \u201cThe first day it\u2019d be like: \u2018Move the snare drum over there.\u2019 \u2018Try a different snare drum.\u2019 \u2018Let\u2019s try a different microphone.\u2019 This went on for days, just trying to get the snare to sound right.<\/p>\n

They had almost recorded the entire album, yet they still couldn\u2019t get Refugee right. The studio was a tense place, and the scapegoat was drummer Stan Lynch. At one point he was temporarily dismissed because of his constant bickering with Iovine over the drum sounds.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Tom\n<\/p>\n

Tom Petty live in Chicago in 1981 (Image credit: George Rose\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were so hard on Stanley. He worked really hard to get this drum sound. [The demo] had a swing to it that Stan didn\u2019t quite understand. None of us did really, but it just seemed to work,\u201d recalls Campbell.<\/p>\n

In the end, it took the over 100 takes to get it right. \u201cWe all blamed each other,\u201d says the guitarist. \u201cBut we never doubted the song. So we just kept at it until, finally, one day we played it and said: \u2018Oh, that\u2019s it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThere were times when Tom would go: \u2018I can\u2019t hit those notes tonight. We\u2019re going to have to leave it off the list.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Mike Campbell<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But still they couldn\u2019t let it go. \u201cJimmy was pushing real hard,\u201d says Campbell. \u201cBless his heart. Jimmy was on a mission. We were on a mission too, but Jimmy was just driven. He wanted to make the best record ever made, and he wanted to be the guy to do it. He wanted to prove to himself and the world that Jimmy Iovine made this happen. And he did. I mean, there\u2019s nothing that we would have accepted that wasn\u2019t great either, but he was pushing, and sometimes his pushing kind of worked against us because it would implode some of the players. But I wouldn\u2019t give him more weight than Tom in terms of pushing for the final version. Even when we had the take, we didn\u2019t think we had it. We were still thinking: \u2018Oh, this is still not good enough. We want to cut it again.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

And they might have continued trying to improve on it, had they not had to finally turn the finished album in to the label.<\/p>\n

\u201cJimmy and Tom took it to New York. They said: \u2018Maybe if we mix it in New York it\u2019ll sound better than it does here.\u2019 Even when it was out we were thinking: \u2018Oh, we should have cut it again.\u2019 It never ended.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers – Refugee – YouTube
\n\"Tom<\/p>\n

Watch On <\/a><\/p>\n

More than three decades later, they still remain haunted by the song, with which they always ended their set.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were a couple of times where Tom was having issues with his voice. It\u2019s a hard song to sing because it\u2019s at the top of his range, and there were times when he would go: \u2018I can\u2019t hit those notes tonight, guys. We\u2019re going to have to leave it off the list.\u2019 A couple of tours ago we tried to lower the key to make it easier for him, but it changed the whole timbre of the music. We struggled along with that for a while. Then we said: \u2018We either do it in the right key or we don\u2019t do it at all. But people want to hear it, so we do what we can.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything we\u2019ve ever done we compare to Refugee or American Girl. It\u2019s an albatross,\u201d Campbell laughs. \u201cBut it\u2019s a good problem to have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 154 (January 2011)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sandwiched between punk, the first moans of goth and the flagging first wave of New Wave, Tom Petty…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":364524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[171,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-364523","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115514113526142391","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}