Tom Petty: The Songwriter Who Wouldn't Back Down

In May 1979, with two albums and two minor hits already behind him, Tom Petty filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He wasn't broke in the way people usually mean that word, he'd just spent over $500,000 of his own money recording an album and then refused to hand it over to his label. Filing halted the lawsuits piling up against him and forced the negotiation he actually wanted. Two years later he picked a fight over a single dollar, holding up the release of an album rather than let his label price it above what he thought his fans should have to pay. Both fights were, on paper, about money. Neither one really was.

A kid from Gainesville who met Elvis once

Petty was born in Gainesville, Florida, in 1950, and traced his own path into music back to a single encounter: meeting Elvis Presley on a film set near his hometown in 1961, then watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show a few years later. He played in local bands through his teens, formed a group called Mudcrutch that fell apart after one unsuccessful single, then regrouped a smaller lineup as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 1976. Their self-titled debut, carried by "Breakdown" and "American Girl," barely registered in the US at first and caught on in the UK before America paid attention. It set the template for everything after: guitar-driven rock songs, verse-chorus structures nobody would call clever, written to be understood on the first listen.

Writing songs by taking things out, not putting them in

Petty's reputation for simplicity rests on a discipline that looks easy and isn't. He was blunt about how he got there: "If you are working on a song, and you come up with a chord that seems really unusual, like it doesn't fit there, it's because it doesn't. Take it out!" That's not a rule about taste, it's a rule about restraint, the instinct to cut the clever move the moment it stops serving the song. Asked once whether it was true that many of his songs did everything a song needs to do in about three minutes, he didn't dress up the answer: "Yeah, that's the idea. If you can do it."

Most of his biggest songs came together fast rather than through labor. He described "American Girl" arriving while he lived in an apartment near a freeway in Los Angeles: "The cars would go by, and I remember thinking that that sounded like the ocean to me. That was my ocean. My Malibu." "Free Fallin'," written with Jeff Lynne for 1989's Full Moon Fever, started as him fooling around at a keyboard trying to make Lynne laugh, and the two of them had it finished within two days. Asked to explain his own process in the documentary Runnin' Down a Dream, Petty admitted he mostly leaves it alone: "I hesitate to even try and understand it for fear that it might go away." That's worth hearing from someone this consistently good at it, even the writer doesn't fully trust naming the mechanism, in case naming it breaks it.

Bankruptcy as a negotiating position

By 1979, Petty and the Heartbreakers had two albums out and had signed away most of their leverage in their original Shelter Records deal, Petty's publishing included, for what turned out to be very little money. When Shelter's distributor was sold to MCA without his consent, Petty balked at being transferred to a new label with no say in it. He financed Damn the Torpedoes himself, at real personal cost, and then simply declined to deliver it while the label sued him. Filing Chapter 11 halted those suits and put him in a position to negotiate rather than just get overridden. MCA responded by creating a boutique label, Backstreet Records, specifically to re-sign him on new terms. Damn the Torpedoes came out later that year and went double platinum. The fight was never really about the money in his own pocket, it was about whether an artist with two hit albums and no leverage could still be treated as something other than an asset traded between corporations.

A dollar he wouldn't concede

Two years later, with Petty now genuinely famous, MCA tried a different move: pricing his next album, Hard Promises, at $9.98 instead of the standard $8.98, a "superstar tax" reserved for artists who could presumably absorb it without losing sales. Petty held the album back rather than let that stand, and floated titling it Eight Ninety-Eight if MCA wouldn't budge. He later explained the principle plainly: "I could see then that you can't price this music out of the reach of the common person." MCA reversed the pricing within about a month. It's a strange thing to have fought that hard over a single dollar per unit, and that's exactly why it stuck, Petty wasn't protecting his own royalty, he was protecting what a fan without much money could still afford to buy.

The Wilburys, and knowing when to be one voice among several

Petty's other defining move came in 1988, when he joined Jeff Lynne, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, and Roy Orbison to record as the Traveling Wilburys, a project that started almost by accident, as a B-side, and turned into a full album written and recorded together in a matter of days. It's worth noticing what that required of him specifically: he was the youngest member of a band built from two of his own heroes, and instead of hanging back, he wrote and sang lead on some of the record's best tracks. He'd spent a decade fighting to be treated as an equal partner in his own career. Given a chance to sit in a room with Dylan and Harrison, he didn't defer, he wrote.

Petty died on October 2, 2017, of an accidental overdose involving several medications, including fentanyl, that his family said had been prescribed for a list of physical ailments that included a fractured hip he'd kept touring on. It came three weeks after he wrapped the Heartbreakers' 40th-anniversary tour, which he'd already said publicly would likely be their last big one.

What's worth taking from his career

Petty's songs get called simple more often than almost any other songwriter's, and he never much liked the word for it, because it undersold how deliberately he arrived there, the discipline was in what he refused to keep, not in what came naturally. But the more instructive part of his career might be the two fights that had nothing to do with songwriting technique at all: a bankruptcy filing to keep control of his own recordings, and a stand over one dollar to keep his music affordable for the people it was written for. Both were long shots that worked because he was willing to actually walk away rather than just complain. If you're weighing whether a deal, a price, or a piece of your own leverage is worth fighting for, Petty's career is a reminder that the fight is sometimes cheaper than what you'd lose by not having it.

If you're a songwriter who'd rather write something simple and true than clever for its own sake, and you're looking for a collaborator who gets that, go find them.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame, American Songwriter — Bankruptcy, American Songwriter — Album Pricing, American Songwriter — Genius of Simplicity, Wikipedia — Hard Promises, NPR