- TOM PETTY DAMN THE TORPEDOES CRACKED
- TOM PETTY DAMN THE TORPEDOES FREE
- TOM PETTY DAMN THE TORPEDOES MAC
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.
TOM PETTY DAMN THE TORPEDOES MAC
band, but without the slick, expensive sound of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. 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.
Petty won again, and named the followup Hard Promises. 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. 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. The band’s stardom was actually validated through MCA’s own blinkered corporate logic. 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.
TOM PETTY DAMN THE TORPEDOES CRACKED
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. 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. 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. ”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. 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. It was a rare victory in a cutthroat business: a musician called a major label’s bluff and forced them to fold. They also returned to him all publishing rights and gave him his own boutique label, Backstreet. MCA kept Petty on contract, but it was now far more lucrative with significant creative latitude. Petty’s final blow was filing for bankruptcy, which opened his current contracts to renegotiation and signaled that he wasn’t about to flinch. Petty then privately told a studio assistant to hide each day’s reels in a secret location without his knowledge. 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. Few mainstream rock albums of the late '70s and early '80s were quite as strong as this, and it still stands as one of the great records of the album rock era.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.
Yet there are purpose and passion behind the performances that makes Damn the Torpedoes an invigorating listen all the same. Most of the songs have a deep melancholy undercurrent - the tough "Here Comes My Girl" and "Even the Losers" have tender hearts the infectious "Don't Do Me Like That" masks a painful relationship "Refugee" is a scornful, blistering rocker "Louisiana Rain" is a tear-jerking ballad. He had written a few classics before - "American Girl," "Listen to Her Heart" - but here his songwriting truly blossoms. Their musical suppleness helps bring out the soul in Petty's impressive set of songs. It helped that the Heartbreakers had turned into a tighter, muscular outfit, reminiscent of, well, the Stones in their prime - all of the parts combine into a powerful, distinctive sound capable of all sorts of subtle variations. Musically, it follows through on the promise of their first two albums, offering a tough, streamlined fusion of the Stones and Byrds that, thanks to Jimmy Iovine's clean production, sounded utterly modern yet timeless. Amazingly, through all the frustration and anguish, Petty & the Heartbreakers delivered their breakthrough and arguably their masterpiece with Damn the Torpedoes. He settled with MCA and set to work on his third album, digging out some old Mudcrutch numbers and quickly writing new songs.
TOM PETTY DAMN THE TORPEDOES FREE
Petty struggled to free himself from the major label, eventually sending himself into bankruptcy. Not long after You're Gonna Get It, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' label, Shelter, was sold to MCA Records.
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