He was the lead vocalist and guitarist of the rock band Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, formed in 1976. From Tribune News Service.Thomas Earl Petty (October 20, 1950 – October 2, 2017) was an American musician. Gary Jules is a singer-songwriter who wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
LYRICS I WON T BACK DOWN TOM PETTY MOVIE
They made a record, “met movie stars, partied and mingled,” Petty sings, before delivering the gut punch: “Their A&R man said, ‘I don’t hear a single.’ The future was wide open.” The song tells of Eddie, a young kid who moved to Hollywood and started a band. And he did it in the late 1990s, when he capped his concert ticket prices at $50.Īlthough many Petty songs illustrate why he enjoyed such an unparalleled career, it’s a sly lyric buried in 1991’s “Into the Great Wide Open” that may mean the most for recording artists. He did it in 1981, when MCA tried to sell the band’s fourth album for a dollar more than the standard.
In standing up to MCA, Petty demonstrated the premise that an artist with fans has leverage. The Heartbreakers’ next album, “Damn The Torpedoes,” went triple platinum, unleashing two of Petty’s most omnipresent songs on the radio, “Don’t Do Me Like That” and “Refugee.” In all, Petty recorded 68 singles, a record 28 of which became mainstream-rock top 10s. In the end, Petty reconciled with MCA, signing a deal with an artist-friendly label under the MCA umbrella, and the rest is Billboard chart history. The companies tried to persuade Petty to drop the bankruptcy claim, to which he responded: “I’ll sell … peanuts before I give in to you.” To pay for their legal bills, the Heartbreakers went on a short tour, the “Lawsuit Tour.” They wore T-shirts that said, “Why MCA?” So began one of the most epic games of chicken in music-business history. And because he was the first, MCA had to make sure he didn’t succeed. Petty was the first mainstream rock star to file for bankruptcy expressly to get out of a contract with his record label. “And if you’re bankrupt, all contracts are void.” “Technically you’re bankrupt,” he later said. Then, when MCA’s lawsuit left him legally unable to do anything with it, he filed for Chapter 11. What did Petty do? Like so many artists do today, he self-funded the recording of the band’s third album, racking up more than $500,000 in debt. But when he moved to act on that premise, MCA and Shelter sued Petty for breach of contract, preventing him not only from negotiating with other labels but also from releasing music or playing live.
LYRICS I WON T BACK DOWN TOM PETTY FREE
That clause gave Petty plausible grounds to claim that Shelter had breached their contract, and that he was therefore free to shop for a new label. As part of a previous renegotiation, he had managed to add a clause to the Heartbreakers’ deal stipulating that their label, Shelter, must consult with him before selling the band’s contract to another company. “I just felt like they sold us like we were groceries, or frozen pork,” he said. When it was announced that the Heartbreakers would be transferred to MCA, Petty balked. And, as is routine, although the record company fronted the Heartbreakers money to make their albums, those costs were deducted against the band’s meager royalties. The Heartbreakers’ record deal was almost as bad as Petty’s publishing deal. He soon managed to get some of those rights back, but it left a mark. Believing that “publishing” referred only to sheet-music songbooks, he had signed over 100 percent of his songwriting rights for a $10,000 annual advance. Petty, a scrappy 28-year-old punk from Gainesville, had been in the business for only a few years, but that was enough time to have acquired a simmering rage.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had released two hit albums when, in 1978, their label, Shelter Records, announced it was going to be sold by its parent company, ABC Records, back to what had been the label’s original parent company, MCA. Decades before Prince changed his name to a glyph and compared the major-label system to indentured servitude, Petty took on the entire industry, waging a battle for his music rights that changed forever how artists negotiate with record companies. Even in the way that the hours between the false reports and the official announcement allowed Petty fans to imagine that the man who sang “I won’t back down” was, in his last moments, not backing down.įew outside the music business know just how accurate those lyrics were. How the CBS report that he died the morning of Oct.
There was something so Tom Petty about the way the news arrived.
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