Daily Times

How would you characterise the musical differences between you and Petty?

Tom was a great classicist. He followed those forms pretty religiously. I veered slightly away from some of those things, into other things. But what was charming and exciting about the Heartbreakers was their formalism. It was kind of like the great bands of the Sixties, like the Beatles. It was a guitar band, something I envied very much. Because when we tried to push the guitars [in the E Street Band], it never quite worked for us. But they were a real guitar band. And the music was beautifully written, beautifully constructed. He had an ear to the classics. But Tom’s attitude and personality, his own vision, gave it a modern edge.

Petty once told me of a conversation he had with you at the time of his legal battles with his record company over “Damn the Torpedoes.” He said you gave him some very encouraging advice. What was it?

Well, I’d been through it (a reference to Springsteen’s legal problems with a former manager in 1976–77, after the success of Born to Run). I always knew one thing. They can take this away. They can take that away. They can’t take your talent. They can’t take the music. They can’t take the fact that you can walk out onstage on any given night and light up the room. And isn’t that the most valuable thing we have? It’s the gift. The rest of the stuff is going to sort itself out. It might be painful at the moment. But it will take its course, and you will come out on top, because you’ve got the magic. They can’t take the magic.

This is a push-comes-to-shove question: Do you have a favorite Tom Petty album?

I liked the record he did with Jimmy (Iovine) back in the day, Damn the Torpedoes. But I like some of the offbeat things too. I like Southern Accents and Wildflowers. Patti loved Wildflowers. It was the gentleness of it. And that particular song (“Wildflowers”) was just beautiful. So we’ve got a lot of favourites.

Published in Daily Times, October 20^th 2017.