TOP 40 DEBUT: December 8, 1979
PEAK POSITION: #10 (February 2, 1980)
On April Fool’s Day, 1974, a 23-year-old Tom Petty left Gainesville, Florida for the bright lights of Hollywood, California. Accompanying him were his fellow bandmates in the country-rock outfit Mudcrutch; on the other side of the country awaited a record deal, a proper recording studio, and impending stardom. By 1975, Mudcrutch had disbanded, their entire contract amounting to just one failed single. But within a year, Petty had a new deal in place, a new harder-edged sound, and a new band that included a few familiar faces from his old band. And on February 2, 1980, a bouncy pop song initially demoed by Mudcrutch in 1974 became the very first Top 10 single for Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. Mudcrutch were a talented group of musicians that, like so many other talented groups, never quite “made it.” But without them, it’s entirely possible that one of the great rock icons of the last fifty years never makes it either.
Tom Petty spent the first two decades of his life in Gainesville, a medium-sized college town feeding into the University of Florida, closer in proximity and temperament to south Georgia than the more tropical parts of the state. Petty grew up a self-proclaimed “hick,” a bad student who started his lifelong love affair with rock ’n roll early. At age ten he met Elvis Presley on the set of the 1961 movie Follow That Dream; two years later he saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Those twin events reshaped his life. Tom would play in bands from 1963 until the day he died.
One of his first bandmates was Tom Leadon, younger brother of Bernie Leadon, later of the Eagles. One of his first guitar teachers was Don Felder, the guy who replaced Bernie in the Eagles. (It’s frankly astonishing that Petty’s early work sounds nothing like the Eagles.) The two Toms started a group called the Epics while still in high school. Within a few years, that group evolved into Mudcrutch. Mike Campbell came on board as a second guitarist in 1970; in 1972, keyboardist Benmont Tench quit college to join as well. Both Campbell and Tench remained with Petty for the rest of his career.
Mudcrutch signed with Shelter Records (an independent label started by Leon Russell) in early 1974, but after more than a year of start-and-stop recording, the company pulled the plug. Tom was kept under solo contract; the rest of the group got fired. Tench and Campbell stayed in Los Angeles, where they soon crossed paths with two other relocated Florida musicians: drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair. The initial idea was to form a new band, jokingly called the Drunks and centered around Tench’s original material. On the invite of his former keyboardist, Petty stopped by the studio during one of the foursome’s recording sessions. His first reaction, as told in the fantastic 2007 Peter Bogdanovich documentary Runnin’ Down A Dream: “Wow, I gotta steal this band.”
The newly-christened Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers released their self-titled debut album on November 9, 1976. A year after its release, the first single, “Breakdown,” literally squeaked onto Billboard’s Top 40 at #40. (It’s a 10.) The second single, “American Girl,” never even broke the Hot 100. (This is insane.) The first LP was a hit in England, while the second (You’re Gonna Get It!) went gold in America, but neither made Petty a household name. With the release of 1979’s Damn The Torpedoes and its lead single, that would change.
Petty wrote “Don’t Do Me Like That” shortly after arriving in Los Angeles with the rest of Mudcrutch. The title came from an old Southern expression routinely used by his father, a polite way of saying “don’t fuck me over.” Tom rented a rehearsal room with a piano—an extravagance at the time, as he admitted later—solely to capture the main keyboard figure he heard in his head; years after, that rudimentary piano part would be replicated, verbatim, by the supremely talented Benmont Tench. (In fairness, Tench also added that opening Vox organ solo, which is worth its weight in gold.) When Petty unveiled the new song to his Mudcrutch bandmates, they were floored. This was like nothing else in their arsenal: more hooky, more streamlined, and more “poppy” than anything Tom had written up to that point. Even in bare-bones demo form, it sounded like a hit.
Petty never seemed fully convinced, though. “Don’t Do Me Like That” had already been considered for the two previous Heartbreakers albums, only to be passed over both times. By late 1979, Tom was ready to give the song away to the J. Geils Band. Producer Jimmy Iovine, a man not known for mincing words, presented his client with a persuasive counterargument: “Are you out of your mind?” At Iovine’s urging, Petty agreed to revisit the now-five-year-old song, slowing the tempo slightly but keeping Mudcrutch’s arrangement basically unchanged. The Heartbreakers nailed it almost immediately. (Considering some tracks on Damn The Torpedoes required over one hundred takes, this alone was a minor miracle.)
And yet, “Don’t Do Me Like That” was still in danger of being left off the album. Only the urging of assistant engineer Tori Swenson prompted Iovine and Petty to have another listen, where they belatedly realized the track worked beautifully in the lead-off position on Side Two. And then their new label Backstreets had a listen, and they decided the track worked beautifully as the lead-off single for the entire Damn The Torpedoes campaign. Released on November 5, 1979, “Don’t Do Me Like That” not only launched the album, it also became the biggest single the Heartbreakers ever had. Petty wouldn’t hit the Top 10 again until the decade was almost over, and he would do it as a solo act.
To this day, I don’t understand Tom’s ambivalence towards one of the most instantly catchy tunes he ever wrote. Maybe he thought it was too catchy? Too obvious? Or just a relic of his past, thus not up to the level of his current work? (All us musicians think the greatest song we wrote is the last song we wrote. It’s a universal flaw.) Whatever the reason, I’m thankful he let common sense prevail, because even on an album as stacked as Damn The Torpedoes, “Don’t Do Me Like That” absolutely holds its own.
Its secret is simplicity; there’s not an ounce of fat on this song whatsoever. You hit the first verse within twenty seconds, the bridge barely a minute later. In-and-out in 2:44 with barely enough time to catch your breath. It’s as clean and direct as anything in Petty’s notably clean-and-direct catalog, buoyed by an arrangement that’s all accents, a series of punches with Tom’s vocal filling in the gaps. (BAM! “Don’t do me like that!” BAM!“Don’t do me like that!”)
Give Mudcrutch some credit: Every piece was already in place in 1974. All Iovine did was hone the individual elements and add production muscle to the frame, while the Heartbreakers—five brilliant musicians working in tandem—played exactly what was needed. No more, no less. I’m reminded of the disarmingly simple productions found on the great Stax and Motown 45s, especially when the track hits that surging bridge and finds another level the demo never even knew existed.
And it’s on the bridge where Tom reminds you what a singular, inimitable vocalist he could be. “’Cause somewhere deep down insiiiiide, someone is sayin’” is pure punk rock and pure Southern twang, “And now I can’t take it no moh-woah” equally uncut honky-tonk. Ten seconds later, Petty sneers that final “tryyyyyy” like Dylan buried under two feet of Florida swamp mud. Honestly, all his vocals on Damn The Torpedoes floor me (the “oh OH OH!!” at the end of “Don’t Do Me Like That” shows up twice more on the album, and yes, it’s glorious every time), often for the smallest reasons. “And you know you better watch your step/ Or you’re gonna get hurt yourself” is a decent lyric on paper. Once Tom sinks his teeth into it (“And ya know ya betta watch yo STEP!/ Or ya gon’ get HURT yo self!”), it’s the essence of rock ’n roll itself.
Damn The Torpedoes was Petty’s triple-platinum breakthrough, a start-to-finish classic and maybe his greatest record ever. (It’s certainly his greatest to include all the Heartbreakers.) So to call “Don’t Do Me Like That” the fifth-best track on the album is no slight whatsoever. If anything, placing a song this good in the middle of the pack only highlights the insane level at which Petty and company were operating in late 1979. And they’d barely slip for the next fifteen years. The epic run of singles that followed would stretch into the Eighties and beyond, attaining a level of consistency not matched by another American band since. As crazy as it must’ve seemed at the time, “Don’t Do Me Like That” was just an opening shot.
GRADE: 9/10
BONUS BITS: In 2019, Dinosaur Jr. mastermind J Mascis released his own nicely idiosyncratic take on the Petty classic as a stand-alone single for Sub Pop. Here it is.