TOP 40 DEBUT: February 9, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #15 (March 15, 1980)
“Refugee” was the struggle to end all struggles. It’s a song forged in fire, at a time when Tom Petty was bankrupt and fighting his label in court. It’s a recording made under duress, when there was every chance the finished product might never see the light of day. Even the process to put it down on tape turned into a battle. “Refugee” famously took more than one hundred takes to capture, a torturous journey that nearly claimed the sanity of guitarist Mike Campbell and, briefly, cost drummer Stan Lynch his job.
Somehow, Petty survived. So did his band, and so did his album. Damn The Torpedoes finally appeared, without regrets or compromises, on October 19, 1979, kicking off with the very song that brought the band to its breaking point. “Refugee” opened with a drum fill that announced itself like a volley of gunshots; it closed on the howl of Petty literally raging against the machine. In between lay a declaration: sonic proof that all the adversity had actually been worth it, that the Heartbreakers had entered the crucible and emerged, scarred but smarter, with the greatest record of their lives.
The only easy part of making “Refugee” turned out to be actually writing the damn thing. Campbell composed most of the music by accident, while experimenting with his newly purchased four-track cassette recorder. His initial impetus—to simply record a rhythm bed for soloing—led to a basic chord sequence in F#m, partially inspired by John Mayall’s “Oh Pretty Woman” (with a pre-Rolling Stones Mick Taylor on guitar). But after a few overdubs, one particular lead line sounded like the beginning of a proper song. Campbell passed the untitled tape on to Petty, along with a few other demos. Tom finished “Refugee” in only ten minutes.
During the press rollout for Damn The Torpedoes, Petty resisted the narrative that any of the album’s lyrics were directly influenced by an ongoing dispute with MCA, the giant corporation that took over his contract after ABC Records folded. (His quote at the time: “It’s a collection of love songs, not lawsuit songs.”) But by 2002, he had a different perspective: “[‘Refugee’] was a reaction to the pressures of the music business… I was in this defiant mood. I wasn’t so conscious of it then, but I can look back [now] and see what was happening.” The anger behind “Refugee” was raw, real, and universal in a way that spoke to millions. But for its writer, that frustration stemmed from a very specific set of circumstances, a chain of events that led to Petty recording his breakthrough album in the midst of a court battle.
Like most young artists entering the music business for the first time, Petty had signed a bad deal. His contract and his publishing were both owned by Shelter Records, a small label run by English producer Denny Cordell and distributed by ABC. Tom appreciated the close-knit staff; he also resented the terrible terms of his arrangement. So when MCA absorbed the Shelter roster after buying ABC in 1979, he balked. Petty seized upon a clause in his revised contract—stating his right to “consult and cooperate in the process” if the label changed distribution—to declare himself a free agent. MCA sued him for breach of contract. Petty retaliated by filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Cordell had been one of Tom’s earliest mentors, but he’d also screwed him royally with their initial Shelter agreement. The Heartbreakers only made pennies in royalties off every album sale; Petty had given up all his future publishing—literally the rights to his own songs—for a mere $10,000. The fight with industry giant MCA was framed, not incorrectly, as David-versus-Goliath, the lone artist taking on a corporate behemoth. But it was also a smart way for Tom to renegotiate a deal that was unfair from the start. “I could work my ass off for the rest of my life,” he fumed in a 1980 Rolling Stone interview. “And for every dime I saw, the people that set me up would’ve seen ten times as much.”
With assistance from managers Tony Dimitriades and Elliot Roberts, Petty began recording Damn The Torpedoes on his own dime, absorbing huge studio costs in the process. (Upon filing for bankruptcy in mid-1979, he listed $576,638 in debts against a mere $56,845 in assets.) Fearing that MCA might seize the unfinished album at any time, session reels were relabeled under the fake name “Morgan Lane.” For months, longtime roadie Alan “Bugs” Weidel hid the tapes in his car every night. As the case dragged on, the Heartbreakers launched a “Lawsuit Tour” to pay off outstanding bills, selling T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Why MCA?”
In the end, Goliath blinked. MCA signed Petty to a new $3-million contract, gave him back his publishing, and agreed to release his albums through a smaller, less corporate imprint. Tom would now record for Backstreet Records, a subsidiary label headed by Danny Bramson, an MCA executive even younger than Petty himself. (According to Warren Zanes’ great biography Petty, the legal compromise only happened after Bramson got involved.) The label had been named for the Bruce Springsteen song that closes Side One of Born To Run. And coincidentally, Backstreet’s first Petty release would be an album helmed by a man who made his name engineering that very Springsteen album.
Like Petty, Jimmy Iovine was a scrapper. The Brooklyn native grew up in a similar working class environment, kicked his way into the music business through sheer force of will, and then fought like hell to remake it in his own image. Both men were young, driven perfectionists, fueled by early successes (Iovine was fresh off producing Patti Smith’s Easter) and willing to do whatever it took to create their first masterpiece. Damn The Torpedoes would turn out to be that masterpiece. Its success would alter the arc of each of their careers. And it would nearly kill them—and the four other Heartbreakers—in the process.
“I had no doubt that we were gonna do something that no one had ever heard before,” states Iovine in the excellent 2007 documentary Running Down A Dream. That single-minded belief paid dividends in the finished product, but the journey to get there took a heavy toll on the participants. Petty considered “Refugee” one of the best things he’d ever written; Jimmy, who agreed, took no shortcuts on the way to unlocking its full potential. According to Campbell, “Refugee” required more than a hundred attempts to get right. (Tom occasionally placed the number closer to 200.) It was Torpedoes’ white whale, the song that continued to elude capture, even as the band chased it over endless eighteen-hour days for weeks at a time.
In that same documentary, bassist Ron Blair recalls rooms filled with tape boxes, each one devoted to a single three-minute track: “’Refugee,’ ‘Refugee,’ ‘Refugee’!” Keyboardist Benmont Tench’s take is more rueful. “Somehow, nobody ever said… ‘Why don’t we edit two takes together?’ Which every band in the world does.” Things got so bad that even the normally unflappable Campbell briefly lost his shit: “I remember being so frustrated with it one day that—I think this is the only time I ever did this—I just left the studio and went out of town [for] two days. I just couldn’t take the pressure anymore.”
It didn’t help morale that the producer wanted to replace the drummer. “Iovine really disliked Stan,” says Tench in one Petty interview. “I think they didn’t like each other.” Lynch tended to play “behind the beat,” a particular rhythmic feel that gave the Heartbreakers their own imitable, loping swagger. But that style didn’t work for Iovine. He thought Lynch’s drumming made the songs “plod”; Stan, on his end, resented the endless takes and Jimmy’s constant berating of his ability. Decades later, Iovine claimed their disagreements were strictly musical: “The playing didn’t feel right to me. That’s not a personal thing.” Petty had a different recollection. “He had real trouble with Stan. Just couldn’t understand why Stan wasn’t [already] fired.” As Tench succinctly put it: “Jimmy… put Stan through the fucking ringer.”
On at least two separate occasions, Lynch either quit the sessions or got fired. “Refugee” wound up being recorded with other drummers behind the kit, including B.J. Wilson (formerly of Procol Harum) and Tom’s longtime friend Phil Seymour. The song still wouldn’t come together. Only after Lynch rejoined the band did the original Heartbreakers—“five fingers of a glove,” in Petty parlance—nail the master take that would eventually kick off Torpedoes. Upon release, the crisp-yet-massive drum sound on “Refugee” went on to influence a generation of rock recordings, a vindication for both Lynch and (paradoxically) his exacting, antagonistic producer.
Even with a “perfect” performance in the can, Petty and Iovine still couldn’t quite let the song go. The duo mixed “Refugee” numerous times at Sound City; Jimmy, unsatisfied, took the tapes to New York City to mix some more. They discovered legendary session drummer Jim Keltner in the studio hallway, performing an impromptu shaker part during a playback session, and added him to the final recording. (A Classic Albums documentary on the making of Torpedoes briefly highlights Keltner’s contribution. It really does glue the song together.) And in the background, the threat of the MCA lawsuit still loomed. “Jimmy used to call me at night, going, ‘What if it never comes out?’” Petty later recounted. For neither the first nor the last time, the skinny songwriter from Jacksonville stuck to his guns. “I said, ‘I don’t know, but we’ve still gotta make it, right?’”
Decades after the fact, Petty offered up an explanation for his near-obsessive approach towards “Refugee”: “It was all about getting that one special performance that really did the song justice.” As usual, he’s not wrong. A 2010 deluxe edition of Damn The Torpedoes included an alternate take of “Refugee” that perfectly illustrates the fine distinction between “pretty good” and “perfect.” The unreleased track hits the same beats, delivers the same sounds, and unfolds exactly like the official version. It’s a great, solid, rock n’ roll performance. But it doesn’t have the magic of the finished cut. Petty was chasing immortality, no matter the cost. What’s amazing is he actually caught it on tape.
I won’t try to argue that “Refugee” is Petty’s best song; his is a catalog containing multitudes, with dozens of highlights and favorites particular to each individual. Nor does the track’s prickly, harder stance resonate with the masses like some of Tom’s more beloved chestnuts (“American Girl” and “Free Fallin’,” to name two). But sonically, “Refugee”—and really, most of Torpedoes—has no equal. It’s one of the best-sounding, best-produced rock records of the last fifty years: meaty and muscular, with a live-wire vitality that comes from five musicians in a tiny room pushing each other towards a collective peak. In Zanes’ biography, Petty remembers registering surprise upon listening to the tracks with fresh ears for Classic Albums: “You could hear all of the care that went into that record… It was stunning, like, ‘We were really onto something good.’”
Early on in their career, Petty and the Heartbreakers were embraced by punk fans: not for their music—which never pretended to be especially loud, or fast, or heavy—but rather their approach. By that metric, “Refugee” is probably as punk rock as Tom ever got. For all its inherent toughness, the song is surprisingly light on guitar; Campbell’s chords never overpower the organ, while Tench’s slicing, spitting Hammond blasts fill the space where a traditional guitar solo would land. But the defiant attitude driving “Refugee” ? That’s 100% pure, unfiltered, stick-it-to-the-man-style punk. Petty’s writing skews similarly lean-and-mean: one lone rhyming couplet per verse and just a single-line chorus, volleyed back-and-forth like a gang chant. No wonder he makes every word count.
“We got somethin’, we both know it, we don’t talk too much about it.” That’s danger, mystery, tension, and tenderness, all in an opening line. “Ain’t no real big secret, all the same, somehow, we get around it.” Now he’s hinting at the intimacy of lovers, or comrades united against a common obstacle—or something else entirely. Petty balances on that knife edge of uncertainty throughout; just marvel at the way he makes the second prechorus sympathetic and standoffish: “It don’t make no difference to me, baby/ Everybody has to fight to be free.” My hands-down favorite, though, is the only verse lyric important enough to be repeated: “Somewhere, somehow, somebody must’ve kicked you around some.” Which, depending on your perspective, reads as either soothing or sneering—and that’s before it’s immediately matched with “Who knows, maybe you were kidnapped, tied up, taken away and held for ransom.” (These two lines together are, possibly, the most Tom Pettyish of all Tom Petty lyrics, and definitely the greatest near-rhyme since Dylan’s “didn’t you/ kiddin’ you.”)
“Refugee” is a fight song with the potency of a powder keg, a love song with serrated edges, an anthem in the shape of a bruise. It’s also Petty and the Heartbreakers at their combative best, wielding rock n’ roll like a switchblade in a dark alley: Blair and Lynch locked into a rhythm of bone and sinew, Campbell’s lead guitar slicing and shivering in the shadows. Petty sings every verse through clenched teeth; when he finally explodes, his shout of “Listen!” serves as both warning and rallying cry. Even the chorus is a confrontation, Tench’s organ counter-punching as Tom turns every syllable—“You DON’T/ HAVE/ to LIVE like a refugee!”—into an uppercut. By the final refrain, he’s snarling like a wild animal, trapped and cornered for far too long.
And in that moment of near-feral ferocity, “Refugee” becomes universal. You don’t need to get sued by a giant corporation to feel “kicked around some.” You don’t have to go to court to “fight to be free.” And you don't have to live like a second-class citizen. Petty was singing for anyone exiled and alone, from broken teenagers to victims of discrimination, from society’s forgotten segments to honest artists screwed over by a corrupt system. For three minutes and twenty-four seconds, we were all united—as refugees.
As time went on, “Refugee” grew in stature within the Petty catalog, building a reputation to belie its original, modest #15 showing on the Billboard Hot 100. (Worse than leadoff Torpedoes single “Don’t Do Me Like That,” better than the 1980-should-be-ashamed-of-itself placement of the sublime “Here Comes My Girl,” which peaked at #59 that May.) The track benefited from recurrent airplay on AOR radio stations and, later, MTV; by decade’s end, it had fully transitioned into one of Petty’s signature songs. From 1980 on, “Refugee” would be performed at almost every Heartbreakers concert, usually alternating closing duties with the equally perennial “American Girl.”
In advancing years, a crucial element of the song—those uppermost notes at the top of Tom’s range—became a liability. Petty found it harder and harder to keep performing “Refugee” consistently, leading to modified setlists and, briefly, a reworked version with modulated chords. But lowering the key changed something elemental in the song itself. Maybe “Refugee” wasn’t built to be easy; maybe the struggle was what gave “Refugee” its strength. On Tom Petty’s final tour in 2017, he returned to singing the song in its original F#m. Every night, 20,000 fellow outcasts screamed the chorus right back to him.
GRADE: 10/10
I WANT MY MTV: The absolutely iconic video for “Refugee” happened entirely by accident: The band was booked for the Merv Griffith Show and decided they didn’t want to show up. So they filmed a bare-bones clip to air in their absence. When MTV debuted in August ’81, the network had a handful of videos and a lot of airtime to fill; Petty, one of the very few American artists with available clips, saw his year-old promo for “Refugee” put into heavy rotation. For many of us, this became our first introduction to one of the decade’s visual icons: a skinny, boyish rocker, clad in denim armor and sporting impossibly blonde hair, staring down the camera as his sneer blossoms into an impish grin. Forty years on, it’s still the Tom Petty I miss the most.
BONUS BITS: Melissa Etheridge recorded her huskily faithful version of “Refugee” in 2005, as both leadoff track and first single for her compilation Greatest Hits: The Road Less Traveled. Six years later, Petty declared it his favorite cover of the song.
BONUS BONUS BITS: The Gaslight Anthem’s take, recorded for a 2011 iTunes session, kicks up the tempo to make the “punk” overtones a bit more obvious. Not to directly contradict Petty himself, but this one’s basically a coin-flip choice with Etheridge’s version in my book.