Pure Heartland: The early Tom Petty song he considered “perfect”
When you’re an artist as prolific as Tom Petty, some songs tend to blend together after a while. It’s not like Petty was trying to push the limits of rock and roll every time he sat down to write a song, so when you write in the same style, there are bound to be a few tracks that fall through the cracks between the more important songs like ‘American Girl’. Although Petty was still making his first masterpieces on his debut album, he almost let the song ‘Breakdown’ fall by the wayside by accident.
Granted, Petty already had to deal with building himself back up before he began work on the album. His former band, Mudcrutch, had fallen apart, and after bringing some of his friends from his old outfit back into the fold, he knew that he needed to come up with something more immediate.
Despite coming out in the middle of the new wave movement, Petty’s debut is indebted to the glory days of classic rock. There’s a certain rockabilly energy to the entire project, but ‘American Girl’ was what really tied everything together, almost turning into the mission statement for where Petty would be going the rest of his career.
When workshopping certain ideas, ‘Breakdown’ felt more like a jam than an actual song, featuring an original cut that lasted almost eight minutes. Petty wasn’t one to waste time if he didn’t need to, and it wasn’t until he got a visit from Dwight Twilley.
According to Petty, the country singer was the one who suggested the song’s iconic guitar lick, telling Classic Rock Stories, “Right in the fade-out of the song, [Mike] Campbell plays [the lick]. Twilley turns to me and says, ‘That’s the lick, man! How come he only plays it once at the end of the song? It’s the whole hook!’ I listened back, and he was right. So I called the band up–four in the morning–and told them to come back down”.
While ‘Breakdown’ is far from the most energetic song in the world, Campbell’s jamming was almost unintentional genius. Even if he was just noodling on different scales, there’s more drama in that one guitar lick than half the record, practically telling the story of this relationship falling apart before Petty even opened his mouth.
Looking back, Petty would also call the song one of the better pop songs he ever wrote, telling Rolling Stone, “It’s really a perfect little record, isn’t it?”. Regardless of how much drama went into the actual song, ‘Breakdown’ feels more like a statement of intent than a proper pop single.
For the next few years, Petty would be up against the wall with both the rock community and his record company, but he was never going to back down to anyone. This was a man who was going to live his rock and roll fantasy on his own terms, and ‘Breakdown’ is a look at that snot-nosed kid looking to change the rock and roll landscape.