‘An absolute ad-lib from the start’: the birth of Tom Petty’s masterpiece Wildflowers

In the spring of 1992, Tom Petty sat at home in Encino with a six-string acoustic guitar and a tape machine. Three minutes and 11 seconds later, the 44-year old had pulled down a song, lyrics and all, fully formed from the cloudless Californian sky. Comprised of only four verses and bereft of a chorus, it was a composition of towering grace and beauty. He called it Wildflowers.

“I swear to God it was an absolute ad-lib from the word go,” he told the author Paul Zollo. “[I] then sat back and went, ‘Wow, what did I just do?’ And I listened to it [and] I didn’t change a word. Everything was right there, off the top of my head.”

The song became both the title track and the tone-setting opening number of Tom Petty’s 10th studio LP. By the metrics of songwriting, production, arrangement and execution, the album Wildflowers is both its author’s masterpiece and one of the finest American rock records of the past half century. A thing of patience, space and perfect analog ambience, the 62-minute set could hardly be any more organic were it to feature Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on bass guitar.

And now there’s more. This month sees the album re-released in a lavishly bumper edition. Along with the LP in its original form, Wildflowers & All The Rest also features demo cuts, surplus outtakes, home recordings and live performances. With a running time of almost five hours and comprised of 54 songs, it is both a compendious collection of monomaniacal proportions and, at a blush under 30 quid, quite the bargain.

Originally unveiled on November 1 1994, Wildflowers sold more than three million copies in the United States alone. For Thomas Earl Petty, its release fell at the end of a period of remarkable domestic commercial success. The preceding five years had seen a slew of albums find their way into the homes of 24 million American listeners. Two LPs from the gratingly quaint Travelling Wilburys – featuring Petty, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison – shifted a further three million units.

By 1994, audiences overseas were less convinced. In Britain, Wildflowers limped onto the Gallup album chart at a pallid number 36; despite the 15-song set eventually scratching its way into the Top 20 – at number 19 – none of its four singles became hits. Of the 86 concerts Petty undertook in support of his towering new record, along with his supreme band the Heartbreakers, not one was staged on British soil.

As with Bob Seger or Van Halen, the singer was at best an infrequent visitor to Europe. By the time he did deign to play four gigs in the UK in the 21st Century – one at the Isle of Wight Festival, three in London – Wildflowers was represented by just one song (an extended version of the impossibly majestic It’s Good To Be King). The fact audiences in Manchester – not to mention Melbourne, Munich and Moscow – have heard not a single one of its tracks in a live setting goes a long way toward explaining the album’s somewhat muted reputation outside of North America.

As well as much else, the issuance of Wildflowers & All The Rest provides an opportunity to redress the balance. In its original form the LP is that rarest of birds – a creation that contains only the strongest material. It also subverts an aphorism of which Petty himself is credited as author. “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus,” he once said. But with the exception of the rollicking You Wreck Me, no one here is in any kind of hurry at all.

“My initial thoughts about it [the album] was that it was different to anything I’d heard him do before,” says the Brighton-born drummer Stephen Ferrone, who plays on all but three of its tracks. “It had a different sound… We played one song a few times that I thought sounded like a Tom Petty song, but he just said, ‘Nah, we’ve been here before.’ I remember thinking, ‘F--k, this is a good song, and he’s just chucked it away.’”

After playing with the Average White Band, Eric Clapton, Chaka Khan, Duran Duran, Brian Ferry, James Taylor and many more, in 1992 Ferrone was working as a session man in New York when he received an invitation to travel to Los Angeles to record with an unnamed collaborator. “Payday,” he thought, “payday.” But after checking in to a prepaid room at the mid-range Sportsmen’s Lodge, in Studio City, his hopes of a booking by Michael Jackson or Whitney Houston began to fade.

The hotel had been chosen because of its proximity to Sound City Studios, in Van Nuys, one of the two facilities at which the sessions for Wildflowers took place. On Ferrone’s first day, he met Tom Petty, and the Heartbreakers’ lead guitarist Mike Campbell; in the sound room, the three men struck up the languid and luxurious You Don’t Know How It Feels. Two and a half years later, the track became the album’s leadoff single.

“Well let me get to the point, let’s roll another joint,” sang Petty in a rhyming couplet that was later outlawed by MTV, VH1, and numerous FM radio stations. After learning that the word “roll” had been replaced by “hit”, the Heartbreakers camp issued a statement which read, “Tom is aware of this [alteration] – and he’s not pleased with this.” Out on the road, fans in the front rows threw joints at the band whenever they played the top 10 hit.

More than any other song on Wildflowers, You Don’t Know How It Feels is the ideal calling card for the album it was sent forth to represent. Sparse and patient, its loud, concussive beat and treble-heavy sound is the closest thing possible to the throb of a world-beating live band. This was new. Previously, Tom Petty’s music had been produced to a polished standard. Here, it sounded as if he and the boys had set up their backline on top of your stereo.

At least in part, the credit for this goes to producer Rick Rubin. At the time of recording Wildflowers, the then 31-year-old had already helped create one bona fide masterpiece. Released in 1986, the swivel-eyed fury of Reign In Blood, by Slayer, proved to all that the native New Yorker could harness a group’s talents to a precise and deeply aggravating degree. By 1992, his restless ear had widened to include, among others, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Geto Boys and The Cult.

Despite a bounty of hits, Rubin was not an admirer of Petty’s earlier LPs. But in 1989, his mind was emphatically changed by the arrival of the Full Moon Fever album. Produced by Jeff Lynne and featuring such bankers as Free Fallin’, I Won’t Back Down and Runnin’ Down A Dream, Rubin listened to the LP’s dozen tracks every day for a year. When Mo Ostin, the CEO of Warner Bros, suggested he oversee the recording of Petty's first record for the label, the producer agreed.

“What was different about Wildflowers was that, at this point in our careers, we didn’t have a deadline,” Mike Campbell tells me. The guitarist is on the line from his house in Los Angeles, a city he’s called home since he and Petty moved west from Florida in 1974.

“We had just finished a long run of touring and recording, so we were able just to sit back and take our time, and Tom was able to contemplate his songs without any pressure. So we would just get some songs and record them, with Rick Rubin helping us out, and then take a break of maybe a week, or maybe a month. It sounds like it took a long time to make, but the recording process didn’t take long at all.”

Ostensibly, Petty and his court of musicians – a union that included Ringo Starr and Beach Boys co-founder Carl Wilson – were seconded at Sound City and Ocean Way Recording, on Sunset Boulevard, for just shy of 21 months. In truth, the relaxed schedule afforded Rick Rubin the time to produce his fourth album with Slayer, as well as American Recordings, the first of six iconic collaborations with Johnny Cash.

“The way the album was explained to me was that this was a solo record that Tom was making,” explains Stephen Ferrone from his home in Los Angeles. “It had nothing to do with the Heartbreakers. In the end, of course, all of them showed up… [and] I have to say that I really enjoyed working with them. It was like when I played with the Average White Band – there was a common goal of getting these songs done right, and done as quickly as possible. That way the songs have a feel about them.”

Ferrone signed off his work on Wildflowers in world-beating style. After improvising a drum part on Wake Up Time, the record’s ethereal closing track, the Englishman boarded a red-eye bound for New York in order to start work the following morning on the Carly Simon album Letters Never Sent. Working with Tom Petty had been a joy, but like the scores of other LPs on which he’d played, it was just a gig. Little did he know that come the autumn he would be appointed the drummer of the Heartbreakers, a position he would hold for the next 23-years.

“Tom put together this group of musicians,” he says. “I was very well paid, very well taken care of, and we travelled very well and worked very well as a unit. There was nothing like making music with the Heartbreakers. It was just an absolutely fantastic experience. Every musician should have a band experience like that. It was an incredible group.”

Until his death in 2017, Tom Petty continued to write superior songs, of which Angel Dream (No 4), The Last DJ and Money Becomes King are only three. In 2006, he and Mike Campbell reunited with Jeff Lynne for the sublime and supremely melancholic Highway Companion LP, by far the most undervalued collection of a bejeweled career.

But it’s with Wildflowers that he made his finest contribution to the Great American Songbook. An album equal in standing to Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen, or King of America by Elvis Costello, its consistently understated contours usher in a complexity and command that permeates like sunlight. As one of its most towering songs says, “It’s good to be king”.

“I like the album when I hear some of its songs on the radio, but to be honest with you I haven’t put one of our records on and – quote unquote – listened to it in decades,” says Mike Campbell, to something less than a chorus of trumpets. “It’s old territory for me.” He pauses, briefly, before coming to what is perhaps the nub of the issue. “But to be honest with you, I’ve never been in the headspace to listen to Wildflowers, especially not since Tom passed. I need more time.”

Ferrone, too, admits to moments in which he thinks of his friend and breaks into tears. Upon being told the news of his comrade’s death, the drummer turned to Campbell in the corridors of the UCLA Medical Center, in Santa Monica, and said, “You’re the captain now.”

“I miss my friend,” says Campbell. “Aside from of course playing on-stage with people, and seeing how much joy it brought to him and to me, back in Florida we shared the dream of taking this path. And it all came true for us. But on a personal level I just miss being able to call him up on the phone and say, ‘Hey man, how you doing?’ I miss just talking s--t with him about this and that.”

Three years after his final concert with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, at the Hollywood Bowl, earlier this month Campbell appeared onstage at the Troubadour club, on Santa Monica Boulevard, with his band The Dirty Knobs. For decades the group was a part-time concern, but next month sees the release of Wreckless Abandon, their debut album.

Once a habitant of the world’s largest arenas, in West Hollywood in 2020 the guitarist’s audience consisted only of a camera crew filming the short set in the hope of raising money for the impoverished, Covid-stricken clubs of Southern California – the clubs in which Campbell and Petty made their bones almost half a century ago.

Even so. “It felt good to play again after so long,” he says.

Wildflowers & All The Rest is available now. Wreckless Abandon by The Dirty Knobs will be released on November 20 on BMG Records