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Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
Hit Parade: Le Petty Prince Edition
01:10:26
Tom Petty and Prince only played together once. But their careers paralleled each other for four decades.
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You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate and panoply about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One Series on today's show. It's been a tough couple of years. If you're a fan of classic culture spanning chart dominating rock and roll, we've lost some real icons. It's been just under a month since the music world mourned the loss of one of the great singer songwriters and torchbearers of rock, Tom Petty.
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I'm free, Free falling.
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And it's been just over a year and a half since we lost the multi genre, multi instrumentalist, prolific pop genius Prince. Beyond their shared status as music legends and American pop crafts craftsmen, Tom Petty and Prince would not appear to have much in common. The former a product of a southern white family from Gainesville, Florida turned proud Angeleno and hitmaker on mainstream rock radio, and the latter Minneapolis favorite son, an African American polymath descended from jazz musicians who broke on urban radio. They are also, not incidentally, but both Rock and Roll hall of Famers, and as such, Petty and Prince were both a part of what is widely considered the greatest all star performance in the Rock Hall's three decade. This performance of George Harrison's Beatles classic while my guitar gently weeps at the March 2004 Rock and Roll hall of Fame induction ceremony is mainly a showcase for the fiery guitar playing of Prince, a jaw dropping solo that takes over three minutes into the song and carries it to the heavens. But the performance was led by Tom Petty, who was at the ceremony that night to help induct his late friend Harrison. Two years before, in March of 2002, Petty and his band the Heartbreakers had been inducted into the hall. That night in 2004 was Prince's turn, which is how the two men came to be at the Waldorf Astoria stage on the same night. Tom Petty was the only person standing on stage that night besides Prince, who'd been inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. Performers become eligible for Rock hall induction no earlier than 25 years after their first recording that night in 2004. Virtually all of the inductees, Jackson, Brown, the Dells, Bob Seeger, Traffick, ZZ Top had been eligible for the honor about a decade or more apiece before being belatedly let in. Even the late George Harrison, who had been inducted that night for his post Beatles work was let in as a soloist a decade late and two years after his death. Petty and Prince were in a different category. Rock hall members who get in on their first ballot, from Chuck Berry to Pearl Jam, form a very exclusive club. A few dozen performers so undeniable their contributions to the popular canon are like oxygen, universally beloved and easy to take for granted. Petty might well have been the easiest of all. His songs had been a part of the fabric of American culture and all over the Billboard charts for three decades. The same was true for Prince. Today on Hit Parade, we'll take a spin through the respective hit parades of Thomas Earl Petty and Prince Rogers Nelson, men born in the 1950s who broke on the charts at the very end of the 1970s and came to define their corners of American rock in the 1980s. Prior to that 2004 Rock hall performance, you probably hadn't thought of them as musical brethren. But they had so much in common. Each man fought categorization and the machinations of the music industry for the entirety of their careers. And each had remarkable staying power, not just as rock legends, but as radio ready pop stars. Both left us too soon. Prince in his late 50s, petty in his mid-60s. But not before they synthesized decades of American music into something new, irresistible and bound for the charts. Indeed, they broke on Billboard's Hot 100 literally simultaneously, peaking with their first major hits at the same propitious moment. And that's where your hit parade marches today. The week ending February 2, 1980, when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers broke into the top 10 with their first major hit, don't Do Me like that, One notch above Prince's father first pop crossover hit, I Wanna Be youe Lover. Frankly, I could do several podcast episodes about Prince's storied career alone. But as in our second Hit Parade episode about the Beatles, I'm not going to attempt to cover the breadth of of Prince's career or even the fullness of Petty's. Instead, we're going to focus today on three key factors in these artists careers. You might subtitle this episode what Becomes a Legend. Most, of course, it's instrumental talent and melodic skill and more than a little bit of luck. But when it comes to these journeymen who kept scoring hits over two decades, you can credit three main factors. Life philosophies, if you will. One, don't let the music business box you in. Two, great songwriting is the best route to big hits. And finally three, it's never too late to be a hitmaker. Let's start with the first don't limit yourself and don't let the record company get you down. Though they were born eight years apart Tom Petty in 1950, Prince in 1958, the two men had a broadly similar relationship to 20th century pop history. They came of age musically in the late 60s and early 70s and therefore had the benefit of having witnessed the first wave of rock and roll and all of its offshoots. From rhythm and blues to folk rock and singer songwriter pop to hard rock and heavy metal. They synthesized two decades of rock after many of its titans, from Elvis Presley to Jimi Hendrix, had already come and gone. Prince, whose father was a pianist and whose mother was a jazz singer, was a pop omnivore. Famously, he had taught himself a range of instruments. And as critic Michelangelo Matos points out in Pitchfork, when Printz signed to Warner bros. Records in 1977 at age 19, his contract not only called for an unusual degree of creative control, but also explicitly stated that he be part of the label's pop roster, not its R&B1. This distinction would shape the entirety of his career to come. Indeed, at a time when black artists from Aretha Franklin to Marvin Gaye were adapting to the sound of disco, Prince was recording albums that incorporated a range of sounds. His very first album, 1978's for your, led off with a single that read as contemporary R and B and even reached the number 12 position on Billboard's Hot Soul Singles the Lascivious Soft and Wet. But while that song introduced Prince's debut album, the album closed with this. The metal funk hybrid I'm Yours was not a single for Prince, but it was a sign, an Easter egg at the end of his album indicating that he would not be boxed in. By this time, both America and England had witnessed the first stirrings of not only hard rock but but punk. As for Tom Petty, he was even briefly marketed as punk, or at least punk adjacent. Before he and the Heartbreakers issued their self titled debut album in 1976, Petty had spent half a decade in the Gainesville, Florida band Mudcrutch, which featured future Heartbreakers Mike Campbell on guitar and Benmont Tench on keyboards. Mudcrutch had moved to Los angeles, signed to LA based Shelter Records and put out one single before breaking up in 1975. That single, Depot street, sounded as much like the who or a UK pub rock band as Southern rock. After the band's breakup, Shelter Records held on to Petty. They mostly wanted him on their roster in the first place, as he was Mudcrutch's primary Songwriter Petty in turn formed the Heartbreakers with Campbell and Tench, plus fellow Gainesvillians Stan lynch and Ron Blair. Given their roots, Petty and the Heartbreakers were nominally a Southern flavored rock band at a time when Southern rock was doing very well on the Billboard charts.
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You can't hide your lion eyes and your smile is in disguise I thought by now.
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You'Re real but time Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were far from the Eagles or the Allman Brothers. Their self titled debut album featured songs that barely even sounded American, with clipped phrasing and three chord directness. Indeed, that song, Anything that's Wrong Rock and Roll, was Petty and the Heartbreaker's first hit to make the charts not here, but in the United Kingdom. In the summer of 1977, the same summer Brits were going mad for the Sex Pistols, Petty reached the UK top 40 twice. First with Anything that's Rock and Roll, which reached number 36 on the UK chart. Their first hit song anywhere, and a few weeks later with this little ditty you might have heard of. It is one of the great ironies of chart history that the now classic American Girl was not actually a hit in America. It was the first single shelter issued by the band, but did not capture the attention of US radio programmers or the retail public. It never made the Hot 100 in the UK, American Girl reached number 40 and Petty and the Heartbreakers made several live and televised appearances In England in 77 years later, Glenn Tilbrook, leader of British post punk power pop band Squeeze, reminisced about what it was like catching Petty and his mates.
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Then Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Now I have to say I have a personal interest in this concert. I'd seen them a few months before. They did this show on a double bill with the Ramones in London and they were absolutely fantastic. I never saw. I'd never seen anything like it because they had a lot of talk of punk energy, but had showmanship and had a real sort of craft to the band and a real driving energy. So I'm very, very excited.
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Tom Petty would later joke that at the time his label would dress the band in skinny ties and scarves to further the perception that they were new wave. For about a year, though, nothing would help the Heartbreakers in their homeland. They wouldn't finally score their first American hit on until the winter of 1978. That's when Breakdown scraped the top 40 on the Hot 100. Sneaking up to number 40.
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Baby, break down Go ahead, give it to me Break down Honey, Can you see Break down It's all right, it's all right.
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If Prince at this time was trying to meld rock into his R and B, Petty was spicing his rock with a dose of soul. Of course, all rock and roll is in some way derived from African American music, but Petty's Breakdown smoldered with an R and B groove. In the late 70s, we. When he and the Heartbreakers performed Breakdown live, Petty would actually segue from his own composition into Ray Charles 60s classic hit the Road Jack.
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Hit the Road Jack.
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By the end of the 70s, breakdown would even wind up being recorded by a performer of color, Grace Jones, the iconoclastic new wave club queen who on her 1980 album Warm Leatherette, turned Petty's song into a reggae tune. Petty himself not only blessed the remake, he actually wrote a third verse for Jones that was not in the Heartbreaker's original recording.
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Wow.
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During this period, Tom Petty's greatest concern wasn't musical crossover or even the charts. It was his record deal. The band was poised for a breakthrough. Breakdown, the single had provided a nice setup for the Heartbreaker's 1978 sophomore album. Youm're Gonna get became the band's first top 40 album. And in July of 78, just two months after its release, you're Gonna get it was certified gold. But that's when, in the space of roughly 18 months, petty and the Heartbreaker's recording contract changed hands twice. First, Shelter Records, which had been affiliated with ABC Records, switched distributors. But ABC demanded they leave Petty and the Heartbreakers with the label. Petty moved quickly to renegotiate his contract with ABC to safeguard the autonomy of his deal with Shelter. But no sooner had he done that than ABC was sold in its entirety to major conglomerate MCA Records. This finally was the last straw to Petty, as he explained 20 years later to VH1's behind the Music.
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We were sure that we were going to get shafted because we were still on this deal for Mud Crunch, basically, and we had a terrible royalty rate. We'd been shifted to this company, and it was all done with kind of attitude of, well, what are they going to do? They don't have any power. And I was like, well, no, the power we have is we won't play.
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That's when Petty exercised the nuclear option. In May 1979, he declared bankruptcy to get out from under his contract on the novel premise that his band's low royalty rate would never allow them to pay back MCA Records. After months of legal maneuvering, MCA succumbed, signing Petty and the Heartbreakers to a better deal with a higher royalty rate. MCA essentially caved because they knew Petty and the Heartbreakers were probably sitting on a smash an album they had been working on with Jimmy Iovine, the hotshot producer of Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith. With the legal disputes settled, MCA could finally release Damn the Torpedoes, which would indeed prove to be Petty and the Heartbreakers blockbuster. An eventual triple platinum classic, Torpedoes remains the Heartbreaker's biggest studio album as a band, and it plays like an instant greatest hits. Torpedoes spent seven weeks at number two on the album chart, stuck only behind Pink Floyd's the Wall, and half its trip tracks were radio hits. The battle that birthed Damn the Torpedoes wouldn't be the last time Petty would clash with his own label. Just two years later, Petty would threaten to title the band's follow up album and $8.98 when MCA proposed raising his LP's suggested retail price by a dollar to nine hundred and ninety eight. The 1981 album was eventually released at the old price under the title Hard Promises, but It was the 1979 bankruptcy fight that first branded Petty as an artist who wouldn't back down at his label's behest. It was also the album that gave Petty and the Heartbreakers their first top 10 hit, a boogie rock number Petty had briefly considered giving away to the J. Giles Band on American Top 40. Casey Kasem counted it down. Five Floridians now living in LA, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers hold at number 10 for the second week in a row on at 40, don't do me like that. And as we noted at the top of the show, one notch below Petty that week on the charts, Prince was scoring his own pop breakthrough with his recent number one sold hit here's Prince and his first top 40 single at number 11, here's I wanna Be youe Lover, I wanna be your lover, a number 11 pop hit and a number one R&B hit, was a standout in Prince's early catalog, a sparkling, danceable soul number that was conversant with disco but not wedded to it. Like much of Prince's early output, it was ribbled, but in a playful way. The pause in the chorus between make you come and running was witty and PG rated. It was exactly the uptempo record Prince needed to announce his emergence as as a pop star. And so of course, this is the moment that Prince, like Petty, decided to test the limits of his power and make his label blink. In his case, that didn't yet involve legal action against Warner Bros. But rather veering away from the sound that had literally just given him a hit. In one of the great left turns in rock history, Prince's third album, Dirty Mind traded in the contempo R and B sound of his first two albums hits for essentially a new wave rock sound. On its black and white cover, Prince appears in nothing but a long coat, a scarf and black briefs, standing in front of an upturned mattress. The album was greeted by near universal critical acclaim. Dean of American rock critics, Robert Chriscow, issued perhaps his shortest and most famous album review, saying Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go. However, the album was also greeted by an inauspicious public reception. Warner Bros. Did manage to get the funk rock track up to onto black radio playlists and into the top five on Billboard's R&B chart, but the album generated no pop hits. And coming after Prince's 1979 self titled album, the one that had spawned I Wanna Be youe lover, reached number 22 on the album chart and went platinum. Dirty Mind peaked below the top 40 and sold poorly. It would not be certified even gold for another four years. And perhaps saddest of all, its best song, a great new wave rock song called when youn Were Mine, wasn't issued as a single and never charted at. When youn Were Mine remains one of Prince's most critically acclaimed songs. Three years after Prince's recording, it wound up on one of the top selling albums of the mid-1980s, Cyndi Lauper's she's so Unusual. It would not be the last Prince song from this period to wind up a bigger hit for for another artist.
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I love you more than I did when you were mine.
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That leads into the second lesson. Great songwriting is the best route to big hits. If there's one major thing Petty and Prince had in common, it was not just the strength of their songwriting and the way they inspired others, occasionally even giving songs away, but also the way they took inspiration from others and made something new out of it. The 1980s, when both men's careers peaked, were an object lesson in sturdy pop songwriting. In an interview for VH1's behind the Music, producer Jimmy Iovine praised Tom Petty's skill as a songwriter above all. The first two songs he played me were Refugee and Here Comes My Girl. He's one of the most consistent songwriters.
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That I have ever laid eyes on.
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And he could hit with anybody. He's that good. Iovine would wind up producing three albums for Petty and the Heartbreakers during one of Petty's most fecund periods as a songwriter. In addition to records as tough minded as Refugee and as irresistible as Don't Do Me like that, Petty proved himself a virtual equal to his heroes. Roger McGuinn, leader of 60s folk rockers the Byrds, reportedly quipped when he first heard American Girl. When did I write that? In 1981, Petty took the homage even further when he wrote a top to bottom homage to the Birds sound and scored a hit with it. The number 18 pop hit and number one rock track the Waiting.
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Is the Hardest Part. Every day see one more, you take it on faith, you take it to the heart. The Waiting is the artist.
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That same year, 1981, Jimmy Iovine would wind up guiding Petty or perhaps forcing him into his biggest pop hit by pinching one of Petty's songs. While Iovine was busy producing the Heartbreaker's Hard Prime Promises, he was also producing Belladonna, the solo debut of Iovine's then girlfriend Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac. Petty and guitarist Mike Campbell had penned a song they were considering for the Heartbreakers but had shelved the way Iovine heard the song. It expressed a female point of view and it sounded like a hit. So Iovine quietly passed Petty's song to Nicks, who wound up singing over Petty's original track. When Iovine presented the demo of the pilfered track to Petty, he simultaneously proposed that the song become a duet fronted by Nicks but accompanied by Petty, with the Heartbreakers backing them both. The result was the biggest smash of Nix's solo career and the biggest of Petty's, with or without the Heartbreakers. A bluesy, smoldering summer 1981 number three smash stop dragging My Heart Around.
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Come on.
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The next Nick's and Petty duet was among the first videos played on MTV the day it launched, August 1, 1981, and it went into heavy rotation on the music television channel immediately. It thus inaugurated Petty's unlikely role as an early MTV star. By the time of the Heartbreaker's next album, 1982's Long After Dark, Petty had leaned into his role as a video star. The song echoed the synth heavy sound of early MTV New Wave, and the video found Tom and the band play acting. An homage to Mad Max and the Roadwaller.
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When I first.
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In addition to paving the way for Petty's early MTV stardom, Stevie Nicks plays an interesting connecting role in our story. After her album Belladonna topped the charts in late 1981, she quickly moved to record a follow up. And while her solo debut kicked off With a single written by Petty. Her sophomore album, the Wild Heart, was led off by a song indebted to and co created by Prince. Nicks wrote Stand back in early 1983 after hearing a priority Prince song on the radio. Indeed, she actually interpolated Prince's melody, so much so that she felt compelled to call the man himself, inviting Prince to play on her record and receive a chunk of its royalties. Less than an hour after Nicks called him, Prince visited Nix in the studio, arranged all of the song's hypnotic keyboards and left just as quickly. He turned Stand Back into a Smash, a number five hit in the summer of 1983.
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Stand back in the middle of my room I did not hear from you.
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Of course. The Prince song Nicks had heard on the radio and adapted was itself a smash. Prince's biggest hit to date, Little Red Corvette.
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Maybe I'm not too Fast.
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Corvette was a single from 1999, a double album released in late 1982 by the Collective now calling itself Prince and the Revolution. The two LP set affirmed once and for all that Prince could not be confined to any one sound. Nicks had been inspired by the single's thick, pulsating synthesizers, but the song climaxed with a classic rock chorus and a searing guitar solo. Little Red Corvette broke down barriers at both radio and mtv. For its first year and a half, the video channel presented itself as a so called rock station, largely unwilling to play videos by black artists. If MTV played Prince videos like controversy or 1999 at all, it was only in the wee hours. Little Red Corvette changed that in early 1983 it was one of two tracks, the other being Michael Jackson's smash Billie Jean, to go into heavy rotation on the video channel, a breakthrough for black acts. Moreover, in Billboard, not only did Corvette reach number six on the Hot 100 in May of 83, it also appeared on the magazine's rock chart then called Top Tracks, a chart that incidentally had already been topped multiple times by Tom Petty, peaking at number 17 on the rock chart. With Little Red Corvette, Prince was one of the first black artists to place on a chart dominated by the likes of Pink Floyd and ZZ Top. The chart success of both Little Red Corvette and its cousin single Stand Back kicked off Prince's imperial period, where everything he touched turned to gold and platinum. That included the songs he gave to others and those he kept for himself. Like Stevie Nicks, Prince was not above reaching to other artists with work for inspiration, even across genres. His epic single Purple Rain, the title track of both his 1984 debut movie and its accompanying magnum opus album was inspired by the power ballad work of such rock titans as Bob Seger, and by Prince's own admission, it borrowed some of its chord changes from the band Journey's power ballad. Faithfully, Prince even sought clearance from the band's Jonathan Cain. When it was released in 1984. On the Prince and the Revolution album of the same name, Purple rain made number two on the pop chart, number four on the R&B chart and number 18 on the rock chart. It was Prince's third straight single to make all three charts after When Doves Cry and let's Go Crazy. Even while he was generating smashes for himself in 1984, Prince was busy writing and producing hits for a parade of artists, including Sheila E with her number seven hit the Glamorous Life, Prince's protege band the Time, fronted by Morris Day with the number 20 hit Jungle Love. And Scottish pop singer Sheena Easton, who took Prince's libidinous double entendre Sugar Walls to number nine. Meanwhile, another artist revived a flower fluttery deep cut from Prince's 1979 self titled album. Reinvented in late 84 by former Rufus singer Chaka Khan, I Feel for your was reimagined into a seminal R B hip hop hybrid led by rapper Melly Melissa, the MC sideman of rap godfather Grandmaster Flash. Chaka Khan's reinvention of Prince's I Feel for your, featuring harmonica by Stevie Wonder, became a no. 3 pop 1R&B smart smash. It sat in the top five of both charts alongside Purple Rain. During this two year period when Prince was hovering over the sound of pop and rewriting the rules for chart domination, Tom Petty was in self imposed exile attempting to record a high concept album. The album Petty was trying to capture was a meditation on his Confederate heritage, punctuated by songs like Rebels and the album's moving title track, Southern Accents. But the album's lead single, Petty's first in two years, barely adhered to the album's concept or indeed anything the Heartbreakers had done before. A psychedelic digital rock track co written and produced by Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, punctuated by electric sitar and cellos, and featuring a trippy Alice in Wonderland music video that became Petty's most beloved MTV hit, Don't Come Around Here no more became a no. 13 pop and no. 2 rock hit in the spring of 1985.
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Don't come around here no more. Whatever you're looking for hey, don't come around here no more.
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While Petty returned to the charts with his headiest song to date. Prince had already moved past Purple Rain with a heady album of his own, the trippy Sgt. Pepper esque around the World in a Day, the first album on Prince's label, Paisley Park. Its lead single, the psychedelic rock story song Raspberry Beret, debuted on the Hot 100 and Top Rock Tracks concurrently with Petty's Don't Come Around Here no More. Prince's colorful classic about a kid working part time at a funeral. Five and dime for a boss named Mr. McGee would wind up peaking at number two pop and number 40 on the rock Tracks chart. Prince was now adept at writing in virtually any mode. By the following spring of 1986, he even blockaded the top two slots on the Hot 100 with singles in two completely different styles. Under his own name, Prince issued a brazenly minimalist piece of lean funk singing in a falsetto that cut through the radio like glass. Prince hit number one with the immortal Kiss. The same week Kiss sat ATOP the Hot 100. A second song Prince penned under the pseudonym Christopher sat at number two, a song he gave to Los Angeles all female rock band the Bangles. It couldn't have been less like the falsetto funk of Kiss. Manic Monday was a warm dayglo colored Mamas and the Papas homage, which reimagined the bangle's LA Paisley Underground scene as easy breezy pop.
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Just another Manic Monday. Wish it was Sunday that's mad fun day.
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If Prince at this point was spinning off a small army of proteges, Tom Petty was meeting and inspiring his elders. He was not just emulating his rock forefathers, but playing with them. In 1986, Petty and the Heartbreakers mounted a tour with Bob Dylan, learning what it was like to play backup to a rock legend. Dylan returned the favor to Petty. Within the year, he teamed with Petty and guitarist Mike Campbell and co wrote the lead single from the Heartbreaker's next album, Let Me Up, I've Had Enough, the snarky Jammin Me, a song that reached number 18 on the Hot 100 in the summer of 1987 and spent a month atop Billboard's album rock chart. Having now twice record and written with Bob Dylan, all that remained was for Petty to record with the rock legend. But no one, Petty included, could have predicted they would form a supergroup. In 1987, Petty befriended Jeff Lynn of the Electric Light Orchestra, the stately orchestral pop rock band that had spent the 70s emulating the production approach of Linn's Heroes, the Beatles. Jeff Lynn had spent most of 1987 producing a comeback album for former Beatle George Harrison called Cloud 9, a disc that gave Harrison his first radio hits in half a decade. One day in early 1988, Lynn brought Petty round to Harrison's house as Harrison was attempting to record a B side for one of his Cloud 9 singles. Also at Harrison's house were Dylan and rock legend Roy Orbison. The resulting five man jam session, Harrison, Dylan, Orbison, Lynn and Petty generated Handle with Care, a song everyone quickly realized was too good to be a B side.
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Reputations changeable situations terrible but baby, you're adorable and lonely with care I'm so tired of being lonely I still have some love to give.
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What started as an impromptu jam became the Traveling Wilburys, a supergroup of Harrison, Dylan, Orbison, Lynn and Petty, who at 37 was the youngest of the bunch. They wound up recording an entire album, Volume 1, which was released in the fall of 1988, spent more than a year on the charts and went triple platinum. Petty was more than a sideman. He helped write and sang lead on parts of eventual radio hits for the group, such as End of the Line.
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You, Think of Me, and what?
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Around this same time, Roy Orbison was working with Jeff Lynn on a comeback album of his own, and Petty chipped in on that project too. He and Lynn co authored a majestic single that would become Orbison's final top 10 hit in 1989, months after the legend died, the stately, catchy you Got it.
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Anything you want, you got it. Anything you need, you got it. Anything at all, you got it. Baby.
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When we come back. Both Petty and Prince score unlikely hits later than expected. All of this 1980s success by Prince and Petty ushered them toward the 90s in elder statesman mode. But that leads to the third of our principles for rock. It's never too late to be relevant or score hits. Prince looked like he might be reaching the end of his chart topping period. After an epic run from 1982 to 1987 that generated a string of classic chart conquering albums and singles from 1999 to Purple Rain to Sign of the Times, from Kiss to youo Got the Look, Prince appeared to be slowing down. His 1988 album Love Sexy, while widely acclaimed, only went gold, not platinum, and it generated just one hit song, the minimalist funk rock jam Alphabet Street.
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Tennessee.
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That's when Prince offered to take on an unusual project within the Warner Bros. Family. He offered his skills to film director Tim Burton, who was working on an adaptation of the comic book hero Batman, starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson, Prince offered to record not just a song for Burton's future blockbuster, but but the entire soundtrack. On each song on the album, Prince would assume the Persona of a character from the film, from Batman to the Joker to Vicki Vale. As a capstone to the album, Prince recorded a pastiche of dialogue samples from the movie, held together with electronic beats and searing guitar. The song's cut and paste production was Prince's inspired, if strange take on on the sampling phenomenon that defined the emerging art form of hip hop. Prince called it Bat Dance. Allying himself to a box office smash rejuvenated Prince's career. Both Bat Dance and Prince's Batman album went to number one on their respective charts. The single topped the Hot 100 and RB chart in August of 1989. The album was certified double platinum and sat at number one on the Billboard album chart for for a month and a half. For all six of those weeks that summer, sitting just a few chart spots away from Prince, was perhaps even more improbably, the biggest album of Tom Petty's career. Remember, Petty had just spent the last three years touring, writing and recording with a small army of his baby boom rock legends. As he approached 40, Petty appeared to be settling into a fine dotage, arriving at elder statesman status early. It was an odd time, therefore, for Petty to make his belated solo debut, Away from the Heartbreakers. Incredibly, this debut made him a more omnipresent pop star than ever. Produced by Petty's fellow Wilbury, Jeff Lynn, 1989's Full Moon Fever, which despite the lack of the word Heartbreakers on the COVID nonetheless featured half of the band as players, was a quintuple platinum Smash. It went four singles deep at pop radio and seven tracks deep at rock radio. It led off with three now classic singles that hit the top four and topped the album rock chart. The number 12 pop hit I Won't Back down, The number 23 pop hit running Down a Dream, And Petty's first top ten pop hit in nearly a decade, the number seven smash Free Fallen. When Free Fallen peaked On the Hot 100 in January 1990, it became Petty's highest charting hit ever, not counting his 1981 Stevie Nicks duet, and Petty found himself in a top 10 surrounded by the likes of Michael Bolton, Technotronic, Jody Watley and Skid Row. The last radio hit pulled from Full Moon Fever, the number five rock hit you're so Bad peaked in the album rock top five in the early summer of 1990 more than a year after Fever dropped.
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In a world Come on man, you're so bad.
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The album not only revived Petty's radio fortunes, it made him relevant to a new generation of rising Generation Xers, particularly on mtv. The Free Fallen video, an ode to Petty's adopted home of Los Angeles, featured skateboarders and goth kids as Petty strummed his guitar on the escalators of a Galleria mall. One year later, Petty reconvened the Heartbreakers and went back in the studio with compadre Jeff Lynn to record into the Great Wide Open, whose title track doubled down on Petty's revived MTV cred. The song poked fun at the music video era and the vagaries of early 90s pop theme, and the video, directed by Julian Temple and starring Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway, satirized the current generation of teen rock idols. The Great Wide Open album was a success, eventually going double platinum, the first multi platinum album for the Heartbreakers as a group since Damn the Torpedoes. It benefited from Petty's revived fortunes post Full Moon Fever and from the album's sparkling top 40 hit Learning to Fly, which reached number 28 in 1991.
- [55:32]
B
Coming down is the hardest thing.
- [55:39]
A
The 1990s would be good to Tom Petty and at first good to Prince, who was facing a shift in the sound of pop and R and B toward the harder edged sounds of New Jack swing and hip hop. As a songwriter, Prince began the decade with one more smash. He gave away to another artist, the biggest hit of his career not recorded by himself, Sinead o'. Connor. The impassioned Irish modern rock singer recorded a cover of Nothing Compares to youo, a deep cut Prince penned in 1985 for the family, a short lived funk jazz band Prince conceived as a spin off from the time OConnors cover in 1990 topped the charts around the world. One year later Prince scored another Hot 100 number, one of his own when his album Diamonds and Pearls, the first album co credited to his new backing band the New Power Generation, spawned the cool strolling chart topper Cream. As Top 40 radio swung toward hip hop, Prince did his best to keep up with varying degrees of success. Generally, when he sprinkled his tracks with actual rap or attempted to emulate the crudeness of rappers, the results were less successful on the charts. Even when the music was unimpeachably funky, The foul mouthed, wickedly catchy Sexy MF stalled at no. 66 on the Hot 176 on the R and B chart. It was the lead single of Prince's 1992 album, which was titled with an unpronounceable male female hieroglyphic mark, which came to be called the Love Symbol. Perhaps Prince would not be able to go toe to toe on the charts with the gangsta likes of Ice cream cube and Dr. Dre. But that 1992 album proved Prince could still write a sturdy pop hit. The early 1993 hit Seven, which peaked, appropriately enough, at number seven on the Hot 100, was the last top 10 hit issued by Prince under his own name. In 1993, the fiercely independent musician, going even further than Tom Petty in both legalistic creativity and anti label orneriness, changed his name to the same unpronounceable symbol found on the COVID of his prior Warner Brothers album. He appeared in public with the word sympathetic slave written on his cheek, protesting what he saw as the indentured servitude of his major label contract. In order to run the clock out on that Warner contract, Prince released new albums under his old name at a faster pace, pulling stockpiled material from his famous vault. Meanwhile, the former Prince issued more polished material on other labels, usually via one off work for hire contracts under his new unpronounceable name. Radio DJs would call him the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. In 1994, the artist scored a top 10 hit under this name, reaching number three on the Hot 102 on the R B chart with the Most Beautiful Girl in the World. It was the kind of move that would make Tom Petty proud, the man who, a decade and a half earlier had declared bankruptcy and found a loophole in the terms of the standard major label recording contract. Like Petty, Prince took on the major label system and on his terms. After a fashion, he won. For his part, Petty was having a good 1993 and 94 too. The career revival that had begun a half decade earlier with Full Moon Fever was still opening doors to Petty for both Heartbreakers and solo projects. In late 93, Petty and the Heartbreakers issued their first ever greatest hits album. For most acts, these compilations typically include newly recorded bonus cuts, which are often afterthoughts. But the one Petty and the Heartbreakers recorded became one of the band's most beloved hits. Mary Jane's Last Dance, a laconic, yowling rock cut that sounded comfortable on the radio next to grunge, brought Petty back to the top 20 for the first time since Free Fallen. It peaked at number 14 on the Hot 100 in early 1994 and once again topped the album rock chart and Its video was another star studded high concept affair featuring Prince's one time paramour Kim Basinger as a Weeknd at Bernie's like reanimated corpse before 1994 was over and just weeks after Petty won MTV's Video Vanguard Award, Petty issued his second ever solo album, Wild Flowers, which led off with the blissed out stoner rock jam you Don't Know How It Feels. Feels became a number 13 Hot 100 hit and helped power Wildflowers to triple platinum sales. Cementing his connection to current alt rock, Petty, appearing on Saturday Night Live in November 1994, invited drummer Dave Grohl to man the kit. It was only six months after Kurt Cobain's death and Grohl was still mourning the passing of his Nirvana bandmate and not yet a Foo Fighter. Grohl bashed out a memorable performance on Petty's Wildflowers hard rocker Honeybee. In early 1995. You don't know how it feels became Petty's last Top 40 pop hit. He'd already done better in the 90s than anyone could have expected expected, making the hit parade deep into his 40s, and he and the Heartbreakers continued to record great albums, including 1996's soundtrack to she's the One and 1999's acclaimed Echo. Prince again had scored his final top 10 hit in 1994. He continued to score the occasional one off top 40 pop or R B hit for the balance of the 90s. And at New Year's celebrations in 1999, Prince's old hit by that name scored enough sales and airplay to briefly reappear on the Hot 100 for the first time since 1983. Yet the 90s was not not the last time either man topped a billboard chart. In 2004 Prince released an acclaimed album Musicology that made no. 3 on the album chart, put the legend back on the COVID of Rolling Stone, and fueled Prince's highest grossing tour since his Purple Rain heyday. Two years after that, Prince was so well re established with the CD buying public that his follow up album 3121 actually debuted at number one on the Billboard album chart. Named for the address of a mansion Prince stayed at when visiting LA3121 re established his bona fides as a first rate funk rocker and it even generated a minor hot 100 hit with black Sweat.
- [64:47]
B
I'm Working up a Black Sweat, I'm Working.
- [64:55]
A
Eight years later, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers topped the album chart themselves and as with Prince, it was thanks in large part to their live reputation. Buyers of tickets to the Heartbreakers 2014 tour were offered their new studio album, Hypnotic Eye, as an add on to their ticket purchase. So many fans opted to buy the disc that it debuted on top of the album chart. Even more remarkably, Unlike Prince, whose 2006 chart topper was his first number one album in 17 years, Petty's 2014 chart topper was his first number 1 ever. 35 years after Damn the Torpedoes got stuck at number 2 behind Pink 4. Sadly, each man would see the upper rungs of the album chart again, but this time posthumously. In the two weeks I After Prince's death in April 2016, 19 of his albums re entered the Billboard album chart. The very best of Prince actually topped the chart for a week, and Purple Rain re entered at number two in October 2017. The week after Petty's death, five of his albums re entered the album chart, including the Heartbreaker's Greatest Hits, which back in 1993 had hit number five, but in 2017 reached a new peak of number two. It was one last poignant parallel between two artists whose careers had echoed each other over four decades. Two men who'd done it their way found creative routes around the music industry's rapaciousness, written songs that topped the charts, became classics and spanned formats and genres. A pair of guys who wound up sharing a stage for one amazing night in 2004. Just weeks after that night, Prince sat with Rolling Stone for the interview that put him back on the COVID of the magazine. Asked to reflect on his triumphant Rock and Roll hall of Fame performance, Prince, in his typically succinct direct and no nonsense way, didn't comment upon the hall itself himself, or his blazing guitar solo or even the George Harrison Beatles song he'd performed. Instead, he reserved his praise for the man who was ringmaster of the performance. It was an honor to play with Tom Petty. Free Fallen is one of my favorite songs I used to love whenever he would come on MTV because you knew you were going to get a great tune, MTV isn't like that anymore. The admiration was mutual. Tom Petty was asked to reflect on that magical rock hall induction performance in 2016, less than a week after Prince's death, and as it turns out, just 18 months before Petty's own. Petty called Prince's 2004 performance thrilling, reminiscing to the New York Times, you could feel the electricity of something really big's going down here. But Petty also had the last word in the article about Prince. It's funny because just a few days ago, he was in my mind all afternoon. I was thinking about him. I had just been talking with Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles. He wrote their Manic Monday song. She was telling me the story of how she came to have that song and meet Prince. And I was thinking about him a lot that day and I almost told myself I was going to call him and just see how he was. I'm starting to think you should just act on those things all the time. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. My producer is Chris Barube. The Executive producer of Slate Podcasts is Steve Lichti. Panoply's Chief Content Officer is Andy Bowers. Check out their entire roster of podcasts at Panoply fm. You can subscribe to Hit Parade at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get podcasts. Past episodes are available there or in the Slate Culture Gabfest feed. If you like Hit Parade, please tell your friends to subscribe and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melanthe.
- [69:59]
B
Sam.