When it came time for Petty to make his second record without the Heartbreakers, Lynch felt the same way he did about Full Moon Fever. Lynch was the guy in the Heartbreakers who never felt shy about expressing any displeasure with Petty. And Petty wasn’t enamored with Lynch’s playing in the studio. He was great in a live situation, but Petty was always concerned about a drummer who had trouble keeping time. Things came to a head after doing two benefit shows for Neil Young’s Bridge School, and Petty fired Lynch. Exit Stan Lynch, enter Steve Ferrone – the perfect time keeper.
Tom Petty stated he had a great time doing the album with Rick Rubin, that it was a “big hang.” He admitted that he had no control over what he wrote for the record. He didn’t edit himself, he just let everything come out. Wildflowers begins with the song of the same name. The way he explained it was that it was a stream-of-consciousness thing – “I turned on my tape-recorder deck, picked up my acoustic guitar, took a breath and played that from start to finish.” His therapist told him that he was singing to himself.
From Warren Zanes’ book Petty: The Biography:
“I’ve read that Echo is my ‘divorce album,’ but Wildflowers is the divorce album. That’s me getting ready to leave. I don’t even know how conscious I was of it when I was writing it. I don’t go into this stuff with elaborate plans. But I’m positive that’s what Wildflowers is. It just took me getting up the guts to leave this huge empire that we had built, to walk out. My kids … I knew this was going to be devastating to the whole family. I was leaving them there, without me to balance things out. My kids knew that a nightmare was coming. Adria was already out of the house, but Annakim was just entering her teens. But staying there was finishing me off. I’d become a different person.”
According to his daughter Adria, she knew her parents’ marriage was over the first time she heard Wildflowers. Of the songs on Wildflowers, she explained that they expressed the purity of where he wanted to go, that he had figured out during the process of making the album he was going to make some changes to his band, and to not live with his childhood sweetheart from high school anymore. He was going to give himself more agency over his own life, considering that as a bandleader and successful recording artist he had a lot of “crippling responsibility” since he was 21. She referred to the album as “bottled sunshine.”
TP wrote and recorded 25 songs for the album. Warner thought Petty gave them too much and asked him to cut the album to a single album. He cut 10 songs, which still left him with enough songs to fill a double album had it been released on vinyl instead of CD. He said it took him three months to figure out which songs to keep and which to shelve. According to Rick Rubin, Petty wanted to release the remainder of the Wildflowers sessions because the legacy of Wildflowers loomed large in his career, that he knew the second half of Wildflowers was an important statement.
During a very informative podcast Rick Rubin did with Adria Petty [Rick Rubin’s Broken Record], Rubin had an epiphany about why Tom Petty went along with the Warner’s suggestion that Wildflowers be a single rather than a double album. Rubin had known Petty to be very stubborn when it came to creative decisions for his music. Whether or not to have his first album for Warner is definitely in that category. When Tom Petty made Hard Promises in 1981, MCA was going to raise the price of the album by a dollar. It would cost a little more than most other albums. Petty thought that was unfair for his fans. Warner exec Lenny Waronker told Petty that double albums don’t sell as much, that the company could do more for marketing the record if it was a single album, and that a single album would be less expensive for his fans. Rubin’s epiphany was the “less expensive for the fans” argument was what sold Tom Petty on the single album.
What happened to “All the Rest”?
Some of the songs came out on the next Tom
Petty & the Heartbreakers album She’s
The One (Songs and Music from the Motion Picture). Those songs were Climb That Hill, Hope You Never, and California. The recordings themselves didn’t appear on She’s The One. The band recorded them
again while the originals sat on the shelf.
Tom Petty gave Leaving Virginia
Alone to Rod Stewart. Somewhere Under Heaven appeared as a
stand-alone single on iTunes in 2015. Oddly enough, Tom Petty said he didn’t
remember recording that song. From what I’ve read from various sources there
were plans to release Wildflowers &
All the Rest in 2015, but those plans didn’t come to fruition until now. Other than these songs, the rest of Wildflowers
sat…
What is in the set?
“Wildflowers & All the Rest” isn’t just the 25 recordings Tom Petty intended to release as a double CD. There is a basic edition of two discs – the 25 songs. The deluxe edition is the basic edition plus two more CDs [this is what I bought]. A third CD is demos. The fourth CD contains the same songs recorded on various tours. The “super deluxe” adds a fifth CD: “Alternate Takes (Finding Wallflowers),” with 16 additional studio tracks, including the B-side “Girl on LSD” and an acoustic version of “Cabin Down Below.” The packaging gets much more elaborate at this level, too, with the printed material now hardbound, plus extras like a replica 1995 tour program, cloth patch, handwritten lyric reprints and numbered certificate of authenticity.
Disc
1 - Wildflowers
You Don’t Know How It Feels
Time to Move On
You Wreck Me
It’s Good to Be King
Only a Broken Heart
Honey Bee
Don’t Fade on Me
Hard on Me
Cabin Down Below
To Find a Friend
A Higher Place
House in the Woods
Crawling Back to You
Wake Up Time
Disc
2 - All the Rest
Something Could Happen
Leaving Virginia Alone
Climb That Hill Blues
Confusion Wheel
California
Harry Green
Hope You Never
Somewhere Under Heaven
Climb That Hill
Hung Up and Overdue
Disc
3 - Home Recordings
There Goes Angela (Dream Away)
You Don’t Know How It Feels
California
A Feeling of Peace
Leave Virginia Alone
Crawling Back to You
Don’t Fade on Me
Confusion Wheel
A Higher Place
There’s a Break in the Rain (Have Love Will
Travel)
To Find a Friend
Only a Broken Heart
Wake Up Time
Hung Up and Overdue
Wildflowers
Disc
4 - Wildflowers Live
You Don’t Know How It Feels
Honey Bee
To Find a Friend
Walls
Crawling Back to You
Cabin Down Below
Drivin’ Down to Georgia
House in the Woods
Girls on LSD
Time to Move On
Wake Up Time
It’s Good to Be King
You Wreck Me
Wildflowers
Disc
5 - Alternate Versions (Finding
Wildflowers)
[Available only from Tom Petty’s website]
A Higher Place
Hard on Me
Cabin Down Below
Crawling Back to You
Only a Broken Heart
Drivin’ Down to Georgia
You Wreck Me
It’s Good to Be King
House in the Woods
Honey Bee
Girl on LSD
Cabin Down Below (Acoustic Version)
Wildflowers
Don’t Fade on Me
Wake Up Time
You Saw Me Comin’
Interesting Tidbits
1. Adria Petty is one of the curators of Wildflowers & All the Rest, along with Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, her sister Annakim and Petty’s widow Dana. Rick Rubin thought all the demos that make up part of this collection were lost. He said that even when Tom Petty was alive, he didn’t know the demos’ location. In a podcast with Rubin, Adria Petty told him that all the demos were in Tom Petty’s closet. Rubin also asked her about what demos happened in which chronological order, and she replied that "as disciplined as my Dad was, he was still a stoner who didn't label his tapes."
2. During this same podcast Rick Rubin said You Don’t Know How It Feels was the first song they recorded for Wildflowers, and it was Steve Ferrone’s “audition” to see if Tom Petty thought he was “the guy” to play drums. The performance on the record was a “first take” – Ferrone passed the audition.
3. You Wreck Me was known for a long time as “Mike’s Song” [Mike Campbell wrote the music]. When TP first wrote the words, the chorus was “you rock me,” which Campbell thought was lame and cliché. TP dwelled on it for some time and finally came back with “you wreck me”. It’s amazing how the change of one word can change the entire meaning of a song. About Mike Campbell, Adria Petty refers to him as “a magical being,” an under-recognized songwriter. Rubin said the Tom Petty told him that Mike Campbell would always bring in a couple of really good songs that he would never have written otherwise. Of Campbell’s guitar playing, Rubin simply said that Campbell’s guitar playing is “as good as it gets.”
4. The car test. Rick Rubin and Tom Petty would use the sound system in a Toyota as a reference point for mixing Wildflowers. If the record didn’t sound good in the car, they determined the mix wasn’t done. They’d keep going back and forth between the studio and the car until the album sounded good in the car [Editor’s note – that’s one way I test-drive cars when I buy a car. I spend a lot of time in my car. If music doesn’t sound good in the car, I won’t buy the car.]
Wildflowers
& All the Rest is the “Holy Grail” for Tom Petty
enthusiasts. It's as good as one would expect from Tom Petty. Buy it!
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