Tom Petty‘s first single was a bust. More than 50 years later, it’s getting a welcome second life.
A remixed version of “Depot Street,” the one and only A-side released on Shelter Records by the rocker’s pre-Heartbreakers band, Mudcrutch, is one of the standout tracks on the new Petty box set Origins 1971-1978 and the subject of a music video that owes a debt to Emmy-winning Widow’s Bay star Stephen Root.
Earlier this week, the Origins producer, Ryan Ulyate, and the video co-director, actor-comedian Tim Baltz (The Righteous Gemstones, Widow’s Bay’s Clown Killer), hosted a listening party in Hollywood, sharing stories and music behind the beginnings of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
No Sleep Til L.A.
Petty formed Mudcrutch in his native Gainesville, Fla., in 1970. The band would eventually include two future Heartbreakers, guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench. The centerpiece of the box set is No Sleep Til L.A., billed as “a curated 12-track document of Tom Petty becoming Tom Petty.” Ulyate had free rein of Petty’s archives — “You’re listening to something that no one’s heard for like 55 years,” he says, “It’s archaeology” — cherry-picking songs from the earliest days of the band in Florida to their cross-country trek to Los Angeles in hopes of hitting it big.
“We didn’t do it chronologically,” says Ulyate. “We put them together in a way that it tells a story. … It’s the story about how this guy that we know and love as a songwriter and a performer and a singer found some people around him, and had different people around him at different times, but ended up being the person that we’ve come to appreciate.”
Among the cuts on No Sleep Til L.A. is “Up In Mississippi,” Mudcrutch’s first recording. “Randall Marsh, the drummer, had a friend who was a pepper farmer, and the pepper farmer had a bumper crop that year and gave Randall $800,” Ulyate recounts. “And they drove down to Criteria Studios in Miami, and they cut that track. They pressed it up on their own 45, and they put it out on ‘Pepper Records.'” The band dropped off copies at all the regional radio stations, according to Ulyate, “then they had all their friends call in to request it.”
A Tulsa pitstop
Eventually Petty and crew caught the attention of music producer Denny Cordell, co-founder of a legit label. Ulyate picks up the story. “Denny Cordell was an English guy, and I think his first big hit was ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ right? When he was like 23. So he was this wunderkind producer guy, and he also formed a record label with Leon Russell called Shelter Records.
“And Denny said, ‘OK, why don’t you guys go to L.A.? But why don’t you stop off at my studio in Tulsa? Because I have a studio in an old church there.'”
Mudcrutch decamped from Florida in 1974 and headed to Tulsa, where they had the run of Cordell’s studio, aptly dubbed the Church. “Cordell wasn’t even there. He just said, ‘Go to Tulsa and spend a week in the studio,'” says Ulyate. “He really helped them find their own footing on how to make records.” A highlight from those sessions included on the box set is “Unheard Kind of Hero,” a Bob Dylan-esque solo acoustic song Petty wrote when he was 17. “His thing was always, if it’s a good song, you should be able to just play it on the guitar and have it work — that’s your test,” Ulyate says.
“Depot Street”
The band eventually made it to L.A. and recorded their debut single, the ill-fated “Depot Street,” a reggae-inspired bop, backed with “Wild Eyes.” “Denny was really into Bob Marley and everything that was happening with reggae, and he turned them onto reggae,” Ulyate explains. “Denny just pushed [Petty] in that direction.
“They put this out, and then it tanked, and then the deal was over.” Petty bounced around L.A. and recorded with session musicians like Al Kooper, Leon Russell, and Jim Gordon, before reconnecting with Campbell and Tench and forming the Heartbreakers with drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair. The 5-LP/4-CD box set also includes remastered versions of the band’s first two albums, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and You’re Gonna Get It!, along with the much-bootlegged Live From the Record Plant show.
As Ulyate, who became friendly with Petty while engineering his late-career albums, was remixing the box set at Petty’s private studio, the Clubhouse, superfan Baltz and a famous buddy dropped by.
“About a year ago, I was lucky enough to visit the Clubhouse with my friend Luke Wilson, and we got to hear a lot of these tracks. … And about six months after that, Adria [Petty, Tom’s elder daughter] got in touch with us and said, ‘Hey, what do you think about directing a music video for something that’s going to accompany the box set?'”
The Widow’s Bay connection
Baltz and Wilson, who co-directed, planned to include vintage footage of Mudcrutch along with band ephemera. That’s when Baltz phoned up a Widow’s Bay friend for some help. “Stephen Root attended the University of Florida starting in 1970 and saw Mudcrutch on the quad quite a few times. I reached out to him initially to see if he had any memorabilia to contribute to the project, and instead he ended up being in it,” says Baltz. “Little did we know we’d have an Emmy winner in our very modest music video.”
Origins 1971-1978 is available now.
