Then the last tour we said: ‘We either do it in the right key or we don’t do it at all. We struggled along with that for a while. We’re going to have to leave it off the list.’ A couple of tours ago we tried to lower the key to make it easier for him, but it changed the whole timbre of the music. It’s a hard song to sing because it’s at the top of his range, and there were times when he would go: ‘I can’t hit those notes tonight, guys. “There were a couple of times where Tom was having issues with his voice. More than three decades later they remained haunted by the song, with which they always ended their set. They said: ‘Maybe if we mix it in New York it’ll sound better than it does here.’ Even when it was out we were thinking: ‘Oh, we should have cut it again.’ It never ended.” The band might have continued trying to improve on it, had they not had to finally turn the finished album in to the label. I’m not sure whether he got credit or not.” He played it on the recording, because I don’t think Stan was there. It helped the drums swing, closer to what the song was trying to do. And one day he said: ‘You know what this song really needs? It needs a shaker.’ And he was right. “But Jim used to come around the studio a lot, just listen or suggest things, and support us. “I wasn’t there that day,” says Campbell. Having stopped by one day, he suggested they add a samba shaker to the track. Part of the breakthrough in finally nailing the drum track of Refugee came from star session drummer Jim Keltner. We were still thinking: ‘Oh, this is still not good enough. Even when we had the take, we didn’t think we had it. But I wouldn’t give him more weight than Tom in terms of pushing for the final version. "I mean, there’s nothing that we would have accepted that wasn’t great either, but he was pushing, and sometimes his pushing kind of worked against us because it would implode some of the players. He wanted to prove to himself and the world that Jimmy Iovine made this happen. He wanted to make the best record ever made, and he wanted to be the guy to do it. We were on a mission too, but Jimmy was just driven. “Jimmy was pushing real hard,” says Campbell. So we just kept at it until, finally, one day we played it and said: ‘Oh, that’s it.’”īut still they couldn’t let it go. It took them over 100 takes to get it right. None of us did really, but it just seemed to work,” recalls Campbell. had a swing to it that Stan didn’t quite understand. He worked really hard to get this drum sound. At one point he was temporarily dismissed because of his constant bickering with Iovine over the drum sounds. The studio was a tense place, and the scapegoat was drummer Stan Lynch. They had almost recorded the entire album, yet they still couldn’t get Refugee right. This went on for days, just trying to get the snare to sound right. “The first day it’d be like: ‘Move the snare drum over there.’ ‘Try a different snare drum.’ ‘Let’s try a different microphone.’ “We were still pretty green in the studio, and we were getting used to Jimmy Iovine and Shelly Yakus who were both very meticulous with the drum sounds,” Campbell remembers. The Heartbreakers had managed to persuade wunderkind producer Jimmy Iovine – the engineer on Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, producer of Patti Smith’s Easter – to work with them. Trying to capture that demo with the band live took a while.” The band tried to learn it, and that was a whole other movie. Then the next rehearsal we had he said: ‘I worked on your tape and I got some words to this song.’ I said: ‘Oh, really?’ He played it to me, and I was just blown away. “All I remember is giving him a cassette, telling him: ‘Here’s some demos,’” Campbell smiles. But that’s the last thing that would be easy about Refugee. It took him just 10 minutes to come up with the words to add to the untitled music on the cassette that Campbell had given him. On Damn The Torpedoes was when he came in with those incredible songs: Refugee and Here Comes My Girl. “He was always fiddling around with these tapes he was making at home. “That’s where Mike’s talents really took off,” Petty remembered.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |