Don't Do Me Like That (1979)

Performer: Tom Petty & Heartbreakers                 Writer: Tom Petty
Highest US Chart Position: #10                             Label: Backstreet Records
Musicians: Tom Petty, Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, Ron Blair and Stan Lynch

It was probably sometime in mid-1981 that I actually purchased a copy of Damn the Torpedoes by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. As with most of the songs that become meaningful to me in any way, it takes something to separate the song from the radio--where is serves as background music while driving or doing homework or shooting hoops in the driveway, or a million other things that teenagers did back then--to put it into my consciousness in a way that is distinct from every other song on the radio. I found it in a junk shop along with all of Badfinger’s Apple recordings, and with three hits on it that had been on the radio I added it to the pile of LPs I took home that day. “Don’t Do Me Like That,” while not the powerhouse song that “Refugee” is, was the only song off the album to chart in the seventies. It was released in early November of 1979 and made it to the Top Forty six weeks later. The song finally peaked at number ten in early February of 1980 for two weeks. It’s significant for being Petty’s first top ten hit single. Petty had written the song after moving to L.A. from Florida when the group was still called Mudcrutch. The arrangement is almost identical to the demo with the most significant difference, other than the recording quality, being the absence of the B-3 organ overdub by Benmont Tench, and the lead guitar work during the verses by Mike Campbell.

The song begins with the entire band on the downbeat, Stan Lynch’s drums crashing down hard on one and the upbeat of two along with the guitars, followed by Lynch’s wonderful sixteenth-note fills, all the while with Benmont Tench pounding away at eight notes on the piano. The second time around Lynch falls into a solid rhythm while Tench’s organ wails over the top of the whole thing and then flows effortlessly into the verse. Petty’s vocals are dense with lyrics. He describes it as dancing over the music, the guitars still hitting their two-note power chords while Tench continues on the piano. When they get to the chorus, Mike Campbell echoes Petty with a melodic guitar riff each time he sings the title, then a wash of organ fills the remainder before it repeats again. After Petty sings another verse and chorus, the group bears down for a powerful bridge. Lynch pounds on every beat for a couple of bars, while Tench doubles the eighth-note piano rhythm on the organ and at the end of the eight bars Tench holds on the organ while Lynch fills into another verse. This time the organ plays fills along with the vocals before a regular chorus goes into an ad-lib chorus by Petty and fades on some solo guitar work by Campbell.

Since the song was an “old” one for Petty, he was going to give it to the J. Giles Band because he thought it sounded like something they would do. But Petty was still trying to finish Damn the Torpedoes and when producer Jimmy Iovine heard the demo he said he ran to Petty’s house to tell him to keep the song because it was a hit. In fact, the group had purposely decided not to put it on the last two records and Petty sort of felt as if they had already passed by the song in the group’s evolution. Petty says that song began when he actually rented a rehearsal studio for a day, because he didn’t have a piano of his own, in order to write it. The title phrase was something that Petty’s dad used to say, when he sensed someone was trying to put something over on him, and Petty’s appropriation of it for singing about a girl is genius. While The Heartbreakers first hit song “Breakdown” had originally been released in 1977, even that song didn’t breakout until it appeared on the soundtrack for the film FM the following year and was reissued on 45. Their other early classic, “American Girl,” didn’t even chart in the U.S. But the group’s third album was the one where the dam burst, and it is a brilliant collection. “Don’t Do Me Like That” will always have powerful associations for me from my final winter in high school, but also from the exciting year that followed.