Even the Losers

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on “Even the Losers,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, off Damn the Torpedoes, and if you have ever sat on a roof with somebody who was never going to stay, this one already knows your name. It is the kind of record the Zoo Freaks call in for when the week has been a long haul and you still want a little pride left in the tank. Over at THE ZOO we spin it the way it was cut, no chatter over the intro, because that first line is half the joke and half the heart of the thing.

Before a single chord rings, a woman’s voice cuts in and says it is just the normal noises in here. That was not a studio gag cooked up in Los Angeles. Mike Campbell had the tape rolling at home while he was chasing a riff, and the washing machine was rattling the room. He got irritated. His wife Marcie answered him, the line stuck on the demo, and Petty heard it and would not let it go. So the greatest underdog anthem on the record opens with laundry. That is Heartbreakers logic. The music around it is Campbell’s old Broadcaster on the rhythm, and the solo rides a Flying V they pulled out of the pile while they were plugging in every amp in the room. Damn the Torpedoes took forever. Campbell has said they were after a sound nobody had made yet, and some songs went fifty and eighty takes before anybody walked out to clear their head. “Even the Losers” survived that grind and came out swinging.

The night inside the lyric happened a decade earlier, 1969, back in Florida. Petty had been steered into an art school in Tampa by a door-to-door pitch that also kept him out of the draft. He came home, went to a party with a buddy, and dropped acid for the first time. Across the room was a girl named Cindy who had shut him down back in middle school. Long hair changed the picture. They sat on the roof, smoked, stared at the moon, and for a few hours he let himself believe the story he had wanted since he was a kid. She told him it was only for that night. Later she took him into a room at somebody’s place and said straight out that he could keep trying, but the two of them were never going to happen. Years afterward he told biographer Warren Zanes that the night scarred his brain all over again, and that when he wrote “Even the Losers” it came back whole. He figured she was probably in a lot of songs.

The chorus was not written down in advance. Petty had the tune and the chords and was bold enough to call the take anyway. He did not know what he was going to sing when he got there. Then it arrived, the whole line, even the losers get lucky sometimes. He called it divine intervention and said he was not going to question where it came from. The phrase was also something his dad used to say, the Florida version of even a blind squirrel finds a nut. In a 1980 Rolling Stone sit-down he laughed at the idea that the guy in the song was a loser. He had been through stretches where it could not get bleaker, and the only way through was the attitude that even losers get lucky. You lose the girl or the job, sometimes both. You do not let anybody know they beat you.

The record itself was born inside a fight. Shelter had been sold to MCA, Petty refused the new deal, lawsuits piled up, and he filed for bankruptcy to keep from being pinned. A settlement put the band on Backstreet under terms he could live with. Talking to the British press around the same time, he said he wanted anthems for underdogs, songs like “Even the Losers” and “Refugee.” The theme was not planned on a chalkboard. After the album was together he could see it was about standing up for the rights everybody has that cannot be taken. He kept them dressed as love songs so they would not turn into a lecture about the music business. The single went out in Australia in the summer of 1980. Over here it lived on the album and on the radio, which is where a lot of Zoo Freaks first met it, between “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl,” pride still intact.

Thomas Earl Petty came up in Gainesville, born in 1950 to an insurance man and a tag-office clerk. The spark was Elvis. When he was about ten, Presley was in Ocala shooting a picture, and Petty stood behind the barricades and watched the girls lose their minds every time Elvis stepped out of the trailer. He went home and wanted a guitar. At Howard Bishop he was the quiet kid in a black turtleneck and Beatles boots. His first band, the Sundowners, started when he was fourteen, playing Beatles, Byrds, and Animals. A falling-out with the drummer landed him in the Epics, with Tom Leadon, whose brother Bernie would end up in the Eagles, and a drummer named Dickie Underwood who Petty later called nuts in the best way. He skipped his Gainesville High graduation to play a show with them down in South Florida.

The Epics turned into Mudcrutch, a name somebody tossed out one night. They holed up in a tin-roof shack the locals called Mudcrutch Farm, leather on the walls, black lights, weekend festivals that drove the neighbors crazy. For a while they were the house band at Dub’s Steer Room. Petty put an ad up at Lipham’s music store, where he had worked, and that is how Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench came into the picture, along with drummer Randall Marsh. In the early seventies Mudcrutch pointed the van at Los Angeles hunting a deal. The band came apart. Shelter, Leon Russell’s label, still had paper on Petty. Tench had put together a crew of Gainesville guys who had already drifted west. Petty heard them, walked in, and did the practical thing. Backing Benmont was fine, he told them, but he already had a record deal, so they might as well skip the starving part and be a band. That was the Heartbreakers. The first album crept out in 1976 and stalled. “American Girl” and “Breakdown” kept the name alive. By Damn the Torpedoes in 1979 the roof-night story, the laundry-room voice, and the lawsuit scars had all turned into one hard, bright record about keeping a little bit of pride.

The official home for the catalog, the fan club, and the old tapes is Tom Petty, and the Damn the Torpedoes pages over there still carry “Even the Losers” in the track listing, laundry intro and all. The verified pages worth following are Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on Facebook, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on Instagram, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on X. The free official fan club, Tom Petty Nation, lives at the Tom Petty fan club, and the gathering spot the estate points fans toward is the Tom Petty Nation group. Roll the window down. Even the losers get lucky sometimes. That is the whole sermon, and it still fits on one side of a 45.