Anyone who’s ever been to a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers knows the song “Breakdown” was a highlight of the show. On stage, Petty and his bandmates would extend the two-and-a-half-minute song into a lengthy epic lasting eight minutes or more.
But it turns out, the original song was much longer than the version that Petty recorded for his debut album in 1976—and it wasn’t until singer/guitarist Dwight Twilley (“I’m on Fire,” “Girls”) heard it that Petty made a major change.
Written by Petty, “Breakdown” featured an iconic guitar hook throughout, with moody lyrics about a failed relationship. But the famous guitar lick, played by Mike Campbell, was originally buried at the end of a long jam that closed out the song.
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Petty, who died in 2017, once told Performing Songwriter that he wrote “Breakdown” while on a break from recording at Shelter Studios in Hollywood.
“I think we took a break because we had recorded everything we had and I made up ‘Breakdown’,” he shared. “I wrote it on the piano. I wrote it very quickly. It’s a very short song.”
“The first version was seven minutes long, with this long guitar solo in the end,” Petty further explained to Guitar Player. “Everyone had gone home, and I was sitting there listening, and in walks Dwight Twilley. Twilley turns to me and says, ‘That’s the lick, man! How come he only plays it once at the end of the song? It’s the whole hook.’”
“I listened back, and he was right,” Petty said. “So I called the band up — 4:00 in the morning — and told them to come back down. We did it again around the lick, took a couple takes, and there it was.”
At the time, Petty and Twilley were both new artists signed to Shelter Records, which had studios in Tulsa and Los Angeles.
A post on Twilley’s official website revealed that Twilley stopped by the California studio one night and Petty played him the newly recorded “Breakdown.” Twilley thought the song was too long.
“It seemed like it was five minutes long or something,” Twilley said.
He recalled hearing Campbell’s catchy guitar lick in the outro solo and told Petty, “I think that’s your hook right there.”
“I left the studio and didn’t think anything else about it,” Twilley added. “Then I found out after I left that, at 2 in the morning, he called his band back into the studio and re-recorded it with that lick.”
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When the band re-recorded the song, Campbell also came up with a trick for his lick. The legendary guitarist once revealed he tried playing it with a slide.
“I use a pill bottle with a ridge on it — One A Day vitamins, I think,” he told Guitar Player. ‘We decided that the bottleneck was too bluesy. So I just played the part without the bottleneck and it worked. It’s just one of those things you stumble onto.”
Eventually released as Petty’s first single from the album’s self-titled 1976 album, “Breakdown” reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100. Fifty years later, it remains a classic rock favorite that’s also remembered as a live concert highlight from Petty’s many years on the road.
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