Good to hear everything was recovered.
From the original blog post:
Petty, originally from Gainesville, Fla., first recorded in Los Angeles in 1974. At the time, he was an unknown, living in seedy hotels and on advances, when he got the phone number of Shelter Records one day while eating at Ben Frank’s on the Sunset Strip.
After signing with the record company, he was playing one night in the studio when the descending chords of “Breakdown” came to him.
A lot of revisionism here. The Mudcrutch demo was cut at Benmont Tench's house while his parents were out of town. Tom and Danny Roberts, co bass/guitar player/singer for Mudcrutch and my room mate at the time, drove to L.A. in Danny's VW bus. They came back about 2 weeks later with the Shelter contact. The band then went to L.A. Danny has pretty much been erased from the Petty saga but he was a major factor in instigating the demo and going to L.A. Mudcrutch broke up because of "creative differences" between Tom and Danny after spending Shelter's advance money. Tom then signed as a solo act to Shelter.
"Breakdown" owes a great deal to "Cheatin" by the Animals.
Another stolen instrument story involving Tom:
In '72 or '73 I went to see Mudcrutch, then a trio after Tom Leadon quit, at the Plaza of the Americas at UofF one Sunday afternoon. TP was playing a gold '65 Precision, not his usual Hofner. It had been stolen from me about a month before. After the gig I told him. He'd bought the bass from a pawnshop in town. I went there and they agreed to pay me what Tom had spent.
That worked for me. I'd done the gold refin and didn't like the way it came out and the neck also had a twist at the third fret. The bass is on the first 3 Heartbreakers' albums.
