Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are one of the greatest rock bands of all time – so recording in the studio must have gone pretty smoothly, right?
Not always – one of the band’s biggest hits took over 100 takes to finally get right.
The song was “Refugee”, and guitarist Mike Campbell chalks it up to the band being unfamiliar with studio recording at the time.
He said “We all blamed each other… but we never doubted the song. So we just kept at it until, finally, one day we played it and said ‘Oh, that’s it’.”a
