Mudcrutch - Long Way From Home - 1975

In 1974 Tom Petty and his band Mudcrutch (Tom Petty, Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, Randall Marsh and Danny Roberts) headed west in search of a record contract. On a scouting mission to L.A. they managed to gain interest from several labels. They headed back to their Gainsville Florida home base with a verbal agreement to sign with London Records. Before they could return and seal the deal they received a call from Denny Cordell of Shelter Records. Cordell managed to convince the band to stop off at one of his studios in Tulsa Oklahoma to do some test recording and hopefully convince them to sign to his label.

Things went well in Tulsa and Mudcrutch became Shelter Records recording artists. Denny Cordell bankrolled the groups last leg of their journey into Los Angeles and set them up with places to stay and recording began. Cordell felt that they needed some time to acclimate themselves to the studio and sent them back to Tulsa with an engineer and all the time they needed to learn this new aspect of their craft.

Mudcrutch eventually recorded enough material for an album and some stand alone singles. After losing their rhythm guitarist they replaced him with a bassist and Tom moved to guitar but when the new guy insisted they record one of his songs Tom had enough and Mudcrutch was no more. This album and a few scattered singles are all we have left.

Side One
01 Depot Street
02 Up In Mississippi
03 Long Way From Home
04 Cause is Understood
05 Makin' Some Noise
06 I Can't Fight It

Side Two
01 On The Street
02 Once Upon a Time Somewhere
03 Don't It Get Weird
05 Since You Said You Loved Me
06 Wild Eyes
06 Country Girls Run Dry

Bonus Tracks
Don't Do Me Like That
Cry To Me

Reality Notes

Another project in my debut albums that never happened series. This is an album I have been wanting to put together for a long time. Unfortunately most of this material still has not seen any official release. Tom Petty is one of the most consistant songwriters out there. From the earliest songs and recordings to his last Tom proved himself a craftsman and A class musician time and time again. As the cliche goes, the average songwriter would kill to write even one song as good as one of Tom's mediocre songs.

When Mudcrutch broke up Mike Campbell stayed with Tom to work on Tom's solo album. Benmont Tench fell in with some other Gainsvile exiles to record some demos. When Tom and Mike paid a visit to one of Ben's sessions Tom liked what he heard and convinced them to be his band. Why not, Tom had a contract and was growing dissatisfied with the way his solo album was coming along. Tom liked being in a band and the Heartbreakers were born.

The sources for these tracks vary from official releases on the Playback box set to dodgy sounding bootlegs so making these songs sound like a cohesive whole presented a challenge. The official releases suffer from the "loudness wars" and have very little dynamic range and the bootleg material lacks fidelity. I had to make some compromises to make it work. Let's call this an interim version until we can do an upgrade.

Once Upon a Time Somewhere was the worst offender. As if the fidelity weren't bad enough the track shifts from stereo to mono in a few spots. I didn't want to lose the song so to mask this I tried folding the whole project down to mono. The results were OK but not great. So I folded only Once Upon a Time down to mono. The transition from stereo to mono back to stereo was not as awkward as I thought it would be so I kept it that way. I did my best to volume match and EQ where needed but my mastering skills still need work and the material fought me the whole way.

There are several songs here that would later turn up as Heartbreakers songs. Long Way From Home was according to some sources rerecorded in 1977 but not released. The two bonus tracks (Hey! I have bonus tracks!) include Don't Do Me Like which was later recorded for the Damn The Torpedoes album and Cry To Me, a cover song that appeared on the No Nukes charity album. Hometown Blues which appears on the first Heartbeakers album also comes from this time and is actually a Mudcrutch song. I could have included that but I didn't wan't to mess up that album.

The cover; while there are a lot of great photos of the band when it was a four piece with Tom Leadon I have only seen one picture of the band as it was before they broke up in L.A. (and that picture is not that great) and none of the band as they were when they arrived in Los Angeles. So I went with a crowd shot of the audience that showed up at Mudcrutch Farm for one of the three Mudcrutch festivals.

Sources
Playback
Mudcructh and Solo Petty Outtakes (Bootleg)
The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased 1971-1977 (Bootleg)