Tom Petty's Last Dance

Doesn't it get scary when you start counting your years backward instead of forward?
Yeah, and you realize this music is going to be here a long time after I am gone. So I want to really put everything I can into it and make it as good as I can and get everything in me out.

Do you feel that there are things that you haven't gotten credit for as an artist?
As successful as [the Heartbreakers] have been, part of me thinks we have also been taken for granted to a degree. Maybe that's because we have always been consistent. We don't really make bad records, though some people might like some more than others. And we have never really done a bad show. So I think in a way maybe we've been taken for granted. I think maybe if we were gone, God forbid, there would be a different take on us. Because this group is really the last link to that whole California thing -- to the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and that whole era of music that came along. This is probably the last thing that attaches to that.

Was it hard to recover from losing Howie Epstein?
The band has a good family atmosphere that wasn't there for a while. It came back about a year or two ago. I think when [bassist] Ron Blair returned, it really bonded us back together in a weird way. If he hadn't been there, I am sure it would have been the end of the whole thing when Howie died. It was kind of cosmic, in a way. Had we looked into putting a new person in the Heartbreakers, I would have just walked away. It wouldn't have been a band to me. I think we all knew that this is the end of it. And Ron stepped in and had this huge enthusiasm through the whole thing. When he first quit, he didn't quit the band, he quit the whole music thing. He was fed up. But we were all young boys then. When he got interested in music again, he started playing with Mike [Campbell, Heartbreakers guitarist and producer] quite a bit, and so he was just there when we needed a bass player for the last two tracks we did for The Last DJ.

Are there any plans for a new Heartbreakers record?
I have got a lot of music, I tell you. I have a good sixty percent of a Heartbreakers record just sitting there waiting to be finished. I feel pretty musical at the moment. That's why I want to stop going on the road for a while after this, because I want to get all these projects done. Time is precious these days.

What are the other projects?
The Heartbreakers one is going to be a big one. We also have a live album we have been threatening to do for years, and Mike Campbell is actually producing that. So I think that will probably come out a year from now. And then, beyond that, I want to reform Mudcrutch [his original Seventies band before the Heartbreakers] and do a record with them. That would be fun, more of a country-rock kind of thing, which is where we came from. But whether I can convince them all to do it or not, that is the question.

Which of the guys do you think would be reluctant?
I think it's just a matter of personalities. Like Randall Marsh, the drummer, would be essential to it. But I haven't seen him in years. I did play with him probably four or five years ago at Mike's studio. And he's a really good drummer. But I talked to Mike about him, and he was like, "I don't really get along with him." And it was right as I was about to say, "Why don't we do the Mudcrutch thing?" So I decided not to bring it up right then [laughs].