“It’s an odd song to begin with, and it’s a very odd song to be on a Tom Petty album, especially one called Southern Accents.”
So says guitarist, songwriter writer and producer Dave Stewart about “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” the ethereal, neo-psychedelic rocker that became a smash hit for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 1985.
“The song came about in the most peculiar way, and almost immediately it went off in a couple of directions,” Stewart explains. “And all of it started with some mad experiment I was cooking up in my hotel room one night.”
The story begins in 1984, at a party to celebrate the end of a tour by Eurythmics, the group Stewart formed with singer Annie Lennox in 1980. Stewart had been lured away from the festivities to the Los Angeles home of Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, who was then in the bloom of a wildly successful solo career. The next morning Stewart woke to find Nicks in his room trying on Victorian-style clothing, before he promptly nodded off again.
He awoke a short time later to hear his hostess speaking angrily on the phone. “She said, ‘Don’t come around here no more,’” Stewart recalls. He’s not sure who she was talking to but the general consensus is that it was Joe Walsh, Nicks’ on-again-off-again boyfriend, who was then on a decade-long break from the Eagles. But, says Stewart, “she could have been arguing with the cleaner.”
Later that day, as Stewart flew to San Francisco to play the tour’s last show, Nicks’ words were still ringing in his ears and forming the beginnings of a melody. By the time he checked into his hotel room, he says, “The music was all there, even the chorus parts with me singing, ‘Don’t come around here no more.’”
He took out his Tascam Portastudio and got to work making a demo so as not to lose the idea. “I recorded a Coral sitar, a drum machine rhythm and a bass synth,” he recalls.
The next day, Stewart flew back to L.A. and played the demo for producer Jimmy Iovine, who had previously dated Nicks and produced her 1981 solo debut album, Pretty Woman. Iovine loved the track and thought it would fit the new record he was working on for Nicks. The lyrics weren’t complete at the time, but Stewart and Iovine got to work in the studio adding more instruments to his demo recording.
That’s when Nicks walked in.
“We went to a studio and started it, but Stevie was in a bad mood with Jimmy,” Stewart recalls. “She started to recite Shakespeare-type things, and Jimmy got annoyed.
“She went into the bathroom for ages, and Jimmy finally said, ‘We should get Tom Petty to help finish the verses.’”
At Petty’s house, Iovine played Stewart’s demo.
“Tom liked it even though it was kind of ‘off’ music to him,” Stewart says. “He started spewing out verses, which Jimmy liked. That’s when Tom suggested going back to his garage studio to finish it up.”
As Stewart remembers, there was never any discussion about re-recording tracks from his demo, but he quickly seized on a new idea: Three-quarters of the way into the song, he suggested having the Heartbreakers enter and ride the song out as a frenzied rocker.
“They listened to the track, and I said, ‘We should go into double-time here,’” he says. “I could see their confusion over this very different song appearing from a crazy Englishman, but the more I talked about it, the more they came around.”
The well-oiled band nailed their parts in two takes. “They were the Heartbreakers,” Stewart says simply. “The energy they had was just incredible.”
With the basic tracks completed, Petty cut his vocals and guitarist Mike Campbell recorded a rousing, wah-drenched solo.
“I used a goldtop Les Paul through a Rat distortion pedal, with a Boss octaver and a wah-wah pedal through an Ampeg Rocket amp,” Campbell said in response to a fan question on the band’s official website. “Also used a slide bottle,” he added, likely referring to a Dunlop glass bottle guitar slide.
Recalls Stewart, “He started out playing a sustained single note, kind of reminiscent of what Neil Young might do, and then it was just, ‘Mike, go nuts’ — and he went off. It was absolutely amazing.”
After that initial session, Stewart, Petty and Iovine brought in Daniel Rothmuller to record hypnotic cello parts, and they called on singers Stephanie Spruill, Marilyn Martin and Sharon Celino for background vocals.
“I had always thought Stevie would do some interesting things with female harmonies,” Stewart says. Which would make sense: Nicks and Petty had been friends since at least 1981, and he and the Heartbreakers had collaborated with her on “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” from Pretty Woman.
Spruill did the honors instead. “On the finished track, Stephanie did the part that’s really like a scream,” Stewart explains. “At first she had trouble going to such a high note, but in the end she did it.”
Buoyed by the experience, Stewart and Petty collaborated on two more songs that appeared on Southern Accents: the funkified “It Ain’t Nothin’ to Me” and the Memphis soul–flavored “Make It Better (Forget About Me).” Released as the first single from the album in February 1985, “Don’t Come Around Here No More” was an instant hit, peaking at number 13 on Billboard, while its Alice in Wonderland–themed video (in which Stewart appeared as a hookah-smoking, sitar player atop a mushroom) became a heavy-rotation favorite on MTV.
“The video multiplied the band’s audience,” Stewart says. “Instead of people just hearing the song as a stand-alone, they saw the video and were drawn in. New people who that didn’t know Tom Petty at the time, they were like, ‘Holy shit, I want to see this band.’
“It’s such a weirdly off-kilter song. I had no idea it was going to end up with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but it’s just an example of the left-field things that I like to do. A lot of good things came from it.”
