The Subtle John Lennon Tribute Only Eagle-Eyed Fans Would Catch On This 1981 Tom Petty Album

The night that John Lennon was murdered outside of his home in the Dakota, across the street from Central Park in New York City, Tom Petty was just under 3,000 miles away in Hollywood, California. Petty was at Cherokee Studios with the Heartbreakers, working on their fourth studio album, Hard Promises, with Jimmy Iovine.

Iovine had recently been working with Lennon on his final albums, Walls and Bridges and Rock ‘N’ Roll. The men were friends as well as colleagues, which is how Iovine knew that Lennon had plans to visit Cherokee Studios to sing on Ringo Starr’s album. The former Beatles drummer was cutting the record next door to Petty and his crew.

“We were kind of jazzed up, thinking that we’d get to meet John,” Petty recalled to Paul Zollo during an interview years later on October 9, which was Lennon’s birthday. Tragically, the Heartbreakers’ excitement was cut short by two back-to-back phone calls in the studio.

Tom Petty Recalls Hearing the News of John Lennon’s Death

Tom Petty remembered it being the “early evening” when the crew received a call to Cherokee Studios that someone had shot John Lennon. Fifteen minutes later, a follow-up call confirmed that he was dead. Petty’s recollection corroborates the timeline of Lennon’s murder, which put Lennon and Yoko Ono on the sidewalk outside their apartment around 10:50 pm EST. Medical personnel pronounced the world-famous rock star dead at 11:15 pm. It would have been 8:15 pm on the West Coast, where Petty was working in the studio.

“We stopped work,” Petty said, “and went home. We were working on ‘A Woman In Love’ that night. If you ever see a vinyl copy of Hard Promises, etched in the run-out groove, you’ll see, ‘We love you, J.L.’ We etched it in the groove at the mastering plant.”

Petty said that fateful day on December 8, 1980, was “terrible.” “It was just damn unbelievable, wasn’t it? You know, you just can’t fathom something like that. It’s strange, you know. The Beatles paid such a huge cost. They were people who could have done anything, and they chose to do good.”

Petty and the Heartbreakers’ subtle tribute to Lennon wasn’t just a way to honor a fellow rock ‘n’ roller. It was a full-circle moment, as Petty often cited watching The Beatles on television as the driving force behind discovering he wanted to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band. Within two decades of that moment, he was engraving the letters of one of the men he saw on the Ed Sullivan Show into his own album.

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