Tom Petty – Feel a Whole Lot Better ….Under The Covers Week

I hope you enjoy this Byrds cover by Tom Petty. One of the best B-side songs I can think of.

I posted The Waiting not long ago and talked about the similarities between The Byrds and Tom Petty. This Byrds song fits Tom Petty perfectly but the original song was not sung by McGuinn but by its writer…Gene Clark. Clark wrote this song in the mid-sixties when a girl he was seeing started to bother him. He also co-wrote Eight Miles High.

Although the song was the B side to The Byrd’s song All I Realy Want To Do, it gained a lot of promotion from Columbia Records and a lot of radio air time. It also became a classic rock standard, with dozens of artists giving their versions of the song.

This song was on Tom Petty’s solo album Full Moon Fever in 1989. The original name of the album was Songs From the Garage. It would have been an appropriate name for it. They worked on this album mostly in Heartbreaker Mike Campbell’s garage. This album caused a riff in The Heartbreakers. The other members thought Tom was going to leave the band. He kept reassuring them but they were not sure.

What’s unbelievable about it is, MCA rejected the album because they didn’t hear a single. This album would have 5 singles released from it.

Tom was absolutely stunned and depressed. He went back and added Feel A Whole Lot Better and the song Alright For Now and presented MCA with basically the same album again. There had been a regime change at MCA and this time they loved it. Ah…record companies…sometimes they are the spawn of Satan.

Although the album was released in 1989…Petty recorded it back in 1987 and 1988. MCA caused much of the delay when they rejected it.

Gene Clark of the Byrds: “There was a girlfriend I had known at the time, when we were playing at Ciro’s. It was a weird time in my life because everything was changing so fast and I knew we were becoming popular. This girl was a funny girl, she was kind of a strange little girl and she started bothering me a lot. And I just wrote the song, ‘I’m gonna feel a whole lot better when you’re gone,’ and that’s all it was, but I wrote the whole song within a few minutes.”

Tom Petty: “I didn’t see much of the Heartbreakers during that period, Mike I kept in touch with, of course, because he was working on Full Moon Fever with me. I never thought of leaving. And I kept reassuring them that I wasn’t going to leave. But I think there was some doubt in their mind.”

Feel A Whole Lot Better

The reason why, oh, I can’t say
I had to let you go, baby, and right away
After what you did, I can’t stay on
And I’ll probably feel a whole lot better when you’re gone

Baby, for a long time, you had me believe
That your love was all mine and that’s the way it would be
But I didn’t know that you were putting me on
And I’ll probably feel a whole lot better when you’re gone
Oh, when you’re gone

Now I gotta say that it’s not like before
And I’m not gonna play your games any more
After what you did, I can’t stay on
And I’ll probably feel a whole lot better when you’re gone

Yeah, I’ll probably feel a whole lot better when you’re gone
Oh, when you’re gone
Oh, when you’re gone
Oh, when you’re gone

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball fan, old movie and tv show fan... and a songwriter, bass and guitar player.

47 thoughts on “Tom Petty – Feel a Whole Lot Better ….Under The Covers Week”

  2. A great song . No wonder MCA changed management – that was Petty’s best album in years. And this song was one of the best on it. It got played on radio in Canada, despite not being a single.

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    1. That was so crazy to me…I thougt they might have rejected it BEFORE Free Falling and all of the rest….but nope…those are the songs they turned down.

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  3. I think the best covers come when a new artist puts their own stamp on a song. Aretha Franklin pretty much owned “Respect” once she covered it. Yesterday’s song (“Twist and Shout”) took The Isley Brothers’ reworking of the original, sped it up, and put a hard edge on it. Tom Petty just sounds like a Byrds tribute band here.

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    1. Oh yea man… I watch quite a few channels…some very good creators out there. Urban Rescue Ranch is the one that I don’t miss. The guy has Adult ADHD and you can tell.

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      5. Yes, I couldn’t agree more Max. BTW, I listened to a short last night of Lou Reed saying he didn’t like the Beatles but he liked John Lennon solo.
        Reed said that Lennon’s ‘Mother’ was the ants pants. Having heard it last night I couldn’t agree more. What a song and I’d never heard it before. Another one for the collection. I imagine you’ve heard it before.

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  7. It’s true, as several pointed out, he does sound a lot like the Byrds on it, but the good thing about that is that by ’89, many of his fans were young enough that they wouldn’t have known the Byrds. So it might have opened up a few of them to the old band .

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  8. One of my all time solo album records by anyone. This one and Ace Frehley from 78 would rank as my two favourites….opposite end of the spectrum Max but under the umbrella known as ROCK!

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  9. Great Byrds song, a great song to cover and even if it is a close cover, so what? Nearly a quarter of a century had gone past, and in teenage music listener years, that is centuries! That is the good thing about covers, it can unearth some rare treasures from the olden days, polish ’em up and new eyes and ears can appreciate them.

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    1. I grew up in the 1980s as a teenager but my musical tastes are in the 60s and 70s not the 80s. So yea…so many of them.

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  13. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were an excellent cover band – I know, it sounds funny to say that, given the many originals they had, which I love as as well. “Feel a Whole Lot Better” is definitely among my favorite renditions they have done. I also love their versions of “So You Want to be a Rock & Roll Star” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” Byrds-style.

    For anyone who isn’t very familiar with the band’s excellent covers and versatility, check out the box-set “The Live Anthology”, released in November 2009. It’s packed with great original and fantastic covers and really shows how much Tom Petty was about celebrating great music!

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    1. CB brought up their version of Needles and Pins…that’s the one I wish I would have done this on! I agree….they knew how to do covers and they did them respectively.

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      1. 100 percent agree with the mystery man known as CB! 🙂

        They had so many great covers. That “Live Anothology” box-set I noted is a true treasure trove. Among other great covers on there are “Something in the Air”, “Green Onions” and even “Goldfinger”!

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  16. This is one of those posts that didn’t show up in my feed right away. I saw it at the end of your current post, and went back to find it. Curse the glitchy WordPress feed. So now, I’m way late to the discussion, but yeah, I had to be told that TP sounds much like The Byrds, and now I hear it. Not sure why I didn’t hear it from the start. This was a favorite Byrds song, so of course I loved TP’s version as well.

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    1. When I noticed they sounded a like was when Petty helped McGuinn on his 80s solo album and comeback song King of the Hill…come to think of it…I need to post that song!

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      2. I do like them. Pretty soon that will be all that is left from the bands we both love. Most of the time also…they sound better than the real bands do now in some ways.

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