Chords for Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Classic Albums: Damn The Torpedoes, The Rickenbacker 12-string

_ _ This guitar, which Tom used on the cover for Damn the Torpedoes, actually belongs
to me, but I was lucky enough to have him borrow it for the afternoon.
_ And this is
one of my favorite guitars, _ and I bought this around the second album.
We didn't
have a 12-string.
This is a Rickenbacker 12-string.
We didn't have a 12-string, but
we really wanted one because we wanted to get a sound similar to the birds on a couple
of songs.
This is before eBay.
There was a thing called Recycler, which was a newspaper,
and people would sell instruments in your area.
So I called up one day, a guy said he
had a Rickenbacker 12-string, $200, and he was in Anaheim, which is about an hour and
a half from here.
And I called him up, and he said, yeah, it's a Rickenbacker 12-string.
And I said, okay, I'll be out there.
I drove out there, and he brought this guitar out,
and my heart sank because I wanted the big one, like George Harrison or Roger McGuinn,
which was a bigger body.
I thought, oh, this is not what I wanted, you know.
And he goes,
well, it sounds good, so I plugged it in.
It sounded pretty good.
So I said, oh, I really
wanted the other ones.
I'll give you $150 for it.
He said, okay, because I'd driven
all the way out.
So I took it back, and of course, it turns out to be an amazing-sounding
guitar.
But what's curious about it is years later, we went to the Rickenbacker factory,
and they looked at the serial number on this guitar, and they said, you know, do you realize
what you have?
And I said, no.
And they said, this was the next guitar off the assembly
line after George Harrison's Rickenbacker 12-string.
[Abm]
They had made a solid body, a smaller
body right after his, so it's from the same era, [N] same year, same ilk.
_ And it's probably
the best $150 I ever spent.
_ And then, like I said, Tom used it for the cover, and now
it's irreplaceable.
And it has a 12-string is a completely different technique than a
6-string, because you've got a double, two strings on each one.
And it requires a whole
different approach, because it's more delicate, and you can't really bend strings, so you
have to [A] really work [N] on your technique to keep it from sounding kind of messy.
It takes
a little more concentration than [E] a 6-string.
[G] But it makes that beautiful sound.
[A] _
_ _ _ [B] _ _ _ [A] _ _
_ _ _ _ [B] _ _ _ [A] _
_ _ _ _ [Eb] _ _ _ [A] _
_ _ _ _ _ [B] _ _ [A] _
_ _ _ _ _ [B] _ _ _
[A] _ _ _ _ _ _ [B] _ [A] _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[B] _ [A] _ _ _ _ _ _ [B] _
[D] _ [E] And then I had a chorus part that was like, _ _
[A] _ _ _ _ _ _ [E] _ _
_ _ [A] _ _ _ _ _ [Gbm] _
_ _ _ _ [B] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ [E] _
[A] _ _ _ _ [B] _ _ _ _
[E] that's basically how it went.
As you can see,
this guitar has beautiful, high harmonic overtones.
There's some stuff at the end of Here Comes
My Girl, where Ben and I play out over this kind of open-string drone.
It sort of went
[A] like this.
_ _ _ [B] _ _ _ _
[A] _ _ _ _ _ [B] _ _ _
[A] _ _ _ _ [E] _ _ _ _
_ _ [A] _ _ _ [E] _ _ _
_ [A] _ _ _ [E] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[A] _ _ _ _ _ [Eb] _ [E] And Ben played [G] along with it, and we had kind of a little arpeggio to go
out on.
We use guitars, Tom and I both, I mean, we have a love affair with guitars,
especially vintage guitars.
And we have a lot of them, and we've bought more over the
years, but we use them, it's a good analogy, is we use the [E] guitars like different colors
of paint.
[N] Like if you were a painter, and you needed more red, you know, we might go,
well, we need a Telecaster to make that color, or you need green, so we'll use a [G] Gretsch
for that color, or purple, [N] Les Paul for that color.
And so each guitar has its own color,
you know, and when you're making a record, if you can hear all the colors to make the
picture come alive, like in a painting, you get all those colors vibrant and balanced,
and you've got a nice painting.
And that's kind of why we have so many.
[A] And that's kind
of how we approach [Em] it.
Back then we only had two guitars when we started out, so we'd
do the best with the two colors, and now [N] we have hundreds of them, but we use them all.
Each guitar, cheaper or expensive, has one sweet spot in it, that it's unique to that
one guitar that makes it really a nice color.
And so _ we'll have a discussion about if there's
a guitar overdub, well, what kind of sound does it need?
Is it a Gretsch or a Rickenbacker?
What would make the sound that would really help this song?
We might have to try a couple
to find the right one.
But we enjoy doing that, and when you get it right, it makes
a big difference.
I mean, you could make a record all on one guitar and find a few variations
in the tone, but it wouldn't