Tom Petty Almost Gave Away His Catchiest Hit — The Change Of Heart Earned Him His First Top 10

Many songwriting talents have given away songs that proved to be huge hits for other artists. Think Prince penning "Manic Monday" for the Bangles, or the Beatles giving "I Wanna Be Your Man" to the Rolling Stones, providing the budding band with its breakthrough hit. But sometimes things fall through, and in the case of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers almost giving away his catchiest hit, it  proved to be a stroke of luck that it fell through and pushed the band into the big time.

In the late 1970s, Petty and his band were busy making a name for themselves as one of the best live acts on the circuit, with high-energy performances and tight songwriting that made the Heartbreakers a go-to support act for some of the era's more established names. One of these was the J. Geils Band, the rough and rootsy blues rock outfit known for its incendiary live shows. Petty was especially close to J. Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf, who recalled shortly after his friend's death that back before he was famous, Petty offered the J. Geils Band one song that went on to be one of the Heartbreakers' biggest hits.

The J. Geils Band was famous for its brash suite of blues rock, and so it must have seemed a fitting opportunity for a young Tom Petty to give one of the sharpest and most confrontational songs he had written in his early years: "Don't Do Me Like That." As Peter Wolf recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2017: "I always heard it as having a Lennon-esque quality, especially in the bridge – just the way Tom puts the edge on his voice. There is also a Dylan-esque quality ... 'Well, you're gonna get yours. In the public eye, you're gonna humiliate me? Baby, your time is gonna come.'"

The song was originally written for Petty's first band, Mudcrutch, in 1974, but he presented it to the J. Geils Band in 1977, sending it to Wolf on tape. However, despite his best intentions, the band, which Wolf remembers was already in the process of mixing its latest album, ignored the offer. Thankfully for The J. Geils Band, the group would go on to enjoy plenty more hits of its own during the early 1980s, but for Wolf, "Don't Do Me Like That" was the hit that got away. "I always felt, 'Man, I wish we'd jumped on it sooner,'" he told Rolling Stone.

The J. Geils Band's quick rejection of "Don't Do Me Like That" soon proved to be a boon to Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, which recorded the song in 1979 as part of its "Damn the Torpedoes" album. Petty himself wasn't particularly enamored with the song; indeed, he thought it was too lightweight to become a single, and he had to be convinced by his producer and studio assistant that it had the potential to be a hit. When it was released, the track was a major smash, peaking at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and catapulting its parent album to No. 2 on the album chart.

Since then, "Don't Do Me Like That" has remained one of the key tracks in Petty's discography and was a staple of set lists during his live performances until his sudden death in 2017. It has received a great amount of acclaim for the punchiness of the band's performance and Petty's biting vocals. Heartbreakers fans can thank the rock gods that things turned out the way they did.