1979 Career-Defining Classic Was Turned Down by Another Band Before It Shot Up the Charts
Just because a musician has a chart-topping song or two doesn't mean they always know a hit when they hear one...just ask Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band.
"Don't Do Me Like That," the lead single from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' multi-platinum smash record Damn the Torpedoes, was Petty's first song to break the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it landed peaked at #10 on November 17, 1979.
But as Wolf explained to Rolling Stone, his longtime friend Petty originally wrote the song with the J. Geils Band in mind.
"As the years went by, I would see Tom," Wolf explained to the outlet after Petty's death in 2017. "There was one point where I was going to do some songs with [Heartbreakers guitarist] Mike Campbell. I'd stay in touch with Tom periodically...One day I got this call from [producer] Jimmy Iovine's office, confirming my address. I got this package and in it was a cassette. It was in Tom's handwriting: 'Don't Do Me Like That.' And there was a note: 'Hey, I think this would be a cool song for you. I think you and the [Geils] band can really do something with it.'"
Wolf ended up passing on the song, but in retrospect, he didn't seem sure why he made that decision.
"It was in the midst of stuff," he recalled. "Maybe we thought we had the songs for our album: 'We can do it for the next one.' I called up Jimmy and, I think, Tom and said, 'Love the song. I'm not sure we're gonna get to it. But I do like the song.' Tom wasn't sure of it for himself for some reason. It was almost like, 'As soon as I finished writing it, I thought of sending it to you.'"
To Wolf, the song had 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," Wolf added, referring to the lyrics. "But the way Tom recorded it, it just became so Tom. I always felt, 'Man, I wish we'd jumped on it sooner.'"
Wolf went on to reveal that "Don't Do Me Like That" came up in his last conversation with Petty.
"Tom and I were together in his dressing room," he said. "I said, 'Tom, I gotta tell you, ‘Don't Do Me Like That'...' And he goes, 'Oh, yeah! Whatever happened?' I explained the whole thing - we were in the mix process or something. And he said, 'I gotta thank you for that. When you didn't end up doing it, everybody talked me into putting it on the record. And it became one of my big, big hits.'"
Indeed, all these years later, it's hard to imagine anyone other than Petty singing the classic track.
Related: 1989 Chart-Topping Breakup Anthem Was Rock Icon's Bestselling Single of All Time
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This story was originally published May 6, 2026 at 9:20 PM.