He wasn’t the frontman, the lead guitarist, or the founding member. He was the bass player and harmony singer who made the Heartbreakers sound like the Heartbreakers for twenty years — and whose absence most fans only recognised after he was gone.
By David Cohen, Crosswinds Daily
There is a particular kind of musician whose contribution you only fully hear once it’s missing. Not the frontman, whose voice defines the band. Not the lead guitarist, whose solos people come to see. But the person who fills the space between — the backing vocalist whose harmony makes the lead vocal sound right, the bassist whose groove makes the drummer sound good, the team player whose instinct for what’s needed in any given bar keeps the whole thing from falling apart.
Howie Epstein was that person for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for twenty years. And when he was gone — fired in 2002, dead at forty-seven in February 2003 — the band carried on, because bands do. But something in the sound changed. Something that had been there so long it had become invisible was suddenly, quietly, not there anymore. And most fans couldn’t quite name what it was.
Milwaukee to Los Angeles
Howard Norman Epstein was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 21 July 1955, into a musical household. His father, Sam, was a top local record producer who had worked with rock and roll and soul groups in the 1950s and 1960s. Howie picked up a guitar at eight years old, within weeks of watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show — a timeline he shared with roughly ten million other American boys, except that Epstein was serious about it in a way most of them were not.
Through the late 1960s and 1970s he played in a succession of Milwaukee bands with the kinds of names that only make sense in their time and place: MHB Experience, Egz, Winks, Forearm Smash, The Craze. He played rhythm guitar, mandolin, and sang — the bass came later. His childhood friend Tom Klagstad would remember the scene years afterwards: “There was no talk of stardom; it was all about writing and playing music. But it was unspoken. Everybody believed they were going to be the next big thing.”
When he felt he had gone as far as he could go in Milwaukee, Epstein planned to move to New York. Before he could pack, a drummer friend lured him to Los Angeles to play bass in a new band being formed by the singer-songwriter John Hiatt. It was the late 1970s, and Los Angeles was where the work was. Epstein threw himself into session work with the single-mindedness of someone who knew he had one shot at making a career out of music. He played on gospel records. He contributed to a Village People album — a credit his brother Craig later noted he never put on his résumé. He played for anyone who would have him, building a reputation note by note.
And then the break came, in the way breaks often do — sideways, through a connection nobody planned. Del Shannon, the pre-Beatles hitmaker behind “Runaway,” was recording a comeback album called Drop Down and Get Me. The producer was a young Floridian named Tom Petty. The bass player was Howie Epstein. And Petty noticed something.
Joining the Heartbreakers
Ron Blair, the Heartbreakers’ original bassist since the band’s formation in 1976, had quit. He was burned out from the touring life and wanted to step away. Petty, having worked with Epstein on the Shannon sessions, knew who he wanted. Epstein joined the band in late 1981 and made his live debut on 1 September 1982, at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, on the tour supporting Long After Dark.
He fitted immediately. Years later he would describe his approach in terms that sound simple but reflect something deeper about how great rhythm sections work: “Simplicity, playing in the pocket, getting into a steady groove. I’ve always considered myself a good team player and that’s the way that the Heartbreakers operate. Everyone listens to what everyone else is doing musically.”
But it was the vocals that made him irreplaceable. Epstein was one of the finest high-harmony singers in American rock — a voice that sat behind Petty’s lead like a shadow, doubling it, thickening it, lifting it in the places where Petty’s own voice was tired or uncertain. It is easy to listen to the Heartbreakers’ back catalogue and define it, as one critic put it, by three eras: pre-Epstein, Epstein, and post-Epstein. The middle era is where the band sounds most like itself.
In 1990, Petty gave one of the most revealing descriptions of what Epstein actually did in the band. He described a night when he was too tired to hit a difficult vocal line early in the set. As he reached the passage and started to struggle, he heard Epstein singing it with him over his microphone — perfectly doubled, perfectly in time, covering for the frontman without being asked. Petty caught Epstein’s eye and saw the grin of a musician who had solved a problem his bandmate didn’t even know he had. “That’s what a great band’s all about,” Petty said. “That’s what it’s all about.”
The albums and the production work
The discography of Epstein’s twenty years in the Heartbreakers is effectively the band’s golden run. Long After Dark (1982). Southern Accents (1985). Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) (1987). The two Petty solo albums that used the Heartbreakers as a backing band in all but name — Full Moon Fever (1989) and Wildflowers (1994). Into the Great Wide Open (1991). Echo (1999). His bass and his harmonies are woven through every one of them, and his contributions to songs like “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” “I Won’t Back Down” (where he harmonised alongside George Harrison and Jeff Lynne and held his own), “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” and “Learning to Fly” are part of the permanent texture of American rock radio.
Outside the Heartbreakers, Epstein built a second career as a producer — and a genuinely impressive one. He produced three albums for his then-partner Carlene Carter, including I Fell in Love (1990), which coaxed Carter back from a seven-year hiatus and revitalised her career. More remarkably, he produced John Prine’s The Missing Years (1991), which won a Grammy and is widely regarded as one of Prine’s finest records — a comeback album for a songwriter who had been largely absent from recording for five years. Prine was characteristically generous in his assessment: “Howie Epstein was a kind, patient, and extremely talented musician. He took two years out of his life and dedicated his undivided attention to the making of two of my records. Those records changed my life thanks to Howie.”
A bassist and harmony singer who could also produce Grammy-winning albums for other artists is not a sideman. He is a musician whose range of ability most listeners never fully appreciated because his primary role — playing in the pocket, singing the harmony, being the team player — was designed by nature to be invisible.
The decline
Epstein’s addiction to heroin became visible to his bandmates in the late 1990s. The details are the details of every addiction story: the gradual deterioration, the unpredictable behaviour, the moments of functionality that gave way to longer stretches of incapacity. The Echo album (1999), which Petty himself was never fond of, was recorded during the period when Epstein’s problems were worsening. And yet, even on Echo, Epstein’s contributions remain strong — his playing and his harmonies on tracks like “Swingin’” are as good as anything he had done in the previous decade.
In June 2001, Epstein and his then-girlfriend Carlene Carter were arrested in Albuquerque for driving a stolen vehicle and possession of heroin. Carter claimed the drugs were hers. The charges were eventually dropped, but the incident was the visible surface of something much worse.
In 2002, the Heartbreakers fired Epstein. Ron Blair, the original bassist whom Epstein had replaced twenty years earlier, returned. Epstein made his final appearance with the band at their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2002 — a ceremony that should have been a celebration but was, for those who knew the full picture, something closer to a farewell.
Petty later described the decision with the exhausted honesty of someone who had tried everything: “He was just degenerating on us to the point where we thought keeping Howie in the band was actually doing him more harm than getting rid of him. Eventually, we realised that we were just contributing to the problem. When you’re living a life where you really don’t have any responsibilities, it’s easy for evil forces to take over.”
23 February 2003
Less than a year after being fired, Howie Epstein collapsed in a bathroom in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was driven to hospital by his girlfriend but it was too late. The cause was a toxic combination of heroin and prescription medication he had been taking for stomach problems and an abscess on his leg. He was forty-seven years old.
Tom Petty wrote about Epstein’s death for Rolling Stone, and what he wrote was not the polished tribute of a public figure managing a narrative. It was the raw grief of someone who had lost a friend to a disease he had watched destroy the man for years.
“There’s a great sadness, because Howie was never not a Heartbreaker. He just got to where he couldn’t do it anymore. It’s like you got a tree dying in the backyard. And you’re kind of used to the idea that it’s dying. But you look out there one day and they cut it down. And you just can’t imagine that beautiful tree isn’t there anymore.”
What disappeared
The Heartbreakers continued without Epstein for another fifteen years, until Tom Petty’s own death in 2017. Ron Blair played bass capably. Scott Thurston, who had joined as a multi-instrumentalist in 1991, picked up some of the vocal duties. The band remained excellent. They continued to fill arenas and produce music that mattered.
But the harmonies were different. The sound was different. Not worse — different. The particular quality that Epstein had brought, the high harmony that sat behind Petty’s voice and made it sound fuller, warmer, more complete, was gone. It was the kind of absence that most listeners couldn’t articulate — they just knew that the band sounded slightly thinner, slightly less rich, slightly less like the version of the Heartbreakers they had grown up with.
That is the specific sadness of Howie Epstein’s story. His contribution was so woven into the background of the Heartbreakers’ sound that most fans never noticed it was there until it wasn’t. He was the harmony nobody noticed disappearing. The groove in the pocket. The team player who covered for the frontman without being asked. The producer who gave John Prine his career back. The Milwaukee kid who played on a Village People record and then helped make Full Moon Fever.
He was forty-seven. He was a Heartbreaker. He never stopped being one, even after they let him go.
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