"The Waiting" always reminds me of Stan when I hear it, because
he's the only drummer in the world who could play it.
Nobody could play that song but him."
Tom Petty (AllMusic)
Quite frankly, he didn't like the music. Jeff Lynne began pushing the band to fit his "blueprint" (as the Playback booklet put it), and Stan didn't want to go that way: "I was always at odds a little bit with the pop sensibility of the group…. I never would have predicted Dave Stewart and Jeff Lynne. I had a whole other fantasy."
As the band was moving into the 90's, they were recording less and less; Petty was moving into the typical one-album-per-two-years method that most songwriters have adopted and even then, some of those albums (e.g. Full Moon Fever) weren't "…and the Heartbreakers" albums. So Stan (and actually all the Heartbreakers except Mike Campbell) had to find other ways to use their time. Stan dove headlong into songwriting and production, something he had been doing on the sideline since the 80's.
When Tom called the Heartbreakers back for "Into the Great Wide Open", the album was produced by Jeff Lynne. Lynne apparently did not like Stan's drum parts, and in order to make the album fit his Beatle-esque view, had Stan playing along with drum parts. Petty has described the "Great Wide Open" sessions as "a complete mess." Consequently, Petty returned to solo work on Wildflowers, and the Heartbreakers were once again left to their own devices.
Mid-way through the solo album, Petty recorded one last track for MCA, which would appear on the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Greatest Hits album. The album and the extra track were both a huge success. The "Mary Jane" sessions were the last the Heartbreakers had with Stan Lynch on drums.
Soon after, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers went on tour. They debuted a song on Letterman called "You Don't Know How it Feels", a song which was destined to appear on Petty's new solo album, and which was originally recorded with Steve Ferrone on drums. Stan says: "If you listen to the whole record [Wildflowers] it's very elegant, but speaking just as a drummer, could you put me in any more of a plow harness?"
One more live appearance at the Bridge School Concert on October 2nd, 1994, and Stan left. He described leaving the Heartbreakers: "I was very scared, frightened. Frightened to death.... Like curl up on the hardwood floor and cry." But Stan had his production work, and has been doing that extensively since leaving the Heartbreakers.
Currently, he is taking a few years off from the commercial business of making albums, and spending his time back in Florida.
Tom Petty maintains that Stan left because of a personality conflict, but Stan has said that he left because he didn't like the music. Since Stan is probably a better judge of why he left, that therefore begs the question: Why does Tom insist that Stan's departure was due to a personality conflict?
There had been personality conflicts right along. Stan had repeatedly quit the band, and was fired from the band more than once. Each time, he had been reinstated, because the other Heartbreakers, as Benmont said, "would never get anything done without him." Tensions ran especially high during the recording of such albums as "Damn the Torpedoes" and "Southern Accents" (during the recording of "Southern Accents", Petty punched a hole in a wall in frustration).
During the recording of "Let Me Up", however, the first inclinations of the differing music styles become very apparent. The first few tracks of "Let Me Up" that were recorded ("Jammin' Me", "Let Me Up, I've Had Enough") were songs that Stan and Benmont loved: Hard Rock. However, Tom and Mike brought in other songs; more Beatle-esque in nature ("Runaway Trains", "It'll All Work Out"). Plus, there were songs that were much more bluesy ("Self-Made Man", "Think About Me"); stylistically, the album was all over the map (probably because this was just the Heartbreakers, with no extra producer). However, it was somewhat obvious that Petty was going to keep on drifting with the pop stream.
Tom Petty probably picked up on Stan's unhappiness with the new pop sound, and when Tom was inspired to write and record "Free Fallin'", he and Mike skipped over Stan for the drum part, and opted instead for Phil Jones, Stan's roadie. Tom believes that Stan was jilted by the fact that the other Heartbreakers got session invites for "Full Moon Fever", but Stan was left out.
Tom's idea that the split was due to a personality conflict isn't so far-fetched. For two men in the music industry, disagreeing over music style can constitute a personality conflict. However, it was not so much a case of Stan feeling abandoned during the solo albums, but more that he didn't agree with the music anymore.
Of course, that's debatable, but since I was a Heartbreakers fan before I was a Stan fan, I vote for the song "Luna", off the Heartbreakers' first album. On that song, Stan makes his keyboarding debut, which he remembers as " one of the few times Tom and I had any real musical communication other than 'Stan, play the drums.' "