Stevie Nicks & Tom Petty — Rockers’ Secret Romance

Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty got very personal while recording "Stop Dragging My Heart Around" — and producer Jimmy Iovine has revealed how he tried to keep them apart!

The legendary producer was guesting with Howard Stern while looking back at his career — including his long stint with Tom, who died suddenly at the age of 66 after a shocking decline. Jimmy, who ended up in front of the cameras on "American Idol," revealed how he tried to keep his then-girlfriend Stevie away from the rocker.

In fact, Jimmy tried to keep Stevie locked away in his basement when Tom brought his band to the producer's home studio. "I said, 'Do me a favor,'" recalled Jimmy. "When he comes, just stay down there." Jimmy told Howard that he was afraid Tom would be upset that he was working with Stevie, having promised to being "100 percent" dedicated to working with Tom.

Eventually, Jimmy came up with an idea to bring Stevie and Tom together on their 1981 hit "Stop Dragging My Heart Around." The song wound up on Stevie's album, though — with Jimmy saying that Tom "just didn't like how it went down, and neither did I."

Jimmy didn't note, however, that Tom and Stevie would later get together outside the studio, as well. Tom never confirmed the relationship until his final years, with biographer Warren Zanes saying: “I pushed on this question, saying to him, after he told me they weren’t a couple, ‘You sure sound like a couple.’ Tom looked at me and said, ‘We had our times.’”

Insiders, however, told The National ENQUIRER that the rockers had first become a couple by 1983 — just two years after Jimmy had brought them together in the studio. And while Stevie remained close to Tom after he returned to his first wife Linda, they tried dating again during his 1996 divorce.

"Stevie has been in rehab for cocaine and alcohol addiction," an insider said at the time, "and Tom kicked his booze habit in 1987 for good." But — as Tom also revealed to Zanes — he was hiding a heroin habit that eventually doomed their relationship.

"If you'd have said to me that Tom Petty was doing that," Stevie later said, "I wouldn't have believed you." Instead, it was left to Tom's second wife Dana to finally get him straight in his final years.