As much as I believe that Jon has had his name added to songs he had very little to do with in terms of actually writing or crafting them, I can't see Runaway having been pretty much a finished song that was just given to him. At that point, Jon was an unknown janitor, he couldn't have paid anyone off to remain silent about this song. And it's not like George Karak and his band were so well known and famous that they just could have given it away for nothing.

What I do believe is that the lyrical idea and the bulk of that stemmed from Jon's bus rides and his observations, but were refined in co-work with Karak. The hammering keyboard intro was, according the German biography, lifted from an older tape with some session musicians, so it's hard to track down who had originally come up with this. The musical structure of the song comes mainly from Karak in my opinion. Simply because it differs too much from all the other stuff Powerstation Demo material and is much less Tom-Petty-wannabe-like.