The 1980s band Tom Petty would have played with in a heartbeat: “We thought we had time”
When Tom Petty first started playing music, he never envisioned being friends with some of the biggest names in music.
The whole point behind making rock and roll was playing music with your friends, but that kind of sincerity that he had towards playing was what made him connect with so many of his heroes, whether that’s Roger McGuinn or Leon Russell. But he understood that some of the greatest collaborations of all time may have been a little too good to last after one too many years.
Petty knew better than anyone that life needed to move on, and even by the time he reached the end of the 1980s, he was practically tired of everyone else in the Heartbreakers for a little bit. Mike Campbell was always his partner in crime to a certain degree, but when you look at how the rest of the band was getting along, it wasn’t that shocking when he ended up putting together a solo album with Jeff Lynne only a few years later.
He needed time to recharge his batteries, and he wasn’t going to get a better lesson than joining the Traveling Wilburys. As much as Petty welcomed Campbell on board, he was going to be one of the only new kids in the band playing next to Bob Dylan and George Harrison. But even when they got together to begin writing songs, every single one of their tunes was about everyone checking their ego at the door and throwing out the right line for any particular tune.
Whereas most bands spend entire months labouring over a single song, Harrison figured that the whole thing could be finished within a span of two weeks. Dylan already had a limited amount of time to work with them, but when you look at some of the biggest songs on the record, the whole thing feels like it was put together over an afternoon with a bunch of them strumming away on their guitars.
And for the youngest member of the band, Petty certainly held his own next to everyone else as well. He wasn’t trying to give away all of his greatest stuff from Full Moon Fever by any means, but ‘Last Nite’ does fit in nicely with everything else that they were doing. But after Roy Orbison and George Harrison passed away, Petty felt that the whole thing ended up coming to an end before they were really ready to let it go.
Harrison would have certainly been game for another record had he not been going through all of his health issues, and while Dylan was the toughest nut to crack a lot of the time, you can certainly tell that he was at least having fun on their second record. But through all the scheduling conflicts, Petty said that he would have happily thrown everything aside to join his old friends again if he knew that it was going to be over.
He had his fair share of personal problems throughout the 1990s, but he felt that all he needed to hear was one phone call to get everything back together again, saying, “It’s kind of stupid what we didn’t do more. I used to say, ‘Just flash the big W in the sky like the bat signal, and we’ll all come.’ We just thought we had all the time in the world.” If anything, getting the band together could have been a great way to lift Petty’s spirit whenever he got to the studio.
He probably wouldn’t have given the band any of the songs that made it onto Wildflowers or anything, but when you look at all of the tunes that ended up on Echo, chances are Petty could have made something that wasn’t as dour with the Wilburys than reeling over the loss of the love of his life.
We’ll never know what that final piece of the Wilburys trilogy could have been, but the fact that the Avengers of classic rock came together at all is already the greatest blessing. The band was all set to be one of the biggest supergroups of all time, and even if a reunion was only wishful thinking, chances are Petty could still feel a bit of that magic when he performed a few Wilburys tunes with his fellow Heartbreakers at the Concert for George.
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