“Kicked our asses”: the blues musician Tom Petty said outplayed him
One of the cardinal rules of being in a band is to have the guts not to back down to anybody. As intimidating as it can be trying to compete with the giants of the music industry, the greatest artists of all time are those who look at what the competition is doing and dare to ask whether they can do something even better. For someone who wrote a song called ‘I Won’t Back Down’, though, Tom Petty knew that one of the veterans of the blues scene absolutely wiped the floor with the Heartbreakers when they were at their peak.
Then again, being on that level of playing doesn’t come sporadically. Most people can only hope to get that good over time, and by the 1990s, the Heartbreakers had gone from being the kind of garage rock act to a well-oiled machine, especially now that they had a powerhouse like Steve Ferrone behind the drumkit.
They may have been making more mellow music on Wildflowers, but it didn’t matter as long as they still had the fire in their playing. A tune like ‘Honey Bee’ should be a standard blues rocker on paper, but as soon as Mike Campbell kicks off the tune with that guitar lick, every listener is transported to some sweaty blues club where the music seems to seep into the walls the more people play.
While Petty may have worked the band hard to get to that point, he did get a bit of help from his work with Bob Dylan. The folk-rock superstar may have worked with the Heartbreakers to give him some cool points back in the 1980s, but as he started to transform his pieces in real-time when he played live, everyone had to be put through their paces and be able to snap on a dime into a completely different style of song than the one they started out with.
That kind of improvisation can be learned, and yet it came so naturally when listening to John Lee Hooker play the blues. As opposed to Muddy Waters and BB King trading licks with their respective bands, Hooker took his tunes to a different level, practically laying the groundwork that guitarists like Chuck Berry would eventually stand on when he sped up those tunes for rock and roll.
Most artists would be humbled to work with someone like Hooker, but Petty seemed almost scared to work with him once he saw what he could do onstage with Dylan, saying, “Bob came in and said, ‘Come on, come back. John Lee Hooker is here, and he’s going to play. Come on. Let’s go play with John Lee Hooker.’ I went back to the stage. Then John Lee Hooker came out and kicked our asses. He was just transcendental. I remember Bob walking across the back telling us, ‘Don’t change chords with John Lee Hooker. He doesn’t change chords.’ And Bob fell over. That was some night.”
Despite being shown what true greatness looks like onstage, Petty knew that he needed to do some serious homework on the blues if he wanted to see that level of playing. And listening to where he went later on in his career, records like Mojo, felt like he was finally sinking the role of the bluesman that he had shared a stage with.
Because Petty didn’t want to be known solely as a rock and roll troubadour, he had plans to become the best musician he could, which meant sampling pieces from whatever style of music caught his ear.
