The gig that made Tom Petty tour with Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan doesn’t perform in the same way that most other artists do; his shows are strange, laced with what can only be described as a combination of mystery and beauty.
Leonard Cohen was always a big fan of Bob Dylan’s songwriting, but found that his live shows took his music and elevated it to a whole other level, somewhere which was equal parts wonderful and strange. The songs were barely recognisable, silhouettes of silhouettes played to the masses and absorbed in whatever way possible. Some people loved this approach to a show, but others hated it.
The first thing that Cohen noticed was how loud the gig was, something which was a complete shift from his own performances. “It was very loud. Fortunately, Raphael, our drummer, had earplugs, and he distributed them,” said Cohen. “Because our music is quite soft, and that’s what we’ve been listening to for three or four months. As Sharon Robinson said, Bob Dylan has a secret code with his audience.”
The poet went on to say that Dylan took on some otherworldly presence when he performed. “In this particular case, he had his back to one half of the audience and was playing the organ, beautifully, I might say, and just running through the songs,” he said.
“Some were hard to recognise. But nobody cared. That’s not what they were there for, and not what I was there for.”
Bob Dylan knew that a good live gig didn’t necessarily need to be an artist playing song after song after song. It could mean different things to different people, and for him, that meant ditching the standard structure and entering some kind of flow state. Interestingly, his approach is the exact opposite of Tom Petty, who used to enter a flow state when he wrote music but then would be true to his creation when playing live.
“I just took a deep breath, and it came out. The whole song. Stream of consciousness: words, music, chords. Finished it,” said Tom Petty when discussing his song ‘Wildflowers’. “I mean, I just played it into a tape recorder, and I played the whole song, and I never played it again, I actually only spent three and a half minutes on that whole song… So I’d come back for days playing that tape, thinking there must be something wrong here because this just came too easy, and then I realised that there’s probably nothing wrong at all.”
Despite these contrasting approaches to making and performing music, the two artists worked together incredibly well, and that meant that they eventually wound up playing together and touring with one another – there was one show in particular that Bob Dylan saw and loved so much, he asked Tom Petty to hit the road with them.
“So we backed him up at Farm Aid, and it went really well,” recalled Petty. “And then afterwards in the trailer, Bob came back and said, ‘Hey, what would you think of doing a tour? I’ve got a tour of Australia [1986] I want to do, and what would you guys think of doing that?’, and we’d all been huge Dylan fans, and we were very intrigued by the idea of playing with Bob, so off we went.”
The tour ended up lasting two years, as they got along and were fans of each other’s music and performance style – this time on the road would cement the two artists as being a creative force moving forward, as they acted as a constant inspiration for one another.
“We’d do part of it, and then more would get added on, and then more would get added on,” said Petty, concluding, “We really did the world with Bob Dylan.”
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.