The musician Tom Petty called “the best bandleader I ever saw”
There aren’t many rock and roll frontmen who could guide a band quite like Tom Petty. Throughout his time working with The Heartbreakers, Petty would turn every musician into a musical machine, getting the most out of the Benmont Tench whenever he stepped behind the piano or playing off the lead guitar stylings of Mike Campbell. As Petty ventured outside The Heartbreakers for the first time, though, he started to see how other great musicians worked amongst their contemporaries.
During the Heartbreakers’ prime, they had already known a thing or two about working as backup musicians for rock stars. Between the tour for the album Southern Accents, the band turned in time working alongside Bob Dylan on one of his tours. While the band admitted to loving the experience, they knew it would be trial by fire whenever they stepped up to play.
Rather than flexing his muscles as a performer every time he got onstage, Dylan was known for changing up his style of music depending on the mood he was having, often playing songs in a different key or switching the time signature on the fly. Even though that discipline got the band firing on all cylinders live, Petty thought there was an opportunity to make his music outside The Heartbreakers.
Just before he released the album Full Moon Fever with ELO frontman Jeff Lynne, Petty got a call from George Harrison asking if he would like to work on a single he was putting together with Bob Dylan, Lynne, and Roy Orbison. Relishing the opportunity to see his favourite songwriters write, Petty would become a member of the Traveling Wilburys, eventually assembling an entire album of material when Harrison’s song became too good to put out as a single.
When working with the band, Petty talked about the lyrical style being fairly democratic, telling Martin Scorsese: “George would say, ‘Ok, guys, I’ve got these songwriters here (claps hands) Time to write a song. Everyone would throw a line out, and you’d go ‘NOOOO’. And then another would come up, and everyone would look up and say, ‘Oh, that’s good. I like that.’”
While most of the supergroup’s debut album featured songs fronted by different band members, Petty knew Harrison was pushing the group forward, telling Mojo: “He was the best bandleader I ever saw. He was really good at organising things, at knowing who was best at what, delegating what to do. And he was a great record producer and made the process a lot of fun. That’s a lot of what a good producer knows how to do: keep the session on and up.”
Then again, Harrison’s experience with The Beatles probably played into the happiness generated in the room. Since the Fab Four split up acrimoniously in the 1960s, Harrison knew that he didn’t want to be in a group that had the same type of drama. As Petty would say later, “I think the qualifications for The Wilburys was more about people that you can hang out with. Though George liked to surround himself with people that were good.”
