Rock and roll widsom: the musician Tom Petty called his musical “older brother”
For someone with as much experience as Tom Petty could boast, it’s easy to become a bit cynical. Navigating the constant highs and lows of success while sustaining creativity demands a persistent drive. Fortunately, Petty always found inspiration and energy from those he considered true masters of the craft.
Petty emerged alongside many names we now consider to be music industry legends, not just because he grew up and enjoyed the quintessential rock ‘n’ roll explosion but also because of the partnerships he made along the way. He also fell in love with The Beatles just as everyone else did, which sparked a career-long exchange of perils of wisdom that supercharged the very boundaries of rock.
While Petty wasn’t unique in his fascination with the Fab Four, nor was his desire to sink his teeth into Meet the Beatles and pull it apart in the hopes of revealing its secret ingredient. But The Beatles became to Petty what any musician could have ever hoped for: lifelong inspiration that guided rather than dictated. Petty’s tastes became more sophisticated as he grew older, but the Liverpudlian outfit was never too far away whenever he needed a writer’s block remedy.
Petty first discovered the magic of The Beatles after witnessing their iconic performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and to say it left him breathless would be something of an understatement. “Most magic is a trick, an illusion. But this was real,” he later reflected during an interview with Music Radar. “Man, oh man, was it real. I think the whole world was watching that night. It certainly felt that way – you just knew it, sitting in your living room, that everything around you was changing. It was like going from black-and-white to colour. Really.”
It’s hard to imagine how a young, eager Petty would have reacted if told he’d one day be part of a supergroup with one of The Beatles. However, The Traveling Wilburys highlighted just one facet of Petty’s deep admiration for George Harrison. While Harrison initially served as a mentor during Petty’s early years, collaborating with him later made Petty feel as though he was absorbing Harrison’s wisdom firsthand.
In 2014, when Rolling Stone asked if Harrison’s relaxed demeanour took aback Petty, he responded the way any fan would—by being more surprised at the appreciation Harrison developed for him. “I was surprised he liked me that much,” he admitted. Harrison, aside from being “a hangout pal” immediately, seemed to embody a certain nonchalance that made anyone feel more at ease, even during high-intensity scenarios.
As a result, Petty would look to Harrison for advice, and Harrison would shrug it off, the frustrations of his past a distant memory and nothing compared to the composure he had since developed. “That’s the thing I needed in my life, the older brother figure I never had,” Petty stated. “And it was someone who had been through such an extraordinary thing in rock and roll. When I needed to talk to somebody, I could phone him, and he would have a pretty fresh outlook on it.”
In response, Harrison admired Petty for similar reasons, including his authenticity and ability to say precisely what he wanted without cloaking it in layers of ambiguity. Petty did something not many were able to do—encourage Harrison to be himself and come out of his shell a little more. “He’s not full of shit,” Harrison once said, and he wasn’t, in exactly the way a former rock pariah needed.
