“I don’t want to sing after him”: the vocalist Tom Petty thought he couldn’t follow
Singing is usually a far more intimate experience for musicians than having to play an instrument. It’s one thing to hide behind a guitar or the massive piano stretching across the stage, but when all that’s standing in someone’s way of the audience is a microphone, it can get a bit nerve-wracking to commit one’s hands to the mic stand, let alone sing any notes. Tom Petty knew he had a job to do every time he played with the Heartbreakers, but he admitted that a few of his colleagues left him too timid to deliver an effective vocal performance.
But Petty never prided himself on being one of the most aggressive singers of all time. He wasn’t brought up to be the same kind of singer that Freddie Mercury or Robert Plant was, but his power always came from the conviction that he had in his voice, always giving the people what they wanted in the same conversational tone that made everyone from Bob Dylan to John Lennon work so well.
That’s not to say he didn’t have his moments where he would fly off the handle. He sounded rightfully pissed off in the early days on tunes like ‘Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It)’, and when working with Jeff Lynne on Into the Great Wide Open, hearing his voice ascend in the breakdown of ‘You and I Will Meet Again’ really helps show off his range as he keeps going higher until the band crash out.
But that kind of confidence doesn’t come overnight. Petty had spent years trying to turn his voice into the best instrument that he could, and when working with Jeff Lynne and the rest of the Traveling Wilburys, he practically had a crash course in what a frontman should be doing. Bob Dylan had taught him the importance of every syllable that came out of his mouth, and George Harrison showed him how to pick the right notes to dwell on when putting together a melody.
“It was really intimidating.”
tom petty
Of all of his supergroup bandmates, though, was there ever anyone that could touch Roy Orbison? It’s clear that everyone in the group had been around the block a couple of times when it came to singing, but Orbison was virtually untouchable in his field, going for the kind of operatic high notes that made Harrison’s bandmates fall in love with him when they first began heard him in the early 1960s.
Petty was always reverent towards artists like Orbison, but he knew that he was no match for him when performing together, saying, “George (Harrison) would audition us. It was really intimidating. One day, Roy (Orbison) went out and sung, and George said, ‘OK, Tom, let’s hear you do it.’ I was, like, ‘God, I don’t really want to sing after him.’”
Once everyone got the record, it was easy to hear why Petty was so nervous. His vocal spots on tunes like ‘End of the Line’ and ‘Last Night’ are perfect for his laid-back demeanour, but anyone who thought that they could outdo Orbison on tunes like ‘Not Alone Any More’ was either delusional or had never heard his voice before, practically sending chills up everyone’s spine in his first verse.
While the band eventually decided to carry on after Orbison passed away, his vocal spots on the album are proof enough of why he should be missed. ‘Wilbury Twist’ and ‘Inside Out’ were fun while they lasted, but there was a certain magic lost the minute that golden voice sang its last notes.
