The two songwriters Tom Petty thought was out of everybody’s league: “It really intimidated me”
With a discography stretching over four decades and countless utterly iconic tracks, both for himself and for various other artists and fleeting projects here and there, it is fair to say that Tom Petty knew his way around the world of songwriting, but there were a few of his predecessors which he viewed as ultimately untouchable when it came to their craft.
Songwriting is a rather miraculous skill, attempted by many but perfected by only a small few, which is perhaps why, when you think of the songwriting realm, the same few faces tend to spring to mind. Petty is certainly among those faces, having amassed a reputation among America’s most enduring and best-selling artists of all time. Whether it was the early triumph of ‘American Girl’ or the archetypal 1980s rock of ‘Free Fallin’’, the extent of Floridian songwriter’s talents seemed to know no bounds.
Throughout his illustrious career, that ever-expanding reputation among the songwriting greats of the US led Petty to cross paths with some of his all-time heroes, perhaps most notably during his days with The Traveling Wilburys alongside a wealth of the greatest songwriters in musical history.
Namely, the Wilburys gave Petty the chance to perform alongside his ultimate songwriting hero, Bob Dylan. “[It was] scary. You know, because you’re there with the greatest writer who ever lived,” he once recalled in an interview with Paul Zollo. “But you try to just not think about that…It really intimidated me at first, but once you’ve done the show a few times, you get used to it”.
It is no surprise that Petty was somewhat intimidated by Dylan given the fact that virtually every songwriter since 1970 has been endlessly indebted to the sheer genius of the folk hero’s output – it isn’t as though every songwriter wins a Nobel Prize for literature, after all. What’s more, Petty was privileged enough to come of age during Dylan’s first emergence back in the mid-1960s, which cannot have helped but impact his songwriting sensibilities going forward.
Dylan wasn’t the only songwriting hero of the 1960s to have had a lasting impact on the Heartbreaker, though. As every self-respecting songwriter should, Petty always had a deep-rooted appreciation for the progenitive sounds carved out by The Beach Boys and their visionary leader, Brian Wilson.
Back in 1966, Wilson changed the landscape of pop music forevermore with Pet Sounds, and Petty was certainly among its many adoring appreciators. “Brian Wilson is the greatest,” he once told Playboy, seemingly placing the Beach Boy on the same pedestal as Dylan. “The root of his personal problem was that he did genius work and never got recognition for it from the man in the street. So he took a real artistic risk. It’s [Pet Sounds] a brilliant album.”
Citing any two songwriters as being the “greatest” of all time is bound to inspire a certain degree of debate, of which Petty is certainly worthy of a mention alongside a few of his former collaborators, too. Ultimately, though, it is difficult to dispute the credentials of either Dylan or Wilson, without whom the very musical landscape that produced figures like Petty would be virtually unrecognisable.
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