The band Tom Petty said “brought sunshine into the world”
When Tom Petty first started playing, music wasn’t about everyone taking things so seriously.
There was still a business element behind everything that the heartland rocker did, but it was much easier for him to have fun playing with the Heartbreakers than trying to make a sweeping statement about anything from politics to the music industry. But when you’ve seen the corporate side of music a little too much, you start to realise just how dark things can become behind the scenes.
But for all of the harsh realities that most artists face, Petty was always the one willing to fight for what he believed in. He didn’t care if one of the biggest names in the industry said that his music was crap or that they wanted to seize his songs. He protected what he thought was his, and if he felt that he wasn’t being treated fairly, it didn’t take him long to start battling against his own record company.
That kind of behaviour doesn’t exactly make for the greatest working relationships all the time, but Petty was proud to be a thorn in their side half the time. The artist should be given free reign to say what they needed to say, and even if Full Moon Fever was initially rejected by his label, it didn’t take Petty long to convince them that tunes like ‘Free Fallin’ and ‘I Won’t Back Down’ were major hits.
If that record sounds happy, though, it only came from the fact that Petty worked through the largest amount of bullshit any of his contemporaries ever did. He had battled against his record company to get his songs back, he eventually went to battle with them again when they tried to hike up the prices of his records, and narrowly escaped death when someone attempted to burn down his house, but he always came back swinging.
And it’s that kind of ‘never give up’ attitude that resonated with people like George Harrison. For all of the glamorous artists out there, Harrison saw Petty as a little brother in many respects. He didn’t take shit from anybody and was proud to play by his own rules, so when Harrison asked him to be a member of the Traveling Wilburys, it was among the easiest yeses that Petty ever gave.
But beyond being able to see his favourite artists write in front of him, Petty felt that the camaraderie of the band helped break up the harshness of the music industry, saying, “We wanted to keep it light, and we wanted it to be something that warmed the heart. We wanted to make something good in a world that seemed to get uglier and uglier and meaner and meaner. The Wilburys was this nice friendly thing. And I’m really proud that I was part of it. Because I do think that it brought a little sunshine into the world.”
The 1980s might not have necessarily needed a supergroup like this, but beyond Petty’s grievances, there was already a lot of darkness coming into play. This was in the midst of the Cold War, the AIDs epidemic was starting to become more prevalent, and even the music world saw people like Nine Inch Nails start to make their first steps into the mainstream, but here were a bunch of aging rockstars reminding everyone why rock and roll sounded so cool in the first place.
While no one was asking for a Traveling Wilburys album when they first got together, the fact that they managed to give us the music they did is a small miracle. They all were out there to have fun, and every time they played together, it’s hard not to have fun right along with them as they play ‘End of the Line’ or ‘Handle With Care’.
