The musician Tom Petty thought was irreplaceable: “I never considered”
It’s never easy trying to keep a band together for years at a time. For every album where things are going great, there are bound to be moments when people butt heads and walk away from each other with a few broken egos by the end of their time together. Even though Tom Petty did have moments when he realised that he could no longer work with members of the Heartbreakers, he could also admit that some legends would never be equalled when they stepped onstage.
Then again, Petty had already been a student of rock and roll before he even started working with his band of heartland rockers. The whole point behind his musical upbringing was about learning from the best of the best, and that meant devouring anything that The Byrds had done or working on music that followed in the footsteps of what he saw Elvis Presley do when he saw him on the set of the movie Follow That Dream.
Still, there was always a natural chemistry between Petty and the Heartbreakers that no one could touch. For all of the members who came and went during Petty’s life, the Heartbreakers tried to maintain tier status as a garage band that happened to get really big. Many of their tunes revolved around getting the right feeling and having everyone bounce off each other.
When you’ve been with that same bunch of guys for so long, there comes a time when you’ll need a break, and Petty couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity with the Traveling Wilburys. This was the equivalent of moving up to the big leagues as a songwriter, and even if someone wasn’t the biggest Beatles or Bob Dylan fan, no one would shake a stick at the idea of working alongside musical legends. If the supergroup began in the mind of George Harrison, though, its soul was in Roy Orbison.
For a band full of legends, the ‘(Oh) Pretty Woman’ singer was the one who left everyone else starstruck in the studio. His voice hadn’t lost an ounce of shine, and even if this was one of the final albums released during his lifetime, hearing him belt out songs like ‘Not Alone Any More’ reminded everyone of why that operatic tenor voice soared through the glory days of rock and roll.
While the band continued on after Orbison’s passing from a heart attack in the late 1980s, Petty felt that it wouldn’t make sense to have someone else dialled in playing his parts, saying, “I never considered Roy replaceable. I never even considered looking for a replacement. It just felt natural to get ahead [with] the four of us.”
Though Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3 did have a few great songs to go around, though, there’s a heavy absence from Orbison on the record. Despite getting some help from other rock and roll heavyweights like Gary Moore on the solo to ‘She’s My Baby,’ everyone sounds like they would rather be doing their own thing on this record, especially with Dylan’s songs being far too dominant across most of the record.
But even if the band’s sophomore effort didn’t pack the same punch as their first did, it was always nice to see the group playing for the hell of it. It would be hard for any band to replace someone like Orbison, but was anyone going to look at a band that had Petty, Dylan, Harrison, and Jeff Lynne in it and say they were doing a bad job?
