The “sophisticated” guitarist George Harrison and Tom Petty called perfect
George Harrison and Tom Petty weren’t the kind of musicians who concerned themselves with having the most showstopping musicians around them all the time.
They knew that their friends were good at what they did, but it was better for them to jam with people they could hang out with than worry about whether or not someone was able to play on the same level as Jimi Hendrix. But sometimes finding that musical common ground means referencing the same types of guitarists that started it all for them.
And when you’re talking about Harrison, that means going back to the days when rock and roll was first starting to form. He had already got the gig with The Beatles by playing the song ‘Raunchy’ on the top of a double decker bus, but his first steps into rock and roll didn’t start until the song ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ stopped him dead in his tracks when he was on his bike. That was excitement in song form, and Harrison wanted to be near it in any way he could.
But learning the guitar wasn’t really about doing all those Elvis Presley moves for Harrison. He was the ‘Quiet Beatle’ for a reason, and it was much easier for him to disappear into his own world at the back of the stage and play his licks. That gave him a lot less time in the spotlight, but a lot more time to listen to what the band was doing. And aside from the traditional Chuck Berry and Scotty Moore licks, Harrison’s guitar vocabulary was shaped by what Carl Perkins was doing.
After all, The Beatles always had a dash of country in their repertoire, and the twang of Perkins’s guitar was perfect for the sound they wanted to get. That kind of picking is all over a track like ‘All My Loving’, but Harrison would have been the first to admit that what Perkins was doing was a singular kind of genius.
He was the one who had grown up bending the strings on his guitar until he got the sound he heard, and a song like ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ pretty much solidified his god status in the Beatle’s mind, saying, “Carl was playing that simple, amazing blend of country, blues and early rock, with these brilliant chordal solos that were very sophisticated. I heard his version of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ on the radio the other day, and I’ll tell you, they don’t come more perfect than that.”
If Harrison was fascinated by it, though, Petty knew the genre like the back of his hand. He had grown up in the American South, so that kind of music was already familiar to him before he even knew what rock and roll was. And now that there was someone playing rock and roll with that same twangy tone to their guitar, Petty felt that he found a hero that was after the same sound he was.
While the heartland rocker only got the chance to jam with Perkins when he started performing in the 1990s, he remembered him destroying every second of his time onstage, saying, “I talked Carl into sitting in with us. Backstage, Carl was very nervous about coming out with us. He said, ‘They may not know who I am.’ I told him, ‘Carl, they’re going to know you and love you.’ When Carl hit the stage, he just ripped the room apart. Neil Young was there that night, and he was shaking his head. Carl was that good.”
Both Harrison and Petty would eventually go in wildly different directions from their roots, but no matter how many times a synthesizer showed up on a Heartbreakers record or Harrison broke out the sitar, there’s a reason why a lot of those Traveling Wilburys songs sounded so familiar. Because when you have someone that hits you on that deep of a level, it’s never truly going to go away.
