The artist Tom Petty said was better than anyone: “He influenced my songwriting”
The art of being a good songwriter never came naturally to Tom Petty.
He didn’t know the first thing about writing a song when he first started making music with his first band, but when he started to make a name for himself in the band Mudcrutch, he started to realise what good rock and rollers were supposed to be doing. If The Beatles could put together a tune, then he could as well, but there was never any worry about Petty ever coming close to what the geniuses of rock and roll could do.
After all, Petty was quoted back in his prime that rock and roll wasn’t supposed to be the most thoughtful music in the world. He was more than happy to make his ditties for nearly anyone within earshot, but he wasn’t exactly trying to rewrite Bach or anything. It was about a couple of chords and a heart with some soul behind it, but even by the standards of lyric writing, Petty was already a cut above the rest.
Even when listening back to him countless times, even Rick Rubin was often dumbfounded at how Petty came up with a lot of his material. Most writers can go into their music rooms and try to write a song about a certain topic, but that’s not how Petty operates. He lets the muse take over half the time, and while he might not know the first thing about what one of his stories is about, what matters is that the audience understands the characters in there.
There are a fair number of perfect songs in his discography, like ‘Southern Accents’ and ‘Free Fallin’, but when it comes to lyrical mastery, Petty wasn’t the kind of modern poet that Bob Dylan was. He was only looking to make music that people could dance to back in the day, and compared to acts like The Beatles and The Byrds, Dylan shook people up in a way that no one had ever thought of before.
A lot of what Dylan was saying may have been controversial for its time, but it made all the sense in the world once Petty heard ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, saying, “He influenced my songwriting, of course. He influenced everybody’s songwriting. There’s no way around it. No one had ever really left the love song before, lyrically. So in that respect, I think he influenced everybody, because you suddenly realized you could write about other things.” You can hear that kind of restlessness in Petty’s songs as well, but he wasn’t thinking along Dylan’s lines, either.
When talking about his influence later, Petty claimed that Dylan was a once-in-a-lifetime artist, saying, “I do marvel at him. Bob’s so much better than all of us.” Even if Petty carved out his own niche for telling tales about people living in the American South on tracks like ‘Something Big’, the only thing he could hope to do was observe Dylan from afar whenever he got the chance to play with him.
Beyond being a member of the Traveling Wilburys, the biggest opportunity Petty ever had was getting to see what Dylan could do from the other side of the stage when the Heartbreakers supported him. On any given day, he could have chosen to change up the set or play a song in a different key than what they rehearsed, but Petty remained as steady as The Band was back in the day, always keeping his eyes glued on his hero and being the happiest person in the room sharing a mic with him on tunes like ‘Knockin On Heaven’s Door’.
That kind of opportunity is the stuff of rock and roll dreams most of the time, but Petty was still grateful for being able to have friends that were in their own separate category of legendary. Anyone could have spent their entire lives trying to get anywhere close to Dylan, but after years of songwriting practice and a couple of gigs under his belt, Petty had done enough time for Dylan to go from the greatest songwriter of his generation to his old friend Bob.
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