‘The Waiting’: The rock icons connected to Tom Petty’s mammoth hit
Some rock ‘n’ roll heroes stand on their own. Cast away in a sea of musicality, they just out from the crashing waves of guitars, bass and drums to make things wholly singular and, as such, remain a rarely beached piece of the audial geography. Tom Petty‘s career, however, as connected to musical icons and genre-defining stylists as the rivers, tributaries and estuaries that flow toward the sea, is completely different.
Whether out on his own, with his band The Heartbreakers, or even his supergroup dalliance with The Traveling Wilburys, Petty remained a part of the rock scene at large with a plethora of legendary artists boasting a connection to the songwriter. Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Stevie Nicks, Mike Campbell, Johnny Cash, Steve Winwood and Joe Cocker are just a handful of the names that could call Petty a friend and collaborator. Another such figure is Roger McGuinn.
As the leading figure of The Byrds, undoubtedly one of the most quietly influential bands of the 1960s, McGuinn can be considered the founding father of Petty’s unique vocal tone. The two voices perfectly collaborated in 1991 as McGuinn was featured on The Heartbreakers’ comeback record Into The Great Wide Open, joining Petty to perform ‘King of the Hill’, providing many fans with a dream duo. And, Petty often noted the importance of McGuinn and his band on his songwriting style. However, there is one track he refuses to give the Byrds man credit for.
‘The Waiting’ is one of Petty’s most popular anthems. In fact, its tonality and comfort are so overwhelming that it left The Replacements singer Paul Westerberg in a noted resolution that he and his band could never match the group’s mainstream appeal. While the band were on tour with Petty they heard the noted “yeah, yeah, yeah” refrain, it left Westerberg in no doubt that The Replacements “just weren’t made of the stuff that makes popular music.”
Breaking the top 20 in the charts in the US, the song is considered one of Petty’s more ubiquitous anthems. Its hand-crafted delivery of the classic line “waiting is the hardest part” has done what all great pop music does: transcended the song that bore it and moved into popular vernacular. And, if you were to ask Roger McGuinn, ‘Who inspired the track’s best line?’ he may have pointed an influential finger in his own direction. However, Petty disagreed when speaking to Paul Zollo for his book Conversations With Tom Petty: “That was a song that took a long time to write. Roger McGuinn swears he told me the line – about the waiting being the hardest part.”
Petty believed it was another rock legend who inspired the line, “But I think I got the idea from something Janis Joplin said on television,” explained Petty. “That’s where it stuck in my mind. I don’t think she said, ‘The waiting is the hardest part,’ but it was something to that effect: ‘Everything else is just waiting.’ And so that’s where that came from.”
After that, things still took a little while to come together, noting that it was a “long, drawn-out process … to write the song. I had a really good chorus, and I had to work backwards from the chorus. So that’s always hard. But I was really determined that I was going to get it. And I got it. It just took me a long time. It took weeks of working on it. If you’re not lucky enough to get it all in one burst, but you know you’ve got something there, and there’s any number of ways of getting it, any number of ways of completing it,” he shared. “But only one’s gonna be right.”
Like all great tunes, ‘The Waiting’ has infiltrated our cultural consciousness. It has levitated beyond its initial intention with the lyrics now providing themselves as solace to depleted souls in motivational posters, even if they did leave Paul Westerberg feeling blue. The many connections Tom Petty made in his life speak to a few elements of his personality: firstly, he was a generally amiable and friendly guy; secondly, he was good enough at his job to make friends with the best in the business, and thirdly, that he wrote lyrics so potent that those friends wouldn’t mind a bit of the credit.
