The 1965 song that changed Tom Petty’s life: “He influenced everybody’s songwriting”
Tom Petty’s horizons were opened up forever when he heard Bob Dylan for the first time in 1965, which immediately made him feel like anything could be possible.
Suddenly, the way that he viewed songwriting changed in an instant, and he placed Dylan on a pedestal. At that time, if somebody had told him that one day he’d be able to consider Dylan his bandmate, that Floridian kid would have laughed them out of the building.
In the late 1980s, both Petty and Dylan answered George Harrison’s call to form The Travelling Wilburys alongside Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. While most supergroups flatter to deceive despite the immense talent in their ranks, due to their egos getting in the way, they were an anomaly to the rule, with everyone putting their own achievements to the side for the greater good.
For Petty, who was the youngest member of the band, it was a dream come true. After all, both Dylan and Harrison, who gave him a musical awakening with The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, made him the artist he had become.
While Petty’s love of Dylan or The Beatles didn’t play out for all to hear on his records, his admiration for them was off the scale nonetheless. Rather than copying Dylan’s style like so many others did, Petty drew inspiration from Dylan’s unique songwriting and applied it to his own artistry, creating something distinctly his own.
It wasn’t until he was a teenager that he heard Dylan for the first time, which was a light-bulb moment. “We hadn’t heard Dylan [growing up in Florida] until ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ came out as a single. And we loved that right away. We learned that, did it in the show,” he later told American Songwriter.
He reminisced, “We learned all his singles. We didn’t have Dylan albums until Blonde on Blonde [1966]. I had heard Highway 61 Revisited [1965]. A friend of mine had that. But I actually bought Blonde on Blonde. That’s where I really got into Bob. And I started to really dig his thing”.
As much as Petty didn’t ever set out to become Dylan 2.0, he did concede, “He influenced my songwriting, of course. He influenced everybody’s songwriting.”
Explaining further, Petty added, “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 realised you could write about other things.”
With that analysis, Petty is absolutely correct. There is an approach to songwriting that existed pre and post-Dylan which look nothing alike. Even if an artist didn’t listen to his records on repeat, subconsciously, his influence will still have crept in.
In 1978, 13 years after ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ burst into his life, Petty finally was in the same room as Dylan, who he watched in Los Angeles. Much to his surprise, he was given a shout-out during the show, which was the moment he finally realised he’d made it, recalling, “There was applause. And that was the first time it really hit me that people knew who we were. Because I’d only made two records then.”
The night became even more surreal when “a guy came up to us where we were sitting in our seats, and said ‘Bob would like you to come backstage.'” While it was only “a brief conversation” which was “nothing of any substance”, it was enough for Petty, who proudly added, “But I had met Bob”.
That encounter was the start of a special relationship between the pair that lasted until Petty departed the world in 2017.
Following the heartbreaking news, Dylan said of his late friend, “It’s shocking, crushing news. I thought the world of Tom. He was a great performer, full of the light, a friend, and I’ll never forget him.” He then went a step further by covering ‘Learning To Fly’ as a tribute at his first concert following Petty’s death.
Little did Petty know when he first heard ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ how wildly his life, not just his songwriting, would be changed forever by the voice on the radio.
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