Credit: Far Out / Ирина Лепнёва
There are probably millions of rock and roll fans who are wondering how the hell they could have the luck that Tom Petty did.
The heartland rocker was more than happy to play music to anyone within earshot whenever he performed, but the fact that he was beloved by nearly all of his heroes is all anyone can ask for when they are first putting together a handful of chords in their garage. Petty was ready to do whatever he could to keep his streak going, but along the way, he found some friends that he wouldn’t have traded for the world.
But being in a group like the Heartbreakers was already like being in one big family after a while. It was like second nature whenever the band started working together on albums like Wildflowers, and even if they were making some of the best music that Petty could think of on one album, it wasn’t out of the question for them to play for hours on end just for the hell of it whenever they booked their stint at the Fillmore.
That kind of brotherhood can’t really be broken even after Petty passed away, but a lot of it was honed when they worked with people like Bob Dylan for the first time. Dylan wasn’t one to suffer fools whenever he made one of his records, and the Heartbreakers were more than willing to do whatever they could to get the right sound for any one of his shows, whether that meant trying a song they had never heard before or maybe throwing in a few covers that they were super rusty on.
Petty wasn’t afraid to fail spectacularly if it meant learning from the experience, but that kind of bravery was enough to endear him to every member of the Traveling Wilburys when they started. The supergroup did mean that the Heartbreakers had to be paused for a little while, but Petty wasn’t about to pass up the chance of working with George Harrison and Roy Orbison in a band of friends.
Because even if they made two records together, you’d hardly find any of them having a bad thing to say about the other. They were all living the dream of playing music with their friends, and even if Petty was the new kid in town to a certain degree, he wasn’t about to take a single second for granted whenever he picked up his bass to play on tunes like ‘Handle With Care’ and ‘End of the Line’.
These were his new friends, and there came a point where Petty almost had to pinch himself for having people that cared about him that much, saying, “It was George’s dream. And I’m just glad it got to come true for him. We were proud being Wilburys, and it was a lot of fun, but the greatest thing to me was there were some really long-lasting friendships made, and that’s a kind of gift that you just don’t get all the time.”
Further reading: From The Vault
None of their records was meant to be the most complicated things in the world, but that was precisely the point. The idea of making an “experimental” Wilburys album would have tainted the entire thing, and getting a bunch of tunes together that everyone liked to play usually made a lot more sense than worrying about what was popular at the time or trying to figure out which songs were cut out to be singles.
That’s simply not how the Wilburys thought, and even if they could get on the radio through sheer star power alone, it helps that the music sounded absolutely perfect whenever they harmonised together. Then again, when you have musical harmonies that reflect the friendship of everyone in the band, it’s like hearing all of them grinning up their sleeves that they could hang out together.
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