Have travel, Wilburys

If respectable, middle-aged rock ‘n’ roll is suddenly enjoying a second childhood, then the Traveling Wilburys are the superstar enfants terrible of the back-to-basics movement, major artists and elder statesmen who’ve joined forces to collectively cast off the onus of artistic sobriety.
And proud of it, man.
“There’s nothing worse than a serious pop singer,” says Tom Petty, prompting laughter from his fellow bandmates at the table, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne — all Wilburys and each one a convicted Ex-Serious Pop Singer in his own right.
Fans who first heard that these three were getting together with fellow rock legends Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison in 1988 to record an alb um might have expected some sort of timely summit from these beacons of several generations. Instead, the Wilburys took the only logical approach that important talents can take in collaboration: serious slumming. A classic of deadpan humor and sly nods to pop tradition, it was more of a barroom battle of the bon mots than a weighty meeting of the minds.

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On The Road With Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: If It’s Monday, This Must Be Miami

By Tom Petty and Steve Hochman
Rolling Stone #562 — October 5, 1989

The first time Tom Petty went on tour, he and his teen band drove from Gainesville, Florida, to Sarasota in a van and spent the night in two rooms at a Holiday Inn. Now when Petty and the Heartbreakers — guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Howie Epstein — take to the road, they do so for months on end, rolling in three luxury buses (one for Petty, his wife, Jane, and their two daughters, one for the band and one for the crew), with four semis for equipment. The accommodations are first-class. Every detail is watched by minions schooled in the ways of modern touring.
Rolling Stone sent photographer Aaron Rapoport to chronicle the opening days of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ first tour in two years and asked Petty and reporter Steve Hochman to keep diaries of the proceedings. As Petty’s opening entry shows, at the start of the nine-week tour, which was to hit forty-four American cities, he was having a little trouble getting in the right frame of mind.

June 29th: Crescent Beach, Florida (Tom Petty): I came here two days ago with Jane and my two girls — Adria, who’s fourteen, and Kim, who’s seven. We’re in our rented place on this fairly deserted stretch of intoxicating white-sand beach in north Florida. I left L.A. after cutting rehearsal a week short. “We know these songs,” said Howie. “Go rest,” said everyone who’s had to deal with me lately. So I’m here resting, I guess. I just walk miles up and down the beach.
Stan lives near here sometimes and might even be here now. The rest of the Heartbreakers will drift down to Miami over the next few days for our first sound check on July 4th and our first show in two years on the fifth. The band has a modest wager that Howie will arrive two hours before we go on, as he is finishing production on Carlene Carter’s LP — the last HB to be free of outside endeavors.
I had a week here last summer, the only week off since we finished our tour with Bob Dylan in ’87. Since then I met some new friends, recorded Full Moon Fever with Jeff Lynne, wrote and sang some tracks on Roy Orbison’s LP, sang on Joni Mitchell’s record, made the Traveling Wilburys LP, played and sang on a couple Randy Newman cuts and, along with Jeff Lynne, wrote and recorded (at Mike Campbell’s) a song for Del Shannon. Oh, we also played on this wild track for Jim Horn. Maybe I should just say, “I’ve been in the studio for a couple of years.”
So have the Heartbreakers been busy? Yes. Benmont with Elvis Costello, Roy O., U2 and who knows how many others. Stan with Don Henley and Lord knows what else. Mike with me on Full Moon Fever, on his own writing and playing with Don Henley and Stevie Nicks and also playing with Warren Zevon, Paul Carrack, and oh, yeah, he did those sessions for Del Shannon with Jeff and me and some more of Del’s as producer. And he produced four tracks on Roy’s Mystery Girl, then somehow found the time to play on those Randy Newman and Jim Horn tracks, too.
Our tour begins in seven days. It’s late. I guess I should rest.

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Rolling Stone #276 — October 19, 1978

Petty’s antipunk reputation also earned him an early confrontation with Johnny Rotten. “We were walking into our hotel lobby in England,” remembers Petty. “I hear this snotty voice saying, ‘Oh, it’s the American pop star Tom Petty.’ I ignore it, check into the hotel, and Stan and I start walking toward the elevator. We hear the same voice, kind of whining, ‘There the hippies go. Bye-bye Tom.’ At this point, Stan wheels around and starts heading for whoever it is. He wants to kill.
“Well, it’s Johnny Rotten, surrounded by French journalists. Stan has to be restrained. I went over there and said, ‘Who the fuck are you talking to?’ Rotten immediately goes into his wounded-punk act, says nothing. There ain’t no Robin Hoods in rock, man. All that punk shit was just a little too trendy.”

Special thanks to the wonderful Sharon for this 1994 article from Mojo Magazine!

INTO THE GREAT WIDE OPEN

Redneck and hippy culture struggled for supremacy on the remote north Florida border. So Tom Petty headed west to The Promised Land, and became the sharpest surveyor of the Californian dream as it melted into post-goldrush despair.

 By Bill Flanagan

 To unravel the contradictions that make up Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, you need to know that their hometown of Gainesville is in northern Florida, up near Georgia, and is very much part of Dixie. It is nothing like southern Florida, down near Miami, which is culturally Caribbean. Surrounded by farm country and southern accents, Tom Petty might as well have grown up in Alabama. 

When Petty was becoming a musician, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, redneck ways were battling hippy culture for the soul of southern youth. For all the obvious contempt between Ku Kluxers and draft dodgers, there was in the middle a vast population who might not agree on the relative merits of Merle Haggard and The Rolling Stones, but who could share a common sympathy for gettin’ wrecked, skippin’ school, and chasin’ girls. Eventually that common ground spawned Southern Rock up in Georgia and Country Rock out in Hollywood. Teenage Tom Petty got beat up for having long hair, played 

Beatles songs in Gainesville cover bands and studied the whole social/musical evolution going on around him with considerably more interest than he spent on his high school work.

Stan Lynch, the Heartbreakers drummer, once said that Petty was in many respects a redneck “in a real good way”. Lynch meant that Petty is tenacious, straight-ahead, impatient with fools and able to fight to the death for a cause he believes in. Petty also has in him a whole lot of hippy, not just in his green politics or relaxed attitude toward convention, but in his taste for musical experimentation. Most people think of Petty as a mainstream American rock and roller in the Dylan/Springsteen tradition. Which he is,
but he’s also made forays into psychedelia (for example, Don’t Come Around Here No More), hard rock (Let Me Up, I’ve Had Enough), big ballads with horns (Best Of Everything), tons of short, melodic British Invasion-style numbers (Breakdown could be The Animals, Listen To Her Heart could be The Searchers), side trips into country (Trailer) and R&B (Cry To Me), and some tracks that are just so nutty that they sound like Petty made them up in his sleep (Wasted Life).

Once, talking about being lumped in with Springsteen, Mellencamp and Seger in rock critic shorthand, Petty said, “I think that I’m a little more - dare I say - eccentric than those guys. I know all those people quite well and I think that they’re terrific … I was into that straight rock thing for a long time. However I don’t think that’s the whole ball if wax… I think there’s more to it than that.”

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