(Credits: Songwriters Hall of Fame)
Thu 4 December 2025 17:00, UK
For Tom Petty, all rock and roll music meant more than a couple of catchy tunes.
He never claimed to be a god among men who wrote the best tunes of all time, but he knew that what both he and his heroes did had some sort of magic behind it that could help people through their darkest times. And since Petty had his own fair share of hardship before he even touched a guitar, the right musicians had the power to completely turn his world around.
Because when looking at Petty’s upbringing, it’s not like he was exactly encouraged to play guitar the minute that he started performing. His father wanted nothing to do with his music from the very beginning, and while his mother supported him a lot more, the heartland rocker remembered getting home from his first paying gig and his mother being convinced that he had stolen the money at the end of the night.
But even if he got over a lot of his personal family drama, there was practically an Olympic run of bullshit waiting for him when he entered the industry. The lawsuit that he had to go through during the Damn the Torpedoes sessions would have weighed heavy on anyone’s mind, but it takes a special kind of artist to go through that headache as well as witnessing his house burn down and be able to pick themselves up and move on.
When you’re in those situations, though, you tend to find out who your friends are, and Petty had a lot of good company by the time he got off the road. He had already been on the road with Bob Dylan and had become good friends with everyone from Del Shannon to Roger McGuinn, but when George Harrison started to become a regular backstage, he knew that he had a friend for life.
Though Harrison was always a bit lenient about getting back into the limelight in the 1980s, Petty was right up his alley. In a world that was full of the most superficial rockstars of all time, Petty still seemed to have some integrity to his writing, and after visiting England and weathering through a hurricane with Harrison, Petty felt that he came out on the other side as a completely different person.
The Traveling Wilburys were all circling around each other, but after working with Harrison and becoming friends, Petty said that he could finally let go of a lot of those pent-up emotions, saying, “George came along, and we just got so close; it was like we had known each other in some other life or something. We were pals within minutes of meeting each other. I remember him saying to me a couple of days after we’d known each other – he’s just hugging me, holding me, and saying, ‘Tommy, you’re in my life now whether you like it or not.’ It was like I’d been sent the very person I needed. He healed a lot of wounds.”
And it also helps that his career started skyrocketing all over again around this time. Hanging out with a Beatle for a while is bound to help someone’s songwriting, but after the uninspiring sessions he was having with the Heartbreakers at the end of the 1980s, joining the Wilburys and going on to make Full Moon Fever, Into the Great Wide Open, and Wildflowers in succession was proof that Harrison’s impact was about more than simply being a good friend.
But until the day he died, that’s all that Petty wanted to see Harrison as. Everyone would have been absolutely knocked out at the fact that they were talking to one of The Beatles, but Petty found out pretty quickly that if you treated him the same way as one of his friends, he would get to know the real version of the guitarist that most people didn’t get to see.
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