(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 7 April 2026 19:30, UK
Tom Petty wasn’t going to apologise for being a student of rock and roll.
As much as people liked to lump him into the same new wave groups that brought everyone acts like Blondie and Elvis Costello, Petty was a rock and roller to the core, and he wasn’t afraid to wear his influences from the Byrds or The Beatles on his sleeve whenever he came out with a new song. It was all in service of making the best songs that he knew how, but he could be humbled when he worked with some of the finest songwriters of his generation later down the line.
But, really, Petty was one of the few artists that could claim to have worked with some of his biggest heroes well before he passed away. The fact that anyone would have seen something in him when asking him to join the Traveling Wilburys was already a dream come true, and even when he started to rub elbows with people like George Harrison and Bob Dylan, he never saw it as him being inexperienced. They were his friends, and he could afford to learn a thing or two from watching them work.
Then again, it’s hard to really get a read on what Dylan was all about throughout his career. Harrison was always more than willing to tell people what he thought whenever he started working, but even though Dylan could be direct as well, you never knew which version of him you would be dealing with whenever working on some of his records. He was a lyrical chameleon in the same way David Bowie was a musical one, but Petty thought that was only a good thing when he first began working with him.
After all, the Heartbreakers needed a bit of a kick in the ass when they started becoming Dylan’s backing band, and part of the appeal was not knowing what the hell was coming next on any show. Dylan was used to shuffling things around every single time he made a new record, and if he felt that he wanted to play the tune in a different key or throw in some strange verses no one had heard, Petty and his band would be right there to support him.
That sounds absolutely exhausting from a musical perspective, but it was worth it for Petty so that he could pick Dylan’s mind, saying, “He’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma. It’s hard to talk about Bob Dylan, cause I just don’t have the answers. It’s his vision. He’s got one of the great minds of the 20th century. One of the true geniuses. There aren’t many geniuses.” And if Petty couldn’t figure him out, how the hell were any of us supposed to?
There’s no way around Dylan’s songs whenever he sings, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all. Some of the best tunes that he ever wrote were all about telling stories that gave people lessons, but when he started to switch up his styles, he never let anyone inside for very long. Blood on the Tracks is probably the closest, but even then, you can see him desperately trying to withhold different parts of his life that he didn’t want anyone to know about following his divorce.
If anything, that kind of privacy has a lot to do with why Petty’s songs are so great. Everyone can see themselves in tunes like ‘I Won’t Back Down’ or ‘American Girl’, but Petty didn’t want his music to become too much of a reflection of him. He liked to not question what made his songs so great, and even if he did try to dissect everything with a fine-toothed comb, maybe the magic would have gone away.
And given the fact that Dylan is still releasing songs that are among some of the finest he’s ever made, it definitely pays to leave a lot to the imagination whenever you make a record. The audience might be waiting to hear the gory details on every one of those songs, but Dylan was the master of giving his audience what they didn’t know they wanted every time he put out an album.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.