(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 11 February 2026 22:48, UK
Tom Petty didn’t get into the music business with stars in his eyes.
The thought of playing to millions of people would have been enticing for any kid who picked up a guitar for the first time, but Petty was far more interested in making music with his friends than focusing on fame and money half the time. He certainly had his heroes that he looked up to when he first got started, but after a while, he didn’t need to worry about seeking out his idols. If anything, his idols came to him half the time.
That said, it’s not like Petty didn’t have a fair bit of luck on his side when starting his career. Although Mudcrutch was never meant to go the distance, having the chance to live with Leon Russell and learn the mechanics of writing songs was like going to rock and roll boot camp before he started to put together the idea of the Heartbreakers. And even when he had his first smashes on the radio, it’s not like he ever took his famous friends for granted.
All the way back on his debut record, Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn was playing bass on a few tracks, and in between working on his later records in the 1980s, he still found time to write a few tunes with Roger McGuinn and help produce Del Shannon’s comeback record. That last one may have ended with Petty stealing Shannon’s bassist, but it’s not like there were any major hard feelings or anything.
Because, really, Petty’s entire appeal was that he wasn’t full of shit. Any major superstar can have those moments where they feel larger than life, but even at his peak, Petty was always an average rock and roll dude, proud to write another great tune whenever he walked into the studio. He was the kind of guy that you could sit down and have a beer with, and that’s what made him so appealing to people like George Harrison when he got together with the Traveling Wilburys.
The Wilburys might have had enough star power to put any other rock and roll band to shame, but they weren’t looking to flaunt their egos, either. If anything, Harrison wanted to downplay his ego every single time he got onstage, and even if there were moments where he could do the heavy listing on tunes like ‘Handle With Care’, it made sense to throw a song to Petty, Bob Dylan, or Roy Orbison to see where they could take it when they stepped up to the microphone.
While Petty was looked at as the new kid, he figured that this was one of the only chances that he had to work with legends like that when working on tunes like ‘End of the Line’, saying, “We were all in a room singing ‘It’s all right…’, and George had the ending of the line ‘We’re going to the end of the line’. He had that much together on that song. I don’t remember it all. But it was quite an experience. We probably will never see anything again like that.”
And it’s not like many supergroups have come out of the woodwork to take their place, either. There have been plenty of artists who have come together to work on albums for the hell of it, but when listening to every other supergroup that came out after the Wilburys, everyone from Velvet Revolver to Damn Yankees felt like they were playing off a gimmick rather than actually collaborating, even if a few of them did have some decent tunes in their arsenal.
But the reason why the Wilburys worked was that they weren’t trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Harrison only wanted to have a band that he could hang out with when he wasn’t up to being a solo artist, and for all of the supergroups that have come after them, you can’t recapture the sense of fun that everyone sounds like they’re having on tracks like ‘Dirty World’ and ‘Handle With Care’.