(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Sun 8 March 2026 20:30, UK
Any Traveling Wilburys song would have been like sacred ground for any of the musicians involved.
There was no reason for them to come together in the first place, but even if they made the greatest songs that they could together, there was never a chance that Bob Dylan was suddenly going to stand in for Roy Orbison by throwing in a song like ‘Handle With Care’ into his live set. But since he was the new kid in town when he first joined the band, the least Tom Petty could do was carry on the memory of the great times that he had with his friends whenever he was on tour.
Because, really, Petty’s attitude seemed to fit the Wilburys so well before he had even started writing with them. George Harrison had taken a liking to him ever since he first met him, and when the former Beatle started forming the idea of having a band with him and Jeff Lynne’s favourite people, Petty seemed to be the perfect person to sit in on bass while surrounded by the greatest songwriters in the world.
If anything, Petty had a first-class seat to watch some of his favourite idols write music for the first time. No one was normally invited into the creative process like this, but all they needed was a couple of chords and a half-decent melody for people to start throwing out words and getting just the right turn of phrase for a song like ‘Dirty World’ or ‘Last Nite’. But even in a band that tight, Petty did gravitate towards what Dylan was doing some of the time.
After all, Petty had already begun working with Dylan with the rest of the Heartbreakers, and while Mike Campbell was on hand to work on some of the production, Petty was the perfect partner that Dylan needed to finish off ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’. The British members of the band didn’t exactly understand the kind of Americanisms that they were talking about, but the outlaw take on a Bruce Springsteen song seemed to fit like a glove in Dylan’s mind.
But for a while, Petty seemed to leave the Wilburys as a happy memory for the next few years of his career. He was already making some of the greatest songs that he ever made on Wildflowers, and despite being on hand to play tunes like ‘Handle With Care’ during the Concert for George, Petty figured that ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ was the best way to incorporate his “other” band into his own setlist.
It took a lot of time for him to feel comfortable with it, but when he started playing a few rarities live, he figured that now was as good a time as any to throw in some of his friends’ songs, saying, “That was one [of the Traveling Wilburys] songs I had a hand in writing with Bob [Dylan]. We’ve just never done it. No one has ever done it. So I just thought, ‘This would be interesting to try.’ We played it and it came off entirely different, but kind of cool. We’re really enjoying playing that one.”
Out of all the songs in the Wilburys repertoire, though, ‘Tweeter’ is probably the most applicable to the Heartbreakers’ brand of rock and roll. All of them knew Americana music like the back of their hands, so if they could work the magic on Dylan’s tour and even stood side by side next to Johnny Cash, it was no problem for them to transpose a song about a couple of outlaws into their set on the rare occasion.
Petty still had time to throw in ‘Tweeter’ every now and again during his final shows, but it was never about deliberately matching what The Wilbruys had done. That kind of chemistry is something that happens once in a lifetime, and the least that the Heartbreakers could do was make something that did Harrison, Dylan, and Orbison proud.