Members / Tom Petty

Tom Petty: Charlie T. Wilbury Jr., the Kid Brother Who Belonged There Anyway

Wilbury aliases: Charlie T. Wilbury Jr. (Vol. 1, 1988), Muddy Wilbury (Vol. 3, 1990) Role: Acoustic guitar, bass, lead and backing vocals

Every family needs a youngest sibling, and in the fictional Wilbury clan, that job fell to Tom Petty, younger than George Harrison by seven years and younger than Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison by even more, and, at the time, still the one member of the group with his commercial peak arguably ahead of him rather than behind. He got into the band, characteristically, through the most unglamorous route imaginable: George Harrison left a guitar at his house and came back to get it.

Backing Dylan, Meeting Harrison

Petty arrived at the Wilburys with more direct connective tissue to the group than his "kid brother" reputation suggests. Throughout 1986 and 1987, Petty and the Heartbreakers had spent nearly two years as Bob Dylan's touring backing band, including a European leg where Harrison and Jeff Lynne came out to watch them play on multiple occasions. That's where the Harrison-Petty friendship actually took root: over a shared, slightly nerdy love of 1950s rock and roll, the kind of music both men had grown up idolizing rather than inventing. By the time Harrison showed up at Petty's Los Angeles house in early 1988 to retrieve a stray guitar, the two were already close enough that inviting him to a recording session felt less like a big ask and more like an obvious one.

Once in the room, Petty slotted in immediately, contributing to what would become "Handle With Care" alongside a legendarily nervy cast of songwriting royalty. He and Harrison drove out to Anaheim's Celebrity Theatre that same week to see Roy Orbison perform, and recruited him for the band backstage. Petty later described the two of them elbowing each other with excitement throughout Orbison's set, delighted that "he's in our band, too."

The Kid Who Wasn't Full of It

Petty's actual musical footprint on Vol. 1 is easy to underrate next to three of the most decorated songwriters in American music, but he wrote "Last Night" and "Margarita" (again, with the whole band chipping in lyrics, per the group's usual method) and sang lead across several tracks with the same unfussy, plainspoken warmth that had defined a decade of Heartbreakers records. What he brought that's harder to quantify was temperament: by every account, Petty was the one Wilbury who never postured, never performed being a legend, and made the whole enterprise feel less like a summit meeting and more like a band. One account of the sessions notes, with some affection, that Harrison was drawn to Petty specifically because he "wasn't full of shit," a rare quality, apparently, in a room with this much combined Grammy weight.

That plain-spokenness cut both ways. Petty was famously candid about his own place in the pecking order. Asked years later who the real "alpha Wilbury" had been, he didn't hesitate to hand the crown to Harrison: "Definitely George. It was his idea, his vision." It's the kind of answer that costs a lesser ego nothing, and a bigger one quite a lot. Petty, by 1988, had nothing left to prove either, and it shows in how easily he gave the credit away.

Full Moon Fever: The Unofficial Third Wilbury

The Wilburys sessions didn't end when the album wrapped. They simply migrated. Jeff Lynne was already producing Petty's debut solo album, Full Moon Fever, in parallel with the Wilburys work, and the two records share enough DNA that fans have long (semi-jokingly) called Full Moon Fever the unofficial second Wilburys album. Harrison shows up on it too, most memorably during the making of "I Won't Back Down," where he stopped a take cold on an early draft lyric and told Petty flatly there had to be something better. Petty rewrote it on the spot, and the replacement is the line every classic-rock station in America has played approximately one million times since.

Petty later called Lynne "such a genius in the studio... he made things that had been really difficult seem so easy," crediting him with teaching him "a lot about singing, a lot about harmony, a lot about arranging" during a period when Petty, by his own account, had never really worked with an outside collaborator before. The Petty-Lynne partnership would outlast the Wilburys themselves by decades, running through 1991's Into the Great Wide Open and all the way to Petty's final solo album, 2006's Highway Companion.

Vol. 3, and Life After the Wilburys

Petty's role only grew on Vol. 3, recorded in 1990 without Orbison, where he and Lynne effectively co-steered a rowdier, more polished record, audible in the fact that the album sounds, at points, closer to a Heartbreakers session than a folk-rock jam. Petty took the lead vocal on "Wilbury Twist," the band's gleefully ridiculous farewell single, instructing the entire English-speaking world, several non-English-speaking countries besides, to put a hand on their head and a foot in the air. Nobody has ever fully explained why this was the note the Wilburys chose to end on. It remains, somehow, completely in character.

After 1991, Petty returned full-time to the Heartbreakers and went on to have arguably his most successful commercial decade, but he never stopped speaking about his years as a Wilbury with genuine, uncomplicated warmth, rare for a musician discussing any past collaboration, let alone one that involved four separate legends' worth of ego in a single room. Of Harrison specifically, Petty said: "He was the funniest guy I ever met... a wise person. He really wanted to know the meaning of it all. But at the same time, he was really light-hearted and tremendous fun." He added, simply, "there's really not a day that I don't think about him."

Tom Petty died of an accidental drug overdose on October 2, 2017, following cardiac arrest, at age 66. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002 as the frontman of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Of the original five Wilburys, only Dylan and Lynne remain.

Want to hear where Petty's solo catalog stands next to the Wilburys work? Browse our Tom Petty solo essentials guide, or head back to the full band history to see how the guitar-retrieval mission started it all.