My band, the Del Fuegos, finished our third album. There was talk at the time about what that third record could do for us if we didn’t fuck things up. We started our touring in Europe. We’d already been invited to open for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on the US leg of their upcoming tour supporting Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough). The idea was that we’d do Europe, build momentum, and return to do the States. It was a good plan, and it would have made a lot more sense … if our record made sense. Instead, the reports started trickling in while we were overseas. Radio wasn’t playing it. Our managers tried to sprinkle good news in with the bad, but there wasn’t a lot to work with. Simultaneously, the Heartbreakers were facing their own disappointments: weak album sales were translating into weak ticket sales. Someone had an idea: put another band on the US tour and call it the “Rock and Roll Caravan.” And make sure that third band had something good going on.
The “caravan” meant we were no longer opening for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers—we’d be opening for the Georgia Satellites, a rock-and-roll band that had just found their way to the top of the pop charts with “Keep Your Hands to Yourself.” A few months prior, the Satellites had opened some shows for us. Reversals of that kind didn’t always go down easily in the digestive tracts of young bands. But the Satellites had made a record that was everything ours wasn’t. It was pure rock and roll. Onstage, they were even better. Here was a band that did what so many others failed to do: they recognized that sometimes the best innovation is to play straight-ahead rock and roll very, very well. They plugged into vintage Marshalls, avoided fussy gadgets. And they were having the time of their lives. They were doing what they did far better than we were doing what we did. We weren’t even entirely sure what it was we did.
The attractive young women on the Caravan tour, the ones experienced enough to make their way into an arena’s backstage, were generally asking directions to the Georgia Satellites’ dressing room. Knowing that we’d be facing a small fleet of tour buses at Caravan venues, the Del Fuegos didn’t even have the strength to downsize. We, too, arrived by tour bus, losing some hundred thousand dollars in order to be on tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for the summer. By that time, we were neither the accountant’s nor our own best friends. Every night, we had to watch not one but two rock-and-roll bands go up there and do it right. Not that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were having the kind of fun the Satellites were having.
Only days before the Caravan tour, someone burned down the Pettys’ Encino home. Even today, when Tom describes getting out of the house, making sure his family was okay, grabbing what he could, he recalls the scene with the lingering shock of a man who has told a story many times but still doesn’t fully understand it. The fire was quickly classified as arson. The family stood on the street in Encino, the sun just up, as the firemen went to work. But the media got there before the fire trucks. Annie Lennox, a neighbor at the time and a friend, went out and bought clothes for the Pettys, bringing them to the hotel that would be the family’s home for the next few days, before the Rock and Roll Caravan tour would begin.
The Pettys went on the tour as a family. Or something like a family. The girls scattered into the backstage areas, hotel rooms, and tour buses. Mike Campbell also brought his kids for some of the tour, so Adria Petty had a companion in Brie Campbell, but she also spent significant amounts of time poking around the less-than-child-friendly environments of the opening bands. She had a foot in both worlds. On one evening early in the tour, Adria brought Brie into our dressing room, and only moments later Mike Campbell was in the doorway, asking what in God’s name his young daughter was doing in our dressing room.
Jane Petty was not as much of a fixture backstage as Adria. I remember her being welcoming, somewhat aloof, but also frequently absent. There was an uneasiness to the tour that I wasn’t able to fully understand. How much was my own discomfort, I don’t know. Just prior to the tour, I started dating a woman who had recently been involved with Benmont Tench. It wasn’t the kind of move that members of opening bands are encouraged to make. But I was young, and I think it gave people something to laugh about for a few moments before they forgot about it. And Benmont may have viewed the whole thing as me helping him move things along. I don’t know. There was music, too. I watched the Heartbreakers every night.
By the final week, I was more than ready for the tour to be over and done. At the last show, the Heartbreakers invited all of the bands to join them onstage, with Roger McGuinn also a part of it. I was as uncomfortable as I would ever be playing music in public. I remember Mike Campbell putting his arm around me as we played, and he seemed surprisingly large, as though his body were three times the size of my own. It was a psychological effect—I’d been mistaken for an adult, mistaken for a musician, and I wanted it all to end before the truth was uncovered.
With the Caravan tour finished, the Heartbreakers went back out with Dylan, for their final adventure as his band. The Pettys rented Charo’s house in Beverly Hills, where their marriage would continue its descent into disconnection. Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) settled in as the unqualified low point in sales for the Heartbreakers.
The following December, I was invited to the Pettys’ Christmas party. It was one of the last times I’d see Tom for many years. As a Christmas gift, he gave me a Beatles fan magazine from 1965. It was Los Angeles, so it was no surprise that there were some celebrated faces milling about. When George Harrison came in, he avoided the main room and went into Petty’s office, but a buzz still went through the place. A Beatle. I felt compelled to mention to Jane Petty that the gift they’d given me would look nice with Harrison’s signature on the front of it. “Of course it would!” she told me, taking me by the arm and leading me down a hallway, where she opened a door and all but pushed me in, with a very brief mention to the occupants of the room that I had “something impending I needed to address.”
George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, and Mike Campbell were in the middle of playing a song, cut off by my entrance. Jane was gone, so fast it must have appeared that I had barged into the small office space of my own accord. Harrison, always ready to entertain his friends, stopped what he was playing and said, “Look, it’s Brian Jones, back from the dead!” He then proceeded to play another song, about a dandy, which had everyone laughing, except for the very uncomfortable fan holding a Beatles magazine from 1965. When it was over, Harrison took a marker and signed the cover, “To Warren of something impending,” adding the signatures of every Beatle. Petty, perhaps seeing that I was stunned, quietly let me know that I was welcome to stay, that I could hang out in the office with his friends. If I wanted to. I did. But I didn’t. I left as abruptly as I’d come. When I later heard about the Traveling Wilburys, I understood that I had been witness to a moment, surely one of many, but a moment nonetheless. And it was clear in that office that Petty seemed as close to comfortable and as close to happy as I would ever see him.