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(Credit: Alamy)
Any band that has been around long enough will feel more like a brotherhood than a bunch of musicians. After spending a lot of time on the road, in hotel rooms, and in the studio, most groups tend to have some unspoken language between each other before they even get together to play music half the time. Tom Petty was more than happy to consider the Heartbreakers his family, but there was only one female artist that he would ever call a Heartbreaker in spirit.
Looking through the group’s history, Petty never envisioned the Heartbreakers as a backing band for him with a bunch of hired guns. Everyone was equally important to make the song better, and without Benmont Tench on keyboards and Mike Campbell playing guitar, the whole thing might never have happened after the release of ‘American Girl’.
Around the same time Petty cut his teeth, though, the singer-songwriter scene was also getting flooded with newer acts. He had a mentor in Leon Russell in his early days, but everyone from Joni Mitchell to Don Henley had started making a name for themselves as prospective leaders of what the next form of American music would look like as well.
Then again, no one really planned the next phase of American rock to come from a longstanding British blues band, either. Because after Fleetwood Mac reached the end of the line with Bob Welch, bringing in Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham was exactly what they needed to see chart success. While they lived the blues dealing with the breakup of their partners, Rumours became one of the best-selling albums for a damn good reason, especially with Nicks’s beautiful tracks like ‘Dreams’.
After getting disinterested in her own band during Tusk, Nicks saw herself as a potential Heartbreaker, saying that she would have gladly gone and joined the group had she had the opportunity. While Nicks would provide some backing vocals on the album Hard Promises, it wasn’t until ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ that she actually had the same Heartbreakers muscle behind her own music.
Although Petty always was a bit coy about what Nicks’s role in the group was, she remembered being given a gift by the heartland rocker that solidified her status, saying, “Tom made me a little platinum sheriff’s badge that had 24-karat gold and diamonds across the top and said ‘To Our Honorary Heartbreaker, Stevie Nicks.’ On the back, it says ‘To the Only Girl in Our Band.’ I keep it on my black velvet top hat. It goes with me everywhere.”
Then again, Nicks didn’t need to be defined by her connection to Petty to kick ass on her own. Though she would still lend a hand to Petty’s recordings when she had a chance, records like The Other Side of the Mirror gave her the kind of credibility that separated her from her old band and her friends equally.
Still, the lost opportunity of never getting a Petty and Nicks duet album is one of the few tragedies in rock and roll. Because even if they were always adjacent to each other soundwise, no one could deny that Petty and Nicks were kindred spirits beyond the occasional catchy tune.
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