Benmont Tench surprised many of his fans earlier this year when he recorded his first proper solo album on Blue Note Records, You Should Be So Lucky, a collection of songs that finds this bonafide session giant showing off his abilities to lead his own charge as deftly as he has supported some of the greatest names in rock from Bob Dylan to Elvis Costello to Johnny Cash to The Dixie Chicks.
What’s more is that this past summer saw him returning to the keyboard stool once again with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers for the incredible Hypnotic Eye, the band’s 13th studio LP and arguably their finest work since 1999’s Echo. And that’s not to mention his loaded dance card of session work logged for 2014, appearing on Blake Mills’ solo debut Heigh Ho, Neil Diamond’s latest Melody Road, the new Jackson Browne record Standing in the Breach and that killer Ryan Adams eponymous title. Having just come off a whirlwind outdoor tour that wrapped in October, Tench took some time out to speak with Jambands.
Some of the topics of conversation might not be what you’d expect from a player of this caliber. But that is what makes this interview so unique in the gracefulness and insight by which Tench tackles such non-linear topics as the difference between Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers and Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers, creating AOR in the new wave and punk rock era, sitting in with the Man in Black, the upcoming 20th anniversary of Wildflowers, Top 40 radio, hanging out with Jenny Lewis and the hidden treasures of the Heartbreakers’ back catalog. For more on his solo album, read his interview with site editor Dean Budnick which originally ran in the pages of Relix and recently posted online.
While you’ve done so much this year, it’s fun looking back seeing you play on so many different albums. All the session work you have done for Rick Rubin…
You learn a lot. You work with a good producer, you learn a lot, you know.
Do you have any fun stories about the sessions for Johnny Cash’s Unchained, where he was backed by the full lineup of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers?
I don’t know if the word is fun, but it was just staggering to be in a room with Johnny Cash, playing all those songs with them, with the Heartbreakers. It was just staggering. Every day you go into work, you go, are you kidding me? And Carl [Perkins] came down for a few days. We had Carl and June and John. It was wild. And the thing is, you always try to do the best, no matter what you’re doing. You’re playing music and you’re not trying to do your best at all times, then it shouldn’t be your chosen field. We really tried to step up for Johnny Cash, even above and beyond the usual call.
You were on most of the other Rubin-produced Cash albums, yes?
I’m on all the Johnny Cash albums Rick did, except for the purely solo one.
That first one, American Recordings, celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. In fact, Wildflowers is 20 years old as of November 1. Unlike Full Moon Fever, you play a significant role on Petty’s second solo album. Was Wildflowers essentially a Heartbreakers album?
De facto it’s a Heartbreakers’ record. I suppose Tom, maybe his mindset, what he was aiming at may have made him call it a solo record, but at the end of the day we all wound up on it expect for Stan [Lynch], and instead of Stan it was [Steve] Ferrone. It doesn’t matter whether you call it a solo record or not. That’s not important.
That’s my favorite era of the Heartbreakers. Wildflowers,_ She’s the One_, Echo ... I love the stuff you guys were doing during that timeframe. It was such a cool, warm sound.
Rick’s really, really good. I’m partial to various eras of Heartbreakers, partial to the first four records. And I do like the Wildflowers record quite a bit, I think it was one of the best ones that we did.
*_Southern Accents_ was a pretty significant album for you guys. That’s coming up on its 30th anniversary in 2015. Are you guys going to commemorate it?
It’d be nice…I don’t think it’s gonna happen, but it’d be nice to see it compiled with all the songs that were recorded for it. It was much more of a unified theme, but you throw Dave Stewart in and everything goes in a curious direction. Not in a bad way, just a curious direction.
The videos from those records are so cool. I was a tween watching those videos. “You Got Lucky” was probably my favorite. Where was that made?
That’s out in…what part of the desert? Out in the desert somewhere three miles outside of Los Angeles. Vasquez Rocks. There’s some famous rock formation which you’ve seen in a million westerns out there.
It’s cool how you guys gave it that Tatooine/ Road Warrior vibe. I was 11 years old in ‘84, so thick into science fiction films, so seeing a video like that, I obviously gravitated toward it.
It was fun to do at the time. I don’t know how it holds up now, but it was fun to do. You could have fun with MTV for a while there.
It seems like they are coming around again these days as well.
MTV plays tons of music now. And I think there’s a VH1 contemporary thing that plays a wide variety of music. For a while it seemed like unless you turned it on at 3 AM, you wouldn’t get very many music videos on MTV and VH1. But it seems to be different now.
I don’t think since the 1980s has Top 40 radio been so creative.
It’s seems like it’s pretty widespread. There’s hope. It’s still a lot of songs that sound very constructed to me instead of just played. But there’s definitely hope. There are a lot of people that are interesting that are around, from Broken Bells to Taylor Swift, that are good at what they do. Taylor Swift is a damn good songwriter.
I think it would be cool to see her work with Rick Rubin, honestly.
I don’t know if Rick would be right for her. She’s one of those people, I’ve got my eye out to see what she does next. I got my eye out to see what Broken Bells does next, I got my eye out to see what Lorde does next.
She’s cool. It’s cool, because she is representing New Zealand as well, a country with a rich history of great rock and pop music that goes largely unrecognized by the general public. Bands like the Verlaines and the Bats and Tall Dwarfs.
As much as I love poetry and as much as I like Television, a band called the Verlaines seems right up my street.
Were you into the punk scene back when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were coming up?
There wasn’t any scene. What we were was a rock and roll band, they came up with the term new wave after we put our first record out. Well after, like a year after. I never felt we were that because I thought there was a specific groove to new wave and it was a little bit more on top and so on. We were going for The Rolling Stones…We were very consciously trying to play back, like a southern band, like a southern soul band like The Rolling Stones. The new wave stuff like Blondie was more on the edge. I love so many bands from the east and I really dearly, dearly love The New York Dolls.
Talking about Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, I know you said there was a good story about how you wound up having the same name for your bands.
Denny Cordell, our first producer, and Tom were brainstorming one night to come up with a band name. And they came to us because we had all been trying to find a good band name and had terrible results, so they came to us and said “What about Heartbreakers?” and we all thought it was a great name. I’m sure none of us knew that Johnny Thunders had a band called the Heartbreakers, too. I’m such a stickler that if I had thought that, I would raise an objection. But there wasn’t the Internet. If I had realized that…I know that a lot of people think that we just took their name.
Well, there was the New York Heartbreakers and the LA Heartbreakers.
I think they had the name before us, but as somebody said at the time in a review, they said at the time they could count five Heartbreakers in the Midwest alone. So it’s irrelevant. Nobody confused the two of us. They knew that we were the ones from the West Coast with the blond hair and they were the ones derived from the punk scene.
Were you a fan of Johnny Thunders?
Johnny Thunders was a really talented man. And I remember staying up to watch The New York Dolls, not staying up but going after we played a gig at a club, because Lord knows I stayed up ‘til dawn. But playing a club in Tampa, Florida, and going over to somebody’s house for a party afterwards, and just didn’t care about the party because the Dolls were on Midnight Special. They were astounding, just like nothing you’d ever seen.
Did you guys do any of those shows? Midnight Special? Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert ?
Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert I never cared for. His production values didn’t seem very good and his hosting style was not to my taste. But the Midnight Special was a tightly run show with a very eclectic group of artists. As I said, you’d see the New York Dolls, you’d see Todd Rundgren and you’d see us. You’d see country singers like Crystal Gayle, you’d see Waylon Jennings.
It’s such a weird time, there’s still very much a buying public, but everyone is focusing so hard on people in their twenties or younger. No one’s concentration on my generation, your generation, who still go out and buy the record or CD at the store.
It’s up to our generations to be worth concentrating on. It’s up to people of our generation to go “We love music, we’re gonna buy music” and then they’ll pay attention. But they’re trying to make a living, they’re trying to make a profit. The economy of the world is not very good. Of course they’re gonna go “We can sell billions of records to Miley fans so we’re going to concentrate on Miley” or find someone who sounds like Miley. Which is why it’s so wondrous that Lorde showed up because she doesn’t sound like anybody else.
It’s nice to see Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift and these people that young kids look up to promoting more organic means of creativity.
Well Taylor seems to be, from what I can tell, she’s doing stuff with Max Martin right now, it’s very cool but it’s not very organic. But the thing about Taylor Swift which can be construed as organic is her songs, she’s a good songwriter. However she ends up presenting it, they’re going to be good songs. The Taylor Swift songs are traditionally done in Nashville. The Miley Cyrus stuff sounds more built to me. The wonderful thing about music is there’s something for everybody. It doesn’t speak to you, or if it just annoys the shit out of you, but it’s probably speaking to somebody else. There’s something out there, guaranteed, that will speak to you, so you can go find that. Miley doesn’t speak to me remotely. But she speaks to somebody, God bless her, good luck.
I can tolerate Miley as well, it seems.
God bless anybody that can make a living doing what they want to do, so God bless her and I’m very happy for her success. But I’ve got my limits on some records.
One thing that’s really cool, you work a lot. You’ve built such a, not just as a member of the Heartbreakers and a session musician, and there’s so many kids learning about music. It’d be cool to see an upswing of working session musicians coming out of today’s youth.
It’d be good. Bands, there are so many self-contained bands these days…Dawes I got to work with a little bit. Those guys can play like nobody’s business and sing like that too and they don’t really need any help, but I was totally glad to go play on their record. And so there is a band ethos around too. Jonathan Wilson, there’s a really good band that Jonathan’s got.
Oh he’s great, too.
Everybody knows everybody in California, it’s great. We’re all supportive of each other and we’re all friends with each other. You go to Jenny Lewis’ house and you’ll see a whole array of people, and you come over to my house you’ll see a whole array of people from Jackson Browne down to the guys in Dawes sometimes, Jenny Lewis.
I always felt Rilo Kiley, both of them, Blake Sennett and Jenny, sort of stemmed from the Heartbreakers, I always thought they had that 90s era Heartbreakers sound to them, that sort of warm sound. That might just be me as a fan.
They might just stem from loving the same music that we love.
The records they made together, especially The Excecution of All Things, are really special.
Oh hell yes. You come to California now, you run into Dawes, you run into Blake Mills, you run into Ryan Adams.
Ryan Adams I’m coming around to as well.
Glyn Johns produced a record for him a couple years ago called Ashes and Fire that’s me and Norah Jones and Jeremy Stacey who played drums on my record, and a bunch of folks.
How did you come to record with Jeremy Stacey?
He lives in London, but he played with Sheryl Crow for a good ten years. He plays with Noel Gallagher now. He’s been my favorite drummer for quite a while.
Did The Heartbreakers ever play with Roxy Music?
No, but [Heartbreakers drummer] Steve Ferrone played with Bryan Ferry on some solo stuff.
I thought I had read somewhere you guys did a show together.
We used to open for The Kinks, which was really special, but I was a big Roxy Music fan from back when you could only get their first record on import.
When did you guys tour with The Kinks?
78. They were marvelous live. The whole dynamic of the band was just really, really special. They had Jim Rodford on bass and Mick Avory. They were really something.
Did you guys ever tour with The Attractions?
No, we did one show in Chicago where we split the bill. I didn’t even meet those guys then, I just remember passing them in the hallway, just kind of sizing each other up. I since have become really good friends with them. I don’t really know Bruce Thomas, I’ve met him once or twice. But I know Davey Faragher really well from playing bass in the Imposters and Pete Thomas and I are very good friends.
You and Pete were in that band The Scrolls together, right?
Well we were gonna call it The Scrolls because we thought it’d be funny, as in Dead Sea Scrolls, because the Dead Sea Scrolls were touring museums. And I think it was three in the morning and I thought it was a funny idea. We wound up being called WPA because Glenn Philips thought that Works Progress Administration was a good name. It was just basically a bunch of us that hung out and played together at Largo. And we wanted to make a recording of the way it sounded when we played together at Largo, just to have a record of the event. And we played a few shows and actually Glenn and Sean carried it on. They still do it, but at the time I was really turned off by some of the way it was presented. A super group is like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young…a super group is not just a bunch of guys who just happen to play in other bands. I was totally like, that whole labeling, that was like, are you kidding? I wouldn’t call anything a super group. I’m in a band with a guy who’s in what you would call a Super Group. Unless you’ve got The Wilburys or CSNY don’t come at me with super group. That was more of a press labeling, we certainly never used it.
We were talking about record stores. I can only imagine in the heydey of the 80s when Record World was around. Did you guys ever do any in-stores?
We did some in-stores every now and then. When we first started we’d do in-stores, but we didn’t play. You’d just go as a meet and greet. You wouldn’t play at a record store then. I think we’d be too loud.
It’s sad to see events like that happen less and less as record shops dwindle in numbers.
Well what’s happened instead is it’s the last passion of the mom and pop store. You gotta welcome the mom and pop store. LA has a lot of good record stores and here in Manhattan there are great, great record stores. If you come into Manhattan, just hit Second Hand Rose, it’ll blow your mind. I spend hundreds of dollars whenever I walk in there but I find lovely, lovely things. Old country blues anthologies, histories of New Orleans, just gorgeous stuff. And pristine original copies of Sgt. Pepper, All Things Must Pass ...
Did you see those Beatles US reissues?
I pay no attention…I search out the old presence of them. The old vinyl is mastered, clearly because there wasn’t any digital, so it’s mastered from tape. The new vinyl that the Beatles put out, my understanding, it’s mastered from digital sources, which is just obscene. But the Beatles are gonna do what they want, they’re not gonna listen to me.
*Going back to the Heartbreakers and your earlier albums, have you guys started doing a big overhaul of the Heartbreakers’ catalogue beyond that deluxe edition of Damn The Torpedoes from a couple of years back? It would be nice to see revamped versions of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough).
Oh they don’t consult me on that stuff. That’s best left to other authorities. I will get into weeds on that, and no one wants to open the door of them getting into the weeds. It’s gonna be a nightmare.
What I’d like to see is the original Let Me Up come out.
What was the original?
The original, the tracks on it were more along the lines of the song “Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough)”, and one of these days song, and that kind of thing. It was much more of a flat-out rock and roll record. Now it’s kind of half the constructed pop record, with “Runaway Trains” and “My Life Your World”, which is a great song. But it’s a very schizophrenic record. It’s kind of a record that’s trying to be two things and I think it’d be interesting to compile the two different styles on different records. I was kind of fond of what it was when it was a straight out rock and roll record.
Final question: As a solo artist you are currently on a jazz label in Blue Note Records. But has or does jazz creep into the Heartbreakers?
I think a little of that might creep in, but I don’t think any jazz creeps in. The only person who leans towards jazz in the Heartbreakers is [Steve] Ferrone. The current jazz style I don’t think works with Tom’s songs. Like I said, my favorite drummers are Charlie Watts, Ringo Starr. And of course Ferrone and Stan Lynch. And those are the styles that work with what we do. If you try to bring the jazz sensibility into Heartbreakers, we’re a rock and roll band. We love rock and roll. We love Chicago blues, we love Delta blues, we love stacks of old records, we love genuine country records…that’s where we come from. Everly Brothers, Buck Owens, we come from that. We don’t come from jazz, it would be unnatural for us.
