Petty Theft is:
Harrison Calhoun - bass, vocals
Jim Collins - keyboards, percussion
John Scully - drums, percussion
Bill Porter - guitar, acoustic guitar, 12-string guitar, mandolin, electric sitar, harmonica, vocals
Mike Rhyner - guitar, acoustic guitar, 12-string guitar, percussion, vocals
Rodney Wall - guitar, 12-string guitar, acoustic guitar, slide guitar, vocals
WHO ARE THESE GUYS ~ AND WHAT IS THIS?
Since we've had this thing up and running, FAQ #1 has been 'What the hell are you doing? Why do you need to do this?'
And that's a great question. I'd been out of this racket for over 20 years with no yearning to get back in it. I mean, not once had I given it one iota thought. It was over, done, a phase of life that had come and gone and I was totally cool with it.
Yet here we are. So--why?
The best answer I can give is it was keeping me awake at night.
The Ticket Timewasters--damn them to hell--play into this. I started doing Tom Petty songs with them, simply because, unlike my fellow Timewasters, I am neither funny nor motivated enough to write gag songs. I had to come up with something. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.
And it was fun. And the year of Summer Bash 2003 at Benbrook Lake, "Mary Jane's Last Dance' and 'Change of Heart' actually sounded pretty good. On the way home I started thinking, 'Gee, wouldn't it be fun to do a bunch of Petty tunes in a band?'
Somewhere on the road that night, that went from a whimsical, throwaway notion to 'Well, what about it?' But by the time I got home, there had appeared a litany of reasons why the idea should be abandoned immediately. To wit: This is going to require someone to mess with the gigs, the gear, the people; you have no gigs, no gear and you hate people; if you don't do that, who will? Who would want to hear such a thing, and in the unlikely event someone does, where would it play and what do you know about stringing all that together? You've been out of the scene for 20 years; who would you get to do this with you? And isn't this a game for the young? What makes you think that at this, shall we say, advanced stage of life, that that would be you?
Great questions, all of 'em. And I had no answers--good, bad, or indifferent.
Yet I couldn't let it go. And it got to the point where every night when I retired for the evening, I could count on at some point waking up from a dead sleep, thinking about it and how cool it would be. Sometimes it would even take the form a an all-too-real dream. There have been other things that have affected me that way. The last was the Ticket. You saw what happened there.
Still, though, I needed impetus--something to get me going, something to make me fight through inertia and do something about this. That something arrived in the form of a 'hey man what's up' e-mail from an old friend who wanted nothing more than to let me know that he was digging the radio scene and thought it was cool that the guy he knew from Oak Cliff was making his way through this world. He couldn't have known what he was about to get pulled into.
That old friend was Rodney Wall. Rodney and I had been in bands together in the '70's, none of which amounted to much. Not being a real stay-in-touch guy myself, we'd had only sporadic contact over the years, but I enjoyed it unfailingly when our paths did cross and there was this certain connection between the two of us that never seemed to go away. This time, though, that golden bulb of enlightenment went off over my head. Here was a guy I knew, a guy of the same era, who came up the same way I did, who knew the same people and shared many of the same experiences and ideas on what we thought bands were about at that time. He was one of those guys who wouldn't do what I did--he'd never put it down. He may not do it often, which was the case, but he'd never get away from it altogether, as I'd done 20 years or so before. And he was a great facilitator. I knew he was bound to know some people, know of some places we might play, and he was bound ot have some some gear. And oh, by the way--he could really play. He's great on both bass and guitar.
In short, Rodney was the perfect guy to get involved in this. And not only was he game, he immediately came up with the name.* Beautiful.
Not long thereafter, he, I and a couple of our boys from back in the day got together with the intention of messing around with some Petty tunes and seeing where it went. Then, once it had been determined that Rodney would play guitar instead of his more customary bass, and I would do what I do instead of playing drums, we started to seek other like-minded souls. Rodney brought in Harrison and the three originals were in place--the two of them and me. Everytime Petty Theft has played so far, Rodney, Harrison and I have all been on hand.
The first time Harrison came over, he came in, set up, played, and might have completed two sentences the entire night. My thought was "This guy's really good, but he's not going to want to do this." We said 'Hey, thanks for coming; nice to meet you; you're a very nice player' that night and I thought that would be it for him. The next day I got an email from him telling me not to be put off by his rather impassive demeanor; that's just his way, and he thought the night was a lot of fun and to call him when we were going to do it again. I jumped up and clicked my heels.
So the three of us and another guitar player, a keyboard player and a drummer began the process; actually, we began two processes simultaneously: working up a set and figuring out who would and wouldn't be a long-haul player in this thing.
We worked up 10 songs and a couple of days before Christmas 2003 played them at the Barley House. It was our first gig. We tried to keep it on the downlow with limited success as a decent crowd showed up. It went about as well as could have been expected.
Then the weeding out process began. The drummer was the first to go. Maybe we rehearsed a little too much for him; maybe he thought we had nothing and would never get anywhere; he didn't tell me and I didn't ask. We just went on.
The replacement for him was Kent, brought in by Harrison. He joined up for our second gig and played with us through December of 2005.
Not long after the keyboard player decided he just wasn't about this. That led to keyboard player #2, a guy I knew who had made it known that this was something he'd like to do should the opportunity arise. I called him and told him the opportunity had arisen. He came on board.
Then some time after that, the guitar player determined that the time spent--reward ratio of this thing was way out of whack and pronounced himself out. Harrison had the man for the gig in mind. That was Bill.
So we went off to rock and roll and for about the last six months or so of 2004 we had a stable unit. In amazingly short order, we were playing about as much as we wanted and turning down quite a few shows just because we didn't want to do that much. In the late stages of that year the keyboard player told us he needed to spend more time on some of his solo projects. We started looking.
Keyboard players are a sticky wicket. There aren't a lot around and many of those who are out there just aren't that great. It's also an essential component of the Petty sound. No one had a ready replacement in mind. A cattle call was in order. That led us to Jim. He joined up in early 2005 and the present PT lineup was complete.
So that's the story of the how and why. I don't know where there is for this thing to go. It may be that bands like this have a low ceiling of possibility. It may also be that we've already achieved all we're going to, that being to play gigs and be the best we can be at what we do, and while we're at it have a little fun. And if that's the case, fine.
The important thing, though, is this: the other guys in this thing are what make it happen. They're wonderfully skilled players who share a strong sense of purpose of getting it right and trying to make it as true to the Heartbreakers sound and vibe as we possibly can. And if you come see us and go away from it feeling we did that, then we did what we set out to do.
That's what it is. It's Petty Theft. We dig it. We hope you will, too.
--MR
About the name: We are aware that there are other bands out there who do the same thing and use the same name; it has been pointed out to us many times. We're also aware that they existed before we did. However, when we started out down this dirty road, it never once occurred to us that anyone else might be doing this.
It was not that we thought we'd come up with something so original that no one else had ever thought of it so much as us thinking there just wouldn't be any kind of audience out there for it--not from us or anybody else. We now see that we vastly, vastly underestimated the amazingly wide cross-section to which Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers appeal. We had played a few times under the Petty Theft handle before we found out that there were indeed other Petty cover bands out there that used it.
So what do we do about it? We toyed with the idea of changing the name but realized no one was making us do that; besides, the name was just too good. So we kept it, thinking that most of these other bands operate in other locales. They don't tread on our turf, nor do we on theirs, and in our case, the likelihood of us ever venturing out into their territory is extremely small. So a policy of detente is in place on our end. We'll stay with it until someone tells us we can't. And if they tell us we can't, we'll kill 'em.