Benmont Tench on life with Tom Petty

00:00:08 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Just a quick note here. You can listen to all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist, which you can find a link to in the show notes for licensing reasons, each time a song is referenced in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect all right. Enjoy the episode. Ben Mont Tench has been playing keyboard with Tom Petty since before The Heartbreakers, when they were playing around Gainesville, Florida, in the early seventies as Mudcrutch with Tom Petty on bass. By the time the band moved to la and changed their name to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, ben Mont's keyboard plane had become integral to the band's sound. His plane is big and resonant, just like the lyrics of so many Tom Petty songs. Ben Mont blends so well with the band that you might actually forget he's even there, like in the song You're hearing Now time to move on from Wild Flowers. Figuring out exactly the best way to compliment a song is what makes Rick Rubin love working with ben Mont so much. In addition to being a founding member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, ben Mont has been an in demand session player since the eighties, he's played on records by You Two, Fiona Apple, Your Rhythmics, and Johnny Cash. Rick and Benmont got together over zoom to commemorate the release of the Wild Flowers box set, but their conversation veered other places too, like the Heartbreaker's time on the road with Bob Dylan, ben Mont's early days with the Heartbreakers in Florida, and how the album Full Moon Fever led Ben Mont tench to rehab. This is broken record liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Rick Rubin's conversation with Heartbreakers keyboardist Ben Montage. Do you remember a time before rock and roll or was there rock and roll? From your first memories of music, I think the first song I ever remember hearing was Frosty the Snowman or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and those would have been pre rock and roll. But I was born in fifty three. Elvis showed up on the scene big time in fifty six. I remember probably sixty one or so, Elvis put out his latest Flame. If you don't know that song, that's an incredible song by Doc Poems and mort Schumann, and it just knocked me completely down. I'd been too little. I had been too little to hear much other than Hounddog and Heartbreak Hotel, which was so spooky it probably scared me. Elvis Presley singing his latest flame after he'd done the army thing and all of that stuff. When you supposedly denuded, it was magic and I was so moved by it as a eight or nine year old kid. And whenever was coming on the radio at the time was mostly pop music, but I still liked it. I liked the Fleetwoods, I liked sad songs. I like all of that. But something about the Beatles just blew it all out. And I think there were bands in Gainesville before the Beatles hit. But as soon as the Beatles hit. I was in Panama. My father was working for the State Department. Briefly. The Beatles hit when I hit America. When I was in Panama, I came back in late sixty four, everybody had a band. I had a band. We weren't any good, but my mom said, when we moved houses, she said, the little kid across the street, the twelve year old boy across the streets a pair of drums, and I know you like and you loved the piano. Since you're born, why don't you go introduce yourself? And I kind of dragged myself over to introduce myself to this kid, Sandy. We put a band together, and then Sandy, five years later, was helping carry gear for this band called Mudcrutch, and he told me all about them and dragged me out to go see them play. And that's the first I saw Tom play and Mike play. I'd seen Tom hanging around the music store when I'd go loiter, but I never met him. And so in that wild, small world amazing. What were your first impressions of Tom when you saw him at that first Mudcrutch show? First Mudcrutch showed they were so good, but something about Tom and Mike stood out, even from Randall marsh on the drums and Tom Leaden on the rhythm guitar or on actually second lead guitar, and Petty was playing bass when they came out to the booth where I was sitting illegally in this nightclub because I was probably seventeen, you were supposed to be eighteen or something. They came from whatever, they couldn't have been a backstage and the astro lounge in Lake City, but they came toward the booth where I was sitting with my friends Sandy and Tom and Mike. There was just something going on. Now. The whole band was great, and randall the drummers who I was taken with immediately. They were so good that four piecepan. But Tom and Might come down, it's like whoa. And they were totally nice. But there was something. There was always something warm but intimidating about Patty, you know, And so I was just a fan. I followed them around. Well, my friend Sandy would say, they're playing here, they're playing there, They're playing a fraternity party. And it's like, Okay, I guess I'll go pretend to be a member of the fraternity. I go to just sit on the floor and listen to these guys play every chance I got. And then I was sitting in with them pretty quickly, you know, And then eventually I quit college to join the band. Do you remember the very first time you got to play with them? I do. There was a nightclub called Dubs Dubs something lounge that had topless dancers, but they weren't there the night I was there and mud Crutch was playing like five sets a night or whatever, and my friend Sandy said, Hey, they wanted to know if you want to bring down your portable organ and sit in with them. And I thought they must really be bored down there if they want me. It was like three years younger than any of them, and that matters when you're seventeen or eighteen, and I thought, well, I want to go see them play anyway, and I had the moment. The portable organ I had was heavy, heavy, heavy, and the amp was heavy, and I drag them out and I'm driving my MoMA's station wagon and I'm looking at the tailgate and looking at this organ and going, so, I really want to pick this thing up and throw it in there, just because Mudcrutch is bored. And at the last second I went, yeah, I'll bring it, and I brought it and I got there and I went in and they were just playing songs that I could either follow or I knew from whatever records they were. They weren't super top. Forty JJ Cale's Crazy Mama was a popular song. They played a couple of Van Morrison songs, but it didn't feel like some cheesy cover band that does steps or learns all this parts precisely. It felt like a soulful band playing these cool tunes, and it was I fit playing with them immediately, and they were pretty clearly enjoyed the way I was playing, and they said, you know, we're playing the University of auditorium this weekend. You want to come and play a song or two. There's a piano there. So I did that, and then whenever I was home from college for a year and a half or so, i'd sit in with them, you know, come home for the summer playing the band. Also, from the first time I sat in with them, it was just it was just fun. It was just really natural. It was really great. Plus, like I said, I was a big fan, so it's like, oh, yeah, really these guys were my heroes. If they were my heroes, so cool, Yeah, so cool. Do you think at that point they imagine that this was a serious thing that they'd be doing or do you think it was just something they would do for Fine, At this point in time, they were they were dead serious about it, that's what they were doing. And I wanted to be a musician. And I was in college as an art student, and because John Lennon went to art college and that's where he met Stu Sutcliffe and the Beatles were born. So I was literally in art college waiting to find a band, and I didn't find it in New Orleans, where the college was, but I found it back home on break and Tom in particular, Mike too had the drive an ambition to go, wait a minute, there's somewhere beyond Gainesville. Come on, let's do this. Bands get record deals and make records with real companies, not just pressed on their own label and financed by a guy who owns a pepper farm in bushvill, Florida. God bless him though. So yeah, it was a It was serious business because we were so music was everybody's life. All you do is go over to any of your friends houses and they put on a record, And I go to Tom's apartment. I put on the new todd Or Hungering record, which was incredibly psychedelic, a little too psychedelic in ways, and he'd put on a Grand Parsons and Namy Lou Harris record, greet as Angel and say have you heard this? Or they'd say they played the City Startus album and go no, no, no, this ain't the one. Hunky Dorry that's the Bowie record. And we just play things back and forth at each other and learn stuff and get excited. So music was always life. It wasn't just some passing fancy. How different was the world pre Beatles to post Beatles For you guys, I don't know about for them because I met them. You know, this is like when I sat in with them, was probably seven years into the Beatles, because it would have been seventy I think. So the Beatles broke up, but everything exploded and the songwriting was mysterious and gorgeous. It was really deep. People say the world went to technicolor, and I remember color. I remember that the world was beautiful and magical and strange before the Beatles came. But really it went three D or four D or something when the Beatles hit. It's amazing. And I was only ten, you know, if you're like thirteen or fourteen and then junior high school, going too high school, that really must have been something. For like Tom and Mike and everybody. It was the best thing. It was the best damn thing. Nineteen sixty four through nineteen sixty six or sixty eight. The quality of music that was showing up was another level. Can you remember, can you remember other artists or particular tracks or albums where it was just like the world stopped for you, like really the ones that changed your life. The first time I heard Aretha, whatever it was, whether it was Think or Chains or Natural Woman or Never Loved a Man, whatever it was that came on the radio, it was Aretha. That was a stop time thing. Those muscle shoals cats combined with Aretha, Franklin, some Tammy Wynette stuff would come on the radio. It was all in the same station. Got George Jones, you got Ray Charles, you got Frank Sinatra, you got Novelee, bands from England. You might have a stone cold country hit, so that since everybody wasn't on TV, and I'm a young kid that's more curious about the sound than the look. I honestly like, I didn't know if whoever the country singer I heard, Tammy Wynette or whatever was black. I just kind of like, wow, this is a fantastic or honest to God, if Aretha was black. Honest to God, I just was listening and hearing this and going, this is bloody amazing. And since you had one after the other, I mean, how can you have Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles and the brand new Beatles record, and Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin and Tammy Wynette and it's all in a row. Yeah, greatest music of all time. Well, the greatest radio of all time because it was so diverse. But also you drive along the FM radio in Gainesville, do you know Walk on Gilded Splinters by Doctor John No, it's long and it is spooky. And if it's one in the morning and you're just burning off steam, driving like the roads between towns in northern Florida and a song like that comes on, it's going to mess you up. It was just this wonderful amount of discovery. And Tom and Mike Bludcrutch in general loved country music, and I'd pretty much written off anything that was hard country. George Jones was country as hell, but he had songs like White Lightning and the Races on that you couldn't deny. But they knew the stuff that was played in the morning before the morning news at six in the morning, the guys with the Billman road type hats and the upright basis and the fills and everything that I would just go I want to watch a cartoon. He go past me, and they were diving into that. They're also so deeply into the Rolling Stones and Bob and Wilson Pickett, which is where we learned so much stuff. Everything was blended together. Everything. They were listening to bluegrass, country, rhythm and blues tom which c James Brown in nineteen sixty five. Just a kid, He's gonna go see James Brown. He said. It was astonishing. They were open to everything. And they got playing electric piano through a Marshall stat and turning it up so much that it distorted like a guitar, and we played some school auditorium and cracked the ceiling. I was so proud. Will be back in a few with more of Rick's conversation with ben Mont. We're back with more from Ben montench. You sit in an unusual place for a musician because you've you are a founding member of one of the biggest and longest running rock bands in the world, and at the same time you're maybe the most sought after studio keyboard player in the world, which is very different. It's an entirely different world, so you get to experience two different lives, whereas if you only played in your band, your experience of music would be one thing, but you get to play with everybody, different producers, different musicians constantly, And I just want to talk about what that's like. What's it like to experience these different things versus just being the guy in the band. Well, you know the thing that I wanted to do from when I was pretty young and Herd Book or t in the MG's, and then when I was fifteen or so, got Similtis records and some Wilson Picket records that were cut as stacks and realized these guys are playing with everybody. I thought, well, I want to be in the band, but I would love to be in a band like Book continuing the MG's that's playing with everybody, or I would love to be a session musician. And I never thought of there's a certain echelon of session musicians that I never thought of as the people who just kind of show up as a job and do it. Now, none of the session musicians I've met or people who just kind of show up as a job and do it. There are people that are so good they can turn sheet upside down and look at the mirror and read it and play it on first sight. So I played on a lot of records. I had a good run that I'd love to do again of playing with all sorts of diverse people, and maybe I can, and you learn so much. But also the band was very insular and didn't know anything except our world and a couple of our friends who were really cool musicians. And through Jimmy Iovin, I found myself really in the Los Angeles session world because he invited me along to a Dylan session. He did, and Bob said to me come back, and he had me work on Stevie Nicks's first solo record, and I met a whole other group of session musicians, and I guess they spread the word, said hey, you should check this Canta. But the best thing was always learning that, oh man, I'm not good enough to be in this room. I better really listen up and step up. But imagine yourself. You're in a room with one of Bob Dylan's greatest bands, David Mansfield and everybody Keltner and Drummond Holy Moley, and across the room is Bob Dylan singing a song and I'm just like I'm in the deep end. I better learned to swim and I met all these wonderful people, James Gadson, who's just the drummer for all time, him and Kelton and Ringo and Watts. I got to play with all these cats. And it's not a feather in the cap thing. It's simply a life experience. Like do you want to, you know, stand on the highest peak, not in order to tell people you did it, but in order to have your breath taken away. Yeah, And that's what that's like with the Dylan session. Your first non Heartbreaker friends would call me up to do something, but for the first few years of the bands, Tom would not let us play sessions. So maybe the first bunch of sessions I did that had any consequence were maybe Dylan and Stevie amazing. Talk talk a little bit about the difference in playing with different people. What's inspiring about playing with someone different than who you normally play with. The inspiring part is usually if the groove is really cool. The best part is if you don't have to think, But it's also really good if you go into a room and you're challenged to play with somebody and you can't quite and it takes you a while to find your way in. Butause your job is to find your way in. So you might find a band with a bass player that you can't really see where he's coming from, but you have to be with him because you're part of the rhythm section, and you find your way in. You might find a drummer who has an entirely different field than you're used to, and you have to go, how do I slot with this? I learned one really cool thing from Danny Korchmar on the first not the first day, but when we were working on the Dylan record. He said, listen, if somebody tells you to play a part and you think it's really stupid, and you're sure, and the producers like, no, no plays a sparts what I want, don't play it because that's the stupid part on that record. Even if it's a hit or whatever, that's the stupid part on the record. And you're going to be the guy that played the stupid part. Nobody's going to know that the producer or held a gun to your head and made you play the stupid parts. It's like, if you don't think it's good, don't play it. Now. You can lose gigs that way. If You're sitting in a room behind the Hammond and the Vox Continental and Bob Dylan's Bob Dylan is the background singers are all to your right. The brilliant background singers are all to your right playing percussion and singing. And across the room you see Jim Keltner and Tim Drumm is next to him, and they are these great guitar players are like Danny Korchmar and Steve Ripley and Fred Tackett around the room, and Bob Dylan is teaching you a song and the song is every grain of sand or whatever it is. And the piano player was great too, Carl pickhart Man. It's like you're at a concert by your favorite musicians, but instead of being in an audience, you're standing in the midst of them. Wow. Yeah, and you're and you don't really know the song so well. You know, it's it's a it's an amazing moment of discovery being in that room and its sounding good, and it just like it's almost like it's playing through you. You know, it is playing through you. And the thing about the sessions with Keltner that time was that it was kind of like a sculptor will tell you that you chisel away at the marble and the figure will reveal itself. And when it's totally revealed itself, that's that's what happens. And I would watch, we would play the songs and they would slowly appear, they'd become themselves in any session, and that's true with Bonnie Rate, it was true with the replacements. It was really hard for me to figure out what Paul Westerberg wanted, but I think I got it. I liked what he played better than what I played. Henley would always challenge me to go farther and farther and farther and farther and farther farther. No, you can do this, but it's not there yet to a perfectionist level. That to me, I'm like, don, your rough vocal was better than any of the ones that are perfect. But that's how I am to going to going to the other extreme where you can just you just go play and you don't analyze, and it's just straight up rock and roll, which is what Mudcrutch was and which is what some of the Heartbreakers stuff was. We'd fine tune, we'd zone in, but it was it was just this feeling of joy and depth and sorrow and hi in the physical sense, like you're lifted. Yeah, it felt like it pretty naturally happened in The Heartbreakers for the most part. And then any additional colors or embellishments just for a you know, if we wanted something special for a moment, we might have to figure out what that was, but that but that would only be icing on the cake. Really. Wildflowers was the exception, because I remember that Wildflowers, you were being very particular about what Steve would do and reordering the bridge is too good to be king and things like that. For the most part, we would flow into it. But Mike was saying, because we've been talking about it lately with people that with you, what would happen is we were used to playing the song and we would get it. It would be really really good. We go, this is it, this is the take, and this is kind of what happened with Mary James's last dance. But we do something and it's like, that's it. We're not going to top that, and you would go, yeah, but try it this way, and there is enough trust in you to go, Okay, what if we do in a very minor way. Change the pattern on each instrumental lick during Good to Be King, not the piano lick, but the cello lick. What if we do that a little bit differently here and leave it out there? It's like what But we did it and that was really rewarding. After a quick break, we'll be back with the rest of Rick's conversation with Ben Montage. We're back with the rest of Rick's conversation with Ben Montench. They jump right into talking about the Heartbreakers tours with Bob Dylan. Talk about the shows with Bob. How did it happen? How did it come about? Well, apparently Elliott Roberts was managing us and he was managing Bob at the same time, and he had this brilliant idea, would you do a Tom Petty set and then Bob would come out? How did it work? We played with for two years for several tours, and it was different different times. There was one thing where we'd come out and play altogether, Bob would leave and we'd play a set of hours, three or four songs and then Bob will come back, or else we would leave and Bob will come out and do this really powerful acoustic set and go back and forth like that. We'd all played together. The last tour that we did with him, Roger mcgwinn opened solo acoustic, then we would come on and play a few songs with mcgwinn, and then mcgwinn would leave and we'd do a set of hours and then Bob would come home with us, and that was a really that was a really great tour to me. It started in the rehearsals were so disastrous though we'd played together for a couple of years that I was kind of like, let me out of here. Of course, the fact that I was doing massive amounts of cocaine couldn't have had any impact on that. I got slapped on that tour. The Bob gigs were great because Tom would say that Bob changed keys all the time. You do all that. He did a little bit of that. It wasn't like every day he's like throwing something at you, but he would say do you know this? As you're walking on stage, you like, we never hearsed it, I don't care. I know it and I know it by heart, and you say, okay, just hearn me and maybe Mike and he'd do that kind of thing. Amazing was the first What was the first thing the Heartbreakers did post the Bob Tour? What was the next project between legs of the Bob Tour or after the Bob Tour? We I think during a break we recorded a record of just really hardcore rock and roll songs, just live on the floor and a couple of different studios, really like hard straight ahead rock and roll, like two guitars, bass, drums, piano, go. Then when it finished, Mike had a bunch of really cool demos, not demos, tracks where he played everything, programmed the drum machine and everything, and they put those together to an album called Let Me Up Have Had Enough, But they left half the live straight rock and roll things off of it, so it's kind of an unsuccessful record that it's a NIX and match and mismatch. And then it just got so crazy and frantic that I think after that is when like eighty eight or whatever, we took a break and Tom ran into Jeff Lynn again and there you go, Yeah, what was it? What was it like when Tom decided to do the solo record? What was the feeling? Well, for me, I was really hurt. I didn't know he was doing a solo record. I had heard we were going to record on such and such a day, and so a few days before that day, I called up Bugs, the guy who knows everything, and said, so, what time I was supposed to show up at the studio Wednesday? And he went on, nobody told you. Nobody told me what. Tom's making a solo record with Mike and Jeff Lynn. And I'm like what? And I was. I was really angry because I was blindsided, and because it's like, hey, where your band? What are you talking about? Is you're gonna make a record with Jeff. I actually said to you, like six months ago, why don't we try something with Jeff? Because I loved the Cloud nine record? So what do you mean the band is involved? But they were having so much fun. Back at it now, and I'm like, I've been doing sessions all along. Why shouldn't Tom have the fun of playing with other people? Why shouldn't he do it? Why shouldn't he and Mike do it? I do it all the time. But also I was really in bad shape, drinking and drugs, and a good friend of mine said, yeah, Tom's making a solo record. You're not on it, you know, what that means, You have plenty of time to go to rehab. So I went to rehab. So I got sober because of that. And I never expected Heartbreakers the last anyway, So I was like, oh, no, this is the death knell, you know, But it wasn't. He never heard all anybody else. We played free Falling more than anybody in the world ever play, you know, and God bless me had me come in and play a little piano on one song on that record. One last thing to just to ask you about you come into a session, what are you focusing on when you're playing? I think the melody and and the groove. I don't go straight to the words. I'm trying to hear the space around the voice, and I'm trying to find how I can support the groove, and if that means by playing around it, I do that. But I look for the groove and what compliments the melody. Would you say that you're looking for parts or you just accompanying what's happening. Often they're the same thing, Like from the first time we played Refugee till we finally got it, from the first time we played here it comes with my Girl at the waiting. I had the part that snipped suited the song for the groove and the vocal immediately, and that was the right thing to continue to play. And it's kind of still is today. And sometimes it's like crawling back to you where it's just totally blind listening to this palm and listening to Steve float and try to float along, or sometimes some songs when I'm playing organ, I'm trying to pull something out of the sky. I know there's a shimmer that can go around the song that I can accomplish with the Hammond, but I kind of have to hold onto the drawbars and slowly pull them in and out and kind of hold on for dear life and almost pray for that right shimmer to come through me. Yet so much of it is out of our control. It's another thing that I think most people listening don't might not understand that it really is a magic process that happens. It's a magic process. The thing about the thing about it is you need to practice, or if you don't practice, you need to know that you can play and get across what is in your head and heart. And that's what the technique is for the technique is so that you can express the magic when it comes through, at least for me. Is it all again? I'm asking this as a non musician. Do you do you imagine what you want to play and play it or does it happen more automatically. It happens automatically, so there's no thought. There's no thought of what chord. You never think about what chord you need to play at any point in time. Your hands just go to the positions they want to go to. I think it's chicken and egg. You know, I don't know which comes first. I know that if I'm playing a solo, if I sing along with it, it's going to be infinitely better. But it's kind of a form of prayer, it's kind of form of breathing, and sometimes it's just down to man. This reminds me of that Jerry Lee Lewis song I'm going to play with Jerry played. Yeah, you know, it's instinctive, but it doesn't mean it's not learned over the course of I've been playing since I was probably eight and I'm sixty seven, so the course of whatever that is fifty nine years or whatever. Every time I listen to a record, every time I play the piano. Every time I do anything, it's going to go into it. You know, it's not they it's a write off for research, that's write off records and films and stuff like that. And it's actually not bullshit because it is going to seriously impact the way that you make the music, that you make films. You see, not just for the score, but for the visual texture that will come through the music records because the space you'll hear, the group you'll hear, the sound you will hear, or just the fact that you may not notice any of that, but but it will have an effect on you, just as how your day is going. Just as when you're worried about the people up in the hills where the fires are, you know that all goes in there. And if you're a really gifted, blessed, brilliant person, then what's going to come out is what comes out of a little Richard or Bob or Aresa you know, or Tom Johnny Cash. The experience that I have with you with Johnny Cash, it can't be conveyed. And you want proof that it's a prayer. The way the way you make records as a form of prayer. That but so is good, golly, miss Molly, and so is heartbreak Hotel. Absolutely so a form of prayer. Absolutely, But if you if your ears are open, if your eyes are open, and that's the whole thing, Jesus will let he who hears, who can hear, let him hear, you can see, let me see. You don't have to be Christian, you don't have to go to any kind of religion to understand what that's doing. It's all in front of you. The pain is suffering. If your fellow man, it's all right there for you if you let it in. And man, there's a lot of static at least I got a lot of stack that tries to keep it away. But when I play music, and when I play music with the people that I am somehouse hosts, playing music with the people that are especially bloods like the Heartbreakers or Mudcrutch, then I'm I'm halfway there. Thank you so much for doing this, and thank you for playing man, Thank you for the music. Well, thank you, jeez. Rick, I love you. It's great seeing you, and I will I will see you soon and hopefully we'll be in a studio together soon making something fun. I love you too. Rick. I'm really glad to see your face and I would just love to let's just hang out, shoot the ship and make some music. Thanks to Ben mont Tench for catching up with Rick and rehashing some of the best moments of his incredible career. You can hear all of her favorite songs that feature Ben mont Tench on our playlist at broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcasts. There you can find extended cuts of our past episodes and also new ones. Broken Record is produced with helpful Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martine Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and its executive produced by mil Lobell. Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries, and if you like Broken Record, please remember to share, rate, and review our show on your podcast staff. I'm justin Richmond, Case