Ninety kilos, the approximate weight of a Farfisa organ, almost saved Benmont Tench from his future.
It was late 1971, and Tench, a local of Gainesville, Fla., was residence from faculty for Christmas. His favourite native band, Mudcrutch, was enjoying a five-set-a-night residency at a topless bar referred to as Dub’s, and so they’d lastly invited him to affix them onstage. He began to load his gear into his mom’s station wagon, hoisted his Fender amp onto the tailgate after which went to seize his organ.
“I picked this factor up and it was so rattling heavy,” Tench recalled. For a second, he thought of blowing the entire thing off. As a substitute, he heaved the Farfisa into the automotive. That night time, he performed with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell for the primary time, forging a musical bond and forming the nucleus of what would ultimately develop into the Heartbreakers. “However it virtually didn’t occur,” Tench stated in a current interview, shaking his head on the reminiscence. “I imply, it was that shut.”
Greater than half a century later, the Heartbreakers themselves are a reminiscence: The group ended abruptly after Petty’s demise in 2017 from an unintentional drug overdose. However Tench, 71, continues to make music. His second solo album, an elegiac assortment of songs titled “The Melancholy Season,” can be launched on March 7.
The album follows a 10-year interval that included a second marriage for Tench, to the author Alice Carbone, the delivery of his first baby and the lack of Petty, his longtime good friend and band chief.
“Tom died, and our daughter was born three months later,” stated Tench, sitting in the lounge of his residence within the Los Feliz neighborhood. It was a late winter afternoon, and the fine-boned, soft-spoken Tench — his neck wrapped in a blue silk ascot, his head lined by a white Borsalino — was sipping tea as daylight handed via a big image window and onto the lid of a 1928 Mason & Hamlin piano.
“The band, the primary focus of my life since I used to be 19 years outdated, was gone,” he stated. “Dropping Tom was a horrible occasion that blew every part up. However I used to be damned if I wasn’t going to make one other report.”
Tench’s former bandmate Campbell, now fronting his personal group the Soiled Knobs, understands his dilemma. “The Heartbreakers had intentions of constructing extra information, enjoying extra exhibits, we might’ve gone on without end,” he stated in a telephone interview. “Even now, the grief continues to be there — however I’ve to maintain making music, as a result of that’s my lifeblood, and it’s the identical with Ben. It is a complete new a part of our lives that we didn’t select.”
Extra lately, Tench has confronted critical well being points. In 2023, he discovered that his mouth most cancers — the illness he had been coping with for greater than a decade — had unfold to his jaw. “The medical doctors took half my jaw out,” he stated, “took a chunk from my leg, muscle and bone to rebuild it.”
A collection of surgical procedures and coverings adopted into 2024, delaying the discharge of “The Melancholy Season.” “I’ve been letting every part heal, doing a couple of therapeutic workout routines and making an attempt to study to talk extra clearly, and to sing once more,” Tench continued, dabbing at his mouth with a handkerchief.
“It’s humorous, if I’m going to the Heartbreakers clubhouse, our outdated rehearsal house, after an hour or so on the piano singing, my pronunciation is significantly better. It simply goes to indicate that, in my life, the reply to every part is to play.”
ON A WALL in Tench’s fashionable Twenties Tudor, there’s a big framed {photograph}: a post-show snapshot of a joyous Petty and the Heartbreakers, after their closing gig — a sold-out live performance on the Hollywood Bowl in September 2017 that capped the band’s fortieth anniversary tour.
The group was pushed by the pressure of Petty’s persona and songs, but it surely was the Heartbreakers’ interaction that elevated the music and the band’s fortunes. Campbell and Tench, particularly, might flip Petty’s uncooked melodies and chord progressions into soulful symphonies.
“That was the great thing about Ben and I,” Campbell stated. “Additionally, Ben had a technical musical information that Tom and I didn’t have. He might fill the house between us.”
After Petty’s demise, Tench sought refuge in his household and within the studio, engaged on albums for buddies like Ringo Starr and Jenny Lewis. Although he’s now revered as one in every of rock’s best and most prolific session musicians, for the primary 5 years of the Heartbreakers, Petty barred him from doing any exterior recording. “It was the legislation for the entire band,” Tench stated. “Tom felt just like the Heartbreakers had a particular sound, and he didn’t need different individuals’s information sounding like us.”
It wasn’t till 1981, when Jimmy Iovine, who was then the Heartbreakers’ producer, introduced Tench right into a recording session for Bob Dylan’s “Shot of Love,” that his studio profession started to take off. Tench started writing and recording with Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks, serving to kick-start her solo profession with “Bella Donna.” And Petty loosened his no-session rule: “Tom stated if we had been going to do classes, they needed to be an actual excessive normal,” Tench stated and chuckled. “Properly, you’ll be able to’t get a lot greater than Bob or Stevie.”
Tench’s instinctively tasteful enjoying coloured radio hits and cult albums alike. The Tench contact could possibly be felt within the glowing harpsichord on Elvis Costello’s “Veronica,” the pulsing organ in Alanis Morissette’s “You Ougtha Know,” and on information by Don Henley, Cher, Elton John, X, Ramones and the Replacements.
“He was the primary well-known musician, and hero, that we bought to satisfy and jam with when Haim was simply enjoying round L.A. to 10 individuals,” Danielle Haim stated. (Tench performed on the group’s 2013 debut.) “He’s so good at slithering round all the different devices, however standing out on his personal.”
Tench tends to defer to songwriters. “It’s actually all concerning the songs,” he insisted. “When you play the organ on ‘Refugee,’ somebody says, ‘Hey, that’s an excellent report, let’s get that man!’ I’m not being falsely humble. I like the way in which I play. I do. Particularly if I’m forged proper.”
The producer Don Was first forged him on Bonnie Raitt’s 1991 album “Luck of the Draw” — the place Tench added a halting Hammond organ to “I Can’t Make You Love Me” — and continued to make use of him on information by the Rolling Stones, Willie Nelson and Brian Wilson. “Benmont has a magical sense of the place to play,” Was stated in an interview. “He all the time helps the narrative and enhances it however doesn’t hinder the singer’s capability to speak. That’s a uncommon factor. Actually, it’s a form of genius.”
Satirically, Tench was shut out from the session for Petty’s 1989 solo album, “Full Moon Fever.” The frontman determined to report with out the Heartbreakers on the final minute, and Tench heard the information secondhand. “It triggered my possessiveness concerning the band,” he stated. “However I’d been enjoying on all these completely different information with different individuals, and Tom wanted the prospect to try this, too.”
By the late ’80s, Tench had dug himself right into a deep gap of alcohol and drug dependancy. “I used to be bitching to a good friend about not enjoying on Tom’s report,” Tench remembered. “And he stated, ‘Nice, it’ll take him at the least six weeks to try this, which implies you’ve bought loads of time to go to rehab.’ I did go, and I bought sober, which was a blessing. If I’d wound up engaged on that report, I’d in all probability be lifeless.”
Tench has skilled his share of rock ’n’ roll loss. His closest good friend within the Heartbreakers, the bassist Howie Epstein, died of a heroin overdose in 2003 at 47. Petty struggled with the drug himself within the ’90s. “Howie by no means got here again from it. However Tom did come again,” stated Tench, noting Petty’s later bodily struggles, together with a damaged hip, on the Heartbreakers’ closing tour. “On the finish, my perception is that he was simply in an excessive amount of ache, and simply wished to make it cease.”
For a second, Tench was silent, as he listened to the sound of his younger daughter laughing within the different room. “I understand how lucky I’m,” he stated. “That I didn’t lose myself. That I’m sitting right here now, that I’ve a spouse and baby. And that I get to maintain making music.”
OVER THE YEARS, Tench quietly grew to become a profitable songwriter in his personal proper. The previous Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey had a world hit with Tench’s “You Little Thief,” whereas Rosanne Money and Hal Ketchum scored nation chart successes along with his compositions. However Tench by no means pushed his materials to Petty. “Tom appreciated a few of my songs, but it surely wasn’t like, ‘Let’s reduce one in every of yours,’” he stated. “Finally, although, I had a group of songs that I believed must be recorded and given an opportunity to be heard.”
Tench began singing his songs throughout common appearances on the Los Angeles membership Largo, and in 2013, the veteran British producer Glyn Johns supplied to work on a solo album. Was, who additionally serves as president of the Blue Word label, signed Tench, placing out his debut, “You Ought to Be So Fortunate,” the next yr. In 2019, Johns proposed work on a follow-up album in Nashville. “However I couldn’t depart, even for a pair weeks, with an toddler daughter,” Tench stated. “After which the pandemic got here alongside.”
In Los Angeles, Tench had gotten to know the multi-instrumentalist and producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Angel Olsen) from enjoying on a circuit of personal jam classes through the years. “I wanted a producer who understood songs,” Tench stated. “I wanted an excellent drummer. And I wished to work on analog tape.” Wilson checked all of the bins.
“I informed him, when you want a drummer, you may name Ringo, dude,” Wilson stated in an interview, laughing. “I feel as a result of I’m from the South like Benmont, we have now a pure rhythmic bond, an unstated factor between us — we put it within the place the place the opposite one desires to listen to it.”
The classes for “The Melancholy Season” passed off in late 2020 and early 2021 at Wilson’s studio in Topanga Canyon. The core band — Tench, Wilson and the bassist Sebastian Steinberg — labored dwell with out a web. “There have been completely no computer systems used on this report,” Wilson famous.
Just a few of Tench’s Largo mates, like Nickel Creek’s Sara Watkins, the guitarist and vocalist Jenny O. and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith got here in so as to add overdubs. However largely, Tench sought to maintain the report within the stripped-down vein of albums he’d lengthy admired, like Dylan’s 1967’s LP “John Wesley Harding.” “What I like about my report is that it’s not crowded, the music breathes,” Tench stated. “You may hear the phrases, you’ll be able to hear the enjoying.”
Earlier this month, he returned to the stage, singing for the primary time since his surgical procedures, throughout a residency at New York Metropolis’s Café Carlyle. Although he plans to tour behind “The Melancholy Season,” Tench urged that his roadwork can be restricted.
“I can’t be away from Catherine very lengthy,” he stated of his daughter. “The longest I’ve ever been away from her is a month and that was homicide. I informed her, ‘Child, I like you greater than music and also you don’t know even what which means.’ However it means every part.”
