Benmont Tench first met Tom Petty in a Gainesville, Florida music shop. It was the mid-’60s and Tench was 11 or 12, Petty three years older.
Tench would drop out of college a few years later to join Petty in the group Mudcrutch. That band eventually became Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, in which Tench was a member until Petty’s 2017 death.
Despite the decades spent together on vans and buses and planes, the days and nights in cheap lodgings and fancy hotels, and the thousands of hours in recording studios and on stage, Tench says the new documentary “Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free,” which arrives on YouTube on Thursday, Nov. 11, showed him more of Petty than he knew.
“It isn’t that you take them for granted,” says Tench on a recent call about his late bandmate. “You appreciate them, but they’re always there. So you have a relationship with somebody, but there were a lot of sides to him that I didn’t know, and I saw him so much.”
When the band started, everyone was together day and night, Tench says. As time passed, their world divided into band life, which orbited around Petty as singer and songwriter, and their own lives with wives and children, side projects and outside interests.
“These kinds of things set up a dynamic,” Tench, now 68, says. “He had his friends that he would speak to about this, that, and the other, and speak to in a certain way. And he had his friends in the band, and we had our own relationship, our own kind of language.”
Petty’s death from an accidental overdose changed all that.
“Now that he is gone, I do look at things a little bit differently,” Tench says. “A lot of it is simply that his passing freed me and made me more of an adult. Because I was a member of a band following the captain, and now I’m just my own adult.”
Watching the new film, and appearing in it either in archival footage shot during the recording of the 1994 “Wildflowers” album, or new interviews with director Mary Wharton, Tench felt regret for what on a very personal level might have been.
“The relationship I think I would have with him now, and the conversations I would love to have with him now, would doubtless be different,” he says. “And I really wish there was a way. There is no way.”
‘Gift from heaven’
In a way, the director Wharton had been preparing for this film all of her working life. At the start of her career when she was working at the VH1 music channel, she flew to Los Angeles to interview Petty for a short documentary on “Wildflowers,” a solo record though it included all but one of the Heartbreakers in the band Petty and producer Rick Rubin put together.
“He was such a classic Southern gentleman,” says Wharton, who like Petty, grew up in northern Florida. “I had always been a fan of his music, but I really fell in love with him as a person.”
A few years later, she was working with a new hire at VH1 named Adria Petty, who only after Wharton started to piece together clues, acknowledged that Tom Petty was her father.
“I was always impressed that she didn’t lead with that,” Wharton says. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m Tom Petty’s daughter, so I deserve special treatment.’ She was just a really cool young lady. We connected and we stayed in touch.”
Two decades later in early 2020, not long after the pandemic sent the world into lockdown, Adria Petty called Wharton, who’d just finished the documentary “Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President,” and asked what she was working on.
“I was like, ‘Nothing, me and the rest of America are in our sweatpants with nothing to do,’” Wharton says.
Adria Petty and producer Peter Afterman told her that they’d recently unearthed an archive of film shot in the mid-’90s as Petty was working on “Wildflowers,” most of which had never before been seen, and asked Wharton if she wanted to shape it into a documentary film.
“The world was in a very sort of chaotic and kind of scary place,” Wharton says. “And then it was like this box of sunshine had dropped out of the sky into my arms. So I just dove into this archive of beautiful footage and incredible music.
“It was like a gift from heaven for me to work on this film.”
‘Hearing Tom talk’
Tench had already worked with Heartbreakers’ guitarist Mike Campbell, Adria Petty, and Tom Petty’s widow Dana Petty on a sprawling box set of “Wildflowers” outtakes, alternate versions, and live tracks. The documentary seemed to him almost the other half of that, he says.
“This film is part and parcel of the same thing,” Tench says. “The records with the outtakes give you a certain picture of the way it went deeper, but the film, especially because you get to hear Tom talk so much, the film takes you further.”
Tench remembers filmmaker Martyn Atkins coming by the “Wildflowers” sessions every so often, and that his fly-on-the-wall style put everyone there at ease. When nothing came of it at the time, he forgot all about it until he was shown what had been captured on the beautiful black and white film.
“Mostly, I enjoyed hearing Tom talking about the record,” he says. “I did learn from things Tom said because he would never say, ‘Hey Ben, come here, I want to tell you what’s on my mind while I’m making the album.’
“That’s not how the Heartbreakers worked. We just went to the studio and followed his lead.
“So when I hear him talking, and explaining what was in his head, that was educational for me,” Tench says. “And I think some people who see the film will get an insight from it, too.”
The story Wharton and her team wove together felt true when Tench watched the film, which includes such classic songs as “It’s Good to Be King,” “You Wreck Me,” and “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”
“They did a wonderful job,” he says. “Nothing felt at all manipulated or edited to be a certain version of a story. It felt very, very real.
“He was a pretty amazing guy, and I think it caught it all,” Tench says. “I really loved that it caught things like him pretending to play the French horn that are goofy and silly and funny because he had a side that was really off the cuff.
“But you also catch how thoughtful he was about the record-making process and about the songwriting process.”
‘Portrait of an artist’
For Wharton, the key to making the film was to look at what she had, all that beautiful archival film, and what she didn’t need to repeat — such going over the same ground as 2007’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” a four-hour-long documentary by director Peter Bogdanovich.
“We followed what felt good, and what made sense,” she says. “We had this conversation with Mike and Ben and Rick Rubin that was a little bit of a free-flowing conversation, where they might start talking about one thing and it leads to talk about something else.
“And the songs were kind of the touchstones,” Wharton says. “I looked at the songs as the tentpoles that were holding up the story.”
For Petty, whose marriage to his first wife was on shaky ground during the making of the album, the songs became some of his most personal and autobiographical of his career, even though he didn’t always realize it at the time. That, Wharton says, gave the film a more personal glimpse of both man and artist.
“I think it was much later that even Tom realized, by talking with a therapist, that ‘Wildflowers,’ the title track, is him talking to himself, and giving himself permission to feel free and to be free creatively and in his personal life.
“I was trying to tell a story that was bigger than the making of the album, and use that as the lens through which we’re viewing Tom Petty,” Wharton says. “I’m trying to paint a portrait of an artist and show you his life and his work and why it matters.”
‘A straight-up guy’
For Wharton, there’s a moment in the film that she still thinks about months later.
“He mentions that as an artist he’s always trying to get better, which isn’t that surprising, but he goes on to say, ‘Because I’ve always thought of myself as not very good,’” she says. “And to have one of the greatest songwriters in rock ‘n’ roll history admit that he’d never thought he was any good is jaw-dropping.
“Here’s a guy who at that point had gold records all over his wall, and Grammys and hit records,” Wharton says. “He had been in the Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison and Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne, a pretty elite group to be in.”
What it told her was that Petty was never one to rest of his laurels. That he was always going to be striving for different ways to express himself.
“Here he was in his middle age, and he’s opening up his heart and showing it to you, and that’s a beautiful thing,” Wharton says. “To me, that was kind of the most surprising, and at the same time, the most lovely thing I discovered.”In a way, that’s similar to Tench’s response when asked what he thinks and hopes the film will leave viewers with.
“It is straight-up true music from a straight-up true guy,” he says of “Wildflowers” and its depiction in the film. “A guy who was not a saint, who was not perfect, who was flawed, who was this, that and the other, but there was no [bull].
“There’s not a false thing on the record, on the whole thing,” Tench says. “He didn’t fake it. We didn’t fake it. And that record is a prime example of that. And the film, really, really brings that to light.”
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