In 1986 Bob Dylan toured Australia with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers as his backing band.
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, now The Speaker Wars drummer Stan Lynch tells Noise11.com, “The setlist was unbelievable,” Stan recalls. “You look down at the setlist and go ‘if you don’t know these songs I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under”.
Stan describes each show as a wild ride. He never knew what would happen next. “What it was like to play with Bob, he was a brilliant musician and a fearless frontman. He would do anything and you really didn’t know what version of the song you would play every night. There was very little rehearsal. It was all on the fly. You didn’t know if you were playing ‘Lay Lady Lay’ or ‘Positively Fourth Street’ until he started singing. You really had to be on your game. You never relaxed, in a good way. You went ‘man this is fun’. It was a high watermark for me in terms of drumming. It never got better for me. It was the pinnacle of great playing for me”.
Stan agrees if was The Heartbreakers greatest moment. “I thought the band was pretty much at their best. It also had that anarchy that I love. You never knew what was going to happen. I just come alive in that”, he said.
The ’86 Australian tour featured a lot of cover and many songs that were just performed once. Stan explains, “A lot of songs came through. There was no rehearsal. Maybe we’d touch on it at soundcheck and then we’d do the song and sometimes we would never do it again. Or the setlist would be printed out and put on my monitor but nothing from that setlist would be played. It was just great. To me it was ‘how much fun can a guy have’.”
These days Stan is in a new band, The Speaker Wars. Their self-titled debut album is coming on 30 May 2025. Check out ‘It Ain’t Easy’:
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