Benmont Tench, Still a Heartbreaker, Is Carrying on Solo
[New York Times]
Starting in the early 1970s, the organist, singer and songwriter was a creative anchor for Tom Petty. On a new solo album, he explores what comes next.
By Bob Mehr
Reporting from Los Angeles
- Published Feb. 27, 2025Updated Feb. 28, 2025
Ninety pounds, the approximate weight of a Farfisa organ, nearly kept Benmont Tench from his destiny.
It was late 1971, and Tench, a native of Gainesville, Fla., was home from college for Christmas. His favorite local band, Mudcrutch, was playing a five-set-a-night residency at a topless bar called Dub’s, and they’d finally invited him to join them onstage. He started to load his gear into his mother’s station wagon, hoisted his Fender amp onto the tailgate and then went to grab his organ.
“I picked this thing up and it was so damn heavy,” Tench recalled. For a moment, he considered blowing the whole thing off. Instead, he heaved the Farfisa into the car. That night, he played with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell for the first time, forging a musical bond and forming the nucleus of what would eventually become the Heartbreakers. “But it almost didn’t happen,” Tench said in a recent interview, shaking his head at the memory. “I mean, it was that close.”
More than half a century later, the Heartbreakers themselves are a memory: The group ended abruptly after Petty’s death in 2017 from an accidental drug overdose. But Tench, 71, continues to make music. His second solo album, an elegiac collection of songs titled “The Melancholy Season,” will be released on March 7.
The album follows a 10-year period that included a second marriage for Tench, to the writer Alice Carbone, the birth of his first child and the loss of Petty, his longtime friend and band leader.
“Tom died, and our daughter was born three months later,” said Tench, sitting in the living room of his home in 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 covered by a white Borsalino — was sipping tea as sunlight passed through a large picture window and onto the lid of a 1928 Mason & Hamlin piano.
“The band, the main focus of my life since I was 19 years old, was gone,” he said. “Losing Tom was a terrible event that blew everything up. But I was damned if I wasn’t going to make another record.”
Tench’s former bandmate Campbell, now fronting his own group the Dirty Knobs, understands his dilemma. “The Heartbreakers had intentions of making more records, playing more shows, we would’ve gone on forever,” he said in a phone interview. “Even now, the grief is still there — but I have to keep making music, because that’s my lifeblood, and it’s the same with Ben. This is a whole new part of our lives that we didn’t choose.”
More recently, Tench has faced serious health issues. In 2023, he learned that his mouth cancer — the disease he had been dealing with for more than a decade — had spread to his jaw. “The doctors took half my jaw out,” he said, “took a piece from my leg, muscle and bone to rebuild it.”
A series of surgeries and treatments followed into 2024, delaying the release of “The Melancholy Season.” “I’ve been letting everything heal, doing a few therapeutic exercises and trying to learn to speak more clearly, and to sing again,” Tench continued, dabbing at his mouth with a handkerchief.
“It’s funny, if I go to the Heartbreakers clubhouse, our old rehearsal space, after an hour or so at the piano singing, my pronunciation is much better. It just goes to show that, in my life, the answer to everything is to play.”
ON A WALL in Tench’s stylish 1920s Tudor, there’s a large framed photograph: a post-show snapshot of a joyous Petty and the Heartbreakers, after their final gig — a sold-out concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2017 that capped the band’s 40th anniversary tour.
The group was driven by the force of Petty’s personality and songs, but it was the Heartbreakers’ interplay that elevated the music and the band’s fortunes. Campbell and Tench, in particular, could turn Petty’s raw melodies and chord progressions into soulful symphonies.
“That was the beauty of Ben and I,” Campbell said. “Also, Ben had a technical musical knowledge that Tom and I didn’t have. He could fill the space between us.”
After Petty’s death, Tench sought refuge in his family and in the studio, working on albums for friends like Ringo Starr and Jenny Lewis. Though he’s now revered as one of rock’s greatest and most prolific session musicians, for the first five years of the Heartbreakers, Petty barred him from doing any outside recording. “It was the law for the whole band,” Tench said. “Tom felt like the Heartbreakers had a specific sound, and he didn’t want other people’s records sounding like us.”
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