Keller Williams pays twangy tribute to Tom Petty
Keller Williams, known in jamband circles as the guy with all the loops, does an annual benefit right after Christmas for the local SPCA (global animal rescue) in his hometown of Fredericksburg, Va.
“I guess I’ve done about 17 of them,” he says while driving through snow-covered Montana last week, “and I always want to bring a different project each year. In 2015, I got together with my studio engineer and another buddy of mine and we did 15 Tom Petty songs bluegrass and really had a good time, rehearsing for it, and the show was super fun.”
And that probably would have been that, but on the afternoon of Oct. 2, 2017, we were all shocked to learn that Mr. Petty died suddenly at 66.
“I was in the studio working on this album I put out called ‘Sans,’ and the day he died I couldn’t really concentrate, obviously,” Mr. Williams says. “It was a huge shock and we pulled up the voice memos that we used to record our rehearsals and ran those through the computer and mastered them and released them on Soundcloud, just to pay tribute to Tom Petty. The voice memos were just so fun to listen to on such a dark day, we felt like it would be a good tribute to release those.”
It actually wasn’t the first time
the singer-songwriter-guitarist had given Mr. Petty a bluegrass treatment. In 2006, on his 10th album, “Grass,” as Keller and the Keels, he mixed “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” with “Breakdown” to create “Mary Jane’s Last Breakdown,” paired with such covers as Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” and The Grateful Dead’s “Dupree’s Diamond Blues.”
Last May, he crossed paths with Missouri bluegrass band The Hillbenders while playing a late-night show at DelFest in Cumberland, Md.
“The Hillbenders were doing their rock opera ‘Tommy’ and I was playing with the Travelin’ McCourys, and we met and liked each other, and they picked up on the Soundcloud I released and kind of talked me into it, and I’m glad they did.”
They talked him into PettyGrass, a tour that hits the Byham, Downtown, on Sunday that takes his initial idea and fleshes it out with a full band treatment.
What was it about Mr. Petty’s material that made him do that benefit in the first place?
“His songs are so deep yet simple and they all have a really sing-along quality to the choruses,” he says, “so much so that I never really had any Petty records, it was all just listening to the radio.
“This is from a time when the radio was on and a lot of people would hear these songs and subconsciously remember them, so when they came back around you could sing along to the chorus. I was able to do that to like 15 songs without ever having a Petty record and something with those songs, when you play ’em, there’s nothing really like a whole room singing the same song at the same time. It’s really a celebration, and that’s the vibe we get with this project.”
When the tour wraps up, he’ll continue to roll along as a solo artist and plans to follow up “Sans” with an album of all new vocal tunes in the fall.
Along the way, he says, “I get to play with String Cheese [Incident] in a few weeks down in Jamaica. And wow, there’s a whole bunch of fun stuff coming up this summer. There’s a Grateful Grass gig with Love Canon [in Floyd, Va., in July] and a nice fun weekend in Tennessee …. The road never ends.”
Being able to jump around through different projects makes it all the sweeter.
“I feel very grateful to be able to do that,” he says. “I wouldn’t be able to do that without the promoters and especially the people buying tickets. I feel like I’m getting away with something every show.”