Songfacts®:

• The Traveling Wilburys were a supergroup for the ages, coming together organically after Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne helped out their friend George Harrison by recording a song with him when he needed a B-side for a single. That song was "Handle With Care," which they had so much fun making they decided it should be part of an entire album.
  
  About a month later, they set up shop at the house of Dave Stewart, their mutual friend and Eurythmics member. Using Stewart's home studio, they wrote and recorded nine more songs in less than two weeks, including "Tweeter And The Monkey Man," one of the most memorable tracks.
• This is as close to a Bob Dylan song as you'll find outside of his solo recordings. It's credited to all five group members, but it was mostly written by Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, with Dylan singing lead.
  
  Dylan came up with lots of eccentric characters in his songs - Mr. Jones, Jack Of Hearts, and Dr. Filth among them - and here he comes up with two more: Tweeter and the Monkey Man. The duo are criminals on the run, pursued by an undercover cop. But in a twist, the cop's sister saves them, and the cop ends up dead.
• According to George Harrison in the documentary The True History Of The Traveling Wilburys, there were a lot of references to Americana in the song, which he and Jeff Lynne - the English members of the group didn't understand. Petty and Dylan were writing the lyrics by singing them, so they got a tape recorder and transcribed the words. Dylan then went in the vocal booth with the transcribed lyrics, sang them through, then changed a bunch of lines on the spot, re-writing the song right in the booth. Harrison, no stranger to genius at work, was amazed.
• The chorus "And the walls came down..." started out as a verse lyric Dylan wrote but didn't use. George Harrison and Jeff Lynne remembered it and suggested they use it.
• The Canadian rock band Headstones released a popular cover of "Tweeter And The Monkey Man" on their 1993 debut album, Picture Of Health.
• According to Tom Petty, Dylan wanted to write a song that was set in New Jersey and fill it with references to Bruce Springsteen. "We weren't trying to mock anybody," Petty stressed. "He just meant it as praise."