The 1964 record Tom Petty called the first great album: “A significant thing”
Tom Petty is one of the few artists who had rock and roll flowing through his veins.
He saw his role as a musician as a higher calling whenever he picked up a guitar, and even when looking at some of his lesser albums, you can hear him trying as hard as he can to break new ground on every single one of those tunes. He wanted to get the most out of the Heartbreakers and make a sonic statement, but that wasn’t the world that Petty grew up listening to when he first fell in love with the genre.
Because when Petty was working on his first chords, the biggest records of the time weren’t always rock and roll. He loved the idea of playing a couple of tunes for a school dance, but some of the highlights of everyone’s record collection at the time were people like Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra. They were all great at what they did, but Petty was in for a different kind of ride when he heard Elvis Presley playing for the first time.
He was in love with tunes like ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to the point of obsession, but he also didn’t think about being anywhere near what Presley was doing. He was one of the biggest stars in the world and no one would have dared to take his throne, but right as rock and roll was starting to wane, The Beatles were what truly set everything on fire for him when he saw them on The Ed Sullivan Show.
And the Fab Four couldn’t have come at a better time. Most historians like to think that The Beatles gave us a little bit of happiness following the death of President Kennedy, but when you look at the other rock stars at the time, it’s not like they had much competition. The biggest names in the genre at the time were teen idols like Fabian, and there was no way that John Lennon or Paul McCartney were going to make something that sounded like a bunch of musical fluff.
Then again, Americans did get a bit of a warped view of what The Beatles were. The American releases of their first albums might be decent collector’s items these days, but looking at the way that the US were chopping up the band’s original works, all of their records felt like a collection of songs rather than a full album statement. But amongst all of the patchwork jobs, Meet the Beatles was the one time where they got it right.
Replacing most of the covers from With The Beatles with their singles from the time, Petty felt that it was the US that made the first album what it was, saying, “[At school] you either had a copy of Meet The Beatles or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, it was like something was wrong with you. Come to think of it, that was the first time an LP was a significant thing. Up till then, people only bought singles. But with Meet the Beatles, that was a record you really wanted to listen to – both sides of it.”
And when listening to the band in that context, this is a one-stop shop for everything that made the band great. It does feel a little cheap knowing that the original British canon has 14 tracks instead of 12, but having an A-side full of some of the greatest pop songs of all time like ‘All My Loving’, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ and ‘This Boy’ was practically a litmus test for what pop music was supposed to be afterwards.
Rock and roll didn’t have to be strictly about dumb fun, and even if half of what the Fab Four wrote about was love songs, it was the structure that stuck with Petty. Because if they could end up making a statement with nothing but a bunch of rock and roll tunes, maybe he could do the same thing when he started working with his buddies to put together The Heartbreakers a decade later.
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