The 1970s band Tom Petty never wanted to hear: “Sorry”
Tom Petty didn’t get into the music business to try to win any trophies.
He wanted to make the best rock and roll that he possibly could, and if anyone stood in the way of him making classics, he wasn’t afraid to go right over their heads, even if that meant sticking it to his own label from time to time. But even if he was one of the biggest names in rock and roll at the time, his brand of heartland rock wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that was happening in the underground.
Then again, Petty was never trying to be looked at as an underground artist anyway. His biggest heroes were bands like The Byrds and The Rolling Stones, and even if that wasn’t the biggest genre in the world at the time, it was a lot easier for him to make that kind of music with the Heartbreakers. And considering how everyone reacted to tunes like ‘American Girl’, it’s not like the world ever got tired of those jangly guitars after the Summer of Love faded from view. But Petty did have to deal with the spiky-haired crowd more than a few times as well.
Despite being one of the best rock and roll artists he could be, Petty always tended to get thrown in with the new wave artists going on at the time. He may have looked the part on the cover of his debut wearing a bullet belt across his chest, but when you listen to everyone that was breaking through at the time, the idea of The Clash, Elvis Costello, Devo, and Tom Petty being on the charts at the time does seem a little bit odd.
And it’s not like Petty took kindly to people calling him a punk, either. He was seething when John Lydon tried to talk trash about him on his first trip to England, and even when he made it to New York for the first time, he wasn’t exactly thrilled when playing the legendary CBGBs. Mainly because Petty was already competing with some hometown heroes before he even played a note on that stage.
‘The Big Apple’ was already home to some of the biggest names in punk, but while Ramones and Blondie had their own sound by that point, Johnny Thunders’ iteration of the Heartbreakers was already becoming one of the most talked-about bands at the time. Petty already had an uphill battle when he came out singing tunes like ‘Breakdown’, but he felt that his mission was to leave people like Thunders in the dust.
Petty wasn’t looking to start a fight by any means, but he also wasn’t going to pretend like there wasn’t a sense of resentment between him and his New York counterpart, saying, “We didn’t know about that band for a long time. We heard about it right before we played CBGBS; that there was another local band called the Heartbreakers.”
Adding, “But by that time, I said, I haven’t heard them to this day, and well, ours is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and they can’t get too confused. Sorry and all that, but we ain’t gonna change our name or nothing. That’s really a New York problem.”
And when you listen to both bands together, it’s not like you were going to mistake one for the other. Thunders was making some of the most hard-edged rock and roll that he could, which bordered on absolute chaos, but Petty was the one who was trying to make the tunes that Mick Jagger and John Lennon had forgotten about when they started writing back in the 1960s.
Thunders did eventually become a rock and roll legend in his own right, but Petty wasn’t interested in being known for the punk attitude over everything else. He had an agenda, and if he was going to be remembered for anything in his career, he would rather it be the songs he wrote than any of his misbehaviour.
