The band Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty agreed saved rock: “The most significant”
Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty should practically be considered zealots of rock and roll at this point.
While Petty has long since departed from this mortal coil, the conviction that both he and ‘The Boss’ had was the kind of pure admiration for rock and roll that every single musician should have before they play a note of music. They were always going to try and keep the genre’s heart beating at every opportunity, but they also could see when the genre was starting to turn a wrong corner now and again.
Because looking through a lot of what Springsteen and Petty had made since the 1980s, things were definitely shifting underneath their feet. Born in the USA and Southern Accents sounded a whole lot different from what they had been doing in their early days, and while they did want to grow, it was only going to take one wrong move for them to start embarrassing themselves with more ‘hip’ musical tricks at the time.
Bringing in synthesisers wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, but when you look through a lot of their greatest hits, there’s a reason why the late 1980s aren’t considered the absolute peak of their careers. Rock and roll as a whole had started to get insanely dull, and there was a point where hip-hop had started to take over for rock as being the sound of rebellion every time it came on the radio.
But there was still a way back onto the charts, and Nirvana was the one that was going to give it to everyone. Kurt Cobain didn’t care one way or the other about whether he got on the radio, but the fact that he could play so many timeless tunes was what made everyone want to ditch bands like Bon Jovi and start moving towards more authentic rock and roll stars like Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell.
And for Springsteen, this was only a good thing for rock and roll. All genres need to evolve, and ‘The Boss’ saw the musical world shifting beneath his feet with Nirvana, saying, “That’s a band that reset the rules of the game. They changed everything, they opened a vein of freedom that didn’t exist previously. The singer did something very similar to what Dylan did in the ’60s, which was to sound different and get on the radio. Your guitarist could sound different and get heard. So there are a lot of very fundamental rules that they reset.”
Petty wasn’t nearly as subtle about his love for Nirvana, even saying that the band was as important as the days of Beatlemania, saying, “Nirvana to me were the most significant group to come since The Beatles. Very powerful vision and a very honest man behind it. I loved him. He was amazing.” But what’s even more interesting is seeing where both heartland rockers went after hearing him.
Springsteen spent a large part of the early 1990s outside the E Street Band, but while he did end up making darker music on The Ghost of Tom Joad, Petty felt right at home with the alt-rockers. That kind of snide attitude towards corporate rock was something he had been doing for years, so he was as much of a friend of grunge as Neil Young was when he started performing with Pearl Jam.
Nirvana couldn’t have been created in an industry meeting, but as far as Springsteen and Petty were concerned, they were what rock and roll was about. Because for all of the people trying to discover the next Nirvana, it’s really an impossible task. These bands can’t be put together out of the air, because the greatest artists are the ones who have something to express beyond being a casual rock fan.
