“Wilder than anything”: the band Tom Petty thought would go on forever
It’s never easy trying to call rock history before it unfolds. Many critics have tried their best to hype up the next big thing as one of the greatest bands to shake the music industry, but for every time they are right, there are also a fair number of bands that never reach the potential the public sets up for them. And for someone who loved rock and roll music as much as Tom Petty, he couldn’t help but feel disappointed whenever some of his favourite bands never got the attention they deserved back in the day.
For someone who had been one of the godfathers of heartland rock, though, Petty had a far more diverse taste than most. He was fortunate enough to befriend some of the biggest names in music like George Harrison in Bob Dylan, but he also wasn’t afraid to prop up bands that were doing everything right, whether that was shouting out Cage the Elephant or giving credit to bands like The Strokes for stealing ‘American Girl’ for ‘Last Nite’ and getting away with it.
He may have been after a good tune, but he was also a punk at heart. He never considered himself part of the punk movement that birthed bands like The Clash, but the spirit of not playing by the rules and toying with what the industry machine wants was always a part of Petty’s DNA, whether that was going against his record label on Damn the Torpedoes or insisting that none of his albums fall out of the price range of his fans. And that extended to the people who would open up for him as well.
Petty had refused to open for anyone after a while, but he knew to keep his ear to the ground when listening to new bands. It was definitely a ballsy move to get people like The Replacements as opening acts on some of his tours in the 1980s, but he also had an appreciation for seeing bands like Mink DeVille when he was first starting to play the club scene in England.
Though Mink DeVille had some grit behind them when they wanted to, a lot of their best material came from them channelling the same elements of R&B and soul that the early rock and rollers did in their prime. And since Petty was always a student of everything from the glory days of rock and roll, he felt that he was looking at a band that would one day take over the world when he first heard them.
After crossing paths on the club scene, Petty was convinced that Mink DeVille was going to be the next iconic rock band before he made it big, saying, “It was wild; wilder than anything we saw in Gainesville, I’ll tell you that. I saw some great bands. Mink DeVille, I thought, was going to be the next Stones. They killed us.” But the underground legends would never be able to make their way out of the core CBGBs scene.
It’s easy to see the same Stonesy sense of danger in their music, though. Whenever Willy DeVille opened his mouth to sing, a lot of what he had to say had that same street-wise grit that Mick Jagger had in the early days, and while a lot of their stuff took their cues from classic soul, it would have been a welcome change of pace seeing them on the rock charts at the time rather than watching Jagger strut his stuff on the song ‘Miss You’.
But that’s one of the Greek tragedies that comes with being in the music business. Many bands have the potential to be some of the greatest names in music, but sometimes, good fortune does not shine on them for too long, and their chances of success slowly evaporate.
