The bands Tom Petty thought would keep rock music alive: “They’re going to carry this forward”
Many rock stars of Tom Petty‘s generation tend to look around the music scene and wonder where the fun went. Sure, rock might not have quite as big an influence on the charts as it had in 1974, but seeing cheap imitations of retro styles was never going to go very far in a music scene that was all about innovation. The true artists of the world were about going against the grain, and Petty thought there were still a few stragglers of the true rock and roll tradition.
Because if you look at it, rock’s relevance in the mainstream has taken a back seat to rap music since roughly the late 1990s. There have still been great acts that have come and gone since then, and even a few movements like the garage rock revival and the indie boom, but nowadays, people are going to talk about how artists like Kendrick Lamar changed their lives rather than The Black Keys.
When Petty started, though, rock was a new way of getting someone’s perspective on life. Since The Beatles had shown us what was possible with popular music, everyone from The Byrds to The Rolling Stones started following suit when Petty was just starting to discover his love for loud guitars.
Although Petty ascended to the kind of rock god status that most can only dream of getting by his final days, he still thought that acts like Cage the Elephant were a breath of fresh air for the rock scene, telling MusicCares, “Rock and roll moves on, more like the blues or jazz now. I’m heartened to see these young bands like Cage the Elephant and The Shelters. They’re going to carry this forward, and we have to be there to carry them through it because there’s nothing like a good rock and roll band.”
Despite Cage the Elephant being far from Petty’s brand of heartland rock, it doesn’t take much to see what Petty saw in them. As opposed to artists who made songs destined to get on the radio or promote the next make and model Chevy truck, every one of their projects is about making something slightly more abstract than what had come before, almost like they were a vintage version of someone like Beck.
But The Shelters might be more indicative of what Petty liked to hear in popular music, to begin with. Following in the footsteps of other under-the-radar legends like The Jayhawks, their blend of country-flavoured rock and roll earned them enough of a reputation with Petty to be included on his final album, Hypnotic Eye, in 2016.
Although it’s customary for any artist to just find a sound that they like and follow anyone who makes something slightly adjacent to it, both Cage the Elephant and The Shelters aren’t acts looking to just give lip service to their influences every chance they get. Whereas the biggest rock bands tend to wear their influences like masks and repackage them for the nostalgia crowd, both of Petty’s favourite acts are the kind of artists that have gone back and listened to that old sound, internalised it, and came back with something entirely different.
