The “garage” band Tom Petty believed “saved” the blues
As much as Tom Petty loved rock and roll, he didn’t want to get tied down to one genre throughout his career.
He knew that he would always find time to listen to people like The Byrds and The Beatles in his free time, but since he came out of the gates looking like a punk in a leather jacket, half of that first album cycle was him trying to convince everyone that he wasn’t part of any New Wave genre by any means. He didn’t like the idea of being labelled, and a lot of his material is some of the best kind of American music ever made.
It’s easier to throw him into the same category as John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen in terms of being a great heartland rock singer, but it’s not like Petty ever belonged there, either. He wasn’t going to make a song the same way that ‘The Boss’ would whenever he made one of his records, because his version of America sounded a lot different coming from the South as opposed to a guy from Jersey.
Petty had a healthy respect for all forms of rock and roll, but he also knew the deep roots of the genre as well. A lot of his good friends in the business were the ones that came from country music, and while Johnny Cash wasn’t exactly a rock artist, he set the stage for what the rock and roll attitude was going to become every single time he went against authority with any one of his songs.
That was the attitude that Petty wanted to have with his music, but there was always a healthy amount of blues in there as well. Mike Campbell had cut his teeth playing along to some of the best blues players of all time, like Albert King, but when you listen to a lot of the bands that were coming out around the time The Heartbreakers made it big, it’s not like every group had the same respect for the blues that they did.
Make no mistake, there were still some great blues bands, but they all seemed to have their own variation on what that music was supposed to sound like. The role of any great blues song is to be malleable, but when looking at Led Zeppelin, there are plenty of people who simply saw them as the precursor to heavy metal and hard rock more than the bluesy offshoot of The Yardbirds.
That kind of music would have fallen by the wayside, but Petty felt that rock had The Rolling Stones to thank for carrying on that kind of music, saying, “Most garage bands were playing blues in crude form during the ‘60s. I think about groups like The Rolling Stones in the ‘60s, and all those singles you’d hear on the radio. But growing up, we didn’t have any radio station that was playing original blues. I had to learn about it from The Rolling Stones. They singlehandedly saved that music for my generation. We have to thank them for that.”
And Mick Jagger and Keith Richards never forgot about their roots in the blues, either. Even though so many people have seen their more embarrassing moments where they have tried to follow trends, the best moments in The Stones’ career usually came when they were making songs that fell more in line with their bluesy roots, almost like what Muddy Waters or Robert Johnson would have done if they decided to be a little bit more suggestive with what they put into their songs.
The closest that Petty ever came to matching that kind of record was around the time of Mojo, but you don’t really need to hear it in every single song to hear why Petty considered blues to be the best genre on Earth. It all came down to his delivery, and whether he was singing a ballad or a rocker, he had that same kind of beautiful vocal tone that you’d find in some of the greatest blues artists.
