The one genre Linda Ronstadt and Tom Petty both hated: “I don’t care for it”
Linda Ronstadt and Tom Petty tended to be cut from the same cloth whenever they made records.
They didn’t have to show up on each other’s projects or anything, but both of them knew about integrity whenever they made their songs and were going to do everything in their power to make something work. But while Ronstadt was a bit more refined vocally compared to the Heartbreakers, she did understand when she wanted to stay as far away from some genres as possible.
Because if you think about it, there’s no chance that Ronstadt would have come out with a heavy metal album when she was still singing. Her voice was better suited to pop music and more ambitious styles of singing, but she could at least still see that a band like The Heartbreakers were one of the best groups that America had ever seen when she first heard ‘American Girl’.
And that’s all that she really needed to get behind a lot of her favourite acts. Some of the biggest names in rock at the time were making perfect Americana music, and while Ronstadt was the queen of country rock to a certain degree, she knew she needed to branch out if she wanted to make something memorable. She didn’t want to spend her life singing old Hank Williams tunes, but right after she started to make bold new choices, the Nashville scene started going in a different direction as well.
Everyone from Eagles to Bruce Springsteen had a few country songs under their belt, and since Music Row was all about following the next wave of music, stadium country music was the next evolution of the genre. Most of the songs populating the charts around the 1990s had a lot more sheen on them that put them in line with what rock stars were doing, and Ronstadt hated every single second of it.
She already wasn’t that much of a fan of stadium rock, so bringing out the simplistic side of country was incredibly disappointing, saying, “I don’t listen to modern country music. I don’t care for it particularly. I like old country music, when it still came out of the country. What they call country music now is what I call Midwest mall-crawler music. You go into big-box stores and come out with huge pushcarts of things.”
And for someone who grew up listening to some of the greatest country artists of his time, Petty felt the exact same way when he was asked about modern country, saying, “We’re kind of interested in all kinds of American music. Pure forms of it. Not what they would call country today. Most of what they would call country today is just bad rock groups with a fiddle. The stuff that we liked was late 1950s early 1960s stuff. We’re a rock and roll band, but a lot of the roots of rock and roll comes from country.”
It’s that kind of purity that’s hard to come by in the industry today. There are still people out there trying to bring some grit back into the genre, like Chris Stapleton, but when you look at what the lion’s share of the country charts look like, it’s anywhere between the good ol’ boys like Morgan Wallen talking about drinking on every other song or the occasional tune that has to deal with everything from trucks to beer to simple living.
Not all country used to be that way, but all Ronstadt and Petty could see was a mad-lib style genre that tried to pinpoint the mathematical formula of a hit. That’s not what the genre was all about, and all we can hope for is someone with a bit more credibility to show Nashville what the genre used to be like back in the days when giants like Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash were making classics.
