The “good things” punk accomplished, according to Tom Petty
In 1978, Tom Petty was a 27-year-old with a Byrds haircut, a Dylan sneer, and a band that had just started cracking the charts. With the Heartbreakers, he’d already released two albums, and songs like ‘Breakdown’ and ‘American Girl’—which found a foothold in the UK first—were finally starting to climb out of cult status into heavy rock radio rotation stateside. For all his classically American power pop credentials, though, Petty oddly found himself lumped in with the only scene that seemed suitable for a back-to-basics, hard-scrabble garage band in the late ‘70s. Yes, once upon a time, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were called “punks”.
Gradually, as Petty’s star grew and critics began to align him more with a new crop of less aggressive and more intellectual radio rockers – think Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seeger in the States, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe in the UK – the punk label fell away. While touring the US in the summer of 1978, Petty was nonetheless asked about the punk movement, which was already being spoken of in the past tense.
“Punk did some good things,” Petty told the Tampa Tribune. “People heard this noise the kids made and realised you don’t have to have smoke and lasers to play good music and put on a good show. You come to play a gig—that’s what you’re there for—to play the gig. All the other things, the girls and the cocaine, are incidental to playing the gig. I think a lot of people sort of got the cart in front of the horse for a while.”
As someone who’d grown up idolising The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Byrds, Petty was what might now be called a “purist” when it came to his rock preferences. The excesses of the 1970s, be they in the form of heavy metal, arena rock, glam, disco, or prog, were not particularly appealing and represented a sort of culture of self-indulgence that he was pushing against. Petty wasn’t a punk by any means, either, but he could at least recognise a kinship with those bands; an emphasis on energy, economy, and just playing the damn gig.
“It’s all rock n roll,” Petty said in the same interview, while also acknowledging the budding public interest in bands, like the Heartbreakers, that were simplifying rock back to its base materials. “There’s a lot of people always been rocking,” he said. “It’s just now doing the nation some good, getting it back on the radio. Kids want to rock n’ roll, and they’ve been denied rock n’ roll. I think there’s an energy, whether it’s created by me or Elvis Costello, is really irrelevant. It’s just that somebody creates it.”
In the years that followed, Petty would continue carving out his own lane, unconcerned with trends but always aware of the temperature. He kept things tight, honest, and driven by the kind of gig-first mentality he praised in that 1978 interview. Whether he was topping the charts or not, there was no caving to pressure or compromising his ethics. Over the long haul, Petty might have turned out more punk than the punks.
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