“I lost interest”: The moment Elvis Presley was ruined for Tom Petty
Any great artist will need some defiant staying power if they want to be taken seriously by the public. Although many people like the idea of being the hot new thing for one summer, it’s hard to get a foot into the mainstream when everything you sing about is the same road-tested tune every time you step up to the microphone. While Tom Petty understood the importance of evolving over time, he knew that the days of listening to just one rock juggernaut were gone forever once he started discovering new music.
As far back as Petty could remember, though, he was always interested in rock and roll. Considering how many people still relied on listening to country music in his native Florida, there was something a lot more interesting whenever he heard the sound of an electric guitar coming out of a blown-out speaker.
But in terms of falling in love with music, everyone has that moment where everything clicks, and as far as Petty was concerned, meeting Elvis Presley was nothing short of a religious experience. Whereas most people saw him as the guy onstage who gyrated every time he performed, Petty saw him for the musical shaman that he was, being the glorified ambassador for rock and roll for millions of people.
Although meeting Presley during the film Follow That Dream helped mould Petty into the kind of rocker he would become, it wasn’t until The Beatles came along that he actually had a vision. He didn’t have the same dancing experience that Presley had, but since the Fab Four stood as a unit and played their music, it made more sense for him to get together with some friends to pound out their own tunes.
It also didn’t help that Presley started to make rock and roll something it had never been before: lame. Ever since leaving the Army, all of the vanity projects that he made on the big screen made ‘The King’ look like a bloated version of what a rock star was supposed to be, which never really went away until he made his comeback special in the late 1960s to remind everyone what he was really like.
Still, Petty thought it was no use watching the re-runs of Presley when he had The Beatles as a model, saying, “When The Beatles came, I lost interest in Elvis, because [The Beatles] were the music of my generation, and I was a huge record buff. So I lost interest in Elvis, though I kind of felt an allegiance to him. I still went and saw those s***** movies for a while. But I knew the difference by then. It didn’t have the vitality that these new records did.”
From there, Petty grew out of Presley’s music and started listening to everything he could get his hands on that was remotely rock-related. ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’ might have still been fun to listen to, but it didn’t compare to what was happening on street level, whether that was the Byrds’s electric guitar chime or the social impact that Bob Dylan was having with every one of his songs.
Petty didn’t ever stop looking out for new artists, either, collaborating with people like Eurythmics in the 1980s while still finding time to pay tribute to his heroes like Johnny Cash. Presley may have started the fire, but it took a few more bands to convince Petty that he could be a rock legend.
