How Janis Joplin influenced one of the best Tom Petty songs
Tom Petty took his time putting together ‘The Waiting’. What would turn out to be one of his most classic and endearing singles didn’t come overnight. In fact, Petty had little more than the central riff that opens up the song and anchors it through its twists and turns at first. Without any real inspiration, Petty kept cycling through the riff, hoping something would come. Then came Janis Joplin.
“That’s all I had,” Petty said about stumbling onto the riff. “I did that for weeks. And then finally I hit on, ‘The waiting is the hardest part / Every day you get one more yard…’ And then I’d go, ‘Now what?’ You eat dinner, you come back, sit down, pick up the guitar. People start banging on the wall. ‘Don’t play that anymore!'”
Not the actual Joplin, of course. The legendary blues-rock singer had been dead for over a decade by the time Petty and his band, The Heartbreakers, recorded ‘The Waiting’. According to legend, it was through a conversation with Roger McGuinn, the mastermind behind 1960s folk rockers The Byrds, that he was delivered a gift from the rock and roll gods.
“That’s where I think I got it from … [Roger] McGuinn swears that he said it to me. Maybe he did. I don’t think so,” Petty claimed in Paul Zollo’s book Conversations With Tom Petty. “I think I got it from the Janis Joplin quote. That’s where it stuck in my mind. I don’t think she said, ‘The waiting is the hardest part,’ but it was something to that effect: ‘Everything else is just waiting.’ And so that’s where that came from.”
The quote attributed to Joplin usually goes something like, “I love being onstage and everything else is just waiting.” While he might not have used the quote word for word, Petty certainly keyed into the sentiment that Joplin (or possibly McGuinn) was expressing.
Check out ‘The Waiting’ down below.
