How The Rolling Stones changed Tom Petty’s life
For the late Tom Petty, Elvis Presley was his first musical hero. However, even at a young age, he understood that Elvis was an imitable talent who would never be replicated, and it would be a waste of energy to attempt to follow in his footsteps. However, The Rolling Stones were different and gave Petty the confidence to chase his musical dream.
While The Rolling Stones were talented musicians, they have never claimed to be virtuosos. The energy which they brought to their recordings and their live shows was unmatched, making The Stones the most dangerous band on the planet. Their brand of music was infectious, providing teenagers worldwide with the courage to start a group of their own, including Petty.
Before The Rolling Stones dramatically entered his life, seeing The Beatles make their television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show was another watershed moment for Petty. “Most magic is a trick, an illusion. But [when The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show], this was real. Man oh man, was it real,” he told Music Radar in 2009.
Petty added: “I think the whole world was watching that night. It certainly felt that way – you just knew it, sitting in your living room, that everything around you was changing. It was like going from black-and-white to colour. Really.”
As much as Petty got caught up in Beatlemania, they seemed out of reach for a boy from Gainesville, Florida. Although they were an authentic band who made their own songs, their level of musicianship seemed to operate on a level that he’d never attain, unlike The Rolling Stones.
Petty explained of The Beatles on Q with Jian Ghomeshi in 2014: “These people look like they are self-contained, they’re making music that they wrote themselves, and the music is all there on the stage. They’re playing it; they look like they’re really good friends and having a lot of fun.”
He continued: “They were so absolutely genius, y’know, they were so good even in ’64 that it seemed really hard to reach that kind of musicianship. But then you saw The Stones come out not much longer after that, and you went, ‘That I can do. I can do that.”
Elaborating on his love of The Stones, Petty said: “They were grittier, it was rawer. They were playing blues in this really energetic kind of raw way, but it wasn’t complicated. There wasn’t a lot of complicated harmony involved. It was sort of my punk music. It was like, ‘That can be done’. Apparently, tens of thousands of American musicians had the same thought at the same time. You won’t meet anyone my age who didn’t have that thought at that time.”
At this stage, Petty didn’t want to hear artists who achieved perfection, and the grittiness of The Rolling Stones taught him that music was allowed to have a roughness. From this point, Petty was hellbent on becoming a rock ‘n’ roll star and never looked back.
