The massive festival set that disgusted Tom Petty: “All I could see were little specks”
Like many of his peers, Tom Petty had a pretty specific view on the purpose of creativity.
He was also more realistic than most when it came to hitting a wall with his own ideas. While some musicians push and push until something sticks, Petty saw it more like a game of fishing. In his mind, waiting for that coveted lightbulb moment was like “keeping your pole in water” until you “get a bite”.
Whether people accept it or not, this is true for everybody. And it’s also a means to an end when it comes to finding your purpose in music. And in Petty’s world, having a purpose was the most important thing, especially when it came to his own projects. As he once said, “If I don’t have a project going, I don’t feel like I’m connected to anything.”
This translated to how he felt on stage, too. There’s a natural intimacy to Petty’s music that makes it carry particularly well in studios and smaller venues. It’s also the kind of setup Petty loved – being able to sit in front of an audience and see every single face absorbing his words as if they were written especially for them.
Most of the music appears this way. Imagine sitting front row, hearing Petty sing something like ‘It’ll All Work Out’, the words “It never goes away, but it all works out” hitting somewhere deeper as though it’s being sung to you from the corner of some dark, dingy folk pub. Petty’s music was designed for intimacy, even the bigger, more stadium-adjacent pieces – it all somehow feels personal, which was also his special secret to timeless music.
Suppose it makes sense, then, that sometimes Petty got it wrong – especially when it came to translating his material to bigger audiences. Speaking to New Wave Rock in 1979, Petty acknowledged the struggles with one particular show and why he missed performing in bars at the time. “We haven’t played bars in a while, and I miss it,” he admitted. “You can see everybody right there. I don’t mind playing bars, they’re fun.”
He also recalled playing at 1978’s Knebworth Festival to around 100,000 people, a “disgusting” experience that they only decided to do because they were on a tour across America and thought playing to that large a crowd in England would tick a box and tackle “the whole country in just a day”. But it ended up being a disaster, mostly because nobody could see anything – not the audience nor Petty himself.
“I walked out to the press area and all I could see were little specks and mountains, and it was all during the daytime, so they couldn’t even put lights on you, so a roadie on the side of the stage was just as prominent as anything else,” he went on. “Biggest mess I ever saw in my life. People bummed out in the mud and the sun all day. That’s no way to hear rock ‘n’ roll.”
They eventually got the formula right. In fact, some of Petty’s most notable performances are ones to crowds of 70,000 or more – including his famed Live Aid performance in 1985 and his Super Bowl halftime show in 2008, which, as we know, is one of the hardest shows to pull off sound-wise. Still, there’s a lot of respect in Petty’s awareness of where his music thrives the most, as even if it was delivered on some larger scale, it always had its core intimacy.
