The single Tom Petty was too embarrassed to return to: “Imagine our horror”
Every entertainer is tasked with doing some parts of their job that they didn’t sign up for. Many people would like to think that the life of a singer involves waking up, doing the odd vocal run now and again, and making millions of people happy every time the lights go down and the spotlight shines on them every night. That’s the kind of fantasy that might be burrowed into everyone’s skull, but Tom Petty knew as well as anyone that it was a lot less glamorous than it was cracked up to be.
Before Petty even had a record contract, he had already found out the hard way that some pieces of his career wouldn’t be traditional. In trying to get a deal for his first band, Mudcrutch, he felt the only logical way to get people interested was to show up in California with their demo tape and shop it around to every single label in the area until he came out with a deal. And even when they were enthusiastic about him, he knew only half the battle was won.
After being dropped after Mudcrutch fell through, Petty knew that he needed to get a deal on his own terms, and when the Heartbreakers were eventually formed, he wasn’t out of the woods when he got to the top of the mountain. He had to deal with people who wanted to steal his songs from right under his nose, and when he finally won his legal battles, it was now time to promote his record.
However, the promotion process looked a lot different back in the late 1970s. Most people got their music either from the radio or by reading about it in music magazines, and since MTV wasn’t a thing yet, people had to go by what they thought was catchy. That didn’t mean that some music videos weren’t still happening behind the scenes.
The Beatles already pioneered the artsy videos in the 1960s like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, but Petty remembered regretting a few of his pre-MTV clips, saying, “You did ’em so you didn’t have to go on The Merv Griffin Show or some TV show you didn’t want to appear on, or you couldn’t appear on. You’d make a clip and send it, and they’d just play it once. So, imagine our horror years later when these things played repeatedly on television. Actually, the one of ‘The Waiting’ is particularly embarrassing.”
And since this was shot in the pre-MTV 1980s, the video clearly reads as someone who doesn’t know the first thing about music videos. It might be nice to see them simply playing the song, but as opposed to the moody video for ‘A Woman in Love’ from the same album, this is the discount version of what a video should be, complete with streamers that make them look like they’re playing at some kid’s birthday party.
The more tragic part of it is the fact that it’s paired with such a fantastic song. ‘The Waiting’ is among one of Petty’s greatest tunes and serves as a perfect version of what the Heartbreakers are all about, but all that people will end up remembering back in the day is a video where Petty pulls down the streamers all around him and the drastic cuts between shots getting the rest of the band members.
It’s far from the most offensive video ever made, but Petty was a fast learned when it came to promoting his stuff, eventually making high-concept videos later down the line on ‘Into the Great Wide Open’ and ‘You Got Lucky’. The video ultimately makes it a timepiece from the stone age of music videos, but it does at least give people something more than looking at the lacklustre album cover for Hard Promises.
