The perfect rock song Tom Petty called difficult to write: “It’s not something you can overwork”
Rock and roll is not the easiest genre in the world to write for. There’s a fine line between writing the perfect headbanging song and teetering closer towards neanderthalic territory, but when someone does reach that comfortable middle ground, there’s no one else who can touch them. While Tom Petty never prided himself on writing the same kind of Bob Dylan-esque turns of phrase, he admitted that capturing the magic of a tune like ‘Long Tall Sally’ by Little Richard was near impossible.
Because even though he came out during the punk and new wave eras of rock and roll, Petty never claimed to be anything more than a fan of old-school outfits. The Byrds and The Animals had been a distant memory for rock fans, but Petty was more than happy to play their songs on the promotional circuit in his first group, Mudcrutch.
Despite his native Gainesville graduating to acts like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers Band, Petty was still a student of the two-minute pop song, and Little Richard was one of the greatest examples of doing it right. Anyone can make a long jam if they wanted to, but making a statement in just two minutes at a time and leaving the audience thrilled by the end of it was Richard’s wheelhouse.
From the minute he opened his mouth on ‘Tutti Frutti’, many people didn’t even realise what they were hearing. Sure, this was still the same blues-adjacent rock and roll that Chuck Berry was doing, but there was something magical in Richard’s vocal cords that made his feral shriek one of the most imitated instruments in rock and roll.
But that’s before you get to the song itself. Yes, not every line is meant to be the most mind-bending statement on the world at large, but a short story about going to a party and dancing the night away is far from a bad idea for a song, especially when the backbeat grooves this well.
Since Petty was never known as a dance act in his later years, he still thought that ‘Long Tall Sally’ was one of the gold standards everyone should be striving for, saying, “There’s a purity there you can’t fake. Try writing ‘Long Tall Sally.’ It isn’t easy. It’s a difficult thing to write because it has to be done with a certain spontaneity. It’s not something you can overwork. So those kind of things just aren’t handed to you every day. It has to just burst out of your heart. Those aren’t things you can plan.”
The one piece of Petty’s statement that gets lost on many people is that simplistic angle. There are bound to be millions of suits that try to pinpoint the mathematical definition of how to make a catchy rock song, but if it doesn’t have the heart behind it, then you might as well just be playing a couple of minutes of dead air whenever their attempt at a hit comes on the radio.
While Petty’s classics like ‘Free Fallin’ and ‘I Won’t Back Down’ aren’t on Little Richard’s level of intensity by any stretch, you can’t say that they aren’t sincere. Because of all the lessons that he learned from his years of songwriting, Petty knew that a song couldn’t fail as long as you sang something that came from the soul instead of being constructed in a lab.
