The one song Tom Petty played his entire life: “I’m their biggest fan”
Any artist will have those few moments when their songs start to sound old after a while. Going on the road is bound to do a number on one’s taste for their own music, and even if it manages to come together in the studio, it’s tough to have the same love for one of your masterpieces if you’re forced to play it every other day while on the road. Then again, Tom Petty was a child of rock and roll, and there were certain songs that he could still play for years at a time and never get bored of.
That said, there was never any point where Petty’s music fell out of style with the public, either. He had the same earnest approach to his music that Neil Young had during his prime, and since Petty managed to never go against his record company and unleash something like Everybody’s Rockin’ upon the world, half of his greatest moments came from him making perfect heartland rock.
This is strange, considering half of his greatest influences came from the British invasion. Even though he debuted in the middle of the pun movement years after the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, there are still pieces of his first few albums that seemed like they were ripped straight out of 1964, only with the British twang replaced with his trademark southern drawl.
But while the British invasion was certainly fun for what it was in the 1960s, The Byrds were the first band to compete with the likes of the Fab Four. While The Beatles claimed that the jangly rockers were one of their favourite acts, Roger McGuinn’s original compositions were light years different from what John Lennon and Paul McCartney had done. There was a lot of Dylan influence in the band’s repertoire, but ‘I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better’ felt like the beginning of what would become power pop.
Despite the band being known later for helping invent country rock with Gram Parsons, everything you need to know about a two-minute pop song can be found here. There’s nothing too flashy about the melody, and by using only a handful of chords to twist things around, McGuinn made his own version of ‘If I Needed Someone’ a few years before George Harrison could write The Beatles’ classic.
Although Petty did have a wealth of classics in his arsenal, he said that he would gladly play the Byrds’ classic forever, saying, “I just love the Byrds so much. I’m their biggest fan, to this day. It’s kind of embarrassing sometimes, ’cause I play these same albums over and over. I went to see them play when they played the Ventura Theatre. Jeff [Lynne] went with me. And when they played that song, I went, ‘Man, that’s a good song.’ I’ve played it all my life in bands.”
And when Petty and Lynne reworked the song for the record Full Moon Fever, they could only serve what McGuinn had already laid down. While it’s not necessarily a one-to-one exact copy, hearing Petty’s lazy vocal tone welcome everything in makes the track feel like a lost relic of the 1960s that someone waited until 1989 to be put out, complete with Mike Campbell matching McGuinn’s guitar solo.
It’s impossible to capture the essence of what The Byrds did on the original, but that was the whole appeal to Petty when he started writing his own songs. He never wanted to outdo McGuinn, but if he tried hard enough, he felt he might have a shot at having his own classics under his belt.
