The sportsman Tom Petty said was “more punk than the Ramones”
Following the example of Elvis Presley and later The Beatles, the baby boomer generation brought rock and roll to the masses in the 1960s and ‘70s. Generation lines are never clean-cut, but the succeeding generation, generation X, consisted of those born between 1964 and 1980. This generation would grow up on a more diverse diet of music, heavily guided by punk rock. Born in 1950, Tom Petty was a bonafide baby boomer.
As a teenager growing up in the 1960s, Petty was well-versed in Presley and Roy Orbison but saw his future manifest before him when he first encountered The Beatles. Like many of his generation in the US, Petty first saw the Fab Four performing live on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. “There was the way out. There was the way to do it,” he reflected.
Petty knew at that moment that he wanted to form his own rock band and have a shot at fame beyond the Florida limits. “You get your friends, and you’re a self-contained unit. And you make the music. And it looked like so much fun. It was something I identified with,” he continued. “I had never been hugely into sports. I had been a big fan of Elvis. But I really saw in the Beatles that here’s something I could do. I knew I could do it. It wasn’t long before there were groups springing up in garages all over the place.”
Throughout the 1970s, Petty built his career as the frontman of The Heartbreakers, growing from strength to strength with early hits like ‘American Girl’ and ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’. The 1980s proved to be even more successful as he joined some of his childhood heroes in Traveling Wilburys and released his most enduring single, ‘Free Fallin’’.
Even though Petty’s years of eminence ran concurrent with the punk and post-punk eras, his sound was firmly rooted in a more traditional rock sound, often infused with country. As a Florida man, he enjoyed reflecting on his background in a breezy, rural southern sound. Meanwhile, the New York Streets that inspired The Velvet Underground in the previous decade spawned the first band officially deemed punk: Ramones.
After forming in Queens in 1974, Ramones achieved local success before releasing their 1976 debut album. Although their name was inspired by Paul McCartney’s pseudonym, their sound was dissimilar to that of The Beatles, with instrumental and lyrical complexities traded for a riotous lack of refinement, simplistic chords and candidly provocative lyrics.
As one might guess, Petty wasn’t particularly moved by Ramones’ seminal output. Speaking to FFanzeen in 1977, the singer-songwriter revealed that he recently saw Ramones live while touring with Blondie in Los Angeles. “I saw the Ramones,” he said. “I haven’t seen a lot of them, but I have a friend here [in New York] at Sire Records who sends me a lot of records for me to hear, so I’ve heard some of it. I’m not really aware of it.”
While admitting that he hadn’t taken a deep dive into Ramones’ music, Petty wasn’t fussed by what he had heard. “No, we’re not trying to jump in on that one. We’re a young rock’n’roll band, and that’s it,” Petty added. “Gene Benson was punk as far as – I mean, he was probably more punk than the Ramones are. So was Elvis.”
Supposedly, Petty referred here to punk as a state of mind as opposed to a musical style. In terms of revolutionary figures, Petty had much more to say about Gene Benson and Elvis Presley. The former, one of the most iconic Black baseball players from the US’s “Negro Leagues”, revealed petty’s soft spot for baseball but also demonstrated his idea of “punk”.
