The 1964 song Tom Petty called a million dollar line: “A great moment in history”
Tom Petty didn’t need to be a true wordsmith on every single record he ever made.
He liked the idea of keeping things simple so everyone could appreciate what he was singing about, and on every one of his records, you could feel him trying his best to make sure his songs were never out of the reach of his fans. He wanted to sing about the simple pleasures in life every time he played, but he knew that there were more than a few artists who could make their songs sound absolutely perfect with a single line.
A lot of rock and roll didn’t concern itself with being one of the most well-read genres in the world, but Petty’s fascination with lyricists came from listening to the best songwriters in American music. Hank Williams didn’t need to be one of the most intellectual songwriters of all time for people to understand what he was on about, and even though Bob Dylan was incredibly literate in his songs, it wasn’t like people had to study every single word he said to get the gist of what he was talking about.
The same applied to Petty as well. A lot of his best songs were all about him trying to find some of the greatest phrases in the air, and even if he didn’t know the first thing about what the song was about, it wasn’t his job to say what every tune was about. That was up for the audience to decide, but while he could tell stories revolving around relationships breaking down or overcoming his own problems, there were far better artists who could get to the point with only a handful of words.
That’s what Chuck Berry did, after all, and his songs are still some of the most cut-and-dry rock and roll songs ever made, but it wasn’t long before the rest of the world started following his lead. Anyone would have killed to have written the kind of songs that he could, but on the other side of the pond, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones already had their own brand of rock and roll going as well.
The Fab Four may have been a bit more celebrated for their strange chords and angelic harmonies, but what The Stones created was a lot more vicious. They weren’t afraid to sound a little bit mean on record from time to time, and when you listen to the way that they worked off each other onstage, Petty felt like he could manage to put together a band that could do the same thing they were doing.
But it was going to take a lot for him to have the same kind of attitude that Mick Jagger did when he was singing ‘Satisfaction’, saying, “They had so much attitude, it dripped off the plate. The riff and distortion grab you, and the lyric is so worldly. It’s hard to talk about ‘Satisfaction’ because everyone knows it so well. But it’s a great moment in rock history. Just the phrase is worth a million bucks.”
And given how simple Jagger put it, it’s not like the title has worn out its welcome, either. Everyone would think that they couldn’t get any satisfaction when they are still a teenager, and when looking through the rest of their work, every single one of The Stones’ best songs feeds off the same sense of frustration that Jagger had when they were still trying to figure out what their sound was supposed to be.
The world didn’t necessarily change in an instant when ‘Satisfaction’ came out, but it was what people of Petty’s generation did afterwards that caught everyone’s attention. Anyone could have tried to make the best tunes that have ever been created, but it took a lot of angst and frustration for someone to be able to stumble upon a song with this kind of raw energy behind it.
