The 1965 song Tom Petty could never understand: “Over our heads”
Tom Petty grew up knowing that rock and roll didn’t need to be the most complicated thing in the world.
He was a child of the early 1960s when it was all about the three-minute single, and even though the rest of the world wanted everyone to start making more advanced music, you weren’t going to find Petty making the same drawn-out songs that Led Zeppelin was doing when he started out. He liked the idea of having those magical few minutes captured on a record, but even when he was a kid, there were a few songs that he didn’t seem to fully understand when they came on the radio.
Because with every single month of his childhood, Petty was seeing rock and roll change just a little bit more. The Beatles were already the big spearheads of the British invasion, but there was also a lot more bands that were coming in to shake things up as well. No one had heard anything that sounded as dangerous as The Rolling Stones or as raw as The Kinks, but each of them seemed to provide another lesson for what Petty was going to do.
It’s not like the rest of the heartland didn’t hear it, either. Bruce Springsteen was already a fan of The Beatles from the moment that he heard ‘Twist and Shout’, but compared to the rest of the bands coming from across the pond, you could hear a lot of Eric Burdon in his musical vocabulary when he started writing tales of escape on ‘Thunder Road’, which is basically the grown-up version of ‘We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place’.
In the grand tale of 1960s rock, though, the Zombies tend to get lost in the shuffle more often than not. The band were the textbook definition of what a perfect power-pop act was supposed to sound like, but there were a lot more than a few good hooks within Odyssey and Oracle. This was a musical masterpiece in lots of ways, and a song like ‘She’s Not There’ was what sent Petty reeling when he first heard Colin Blunstone’s voice.
He didn’t claim to have the strongest voice of anyone in England at the time, but with the right arrangement behind him, Blunstone could sound almost a little bit spooky on his tunes. The Zombies were already trying to go for something sinister with their name, but for a song that’s as dour as ‘She’s Not There’ and even tunes like ‘Time of the Season’, you could hear them making tunes that were a bit more ominous than what you’d find from your standard Keith Richards riff.
But it was the arrangement of the piano on ‘She’s Not There’ that really messed with Petty’s mind when he first heard it, saying, “The piano break was over our heads at the time, but so right. Colin Blunstone’s voice was a sound I had never heard before. I thought if a zombie sang, that’s how he would sound.” The piano wasn’t anything new to rock and roll, but this was a better indication of what Benmont Tench could do behind the keys than what Little Richard might have been doing.
The piano on a lot of Petty’s records was meant to fill out the sound in a unique way and colour the rest of the band perfectly, and Tench clearly took a few cues from The Zombies in some ways. The way that everything is arranged on ‘Here Comes My Girl’ sounds immaculate, but it’s actually not all that complicated when you look at where they were getting their inspiration from back in the day.
They were still trying their best to make everything sound great on record, but getting that little bit of elbow grease out of their arrangements came from listening to The Zombies. It didn’t make the most sense at the time, but these were the kinds of songs that Petty was bound to spend a lifetime trying to figure out.
