“People don’t like that”: The artist that Tom Petty thought had too many hits
There isn’t a single soul in the music industry who’s going to say that reaching the top of the charts is a bad thing. While a handful of punks will consider any song that sniffs the top 40 as a sign of selling out, most people would give their left arm to have a song that even manages to clear the bottom of the charts, let alone reach the top of the pile for a few weeks. As for Tom Petty, though, he knew that there were always cases where a band could get too overexposed as well.
Because when looking at rock and roll, it was always made by outsiders in some capacity. The best artists in the genre are normally people who don’t have a set home, and by reaching the top of the charts, people like David Bowie were treated as the exceptions to the rule in rock and made eccentricity feel a bit more acceptable for the greater listening public half the time. But that wasn’t the kind of music Petty was in the business for.
As much as he had been a thorn in the side of the industry types for years, Petty was still interested in playing mainstream music to anyone who would listen. Every one of his singles stayed within the radio-rock format, and once he sorted things out with his record company, tunes like ‘Here Comes My Girl’ and ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’ became the next version of rock and roll for a majority of fans, even if there was a little bit of The Byrds in his delivery.
If Petty found the mathematical way of making hits, though, Jeff Lynne had turned the entire practice into a scientist. He had been studying the idea of pop as an art form ever since the days of The Beatles, and while ELO also had their zany moments on record, Lynne had that uncanny ability to make every single one of his choruses land with audiences.
While most people around that time did see Lynne’s space-themed outfit as nothing more than the band with the cellos and the afros, it didn’t matter whenever ‘Telephone Line’ or ‘Evil Woman’ came on the radio. But when someone is at the top for that long, there comes a point when there doesn’t seem to be a clear goal for where they should go next after they reach the top of the mountain.
When talking about his comeback, Lynne remembered Petty telling him that the number of singles he put out may have indirectly hurt ELO, saying, “Tom Petty made the best rationale for that: I always had too many hits! Too many hit singles. And people don’t like that. Writers, they just don’t forgive you for that. If you have too many, they think there’s gotta be something wrong with you. You must be like Perry Como, know what I mean?”
But if someone has the golden touch that Lynne did during every single production job, why would he not want to show it off? It can get a bit monotonous, but even if a few critics got tired of hearing him on the radio, that shouldn’t have become a problem when the sound he made was perfect, especially when working on records with Petty like Full Moon Fever or becoming his bandmate in the Traveling Wilburys.
He may have been omnipresent on the charts back then, but Lynne’s problem of having too many singles is the same non-issue that people level against Taylor Swift now. Yes, she may dominate a good portion of the hit parade, but the only time that becomes a problem is when it’s unwarranted, and when someone’s dealing with a musical genius, there’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t have the world’s ears attuned to them.
