“He’s fantastic”: The artist Tom Petty called essential to music
Every generation tends to have those few artists that make the entire music world shift on its axis. As much as music seemed to be going in one direction on one day, it took these artists to strip everything away and make something that everyone had to either follow or go in the opposing direction of. While Tom Petty was usually fine sticking to the rules of rock and roll, he felt that having this superstar in the public eye was important for rock moving forward.
Even though Petty got his start in the late 1970s, he was born at the right time to earn himself a spot as a seasoned veteran of rock and roll. Despite being one of the founding fathers of heartland rock when he first started, his fixation with Elvis Presley and The Beatles gave him a bit of credibility while making some of the most straight-ahead rock and roll of his generation on tunes like ‘Refugee’.
Looking back on his transition to MTV, though, things were certainly a bit rough. His embrace of synthesisers on Long After Dark didn’t exactly endear him to his heartland rock audience, and even when he ventured into the world of music videos, he was nowhere near as flashy as someone like Michael Jackson from around the same time.
That’s because the new generation hadn’t quite figured itself out yet, and the biggest names in the world had yet to be crowned. Since no one knew what they should work with, Prince found the way forward by performing every genre under the sun and doing it ten times better than anyone else.
Going through his discography, fans get a helping of everything from funk to jazz to rock to R&B sometimes on a single album. While anything with those qualifiers should feel disjointed as hell, Prince made the whole thing work whenever he got onstage, all while delivering the kind of showmanship that was far wilder than someone like Presley had ever thought of.
There was no way that Petty was going to wear that kind of sequinned jacket or suddenly dip his toes into funk, but he did know that Prince was going to be a name worth keeping around, saying, “He’s fantastic, and he’s so essential because he’s not afraid to do anything, which we’ve needed for a long time. I’ve always felt like the fellas that are really sellin’ the records and have the influence tend to get a little bit careful.”
Although Petty did find himself getting into that camp of “careful” players, some of his later material was all about pushing the envelope to some degree, whether that meant working on epic ballads on Wildflowers or dipping back into the blues on one of his final albums, Mojo.
Then again, it was always about more than simply music with Prince. He was the complete package from the minute he stepped out onstage, and if anyone ever tried to follow him, they were bound to get left in the dust.
