“The heavens split”: The band that made Tom Petty love rock and roll
The live show is always an essential part of the rock and roll experience. Any band can spend their time making the best music from the comfort of their rehearsal space, but once they hit the main stages and have fans dancing to every single thing that they’re playing, that’s normally the moment where every meagre music fan becomes converted into a real musician. But when Tom Petty was first starting, he had a lot to learn before he was ready for the stadiums of the world.
When Petty first began, he was much more interested in the idea of the guitar than anything remotely rock and roll. Before he had heard of what the genre even was, he had loved watching westerns when he was a child, and usually, the main characters could always find their way around on an acoustic and strum a couple of chords and words about their baby left them far behind.
That was all well and good, but when Elvis Presley came into the picture, something in Petty’s DNA changed. He had seen him working on one of his films, Follow That Dream, and it was the equivalent of seeing a living prophet floating on air. His parents may not have approved of what he was doing, but he knew that this was quickly becoming big enough to start an entire religion based on music.
The only thing he needed were other people who could play. He was still going to be playing the same cover tunes that everyone knew when they were starting out, but when working on music with The Epics, things started to be taken a little more seriously. There had been people in it for the free beer on the weekend or chasing after women, but when Petty hit the first few chords of a song, he knew that things were going to be different.
Although it wasn’t anything groundbreaking, the heartland rocker knew that he had found the vehicle that would make him a star, saying, “We found something we all knew…WHAM! The heavens split. It was the best feeling I’d ever felt in my life. ‘Wow, we’re really doing it.” It may have sounded pretty good to them, but it would take a while for everyone else to catch on to what they were doing.
Even Petty wasn’t safe when coming home from his gigs. When the band actually got paid for their trouble, he remembered returning home and getting reprimanded by his mom, who thought that he had stolen the money from the bar instead of earning it. But even then, that band was never meant to last.
After renaming themselves Mudcrutch and getting Mike Campbell into the mix, the genesis of the Heartbreakers was already there, but after their first album sunk without a trace, it wasn’t until they got Stan Lynch and Ron Blair into the equation that they were truly a unit when working on tracks like ‘American Girl’. But as they say, the heart only grows fonder over time.
Despite being on ice for years, Petty couldn’t let go of Mudcruth completely, eventually reforming the band in the 2000s and putting out some of his last songs with them on the album 2 before his passing in 2017. He had seen far greater success than anyone could have imagined with the Heartbreakers, but no one is ever going to feel that same rush of musical adrenaline better than their first musical love.
