The band Tom Petty said was his version of “punk music”
Punk rock has never been about one particular style of music. Everyone knows the power that bands like Sex Pistols had, but the attitude was more important, and before anyone put safety pins through their noses, Tom Petty was drawn to bands that broke the rules of convention when they strapped on their guitars.
Then again, Petty didn’t exactly like getting roped in with punk music, either. He wasn’t the kind of artist who only wanted to make noise on guitar, but since he was photographed wearing a leather jacket with a bullet belt on the cover of his first album, it wasn’t hard for the public to jump to conclusions a little too quickly. Compared to all the real punks, Petty was more likely to knock a punk’s teeth out.
And it very nearly came to those blows as well in England. John Lydon has never been known as the most diplomatic public figure in the world, but the minute that he said something out of turn to Petty, the heartland rocker wasn’t above confronting him head-on in front of the world’s press and watching him crumple in on himself as soon as he got called out on his mouthy bullshit.
Petty could take care of himself, but his heroes weren’t people like them. He had a great deal of respect for the originators of punk, but his musical diet always catered to bands like The Beatles and The Byrds half the time. For him, nothing beat the power of a good song, and while a handful of writers could put together a tune in the punk scene, Petty’s version of rebelliousness came from listening to the British Invasion back in the day.
But whereas The Beatles were one of the crown jewels of rock and roll by that point, Petty found himself gravitating towards what The Rolling Stones had done, saying, “You saw the Stones come out not long after [The Beatles] and said, ‘Now that I could do.’ They were playing blues in this really energetic, raw way, but it wasn’t complicated. There wasn’t a lot of harmony involved. It was sort of my punk music. It was like, ‘That could be done.’ And apparently, tens of thousands of American musicians had the same thought at the same time.”
Granted, Petty does have a valid point about The Stones in their early years. While most people couldn’t hope to be a Brian Jones figure and manage to play an endless amount of instruments from one album to the next, seeing Keith Richards throw together a few chords with Mick Jagger and walk away with a classic song was the kind of approach that everyone had been looking to do but never got the push to do so.
Even when moving onto the band’s classic period when Keef got his Fender Telecaster, there was always that sense of him winging it a lot of the time. That’s not even an insult, either. He knew that he had something with that open-G tuning, but after messing around with different chord shapes, he managed to get a tune out of it every single time despite not knowing the first thing about music theory.
Because as much as Petty eventually made sweeping epics across his albums, he knew there was no point in trying to prove how smart you were on every track. No one needs a music degree to play rock and roll, and with The Stones as his model, he was more than happy to pick up a guitar and play anything he could get his fingers around.
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