“It saps credibility”: The band Tom Petty thought completely sold out
One of the biggest parts of any band is having some kind of integrity in their music. Even though the lion’s share of the music business is about selling things, there will always be people who still want to be in the mainstream for the right reasons, always trying to make some sort of revelation to their audience whenever they sit down to make a record or tour. Tom Petty was more than happy to play that kind of music while still writing hooks, but he thought that one particular punk band was far from the authentic badasses they claimed to be.
Then again, if there’s any genre where selling out should be considered a cardinal sin, it’s punk rock. The whole ethos behind bands like The Clash was about subverting people’s expectations about what music could be, and even if it wasn’t the most listenable content in the world, it still garnered some of the most interesting detours that any artist from the late 1970s had ever done.
Considering how many people were fawning over both punk and new wave at the time, though, having Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in the mix was a bit strange. In between listening to the likes of Ramones of Elvis Costello on college radio, suddenly fans would get to hear songs that sounded like relics from the late 1960s that somehow waited a decade to come to light, like ‘American Girl’ and ‘Listen to Her Heart’.
But as much as he fit into the ethos, Petty never claimed to be a punk. He still sported a leather jacket and a bullet belt on the cover of the band’s first album, but he knew that his kind of music wasn’t going to cater to the same audience that would have preferred to get spiky hair and put safety pins through their noses.
Petty was ready to put his money where his mouth was, too. When touring England for the first time, the heartland rocker nearly got into a fistfight with John Lydon when the punk icon questioned whether he was really the badass that he implied, eventually rendering the Sex Pistols frontman into a sheepish mess when he confronted him.
Though Johnny Rotten was still one of the leading figures in rock and roll, Petty felt vindicated looking at the corporate side of the band’s reunion later on, saying, “They had a big punk concert here over the weekend with the Sex Pistols and all these groups. It was sponsored by Levi’s, which I found really ironic. I think we should steer away from that as artists. I think it’s probably a bad move. I think the more songs that go in these commercials on TV is just hurting rock in general. I think it saps its credibility.”
Even for someone who had been in the public eye as long as Petty had, he still never minced any of his words. He could still make mainstream music, but hearing him go after major corporations on albums like The Last DJ and go to war over the control of his songs during the Damn the Torpedoes was the sound of a musician screaming back at an industry that only wanted his money.
Because Petry wasn’t the kind of person who was just going to roll over when someone told him what to do. He was as authentic as they came in the music industry, and even when icons like Sex Pistols sold out, Petty knew that nothing was going to get in the way of his music and the fans who listened to every word he sang.
