The band Tom Petty thought made rock and roll look like a joke: “Made it seem gimmicky”
One of the biggest crimes one can commit in rock and roll is being either boring or embarrassing. Every great rock act that has come around in the last half-century has earned their position by not only having the tunes but also by looking effortlessly badass whenever they take to the stage to play. Tom Petty more than earned his keep as an artist that never took shit from anyone, but by the time he got started with the Heartbreakers, he thought that Sha Na Na was making a mockery of what his kind of music had become.
Then again, no one can expect the titans of rock and roll to still look over the passage of time. It’s a fact of life that some of the greatest tunes of one generation will look especially cringy looking back, but for Petty, it still didn’t get much better than listening to the likes of Chuck Berry and Roy Orbison in the late 1970s.
But Petty wasn’t the only one who got the nostalgia bug around the same time, and Sha Na Na were the ones who were going to capitalise on it. Clad in their signature greaser looks, the musical collective looked like they were ripped straight out of a dusty garage and had decided to play some old-school rock and roll for a living. They looked the part, but what they were doing was about as genuine as The Monkees.
Actually, The Monkees comparison might be too much of an insult to Mickey Dolenz and Davey Jones. Despite their reputation as a manufactured version of rock and roll, The Monkees still had good tunes, but by the time Sha Na Na rolled around, it was basically becoming a pastiche of what rock and roll had become, almost as if they were trying to make it look like a bygone sound of yesteryear.
At the same time, rock had grown a lot since then. Artists like Led Zeppelin had taken their fair share of influences from giants like Elvis Presley, but there was a reason why fans were gravitating more towards their epics like ‘Kashmir’ than they were to the likes of the Elvis Presley-esque ‘Hot Dog’.
While the punk movement was meant to bring everything back down to Earth, Petty never truly fit that banner, either. He was a rock and roller but he still thought that Sha Na Na turned rock and roll into parody, saying, “The truth was that in 1970 there wasn’t that many people playing that kind of music, like Chuck Berry. I think it was that group Sha Na Na that made it seem kind of gimmicky, with poodle skirts and jukeboxes. I think they were trying to make it into that. But we knew that music and I think that also played into what we were doing.”
But who were the group Sha Na Na?
Since Petty had grown up listening to many of the greatest rock and roll of the 1950s and 1960s, Sha Na Na should have been right up his alley. After all, the biggest names in music had started moving farther and farther away from the glory years of rock and roll, so hearing something that was supposed to throw back to the days of doo-wop groups should have done the trick just fine, right?
Well, yes and no. Despite the massive amount of adulation that Elvis Presley was getting during his comeback specials in the late 1960s, this was the first time that rock and roll looked passe and boring. No matter how many times Jon ‘Bowser’ Bauman wanted to look tough, all that the kids saw was an amateur excuse for a singer trying to remind all of the older uncles and parents in the audience about how good times were back then.
In the grand scope of history, Sha Na Na seems to occupy the same space that Pat Boone and Frankie Avalon occupied years before them. They were still fine artists for what they were, but their version of what “rock and roll” was supposed to be took out all of the danger and authenticity and made it feel like something that you would get off an assembly line in a glorified pop star factory.
It’s not like big business would learn its lesson on quality control, either. Around the same time Petty was breaking out, cinemas were also coming off of atrocities like Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, which took one of the greatest masterstrokes in the rock canon and turned it into syrupy Muzak versions of the original Beatles record.
No matter how often the corporate side of rock tried to shove this kind of music down someone’s throat, the real fans knew where the quality was. Sha Na Na may have worked well as a touring act, but as far as true rock and rollers were concerned, they seemed more concerned with their hairstyles being right than whether or not they could play their instruments.
