The Broadway show that started Tom Petty’s musical journey: “It was incredible”
Tom Petty was usually among the first to say that none of his songs had to be the most complex thing in the world.
There were many avenues that an artist could go down when making their classics, but he wasn’t suited to making the vast musical journeys that you would hear on a Led Zeppelin record or try his hand at creating the most spectacular guitar solo ever recorded or anything. He revelled in being able to make a catchy pop song, but a lot of the music was built inside of him long before he ever thought of picking up a guitar.
But every artist usually has that awakening moment when they realise that rock and roll is their calling, and Petty was no different. He had seen Elvis Presley up close when he was only a kid, and even though there was no chance of him getting anywhere close to ‘The King’ in any recording situation, he was blown away by what he could do whenever he opened his mouth. The songs were fantastic, but the real power came from when he heard what people could do with ballads.
You have to remember that half of Presley’s bread and butter was being able to work on songs like ‘Love Me Tender’ and sell them perfectly, but not all of them fit within the confines of rock and roll. No one was looking at any of his heartbreaking ballads and thinking that they belonged in the same category as ‘Hound Dog’ or anything, but a lot of the vocabulary that Presley was working with came from songs that worked a lot better onstage than they did in the studio with a band.
No one would have considered that rock and roll had any place in the era of sophisticated Broadway shows or anything like that, but there was certainly room for it. The Beatles had taken some of their first cover songs from show tunes, and when Petty had barely even understood what music was, his mother was already showing him the first pieces of what harmony could do when listening to the soundtrack to West Side Story.
The show itself is one of the best that has ever come to Broadway, but Petty was much more interested in the actual music behind everything, saying, “I really loved all those songs. I still really do. I think it’s an incredibly well-written piece of music, that whole show. It was incredible. [My mother] bought things like that, and Nat King Cole. Which I thought were really square at the time, but now I look back on it, and it was very good music.”
You weren’t necessarily going to find the same kind of harmony when Petty was writing ‘Here Comes My Girl’, but his rock and roll tunes weren’t built for that, either. He had the same kind of drive that he did when listening to The Beatles and The Byrds as a kid, but when he started looking beyond rock and roll, a lot of the best tunes that he wrote later on in his career had a much more refined edge to them.
It’s hard to think of an album like Wildflowers to be on the same level as a Broadway show, but Petty’s melody on songs like the title track and ‘Wake Up Time’ are so well-constructed that they wouldn’t feel out of place on a Broadway stage. And with the help of someone like Michael Kamen behind many of the arrangements, almost all of the songs on the record feel a lot more refined than the lean, mean rock and roll machine that the Heartbreakers were in the days of Damn the Torpedoes.
They had grown up a lot more in those decades, and while they weren’t going into easy listening territory by any means, they were willing to push themselves if it meant making a song that would stand the test of time. Johnny Cash had already begun working with them on tunes that were American standards, so there was no sense in trying to go back to the same naive energy that they had when they were making ‘American Girl’.
