The forgotten singer who changed Tom Petty forever: “No reason to be afraid”
A lot of the greatest Tom Petty songs feel like a love letter to the greatest rock and roll music ever made.
He didn’t necessarily have to wear his influences on his sleeve all the time, but when you listen to any number of his tunes, you can hear different callbacks to everyone from The Stones to The Beatles to The Beach Boys, no matter where you look. But even in his record collection, there were a few missing pieces of rock and roll history that Petty needed to shine more of a light on.
Because as much as Petty loved the idea of making straight-ahead rock and roll music, it’s a lot easier to call his music ‘Americana’. Some of the best songs that he ever made are practically versions of all kinds of American music, and while it’s easy to hear blues and rockabilly in a lot of Petty’s retro-sounding tunes, it’s easy to forget how important country music was to Petty’s upbringing when he was first growing up.
No one was able to walk into a room and hold their own with someone like Johnny Cash if they didn’t do their homework, and Petty was willing to take that deep dive. He and the Heartbreakers knew all those obscure B-sides that no one had ever talked about, and it wasn’t out of the question for them to start jamming on an old-school Hank Williams tune in between tunes at soundcheck now and again. But it’s not like Petty was the first one to suggest that country and rock could play nice together.
The country rock movement was already alive and well by the time that Petty moved to California, and the Eagles had shown everyone that it was okay to add a little bit of twang to every rock tune. Don Henley and Glenn Frey might get a lot of the praise for bringing it to the mainstream, but Petty felt that the main missing link between the genres was when Gram Parsons first joined The Byrds.
Parsons has become more of a myth than a man these days, but while Sweetheart of the Rodeo didn’t chart that high, it was a game-changer for anyone looking to make more rootsy material. This new kid was showing Roger McGuinn what country songs could sound like with those jangly guitars, and a lot of those songs were lessons to Petty when he was woodshedding his own songwriting.
He knew that he could write tunes like that if he only applied himself in the right way, saying, “I remember when I got the Byrds album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. It was like, ‘Wow, listen to this! They’re playing country music!’ That was the first time I ever heard Gram Parsons, and it was really good [laughs]. Then I started to realize that there was no reason to be afraid of the music, and eventually I realized it’s exactly the same thing as rock and soul music — the exact same thing.”
And while Petty didn’t have to adopt a Southern drawl or anything whenever he made one of his country-leaning tunes, the lessons he learned came through in the storytelling more often than not. ‘Louisiana Rain’ is one of the best country tunes that he ever wrote, and even when making Wildflowers, you can hear him taking those same lessons he learned for tunes like ‘To Find a Friend’ as well.
Parsons might not have got into the business trying to change everything overnight, but he was a missionary of all things country for kids like Petty growing up. The sounds of Nashville and Bakersfield were exactly the coolest genres in the world, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t some great music if you knew where to look for it.
