The genre Tom Petty considered boring: “It all sounds alike to me”
Rock and roll wasn’t meant to be playing the same chords forever. There were definitely artists that needed to take things further, but even the massive detours that acts like The Beatles gave us weren’t quite enough to satisfy everyone. There had to be a more dangerous outfit, and once metal started, fans finally had the answer to their prayers, but Tom Petty was never thrilled by what he saw.
But when you think about it, metal isn’t all that different from the glory days of rock and roll. The actual sonic palette might be a little strange, but everyone from Black Sabbath to Deep Purple was following the classic blues tropes that everyone else was following in the days of Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
Once Petty started to make some noise out of the heartland, though, metal underwent a pretty distinct shift. After the glam scene faded in the 1970s, it started to get folded into the next wave of American heavy metal, with everyone from Poison to Quiet Riot trying to pick up where acts like Sweet and David Bowie had left off.
A group like Van Halen may have at least had some credentials behind them, but the minute that the third wave of bands started to come in, it slowly started to become ridiculous. Yes, the guitarists could certainly play, but was it really worth waiting through a half-baked AC/DC ripoff riff and misogynist lyrics for a half-decent guitar solo that flew up and down the fretboard?
For Petty, this was far from the kind of music he was raised on, telling Guitar Heroes, “Most of the heavy metal bands, I really love the power of the music, but I don’t think they do very much with it. It’s usually such a boring macho trip, songs about ‘I’m going to get you and you’re going to love it!’ kind of thing. Most of the new heavy metal groups I don’t really pay much attention to; it all sounds alike to me, so I don’t notice it.”
Then again, that comes down to how Petty thought about his craft. Regardless of what kind of music was going on around him, he was concerned with pleasing himself whenever he sat down to write a song, whether he was pulling from anyone from The Stones to The Byrds or just trying to come up with something that he could be proud of in 30 years.
That might have been the retro way of looking at songwriting, but it’s hard to say it didn’t work. While many of the biggest metal acts of the 1980s have been whittled down to the best of the bunch on 1980s playlists on Spotify, albums like Full Moon Fever and Southern Accents still hold up as amazing relics of their time, featuring songs that didn’t need to rely on Mike Campbell doing his best Eddie Van Halen impression over it.
Many 1980s metal bands did have the same starting point Petty did with acts like The Stones and Led Zeppelin, but it was about more than just a catchy riff that got people listening. It was about telling a story within the song, and even if Petty’s greatest hits only lasted a few minutes, you could still see a picture every time you threw on one of his tracks.
