The guitarist a teenage Tom Petty studied to become a rhythm legend: “Rhythm can do a lot”
For any guitarist taking themselves seriously, any time with the guitar is about learning something new. As much as some people try to strum along to their favourite songs, the professionals know how to dig into their favourite artists and see what made their songs sound so magical when they first came out. Although Tom Petty was normally fine sticking to playing rhythm up the middle in the Heartbreakers, he knew that there were some mandatory people for him to aspire to play like.
Because as much as people like the idea of lead guitar, rhythm playing is a bit of a lost art. The whole idea of strumming chords might seem like the easiest thing in the world to someone who only practises scales, but there’s a good chance that those soloists would never be able to pull off an AC/DC song correctly because they never bothered to learn how Malcolm Young made them jump back in the day.
But the art of strumming always comes back to being able to play in time. No matter how much people like the cool riffs, being a rhythm guitarist also means becoming a second drummer in some respects. Ask anyone from Pete Townshend to James Hetfield, and they will tell you that half of the battle is being able to lock right in with the drummer on those intense rhythms and make sure that the band feels like one cohesive unit.
And while The Beatles might be remembered more for their songs these days than their musicianship, you can’t forget the genius that was going on in the back of their songs. Paul McCartney and George Harrison have gone down as virtuosos in their own right, and Ringo Star always played incredible drum tracks to their tunes, but John Lennon tended to get a bit overlooked in terms of the most diverse musicians in the band.
Despite him not talking up his playing all that much, Lennon was responsible for making the band flow in a way no one else could. From the subtle bounce on ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ to the way he smacks the life out of his strings on songs like ‘You Can’t Do That’, he always wanted to play a rhythm that best matched with what the vocal was doing in relation to the rest of the group.
For Petty, this kind of playing was almost mandatory listening back in the day in between his Byrds records, saying, “I basically studied Lennon’s playing. [On] films, just watching his right hand. In a song like ‘And I Love Her’, he was amazing. Rhythm can really do a lot.” And looking at where Petty took things, he graduated magna cum laude from Lennon University.
Even though he never played anything too flashy behind Mike Campbell, he was responsible for getting that bounce down to a science, whether that was leading the band in on ‘Refugee’ or the punk-ish aggression on ‘I Need to Know’. Even when working on a tune like ‘American Girl’, Campbell seemed to pick up a few tricks by having that same nonstop strumming for the main riff that Lennon employed on ‘All My Loving’.
But despite Lennon not playing much compared to the rest of his bandmates, he should never be forgotten in terms of why The Beatles worked so well. He will forever be known as one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived, but there’s a lot more variation going on in a tune like ‘Norwegian Wood’ than anyone realises.
