The musician who “meant everything” to Tom Petty
Throughout his career, Tom Petty was worried about being considered “old-school”. From the minute he made his first steps as a songwriter, Petty was looking to pull from the music that ignited his musical fire as a kid, becoming infatuated with rock and roll when he saw Elvis Presley for the first time. Although a handful of heroes have drastically impacted Petty, he still thought one songwriter towered above them all.
Before Petty had even written his first song, though, he was already in awe of what rock and roll did to him when he listened to it. When talking about his upbringing in Runnin Down a Dream, Petty talked about how uncomfortable the music made his friends and family at first, recalling, “I couldn’t stop playing it, to the point where my parents thought that something was wrong with me. Even the other kids thought it was weird”.
While Petty loved the sound of the record, he never considered trying to play the music until seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Arriving in 1963, the Fab Four’s performance on the popular show sent shockwaves throughout the musical community, with millions of kids wanting to pick up guitars of their own and form a band.
Petty would gain an affinity for John Lennon out of all the Beatles members. While Lennon may have been responsible for half of the excellent material the band wrote, his approach to music was about something more than the three-minute single.
Throughout his partnership with Paul McCartney, Lennon was interested in expanding the musical vocabulary of rock and roll, creating songs deliberately designed to shock the audience like ‘Revolution’ and ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’. While Lennon was preparing to reach a new phase in his career in 1980 with the release of Double Fantasy, his life would be cut tragically short when he was murdered in December of the same year.
Having made plans to visit Petty and the Heartbreakers while recording the album Hard Promises, the band etched their tribute into the grooves of the record, spelling out “We Love You JL”. While many figures have come and gone throughout rock history at that point, it hit much closer to home for Petty.
When talking about his musical upbringing, Petty would claim that Lennon’s music was integral to his songwriting, telling Rolling Stone, “John Lennon meant everything. His influence was immeasurable in those times when I started to play in the mid-1960s. He was probably one of the two or three great rock singers of all time. He was just transcendental”.
While Petty would never know what it would be like to work with someone of Lennon’s stature, he did get the next best thing when working in the Traveling Wilburys. Working alongside fellow legends like Bob Dylan and George Harrison, Petty understood how some of his favourite writers approached their craft, contributing lines to classics like ‘Handle With Care’. Although Petty may have carved out his spot in rock history, he admits to nothing without Lennon’s work’s influence on him.
