The one artist Billie Joe Armstrong said would “live forever”
The word ‘punk’ had always meant more than a genre of music to Billie Joe Armstrong.
There are thousands of people that claim to be punk if they have safety pins through their noses, but for the Green Day frontman, he knew that the aesthetic was about following your dreams even if it goes against the grain of what the rest of the world wants. It’s all about following your dreams at the end of the day, and that meant Armstrong taking cues from every musician that turned him on whenever their record came on.
It’s always better to be well-rounded as a listener, but that wasn’t exactly going to sit well with the biggest names in the punk underground at the time. Armstrong was already committing a cardinal sin by making songs that people might actually be able to sing along to and even having vocal harmonies in some of their tunes, but when they signed over to a major label on Dookie, a lot of the elitists felt that it was time to jump ship and claim that their favourite band automatically sucked.
Which is confusing on so many levels. Sure, the “sell-out” angle has torn down so many bands and turned their music into absolute shit over the years, but any lover of music needed to get their ears checked and see if they actually heard everything on Dookie. All of that album was their old sound with better production, and even if they had a sonic sheen that made purists want to throw up, hearing Tre Cool on ‘Burnout’ or the breakdown in ‘Welcome to Paradise’ was still a trip.
Because throughout each facet of his career, Armstrong was worrying about the song before anything else. No song on a Green Day record was going to make the track listing unless it had a certain power behind it, and that came from listening to Top 40 Radio for years. It wasn’t considered “cool” in the traditional sense, but Armstrong knew that people like Tom Petty could teach him lessons that no other punk guitarist would have been able to when he first heard him.
Even when talking about him at the Billboard Century Awards, Armstrong wasn’t afraid to say that Petty had a major influence on how he looked at music, saying, “I love music, I love rock and roll, therefore I love Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. But if there is one thing I’ve learned from Tom Petty is that great songs never go out of style and live forever. Through the darkest ages of American radio, Tom Petty has been a beacon of light. Tom Petty has given us hope in music that reflects and challenges us to find some kind of deeper meaning in song. Tom Petty’s music is timeless.”
While Petty is far more laid-back than anything that turned up on a record like Insomniac, it’s not hard to see the subtle ways that he has influenced Armstrong. A lot of the greatest mellow moments in their catalogue have owed a great debt to Petty’s music, and given how much Petty was determined to stick to his ideals, he was more of a punk than anyone wearing the leather jackets and bullet belts.
It’s not exactly a mistake that the band would end up rubbing elbows with the Heartbreakers now and again as well. They already had the luxury of having Benmont Tench worked with them on the album Warning, but it’s hard to look at a song like ‘Last of the American Girls’ and not think of the track that sent Petty into the stratosphere back in the day when Sex Pistols were taking over the cultural conversation.
Although Petty reached iconic status well before his passing, there are pieces of his music that seem to go underappreciated to this day. It may have looked like The Traveling Wilburys were jumping the gun a little bit by letting him join the group, but he went from being the new boy amongst rock and roll giants to one of the few American artists that can reach the same writing heights of the British invasion heavyweights.
