The one music video Tom Petty called “embarrassing”
Tom Petty never gets put in that same company when discussing the darlings of MTV’s rise. Arriving on the rock scene a few years shy of the music video explosion, Petty could ride the wave of MTV without ever being labelled as the kind of artist who lived off of the medium. While Petty could adapt to becoming an actor whenever he made music videos, he admitted that he wasn’t too flattered by how he was portrayed in one of the videos.
For all of the smoke and mirrors that came with MTV, though, Petty was never that concerned with the flashy cars that came with big-budget videos. Since the channel was slowly turning into the biggest radio station in the world, Petty would eventually lean into the idea of making videos, usually making simple performance shots of the band playing the song in the studio like on ‘Refugee’ or ‘Insider’.
As the group evolved throughout the 1980s, however, Petty started to see a new art form that could be utilised when having a video. For the single ‘You Got Lucky’, the band finally got to show their charming side, not lip-synching for the first time and weaving together a sci-fi narrative with a storyline running through the entire video.
By the time Petty found himself in the 1990s, he had started to hone his craft as a video artist. Instead of making songs that were perfect for a video, Petty wanted to make a video that would illustrate the stories that he sang about, culminating in the video for the song ‘Into the Great Wide Open’.
Being one of the few video appearances from Johnny Depp, Petty extended the song for the first time to suit a video, telling the story of the titular Eddie as he worked his way through life in Hollywood before becoming a rock star. Although Petty had honed his craft at this point, it made most of the band’s early videos hard to return to.
When speaking to BAM, Petty said that most original videos never had much thought put into them, saying, “The first ones we made were never meant to be played more than once or twice; they called them ‘promos’ then. You’d make a clip and send it, and they’d just play it once. So, imagine our horror years later when these things played repeatedly on television”.
Of all the videos around that time, Petty said he had a distaste for ‘The Waiting’, explaining, “Actually, the one of ‘The Waiting’ is particularly embarrassing”. Considering where Petty would take the new medium, though, it’s easy to see what kind of horrors he had in mind when working on those videos.
Coming from a pretty serious band, the set of ‘The Waiting’ should be on a children’s game show, with Petty even tearing down pieces of the set as they play. Although none of the members of the band were taking themselves all that seriously when putting together these kinds of videos, it does give listeners a slight snapshot as to what they were like when they weren’t playing music.
