“It poisoned the water”: The show Tom Petty called the musical version of Satan
There’s always been a certain darkness that has followed rock and roll around since it got started. Even though it was always meant to be one big party, it didn’t take people long to think that the genre was all about worshipping dark forces and trying to indoctrinate children to act out of line. While it’s a stretch to call anything that Tom Petty ever did occultist, he knew that some dark pieces of the music industry were hidden right under people’s noses.
But Petty’s outlook on the music industry was never exactly a glowing endorsement, either. He knew from day one that he wanted to be a rock and roll star, but he was not willing to put up with any kind of baggage that came with it, to the point where he would willingly put his neck on the line if it meant fighting for what he wanted.
Most musicians wouldn’t bat an eye when seeing the price of their album go up, but for Petty, it may as well be a major offence to his integrity. There was no way that anyone was going to sell his music like some piece of meat. What he was making was art in its own way, but it turned out that he came into the fray as soon as rock and roll was starting to become much more commercialised.
Damn the Torpedoes managed to put a nice bow on the 1970s, but by the time the promotional cycle started, Petty had already become the first to adapt to the concept of music videos. Looking at the videos for ‘Here Comes My Girl’ or ‘Letting You Go’, it’s clear that the band weren’t taking themselves too terribly seriously, but when MTV started to become the massive conglomerate that it was, the heartland rocker knew that he may have made a mistake getting involved in the video process.
It had first been a cheeky way to promote their song with a mimed performance clip, but when Madonna and Michael Jackson were becoming larger-than-life stars, some people looked at the station and only saw dollar signs. Once you hit every single eyeball on MTV, you had an ace in the hole, and while Petty leaned into it, he wasn’t about to complement the channel, either.
“I think MTV was Satan. It didn’t do anything good for anybody, and it really poisoned the water, as far as the music business was concerned.”
Tom Petty
For him, this kind of practice represented everything wrong with the industry, saying, “I think MTV was Satan. It didn’t do anything good for anybody, and it really poisoned the water, as far as the music business was concerned. It made us a lot of hit records, and I couldn’t ignore it—I think if I had, we wouldn’t have lasted.” That said, Petty was good at riding the wave of that era as well.
He did have his over-the-top videos like ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’, but since he was always in on the joke most of the time, he never did anything to embarrass himself by the time that grunge rolled around. Even in the midst of his run in the late 1980s, his fellow Wilbury George Harrison put it best when he sang about being “overexposed [and] commercialised” in the video for ‘Handle With Care’.
So, while MTV may have been a net positive for a while, it only took a few years for people to realise what a mistake they had made. Petty had managed to move far past his time as a video star, and he could still hold his head up high until his final shows, while the channel itself fell into the never-ending purgatory of reality television.
