“Boring”: The two bands Tom Petty thought made rock music sound dull
Tom Petty never took any bit of rock and roll for granted during his lifetime. Even though his flavour of retro rock could have become passe years before he came along, he was never afraid to wear his Byrds and Beatles influences on his sleeve in the age of punk rock or at the height of grunge. He remained defiantly proud of what the golden age of rock stood for, but he thought two bands were responsible for a generation of boring groups coming to the forefront.
Granted, Petty arrived on the scene at a time when rock was starting to become boring for the very first time. As much as acts like David Bowie were still working on their sound and making things no one had seen, the charts still had the same kitschy schlock that made the 1970s insufferable, whether that was another soppy ballad from Barry Manilow or the Captain and Tenille making the music that many a middle-aged mom could drink wine coolers too.
Rock and roll hadn’t felt dangerous in a while, but when the heartland rocker was growing up, Cream were about as heavy as it got. Compared to the other British blues acts around at the time, hearing Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce bounce off each other while Ginger Baker rained fire from the back of the stage was everything that jamming was supposed to be.
But once a little kid from Seattle sat in with him during his first tour of London, the world got a better picture of what Jimi Hendrix could do. Outside of being an angelic gift to guitar heroes everywhere, Hendrix’s way of playing off of Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell is still the kind of groove that most hard rock bands wish they could match.
Once bands started to pick up guitars of their own to emulate them, though, Petty saw things going south really quickly. Instead of having to worry about the song, a lot of the biggest rock bands that came out afterwards seemed more interested in jamming for minutes on end and only occasionally bothering to write something that even resembled a hook.
For Petty, he needed to hear something different than the kind of music both bands inspired, saying, “Too much musicianship could be just as boring as none at all. People like Cream or Hendrix started all that. But they were doing something new and exciting, and they were good enough to get away with it. Trouble was, what happens after that is that everyone starts playing fifteen-minute numbers. And that’s when I got bored and stopped listening.”
And if you look at the first Petty records, his music seemed like the complete antithesis of the masturbatory solos of other bands, with most of the songs hovering around the two-minute mark and never overstaying their welcome. Even when he did stretch things out on later releases, it was always about developing more drama behind the story of a song rather than giving Mike Campbell an endless amount of solos.
While the vitriol of those jam bands did put Petty in close alignment with punk rock, he was never going to identify with what John Lydon had to say, either. He was born in the era when rock and roll was short and sweet, and no five-minute guitar solo was going to win him over if the tune was shit.
