Why Tom Petty originally hated punk rock: “We’re a rock and roll band”
When he debuted in 1976, Tom Petty unexpectedly found himself in a state of change. Rock and roll was far from dead, but the kind of rootsy offshoot of the genre he pioneered wasn’t the order of the day anymore, replaced with the oncoming punk movement. Petty could certainly appreciate many of the gritty versions of rock and roll, but he admitted that the Sex Pistols’ brand of punk rock was something he could never understand.
Petty wasn’t cut from the same cloth of punk rock as his contemporaries, but he still had the tendencies of a young and hungry kid wanting to stick it to the man at every turn. Yet, some of the biggest moves of his career also came from him writing old-school rock in the vein of bands like The Byrds and The Beatles.
That’s not to say that Petty couldn’t get heavy when it was necessary, with tracks like ‘I Need to Know’ and later highlights like ‘Makin’ Some Noise’ arriving as perfectly enjoyable barnburners upon release. Regardless of how few times they got the lead out, the Heartbreakers were still songwriters first and foremost. In contrast, all John Lydon represented to Petty was a bunch of flash.
Then again, it’s not like that kind of narrative was entirely unfounded. The entire ethos behind Sex Pistols’ rise to fame in the first place was to replicate amateur musicians bashing away on their instruments, but that’s precisely what made them so unforgettable. Anyone could have played the intro to ‘Anarchy in the UK’, but no one had as much attitude as Steve Jones did when he bashed those power chords.
When looking at their presentation, all Petty saw was a cheap band looking to make a profit off of rock fans who didn’t know any better, telling NME, “When we were here, people always approached us as punk, and we’d say ‘No, we’re a rock ‘n roll band. We didn’t fit that category.’ Then all we heard was punk this, punk that, and we said, ‘Fuck punk!’ The truth is that I’m glad we were here in ’77. I used to laugh myself sick at The Sex Pistols’ antics. Every day, you could buy a paper, and there was something outrageous going on.”
While Petty’s jabs were all good natured in the early days, there were occasionally times when it got a bit too heated. On one of his first trips to England, Petty even managed to get into a major scrap with Lydon, very nearly getting into a fistfight in the middle of a hotel lobby when the punk leader started hurling abuse at him for being a rockstar.
However, that was just a part of who Petty was from the start. Whether it was a punk or some higher-up trying to tell him what to do, the heartland rocker never apologised for speaking his mind. He was going to make his point one way or the other, and if that meant bringing in a pocket knife and cleaning his nails in the middle of a business meeting, that was what he was going to do.
For all of the antics that the Sex Pistols got into during their prime, Petty was probably far closer to what a real punk would look like. There was a lot of anger and outrageous behaviour surrounding what the kings of punk were doing, but if that was a lot of smoke, Petty was a burning fire.
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