The Elvis Presley song that Tom Petty said “could have been the national anthem”
From over here in Blighty, Tom Petty represents America in a uniquely nostalgic way. When his songs sing of starting afresh, you picture him driving off into the sun behind the wheel of an old dented Mustang as opposed to hopping behind a Vauxhall and getting a job as a waiter in Leicester. He captured the upbeat heart of American optimism even in his softer and more cynical moments.
This is how Petty saw music. He thought of it as a tool to comfort the disenfranchised, a trampoline to rebound those in the midst of a free fall, and a boon to bring joy to those who needed it. However, he wasn’t the first to hear music in his manner—his hero had many of the same tenets.
Petty’s obsession with Elvis Presley started at the tender age of ten. That was when Petty’s uncle got a job on the set of the 1962 film Follow That Dream – a fitting title for Petty’s own sound – while it was shooting in Florida. Petty was able to see The King arrive on set, an experience that continued to stick with him as he began to obsess over music.
“He arrived in a fleet of white Cadillacs,” Petty recalled to Rolling Stone in 2011. The adulation moved him in a way that he couldn’t quite fathom. “People were screaming, handing records over a chain-link fence for him to sign. I remember his hair was so black that the sunshine was glowing off of it,” he continued.
A star had arrived amid his small life in rural Florida, and it stirred up the potential for untold possibilities. “Just a nod and a hello made your skin tingle,” he wistfully recalled. “I was high for weeks. It lit a fever in me to get every record I could, and I really digested it. Elvis became the soundtrack of my early years.”
Luckily for Petty, there was almost a full decade of Presley material for him to dig into by that point. Presley first stepped into the renowned Sun Studios in Memphis during the summer of 1953, and from that point on, a deluge of classic songs would come pouring out. It would be 1956’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, the bluesy and sparse rocker, that put Petty in the ranks of the Elvis army for life.
“It could have been the national anthem,” Petty claimed. “It rocks, and when the piano comes in, it starts to roll in this really sensual way. The track is very spooky and very empty – there’s just bass and a little piano, with D.J. Fontana playing the deepest groove.”
Once again, from a British perspective, the song is deeply American in a multitude of ways. Firstly, longing occurs on a grander scale in the sweeping States. In the song, you picture Presley holed up in a Los Angeles hotel while his old lover is half the world away in Buffalo—it’s not like that for most of the world where you’re likely to get a wry, snide breakup song along the lines of ‘I’ve just bumped into my ex in a Tesco Express’.
But Elvis was always earnest, and that played into his larger-than-life aura. Petty always gravitated toward Presley’s more unique-sounding records when the King’s sincerity seemed to cut through most cleanly. Whether it was the singular arrangement of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ or the shrugged-off improvisation of ‘That’s All Right’, Petty could immediately sense when Presley was doing something outside of the box. The latter was a revelation for Petty, who had a lightbulb moment with Presley’s first hit single.
“Elvis and his band were fooling around at the end of a session at Sun with this song, and Sam Phillips heard it right away,” Petty added. “It was a pretty obscure Arthur Crudup song, and it’s incredible to me that Elvis knew it. He really put his own whack on it. He sings with a hiccup in the timing – I don’t know where that came from. The Sun stuff is really high art. It’s so pure, and that sense of discovery is there.”
