“All-time top five”: Tom Petty’s favourite country-rock album
Rock and roll has never been tied to one sound. Even though some people like to defend their respective genres to the death in terms of what rock and roll “should” sound like, the entire premise of the genre was malleable by design, so it isn’t out of the question for making anything from prog rock to grunge rock to punk rock and everything in between. But when Tom Petty burst on the scene, he was rock and roll with a little more dirt under his boots than most of his contemporaries.
Especially in the late 1970s, Petty looked incredibly out of place compared to the people with whom he was rising to prominence. The Heartbreakers’ debut album came out in 1976 around the same time that people like Elvis Costello and Blondie were the biggest things in the world, but Petty was the furthest thing from new wave and never bothered with being called punk rock, despite his insistence on wearing a leather jacket on the front cover of his record.
He definitely had punk sensibilities judging by how he fought against his record company on Damn the Torpedoes, but many of his tunes were about the regular problems that anyoen finds themselves in in everyday America. Whereas Bruce Springsteen painted pictures that made people see the picture of the New Jersey boardwalk where he grew up, Petty’s music was always open enough for anyone to insert themselves into the story, whether that’s the heartbreaker in ‘Free Fallin’ or the kid without a true home on ‘Refugee’.
That attitude was commonplace in rock and roll, but Petty was pulling from the country tradition when making most of his tunes. He had rock flowing through his veins whenever he played songs like ‘Shout’, but in songs like ‘Nightwatchman’ or ‘Something Big’, he was dealing with tales of fallen angels and broken heroes that most people had to go to Johnny Cash to hear pulled off right.
The Rolling Stones could certainly respect that approach to country music, but the true originator of that was Gram Parsons. Parsons was the one to show Keith Richards what the roots of country music were when he left The Byrds, and despite not having a lot of time on this Earth, albums like Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Grievous Angel were the blueprint for where bands like Eagles would go when bringing country rock to the mainstream.
Petty was never comfortable being considered authentically country, but he couldn’t deny that Parsons’s swan song was among the finest records he ever heard, saying, “Grievous Angel is in my all-time top five albums. Always wanted to meet Gram, but when I got to LA, he’d been dead for four months. People always say, ‘Oh, you’re like Roger McGuinn,’ but I prefer the Parsons’ Byrds. It’s hard to introduce country rock into what we do. People think it’s corny parents’ music, but we’re southern country like Gram.”
Even if Petty described himself as southern country, a lot of that was reserved for his deep cuts half the time. It wasn’t shocking to see him reel people in with songs like ‘The Waiting’ or ‘Here Comes My Girl’, but for anyone bothering to look into his deep cuts, tracks like ‘Louisiana Rain’ and ‘Southern Accents’ carry on the tradition Parsons started by having tunes with a handful of chords and melody that could break your heart.
And while Eagles certainly soared higher in terms of raw sales, Petty was a far more authentic version of what country rock was supposed to be. It was easy to listen to ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Tequila Sunrise’ in between the Johnny Cashs of the world, but Petty was the only one who bothered to go back and listen to those old Hank Williams records and try out tunes like ‘Lost Highway’ live.
