“I wasn’t ready yet”: Tom Petty’s honest assessment of his early songs
When Tom Petty was a teenager, he set out on a mission to achieve his dream. In his earlier band, Mudcrutch, he was determined to live the ultimate fantasy of handing a demo tape over to some big label executive and being handed success on a silver platter right there and then. But in his adult life, the musician knew that not happening was the best thing that ever happened to him.
“I was very romantic,” Petty laughed as Tom Power reminded him of the road trip he took as a teenager. He piled into his car with a demo recording of some of his earliest songs and set off to hand it out. “I did not see why I couldn’t walk in the door, play them a tape and suddenly be signed up and on my way,” he said, “I thought I had the music.”
However, Petty was never just some kid with some band. Anyone who encountered him could see that he did, in fact, have the music, spotting the early glimmer of the talent that would earn him a lengthy career as one of the most beloved classic rock figures in history. Plenty of people would have predicted that the voice on that tape would go on to major success, but Petty is so thankful that they didn’t try and launch it there and then.
“I always felt like, ‘If you give me the shot, I can do it,’” he said, recalling the fearless confidence of his youth. “Sometimes I look back at this and go, ‘God, you had a lot of nerve’,” he continued, almost suggesting that his gutsy youth may well have been his downfall if other people hadn’t stepped in.
“Even when we came out, even when we signed to Shelter, I don’t think we were ready,” he remembered of that first Mudcrutch release or his earliest work with the Heartbreakers. “I think we thought we were ready, but I wasn’t there yet.”
He credited his producer, Denny Cordell, for saving him by hitting the brakes, forcing him to pause and not let his confidence run away with his career before he was properly developed as an artist and ready. He admitted he didn’t know where he would have ended up “If it hadn’t been for Denny Cordell who said, ‘Wait a minute, we’re not making a record right away. We’re gonna take time, we’re gonna get used to playing in studios, you’re gonna spend all your time learning how to write songs while I expose you to lots of people and lots of records.’”
Even while Petty dreamed of being a musician from an early age, he didn’t engage with all that much music. “Those days, you only knew the records you owned,” he said, “I didn’t have the money to have a huge collection, but Cordell had every record in the world in his office.” The musician got a vital education right there when he painted a picture of a student and his mentor meeting at Cordell’s office to borrow vinyl records and be schooled in a new classic album.
They say no one can’t be a writer without being a reader, and the same goes for music. No one can’t be a musician without being a music fan, and the more inspiration they engage with, the better their work will be. Petty swore by that philosophy as he continued, “He’d play all this stuff to me and my songs got better.”
Eventually, the day came around that Petty got the green light. As if the student was finally ready to become the master, Cordell and the team at Shelter decided that the musician was now ready to launch into his career, able to actually make the most of all the talent they spotted when he was young. Considering he thought he could just release the roughly recorded tape he presented people with, the finished product proved just how much he’d grown. “By the time we made our first album as the Heartbreakers, there was nothing in the demo tape that even got recorded,” he said.
All in all, Petty’s story is about the importance of taking time and not ruining something by rushing. In his adult life, the musician admitted that had he been granted his dream as a teenager, he’d have burnt out and faded into irrelevance pretty quickly. “We had the talent and we had the will to do it, but we weren’t ready yet,” he said. But by the time they were ready, that talent was still there, and strong enough to last.
