Why Tom Petty called his music “cheap shit”
Rock and roll has always been about more than just three chords. Even though artists might spend a few minutes trying to put together a few chords with a melody that works for them, every one of their classics will mean something to their audience for entirely different reasons whenever they play them in concert. Despite Tom Petty being one of the biggest names in rock music, he didn’t like to see his craft as anything that special.
When Petty first started out, he was more interested in the guitar than anything else in the world. First becoming enamoured with artists like Elvis Presley, Petty thought that half the reason why he eventually got a guitar was that he never shut up about it when talking to his parents.
Once he witnessed The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, though, he realised that it was possible for a guy like him to play music. Although he had a handful of bands in his native Gainsville, Petty stood out for being one of the few who actually wrote songs that people could sing along to.
Since most of the biggest names coming out of Florida were jam bands like The Allman Brothers, Petty had his eye on the same kind of music he loved from the British invasion, eventually working those influences into his first songs with the Heartbreakers. Even though fans and critics alike fell in love with songs like ‘American Girl’ and ‘Breakdown’, Petty thought that most of his music could be disposable.
In one of his first interviews with Rolling Stone, Petty came under fire after he referred to his music as “cheap shit”. Considering every single person put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist in ‘Refugee’ or ‘Here Comes My Girl’, Petty was chastised by a number of his fans for not having the same passion for his music as they did.
While it broke Petty’s heart for his fans to think that he didn’t care about his music, he said that he needed to look at his songs objectively, saying, “I felt terrible. I felt like I’d insulted everybody by saying that. But I can’t approach it that seriously. I can’t sit down and say, ‘Here’s a classic.’ I’ve got to say it’s disposable. You move on to the next thing; you can’t dwell on what you’ve done”.
As Petty got deeper into his work with the Heartbreakers and into his solo career, he started to pay more attention to what went into creating a great song. Becoming a child of the studio, many of Petty’s best moments involved him utilising the studio in the same way that The Beatles had years before, working with Rick Rubin to create a live sound on Wildflowers and working with Jeff Lynne to create textures on Full Moon Fever.
Regardless of the added extensions, nothing that Petty ever sang could be considered disposable, writing complex stories that captured the spirit of working-class America in the same way that artists like Bruce Springsteen had. It may have been seen as cheap at the time, but the echoes of songs like ‘Free Fallin’ and ‘I Won’t Back Down’ are still reverberating through the rock scene to this day.
