The “wild” 1964 riff that silenced Tom Petty
If your work were able to silence Tom Petty, you really deserved a medal for your contributions to revolutionising music.
That was largely because Petty was a total behemoth in himself, completely changing the game for guitar players, singers, and rock stars in general with everything he ever did. However, to stun him into silence was a whole new level of godliness, and there was one band who mastered that art.
To say that Petty was most dominantly inspired by the British invasion would be making a pretty obvious statement, as that transatlantic root seemed to be at the centre of everything he ever did. Whether it was the melodies of The Beatles or the electric live energy of The Who, Petty lifted pockets of influence from all of them.
And then came The Kinks, as much a British invasion staple as any other band, but in terms of how they hit Petty across the face and spun him into an entirely new orbit was like nothing any other artist had achieved before. Fittingly, the song was ‘You Really Got Me’, because the instant the guitarist heard it, he fell hook, line, and sinker.
People often recall the first time they heard specific songs in their formative years, but Petty’s experience of the song was particularly visceral. “I heard that song for the first time at a dance. The DJ played it really loud, and the whole room went still,” he said, as if he was still there in that hall, under the trance.
Then something magical, if not entirely unjustified, happened. “Then everyone erupted in applause, for a record,” he recalled with an apparent sense of whimsy, “That guitar break, I’d never heard anything that wild in my life.”
Indeed, he was far from the only one to feel that way. Most rockers, despite thinking they were worldly wise to new and innovative ways, were completely blown away by Dave Davies and his perfect riffs, constructed like a mathematical equation but carried off as if it required no effort whatsoever.
It seemed so simple that you could try to bottle it, but the reality was that no one could come close. Even Petty, for all his young years at the time with a life of hedonism ahead of him, realised that what Davies had cultivated was a stroke of genius. All he could do was revel in its mastery.
Yet whether it was school dance halls or the world’s biggest stadium stages, that notion of feeling the world change for the very first time, particularly when it came to rock music, was something that the guitarist never wanted to let go of. He was never a product of the British invasion, but if you were to write the first chapter in his story, it would definitely start there.
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