(Credits: Far Out / The Bigger Picture)
Sat 21 March 2026 19:30, UK
Tom Petty was willing to do anything he could to succeed when he started putting the Heartbreakers together.
He had already seen what would happen when things didn’t work out with Mudcrutch, and he wasn’t about to fall back and become a solo songwriter right out of the gate. He needed the right set of people behind him, but it turned out that the rest of the world wasn’t quite ready for Heartland Rock when Petty first burst onto the scene with tunes like ‘American Girl’ and ‘Breakdown’.
Because as much as ‘American Girl’ is one of the most romantic patriotic tunes that Petty ever wrote, there was little to no impact when he first put it out. Most of the American music scene wanted nothing to do with that kind of music, and while it did eventually start gaining some traction when it hit over in England, it took the rest of the world a little bit more time to come around on what Petty was doing.
Then again, it’s not like Petty was going to make it easy for the rest of the rock scene, anyway. He wasn’t willing to compromise his sound for the mainstream, and even though the early waves of disco were just starting, you weren’t going to be seeing him throwing on some leisure suits and making a tune that could have been played out of Studio 54. He had a much more rootsy background, but it kind of fell in between genres when he first got started.
You have to remember that disco was coming in on the heels of punk rock, and no matter how badass Petty looked on the cover of his debut album, he wasn’t exactly the punk rock persona that everyone else had wanted. In fact, there was a good chance that he was going to be thrown into the new wave category with the rest of the underground rock acts, but there was no reason to think that he had too much in common with anything that Devo or The B-52s were doing whenever they played.
And Petty figured out pretty quickly why he didn’t really like that kind of attention when he first started playing with the legends of punk rock. He had already gone through a personal spat with John Lydon when he played in England for the first time, but even if Ramones had a no-bullshit mentality to everything they played, Petty felt that their balls-to-the-wall energy wasn’t something that he was all that interested in when he first started performing with the Heartbreakers.
He had a great deal of respect for the CBGBs crowd, but it wasn’t exactly the genre for him, either, saying, “We were actually dropped into the punk thing. We opened for the Ramones, and we did fine, but it wasn’t our thing. I think if we’d have gotten spiky haircuts and adopted this we-don’t-like-anybody type of thing, it would have been a pose for us, and it would have been a lie. And you can’t lie. That’s rule number one: You must be honest, because they will know.”
That’s not to say that Petty couldn’t fight when he wanted to, though. The earliest punks may have been seen as dangerous when they first launched onto the scene, but when you heard people like Petty, he wasn’t going to suffer fools gladly, especially when he was being jerked around by his record company. He had come a long way from Gainesville, and he wasn’t about to fall back because someone didn’t like the fact that he was becoming successful.
He was willing to play the game only on his terms, and even if Ramones had the same kind of energy that Petty was looking for, there was never an option for him to be a threatening presence like they were. He could crank up the energy when he needed to, but he was also the kind of person that could throw in a heartbreaking ballad into his repertoire whenever he wanted to.
