(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 9 September 2025 16:30, UK
Tom Petty never seemed to give off the right impression when he was first starting out.
Heartland rock didn’t fully exist yet, but even if it did, Petty wasn’t going to fit the mould like the rest of the world, He only wanted to make rock and roll, but that didn’t stop the rest of the world trying to put banners on him before he was a proper solo star. They wanted to put him in a box and he was having absolutely none of it.
Because before he even got lumped into the heartland rock category, Petty already had something to say about it. He loved listening to people like Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp, but he didn’t want to give off the impression that he made fucking soft rock. He had the potential to venture into heavy territory, and that meant proving everyone wrong once in a while when he made more aggressive detours on tracks like ‘Out in the Cold’ and ‘Makin’ Some Noise’.
But when he first came out of the woodwork, the order of the day was all about punk rock music. People were sick of listening to the same corporate schlock on the radio, Petty included, but when he showed up on the cover of his own album with a leather jacket on, people didn’t think back to the greasers from the 1950s. They saw a kid who wanted to be a punk rocker, and Petty didn’t belong there, either.
There were plenty of people trying to put safety pins through their nose and be contrary to everything that was popular, but Petty still loved the idea of rock and roll. He wanted to join the ranks as people like The Byrds whenever he performed, and no amount of media attention was ever going to put him in the same category as John Lydon or Joe Strummer. But the punk community was a lot less aggressive than he thought.
For one, Petty learned up close and personal that Lydon was all bark and no bite. He had confronted him in the middle of a hotel when the Sex Pistols frontman started mouthing off to him, but after seeing one of the biggest punks in the world crumple into a ball in front of him, he realised there were a lot more people out there than would have killed to write the songs he was writing.
Even when working on his later records, Petty felt that people like John Doe of X were given the wrong reputation, saying, “A lot of people had the attitude in those days that it was wrong to be successful. John Doe [of X] was telling me how fucked it was that some of the LA bands were copping attitudes like they didn’t want hits. He said, ‘I’d love to have a fucking hit!’ That’s what rock ‘n roll is all about. Musicians want to be heard by a lot of people. That’s a basic thing.”
And it’s not like the real punks didn’t know how to play that kind of game, either. Mick Jones may have played up the rock star angle a bit too much for Strummer’s liking in The Clash, but the reason why songs like ‘Rock the Casbah’ or ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’ work so well is because they have some of the best hooks that they could have written.
So while there are a few corners of punk that will try as much as they can to be contrarian to whatever’s going on in the mainstream, being different doesn’t mean giving up on pop song structure. Everyone wants the opportunity to be in a big band, and while not every tune needs to have the same structure to get on the charts, it helps to go back to the same model that Chuck Berry set for everyone in the early days.
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