AN AMERICAN TREASURE
“Call me a punk and I’ll fucking cut you. I’m fucking serious. I don’t fuck around.”
It didn’t take much to get Tom Petty’s blood up back in the old days. He was a natural-born malcontent with a black biker jacket and a smirking sneer plastered across his face. At least that was the impression the world got from the photo on the cover of the self-titled debut album from his band, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers.
Turns out it wasn’t far from the truth. Petty had a high-sensitivity/low-tolerance bullshit meter, and continued attempts to hammer this square peg into the round hole of the punk rock movement was pushing the needle into the red. It was during an interview with Los Angeles magazine Back Door Man in November 1977 that he finally snapped.
“It’s a crock of shit,” Petty fumed. “From the beginning, I think because I have a leather jacket on they called me a punk. Don’t fucking call me one. I don’t like that. I ain’t joining nobody’s club, I’ve got my own club. I’m in a rock’n’roll band.”
Petty wasn’t a punk. But he was an eternal rebel. He conducted his entire career on his own terms, not least his battles with the music business and his refusal to be steered into doing something he didn’t want to do.
Petty was right about something else too. He was in a rock’n’roll band, possibly the greatest America has ever produced. The Heartbreakers weren’t epic myth builders like Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, or mystical poet-warriors like The Doors, or cocaine-dusted desperados like the Eagles. Petty himself was way more complex than his ornery hesher image suggested, but the way he saw it he had one job to do. And he did it better than anybody.
“He could write the shit out of a song, he could sing the shit out of a song, and he kept that band together for over forty years,” says Heartbreakers keyboard player Benmont Tench, a friend of Petty’s for more than 50 years.
Petty’s youngest daughter, Annakim Violette, puts it even more neatly: “He was an immortal badass.”
‘He was an eternal rebel. He conducted his career on his own terms, not least his battles with the music business.’
One of,’ he sang on , on his breakout 1979 album
