No one is better equipped to describe the good, bad, and ugly of a decade than someone who’s lived through it, and Tom Petty was certainly speaking from experience when he compared a modern genre to 1980s rock. After all, Petty wasn’t just well-versed in this decade’s music—he was that rock music.
Like so many other aspiring young artists of the 1960s, Petty grew up listening to musical icons like Elvis Presley and the Beatles. He developed a keen sense of what he liked and perhaps an even better sensitivity to what he didn’t.
The Genre That Reminded Tom Petty of 1980s Rock
Tom Petty took time out of his 2013 Rolling Stone interview to clarify previous comments he had made about modern country music sounding like “bad rock with fiddle.” (Notice we said he clarified them; he didn’t take them back.) “I hate to generalize on a whole genre of music, but it does seem to be missing that magic element that it used to have,” Petty told the magazine.
“I’m sure there are people playing country that are doing it well. But they’re just not getting the attention the s***tier stuff gets,” he continued. “But that’s the way it always is, isn’t it? I hope that kind of swings around back to where it should be. But I don’t really see a George Jones or a Buck Owens or anything that fresh coming up. I’m sure there must be somebody doing it.”
Petty said, “Most of that music reminds me of rock in the middle eighties, where it became incredibly generic and relied on videos. I don’t want to rail on about country because I don’t really know much about it, but that’s what it seems like to me.”
The Musician’s Disdain For Country Was Decade-Specific
Tom Petty’s 2013 conversation with Rolling Stone wasn’t the first time he expressed his distaste for what he called “modern” country music. Even almost two decades prior, Petty wasn’t afraid to share his thoughts on the evolution of a genre he spent most of his childhood listening to as a young boy in Florida. As he explained in a 1997 interview with Bam, the country music that was popular at the time was foreign to what he was raised on.
“It isn’t country music,” Petty argued, “it’s s****y rock music. I swear they look like people who couldn’t cut it in rock. The industry is so manipulative. They adopted all the worst of the rock arena tricks—staging and all this crap that way everything country wasn’t. I think they probably did that to aim it at a young audience. The people who can’t go for Marilyn Manson. But they’re somewhere in the middle. So, they feed them this crap.”
“I think it’s just dreadful, all them hats and everything,” he continued. “It’s silly to me. They all look like the same guy. There’s probably somebody still good out there, but, as a whole, I think we can dismiss the genre. I like country in the ‘50s and maybe up to about the mid-’60s. Then, it was very isolated after that as to anything that was very good. Johnny Cash told me that he thinks country music is for people who hate country music.”
Photo by Larry Marano/Shutterstock
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