But when it comes to falling in love with music, everyone has that moment where everything clicks, and as far as Petty was concerned, meeting Elvis Presley was nothing short of a religious experience. While most people saw him as the guy on stage who spun around every time he played, Petty saw him for the musical shaman that he was, the glorified ambassador for rock and roll to millions.

Although he did meet Presley during the movie That Dream is coming helped shape Petty into the kind of rocker he would become, it wasn’t until The Beatles came along that he had a vision. He didn’t have the same dancing experience that Presley did, but since the Fab Four were a unit and played their music, it made more sense for him to get together with some friends to sing his own songs.

It also didn’t help that Presley started making rock and roll something it had never been before: lame. Since leaving the Army, all the vanity projects he’s done on the big screen have made “The King” look like a bloated version of what he should have been as a rock star who didn’t really go away until when he made his special comeback in the late 1960s to remind everyone of who he really was.

Still, Petty thought there was no point in following Presley’s reruns when he had the Beatles as his model. saying“When the Beatles came along, I lost interest in Elvis because (The Beatles) was the music of my generation and I was a big record buff. So I lost interest in Elvis, although I felt a kind of loyalty to him. I went and watched those s***** movies for a while. But I knew the difference by then. It didn’t have the vitality that these new records had.”

From there, Petty grew out of Presley’s music and started listening to everything he could get his hands on that was rock related. “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock” may still have been fun to listen to, but it didn’t compare to what was happening at street level, whether it was the Byrds’ electric guitar bells or the social impact that Bob Dylan had it with him. each of his songs.

Petty never stopped looking for new artists either, collaborating with the likes of Eurythmics in the 1980s and still finding time to pay tribute to his heroes like Johnny Cash. Presley may have started the fire, but it took a few more bands to convince Petty that he could be a rock legend.

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