Rock and roll hadn’t felt dangerous in a while, but when the Heartland rocker was growing up, Cream was about as heavy as it gets. Compared to the other British blues bands of the time, hearing Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce bounce off each other while Ginger Baker rained down fire from behind the stage was everything jamming should have been.

But once a young kid from Seattle hung out with him during his first London tour, the world got a better idea of ​​what Jimi Hendrix could do. Besides being an angelic gift to guitar heroes everywhere, Hendrix’s playing with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell is still the kind of groove most hard rock bands wish they could match.

Once bands started getting their own guitars to emulate, however, Petty saw things go south very quickly. Instead of having to worry about the song, many of the biggest rock bands that came after seemed more interested in jamming for minutes on end and only occasionally bothering to write anything that even resembled a hook.

For Petty, he needed to hear something different from the kind of music inspired by both bands, saying“Too much music might be as boring as none at all. People like Cream or Hendrix started all this. But they were doing something new and exciting and they were good enough to get away with it. The problem was that what happens after that is everyone starts playing fifteen minute numbers. And then I got bored and stopped listening.”

And if you look at Petty’s early records, his music seemed like the complete antithesis of the masturbating solos of other bands, with most songs hovering around the two-minute mark and never outstaying their welcome. Even when he expanded things on later releases, it was always about developing more drama behind a song’s story rather than giving Mike Campbell an endless supply of solos.

While the vitriol of those jam bands put Petty in close contact with punk rock, he would never identify with what John Lydon i had to say either. He was born in the era when rock and roll was short and sweet, and no five-minute guitar solo was going to win him over if the song was shit.

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