I think if I'd quit years ago I'd never have known what I was capable of doing.'' Being 44, I'm kinda glad to see it because I feel I'm just hitting my stride. I don't think it's necessarily even a youth-oriented music. Nevertheless he's grateful for the continuing licence given to men in their forties and fifties to play rock'n'roll in public: ''Rock isn't a young music anymore. We always went on the theory that if we made really good music we might attain stardom, but it was never the primary goal.'' I think in America for a long time you had groups that wanted to be stars more than they wanted to make music. ''They don't give a damn how much money they're going to make. He speaks with warmth of the post-Nirvana generation, and their rediscovery of the right reasons for making rock music. What you don't find here, or in any of Petty's music, is the slightest hint of superstar smugness beneath the fluent craftsmanship and fluid melodies. Tom Petty: 8 of the rocker's best songs.
We'd have a general structure worked out, but I'd still leave it up to the musicians, having them contribute to the process too.'' It's hard for me to do 10 takes of a song and stay fresh. We didn't spend too long with any one song. And if we didn't use a lot of instruments, maybe only four or five, we could try to make them all personable. Rick and I thought it would give the record a certain character. ''Our plan was to record all the tracks live,'' Petty said, ''and we stayed with organic instruments - no synth, no digital, no computer, no sampling. Petty's 15 new songs were the product of 18 months' work, but their natural grain and unforced momentum make them sound almost as though they were made up on the spot. If Wildflowers is indeed Petty's finest work to date, some of the credit must go to its producer, Rick Rubin, who made his name with the rap artists LL Cool J and Run DMC, before triumphing this year with Johnny Cash's career-best American Recordings. Or, more significantly, from his 10th album, Wildflowers, which has the creative intensity of someone in the first flush of self-discovery. But if Tom Petty long since qualified as rock royalty, you'd never know it from his courteous, undemonstrative presence in a London hotel suite. A mid-Seventies move to Los Angeles began a sequence of albums yielding such hits as ''American Girl'', ''Breakdown'', ''Refugee'' and ''Free Fallin' '', boosted by endless touring (including two years as Bob Dylan's backing band), membership of the Traveling Wilburys, and an MTV award earlier this year for the video clip accompanying his hit ''Mary Jane's Last Dance''. The story of the young Tom Petty's conversion is a classic vignette, and it's worth telling because it lies behind the unusual integrity of Petty's subsequent career, which began with an apprenticeship in local Top 40 bands. That made it all start to fall into place.'' Months went by until one miraculous day it showed up, and in it was a discography and a chronology. Eventually, I sent off to England for something called The Elvis Presley Handbook. I had no idea of the chronology of it, or how it had come to be. In America there really wasn't much interest then. But when I was 11, it was hard to find anything about him at all. There's so much information about him now. ''I was telling them how he's such a part of the culture now that I'm not sure people think of him as a great artist, which he was for a long time. All I wanted to do was listen to this music.''Ī few weeks ago, Petty said, he'd tried to explain Presley's significance to his own teenage daughters. I didn't even dream of singing or playing an instrument. I just didn't do anything but play these records. So I traded in my aluminium slingshot, which was my most prized possession, for this box of records, and my life was transformed from that moment on. One of my friends had an older sister who'd gone to college and left her box of 45s behind. I didn't have a sleeve, and when I got home it became my mission in life to get an Elvis Presley record. There were thousands of people on the street, mostly girls passing record sleeves up to be autographed.
#Tom petty young movie#
''My aunt drove over and said, 'Hey, how'd you like to see Elvis Presley on a movie set?' So we went and stood down behind this chainlink fence. He was living in Gainesville, Florida, and his uncle had been hired to join the film crew on a location shoot for Follow That Dream.
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