Tom Petty absorbed the Byrds and turned them into something America could drive to work with. That is the whole trick, and it took a kid from Gainesville, Florida to pull it off. His uncle took him to meet Elvis Presley on a movie set in Ocala in 1961, and that encounter lit the fuse. The British Invasion arrived a few years later and scrambled everything else. As he grew older, Petty immersed himself in the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, studying their albums the way a mechanic studies an engine. But the band that really got its hooks in him was the Byrds.
What Petty took from Roger McGuinn was specific and physical: the Rickenbacker 12-string guitar. McGuinn had seen George Harrison play one in A Hard Day's Night, went to the guitar store, and traded an acoustic 12-string and a five-string banjo to get his hands on a Rickenbacker 360-12. He built the Byrds' entire sonic identity around it, that shimmering, ringing jangle that defined folk-rock in the mid-1960s. Petty picked up the thread and ran with it so convincingly that when McGuinn's agent played him "American Girl," McGuinn's immediate reaction was, "When did I record that?" That is the highest compliment an influence can receive. You absorb someone so completely that they mistake your work for their own.
The Rickenbacker was the instrument, but Dylan was the method. Few singers have been called Dylanesque more often or more accurately than Petty, and the comparison earns its keep. It is about the plainspoken character study, the refusal to dress up a simple human situation in anything fancier than it deserves. Petty took that instinct and married it to the Byrds' shimmer, then handed it to a band that could play it live without blinking. The Heartbreakers were built for exactly that kind of work, and the discipline they brought to the project is audible in everything the band recorded.
On the cover of the 1979 breakthrough album Damn the Torpedoes, Petty stands holding a 1960s Rickenbacker 12-string guitar. The choice of that out-of-fashion instrument, along with Petty's late-Beatles haircut, signals a dedication to an earlier time in rock and pop. The statement was deliberate in the best way. Disco was at its commercial peak. New wave was cresting. Petty showed up on the cover of his third record holding a guitar that was already fifteen years old, and the music inside was as unfashionable and as good as anything on the radio. Damn the Torpedoes rose to No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart, where it sat for seven weeks, held off the top spot only by Pink Floyd's The Wall.
The album's lead single had been sitting in a drawer for five years. "Don't Do Me Like That" was first recorded as a demo with Mudcrutch in 1974, and Petty had seriously considered giving it to the J. Geils Band before producer Jimmy Iovine talked him out of it. Good call. The single became the Heartbreakers' only solo song to reach the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 10. A song written in Gainesville, shelved for half a decade, rescued by a producer's instinct, and turned into the band's commercial breakthrough: that is a better story than most bands get to tell.
The lineage running forward from Petty is at least as interesting as the one running back. His influence can be felt in everything from the War on Drugs' hazy heartland epics to Jason Isbell's sharp, character-driven songwriting. And the influence moved sideways as well as forward, into an entire genre. Americana, as a format, echoes the rootsy, acoustic-friendly sensibility Petty refined on 1994's Wildflowers, an album that stripped the Heartbreakers sound down to its bones and found something warmer underneath.
What Petty understood, and what his best inheritors understand, is that the jangle is a specific emotional temperature: open, slightly wistful, built for motion. The chain from Elvis to the Byrds to Dylan to Tom Petty to Jason Isbell is a river that keeps finding the path of least resistance through the landscape, picking up sediment as it goes. Petty was the widest bend in that river, the place where the current slowed down long enough for everyone to see what was actually in the water. He made the music of his heroes sound like it had always belonged to the American highway, because for him, it had.
