Before the advent of YouTube tutorials, music streaming services, and handy chord and tablature websites, young musicians had to get creative with how they learned popular music of the day. As an aspiring guitarist growing up in Florida, Tom Petty was certainly no exception to this hard-earned educational practice.
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Years after he was holing himself up in his room, hoping for a chance to scribble down lyrics to his favorite songs, Petty recalled the one song that seemed to stump him more than the others.
Radio Is to the 1960s What the Internet Is Today
The internet has completely changed the landscape for aspiring musicians. From websites to apps to music platforms, there are countless tools available at our disposal to study and dive deeper into virtually any song we’d like. But back in the early 1960s, the only options were to acquire a massive vinyl collection, ask a friend who knew how to play a song already, or wait patiently by the radio. More often than not, Petty opted for the third route.
Radio, Petty said during a 2006 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, was “everything. You know, I still see it as this really magical thing, and it was wonderful. I didn’t have the money to have a vast record collection, So, I learned everything, really, from the radio. In the mid-60s, AM radio—pop radio—was just this incredible thing that played all kinds of music. You could hear Frank Sinatra right into The Yardbirds, you know, to The Beatles into Dean Martin.”
The Heartbreakers frontman said radio was how he and his friends learned the music they played in various high school cover bands. “When I was 15 or 16, playing in groups, we used to sit in the car and try to write the lyrics down as the song was playing. We’d assign each person a verse. I’m going to do the first one. You go for the second one. Then sometimes, you’d wait an hour for it to come on again, you know, so you could finish it up.”
This 1965 Rolling Stones Track Stumped Young Tom Petty
Unsurprisingly, Tom Petty’s method of waiting for a song to play on the radio and frantically scribbling down the lyrics while also trying to subconsciously internalize the harmonic structure was easier said than done for some songs. While most pop songs of the mid-1960s were manageably short and predictable in melody and structure, Petty revealed the one song that gave him the most fits as a teenage musician: “Get Off of My Cloud” by The Rolling Stones.
“It took us a good three hours to get that one written down,” he recalled. “But it was that kind of thing. [Radio] was a friend, you know? It was something that was there. You didn’t really think about it that much. Looking back on it, it was such a musical education.”
The Rolling Stones released this 1965 track as a single follow-up to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. In fact, Mick Jagger originally wrote the song as a response to their recent smash hit. “It’s a stop-bugging-me, post-teenage-alienation song,” Jagger said in a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone. “The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early 60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior or dress.”
Petty certainly seemed to think so, too, as a teenager growing up in Gainesville, Florida, seeing as how he labored over learning the song for hours on end.
Photo by Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images
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