Tom Petty Thought Elvis Had Been ‘Tributed to Death’: ‘You Can Actually Disgrace the Artist’
Tom Petty was a fan of Elvis Presley ever since he met him as a child on a movie set. He was vocal about his appreciation of the other star’s music, so he received an invitation to perform at a 60th birthday tribute concert. Petty turned down the offer, noting that it wasn’t necessary. He believed that too many tributes to an artist could actually be a negative thing.
Tom Petty was a big fan of Elvis growing up
Petty met Elvis when his uncle introduced them on the set of the movie Follow That Dream.
“What stays with me is the whole scene,” he told Esquire in 2006. “I had never seen a real mob scene before. I was really young and impressionable. Elvis really did look — he looked sort of not real, as if he were glowing. He was astounding, even spiritual. It was like a procession in church: a line of white Cadillacs and mohair suits and pompadours so black, they were blue.”
The moment sparked a love of music in Petty.
“One of my friends had an older sister who’d gone to college and left her box of 45s behind,” he told the Independent in 1994. “So I traded in my aluminum slingshot, which was my most prized possession, for this box of records, and my life was transformed from that moment on. I just didn’t do anything but play these records. I didn’t even dream of singing or playing an instrument. All I wanted to do was listen to this music.”
He didn’t want to appear at a 60th birthday party concert for the other musician
In 1994, Petty received an invitation to appear at a 60th birthday celebration for Elvis in Memphis. Per the book Images of Elvis Presley In American Culture: 1977 to 1997, he refused, calling the whole event a “hokey affair.”
“If anyone’s been tributed to death, it’s Elvis,” he said. “Maybe the idea was to illustrate that the man was one of the great artists of all time, a fact blurred when he became such a huge, mythical part of the culture. But tributes are a delicate matter, because you can actually disgrace the artist by trying to pay tribute.”
Tom Petty remained a lifelong fan of Elvis
As Petty got older, his devotion to Elvis tapered off.
“I was [a fan] until ’64, and then Elvis was getting so s****y by then,” he said in the book Conversations With Tom Petty by Paul Zollo. “It had never been the music of my generation. I was an odd kid for even being interested in Elvis. So when The Beatles came, I lost interest in Elvis, because [The Beatles] were the music of my generation, and I was a huge record buff. So I lost interest in Elvis, though I kind of felt an allegiance to him. I still went and saw those s****y movies for a while. But I knew the difference by then. It didn’t have the vitality that these new records did.”
Still, he didn’t think this was a reason to write off Elvis altogether.
“We shouldn’t make the mistake of writing off a great artist by all the clatter that came later,” he said, per the LA Times. “We should dwell on what he did that was so beautiful and everlasting, which was that great, great music.”
