(Credits: Far Out / Ирина Лепнёва)
The main attraction in any good rock band always comes from the singer at the centre of it all. Not everyone can manage to entertain a crowd in the same way whenever they take to the stage, but if they manage to establish a rapport with the audience or play to the crowd in the right way, it almost doesn’t matter what comes out of their mouth half the time. And while Tom Petty had his guitar to hide behind a lot of the time when writing his classics, he knew what made a great rock and roll frontman when he saw one.
After all, he had been a student of rock and roll from the day that he saw Elvis Presley. While Chuck Berry and Little Richard had their moments of working the crowd, Presley was the first time that most people got a look at what a true rock and roll frontman could do, whether that was him committing the crime of shaking his hips a little too much or turning in the kind of performances that would have been too sexually charged for most conservation parents to take back then.
But even when Petty started making his own songs, there were many more avenues for artists to go down than copying Presley. There was Mick Jagger on one side playing up the sinister angle of a frontman in The Rolling Stones, but as soon as someone like Robert Plant stepped onstage, the moniker of ‘The Golden God’ was the perfect description, almost as if he could call up to the heavens whenever the time called for it.
Then again, being a frontman doesn’t mean looking like a master of the universe all the time. It was always about trying to keep the band jumping in the same way that blues musicians used to do before rock and roll existed. There’s a certain swagger involved with that, and J Geils Band had that in spades when they first started.
While most people look back at them as the cheesy band from back in the day that made songs like ‘Freeze Frame’, they had much more going for them than a handful of hits. They had played through every bar that would have when working in Boston, and despite the guitarist naming the group after himself, Peter Wolf had that innate charisma that made every show feel like a spectacle, even if he wasn’t reaching into the stratosphere for notes like Ozzy Osbourne was.
Petty may have had his own sense of swagger when he got onstage, but he knew that he needed to study what Wolf was doing if he wanted to be halfway decent, saying, “Peter Wolf was a master at working the crowd. He knew how to get the place really rockin’. I learned a great deal watching him — but not many others.”
There were even a handful of tunes that Petty was thinking of giving away for Wolf to sing. Despite it becoming one of his biggest hits, Petty felt that Wolf was better suited to sing the lead vocal on a song like ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’, but there’s something about the Floridian drawl in Petty’s voice that makes him like a suburban answer to Booker T and the MGs when he struts across the melody.
But until the day he died, Petty knew to channel Wolf’s energy whenever he played his classics. He wasn’t going to be the most engaging frontman or give Little Richard a run for his money playing live, but if he could relate to the audience by being himself, he was already half the way there.
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