For Tom Petty, his obsession with Elvis Presley started at the age of ten. That was when Petty’s uncle got a job on the set of the 1962 film Follow That Dream while it was shooting in Florida. Petty was able to see The King arrive on set, an experience that continued to stick with him as he began to obsess over music.
“He arrived in a fleet of white Cadillacs,” Petty recalled to Rolling Stone in 2011. “People were screaming, handing records over a chain-link fence for him to sign. I remember his hair was so black that the sunshine was glowing off of it. Just a nod and a hello made your skin tingle. I was high for weeks. It lit a fever in me to get every record I could, and I really digested it. Elvis became the soundtrack of my early years.”
Luckily for Petty, there was almost a full decade of Presley material for him to dig into by that point. Presley first stepped into the renowned Sun Studios in Memphis during the summer of 1953, and from that point on, a deluge of classic songs would come pouring out. It would be 1956’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, the bluesy and sparse rocker, that put Petty in the ranks of the Elvis army for life.
“It could have been the national anthem,” Petty claimed. “It rocks, and when the piano comes in, it starts to roll in this really sensual way. The track is very spooky and very empty – there’s just bass and a little piano, with D.J. Fontana playing the deepest groove.”
Petty gravitated toward Presley’s more unique-sounding records. Whether it was the singular arrangement of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ or the shrugged-off improvisation of ‘That’s All Right’, Petty could immediately sense when Presley was doing something outside of the box. The latter was a revelation for Petty, who had a lightbulb moment with Presley’s first hit single.
“Elvis and his band were fooling around at the end of a session at Sun with this song, and Sam Phillips heard it right away,” Petty added. “It was a pretty obscure Arthur Crudup song, and it’s incredible to me that Elvis knew it. He really put his own whack on it. He sings with a hiccup in the timing – I don’t know where that came from. The Sun stuff is really high art. It’s so pure, and that sense of discovery is there.”
