The legacies of both Bono and Tom Petty feel like they should be two opposite ends of the musical spectrum.
One seemed to stand for the righteous values of rock and roll and always stood by the principles, and the other is the singer for U2. OK, that’s not fair. For what it’s worth, both of them carved out a niche in rock and roll that went beyond playing typical commercial rock and roll, but even after scaling the heights that most others find impossible, they had to give it up for the artists who have a certain magic spark in them before they stepped up to the plate.
Granted, Petty knew that kind of excitement ever since he heard The Beatles for the first time. Elvis Presley may have been the first one to turn him into rock and roll, but when he saw the Fab Four playing on the Ed Sullivan Show, he suddenly realised that the idea for playing in a rock band wasn’t something out of his reach. That could be done, but after he started releasing masterpieces, rock and roll started going through a strange state of change.
The commercial aspect of everything MTV stood for didn’t always sit well with Petty whenever he tried to play the game. He understood the importance of music videos and even had a few certified classics under his belt, like ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’, but there had to be something more to life than looking at the biggest names in “hard rock” like Poison trying their best to mug for the camera whenever they played.
So when a band like Nirvana came out, Petty could have been happier to see one of the true greats of the genre explode purely based on the songs, saying, “Nirvana to me were the most significant group to come since The Beatles. Very powerful vision and a very honest man behind it. I loved him. He was amazing.” But at the same time, a frontman like Kurt Cobain should have been enough to kill Bono.
By the end of the 1980s, the U2 frontman started to become known more for being pretentious every single time he got onstage, but when the band released Achtung Baby, something felt different. ‘The Fly’ had completely reshaped how everyone looked at Bono, and while he was working on that kind of transformation well before Nevermind came out, he had a great deal of respect for what Cobain brought to the world of music.
If Bono was mocking the lavish rockstar, he was commending Cobain for speaking out against the very people the Irish legend was parodying, eventually telling his daughter Frances Bean, “When I heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, it was like the hyperbole hadn’t even been half enough…it was insane, an instant classic that changed the world immediately. The force that is in this music can never be extinguished, or covered up, or ignored or destroyed because it is too great.”
And it’s not like the rest of the world necessarily disagrees with that assessment, either. While some of the biggest names in rock and roll might be the ones that are looking to please the old guard of rock and roll, the ones who are often the most interesting are usually pulling from Nirvana’s sense of swagger, usually being too cool for school when it came to interviews of refusing to go by the rules of what the label wanted them to make.
But it should come as no surprise that kind of mentality resonated with Bono and Petty in equal measure. Neither of them could really be classified as punk singers, but they did have that rebellious edge when they started, and they would spend the rest of their lives championing those who spoke their minds.
