Anyone living in Los Angeles during the mid '70s (like I was) needs to remember that it was an Eagles-Supertramp-Stewart world – critical information because otherwise you won't remember why the Masque became the place to go or why a bunch of bands like Catholic Discipline, the Bags, and the Weirdos who couldn't play worth shit were the best thing in town. You won't understand why, for about 10 seconds in the fall of 1976, when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' first album came out, the band was considered hard and fresh. I can't believe it either, but stacked up against the anemic competition, the band sounded all stripped down to basics and energized by a bad, old-school rock and roll attitude – one more reason why it made sense to figure out how to get your punk on.

In some ways, it should be said, it's easier not to know this, because it'll allow you to appreciate the album outside the context it was created in and to digest it as a piece of timeless pop – with sometimes-terrific hooks, jangly guitars, and a tight rhythm section, all of which occasionally lift you past Petty's constipated vocals and the fucking perms (wait, strike the perms, we're not about context in this paragraph). Credit should be given where it's due: "Rockin' Around (with you), " "Anything That's Rock 'N' Roll," and maybe even "Breakdown" are good pop tunes, and "American Girl" – not just the best Byrds song not written and recorded by the Byrds, but also arguably the best Byrds song ever – is even better than that. Of course, there are the timeless, racist overtones of "Strangered in the Night," which make you think that T.P. and co. was and still is just another Southern rock band (during the mid '80s the stage backdrop was a huge Confederate flag).