Tom Petty was a “weird video star”

The New York Times

Petty may have been memorialized as a classic rocker, but he’s best remembered for MTV music videos that were “weird” and conceptual in all the ways his music was vividly normal, says Wesley Morris. “Mr. Petty’s approach to being on MTV was not to take it more seriously than he had to. His sense of frivolity came with a coating of stranger-danger,” he says.