The consistency in personnel and Petty's allegiance to the sounds of the '60s did mean his music veered toward classic rock, a perception that tended to obscure the variety within his body of work and how he seemed like a bit of a punk when he released his first album with the Heartbreakers in 1976. Over the next decades, Petty expanded and refined this blend, almost always with guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench - the musicians who had played with him since the early '70s, when they all were in the rambling country-rock outfit Mudcrutch - by his side. Tom Petty straddled the divide separating classic rock and new wave, revitalizing and reinvigorating the big jangle of the Byrds and the garage rock roar of the Rolling Stones with his earliest records with the Heartbreakers in the late 1970s.
