Kiss and the Beatles came from opposite places — geographically, artistically and just about every other way. And yet, they both inspired songs on Tom Petty‘s debut album, released on Nov. 9, 1976.

The Beatles, of course, were the more likely source of influence. Petty was 13 years old when he saw the Liverpudlians perform on The Ed Sullivan Show, a canon event for many burgeoning musicians.

“This was the great moment in my life, really, that changed everything,” he told grammy.com in 2014. “I had been a fan up to that point. But this was the thing that made me want to play music. You saw that it could be done. There could be a self-contained unit that wrote, recorded and sang songs. And it looked like they were having an awful lot of fun doing it.”

The Beatles were in the back of Petty’s head when the Heartbreakers were at work recording “Breakdown,” a song with a sort of laid-back groove that would eventually become one of their biggest hits. But then, it was just a track Petty had written quickly at the piano in the studio.

Listen to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ ‘Breakdown’

“Yeah, that was a drumbeat I got wrong,” Petty would later explain in Conversations With Tom Petty. “There’s a Beatle song called ‘All I’ve Got to Do.’ Which has a great drum beat. [Sings drumbeat] So I was thinking that would be the drum beat. Though I think I kind of translated it wrong, ’cause it’s not really that beat at all. So that’s what Stan [Lynch] did with it. And he played a great track there.”

Listen to the Beatles’ ‘All I’ve Got to Do’

And then there was a song called “Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll” which appears to stem at least a little bit from Kiss. In Conversations With Tom Petty, author and interviewer Paul Zollo told Petty: “Mike [Campbell] said he saw Kiss and realized if you put the words ‘rock and roll’ into a song, it would make it work.”

“I never knew he said that,” came Petty’s reply. “I liked the phrase ‘rock and roll’ and I was kind of afraid it was dying out at the time. I used it in a couple songs around those days.”

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Ironically, just a few weeks after Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was released, the band opened for Kiss at the Municipal Auditorium in Columbus, Georgia, during Kiss’s Rock & Roll Over Tour. The Heartbreakers were still finding their way in the business then, while Kiss was huge.

“For that tour, we were nobodies,” Campbell recalled to Vulture in 2025. “Our gigs leading up to that were playing in sawdust places on the floor — it was awful. We arrived at the venue and the band came in wearing their robes like heroes. Gene [Simmons] is standing in the hallway and I didn’t think he would even talk to me, nonetheless give me a lecture. I said, ‘What are you guys doing here?’ We were in a very small town somewhere in the South on a weekday. Not exactly a place you would expect to see Kiss. He looked at me and said, ‘Listen, kid,’ and went right into it. He told me all about honoring the markets. He was like a professor.”

Listen to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ ‘Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll’