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On this day in 1981, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers‘ “The Waiting” held the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s newly created Rock Top Tracks chart (later renamed Mainstream Rock).
Released on April 20 as the lead single from the band’s fourth studio album, Hard Promises (dropped May 5), the song quickly climbed to the top and stayed there for four weeks. And even though the track about waiting didn’t wait very long to see success, writing it took weeks of trial, frustration, and persistence.
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According to Peter Bogdanovich’s 2007 documentary, Runnin’ Down a Dream, Petty wanted a song with “a little lick from the beginning.” Strumming the chord progression, he says, “I did that for weeks … and then, finally, I hit, The waiting is the hardest part / Every day, you get one more yard / You take it on faith, you take it to the heart / The waiting is the hardest part. I’d get to that, and then I’d go, ‘Now what?’ You eat dinner, you come back, sit down, pick up the guitar. People start banging on the wall. ‘Don’t play that anymore!’”
As for the lyrics, Petty credits another music legend, Janis Joplin, with sparking the initial idea. Years before, Joplin famously said, “I love being onstage, and everything else is just waiting.” It’s that line that Petty credits for inspiring “The Waiting.”
“I got it from the Janis Joplin quote,” he told Paul Zollo in the book Conversations with Tom Petty. “That’s where it stuck in my mind.”
One of rock’s first and greatest hits, the track was categorized by Rolling Stone as the pinnacle of the band’s signature “golden twang” era — a nod to the guitar tones, optimistic lyrics, and sing-along chorus. Meanwhile, American Songwriter called it “one of the best call-and-response moments of the Heartbreakers’ entire catalog (and there’s a lot of ’em).”
It was so worth the wait.
Related: 1981 ‘Tense’ Collaboration Named One of the Greatest Classic Rock Team-Ups of All Time