Tom Petty: Farewell to Florida rock icon
A friend sent me a text: “Tom Petty? Say it isn’t true.”
It was the first I’d heard that arguably Florida’s most iconic born-and-bred musician had suffered a massive heart attack and was hospitalized in grave condition.
On a day when we all were stunned and horrified by the mass murder of dozens of country-music fans in Las Vegas, the late-afternoon news about one of America’s most beloved rock and rollers was particularly soul crushing. Both came out of nowhere. Petty’s musical coming of age itself is a beloved chapter in Florida lore. It was the scorching summer of 1961. The boy his family called “Little Tommy” met a music icon of yesteryear: Elvis Presley.
Not the bloated caricature Presley later became; this was a duded-up Mack the Knife Elvis, looking cool in a tailored suit even though the temperatures were well into the 90s.
Presley was shooting scenes at a bank for his film, “Follow that Dream.” Presley was 26 and Petty just 11. Petty’s Uncle Earl Jernigan was a prop master for the production and arranged for his family to have special access to Elvis.
“He stepped out as radiant as an angel,” Petty marveled. “He seemed to glow and walk above the ground.”
And there, along Silver Springs Boulevard near downtown Ocala, Tom Petty’s rock and roll dream was born.
Growing up in Gainesville, an uncommonly musical town best known for the University of Florida campus, Petty lived a fearful and physically abused childhood due to his father’s volatility. Music became his singular focus — his escape.
At Lipham Music in Gainesville, a popular hangout for many aspiring musicians, Petty took guitar lessons from another artist destined for rock stardom, future Eagle Don Felder.
Throughout his teen years, Petty played guitar and bass for garage bands like the Epics and Sundowners on a circuit of Central and North-Central Florida frat houses and youth centers where the Allman Brothers, Stephen Stills and Gram Parsons also played.
In the early 1970s Petty’s band, Mudcrutch, performed in high-school assembly halls with then-unknown Lynyrd Skynyrd.
In the mid-1970s Petty had assembled a group of fellow Gainesville musicians — including guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, and drummer Stan Lynch — the nucleus of his longtime band, the Heartbreakers.
Petty and his confederates finally pulled up stakes to chase the dream in Los Angeles. Even then, in his early classic song “American Girl,” he wrote about hearing the cars going by “out on 441.”
By that time hits like “Breakdown” started coming, and Petty was on his way to stardom.
A few years later, when his breakthrough album “Damn the Torpedoes” hit store shelves, I was a 13-year-old kid in the Midwest. I vividly recall the skinny guy with blond hair and mirrored sunglasses who sang “Don’t Do Me Like That.”
He may not have been the toughest, or the best-looking, or had the greatest voice, but one thing was certain to me as I looked at that bright-red album cover: Tom Petty was cool.
In 1981, I saw Petty on the last show of his tour supporting another great album, “Hard Promises” featuring my favorite Petty single, “The Waiting.” Petty was elated to be finishing the tour, and performed no less than five encores.
Through the years, Petty added that cool to collaborations with Stevie Nicks, toured with the Heartbreakers as Bob Dylan’s backup band, then hit fictional supergroup gold with Dylan, George Harrison and Roy Orbison in the Traveling Wilburys.
For me, Petty’s pinnacle was his multiplatinum solo record in 1988, “Full Moon Fever.”
His anthem “I Won’t Back Down” was his own philosophical statement of intent and explained his ability to survive the slings and arrows of the music business.
Petty’s enduring appeal was evidenced just last month when he and the Heartbreakers wrapped up a sold-out world tour at the Hollywood Bowl. I can’t help but wonder if all that work might have had something to do with what happened Monday. Such a sad, sad day for the music world.
With his work ethic, integrity and the music still very much intact, one-time Florida boy Tom Petty ran down a rock star dream, then lived it.