Rocker scored hits with Heartbreakers
Tom Petty, the American rock icon whose laconic drawl and jangling guitars made him a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and one of the bestselling musicians of all time, died Monday at a Santa Monica hospital after suffering cardiac arrest. He was 66.
His death was confirmed by Tony Dimitriades, longtime manager of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
“We are devastated to announced the untimely death of our father, husband, brother, leader and friend, Tom Petty,” said Dimitriades in a statement tweeted from Petty’s official Twitter account just after 9:30 p.m. Monday. “He died peacefully at 8:40 PM PST, surrounded by family, his bandmates, and friends.”
Petty was reportedly found unconscious and not breathing in his Malibu home on Sunday. There was confusion over his status for hours, as multiple
media outlets reported his death then retracted their stories, citing erroneous information from the Los Angeles Police Department.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which sold more than 80 million albums worldwide, had wrapped up its 40th anniversary tour with three sold-out concerts at the Hollywood Bowl last week.
In May, the group appeared as headliners at the BottleRock Napa Valley music festival and returned to Northern California for a threenight stand in August at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, with an additional show Sept. 1 at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento (the singer was forced to reschedule the latter dates due to laryngitis).
Mr. Petty had said that after four decades of touring, the trek was intended to be his final major outing.
“It’s very likely we’ll keep playing, but will we take on 50 shows in one tour? I don’t think so,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone before the launch of the tour in April. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was thinking this might be the last big one. We’re all on the backside of our 60s. I have a granddaughter now I’d like to see as much as I can. I don’t want to spend my life on the road. This tour will take me away for four months. With a little kid, that’s a lot of time.”
Intended to commemorate the release of the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ self-titled 1976 debut, the tour found the group digging into deep pockets of its back catalog, dusting off rarities from each of its 13 albums and the singer’s three solo discs, alongside its more than 40 mainstream rock hits.
His finest songs — such as “American Girl,” “Free Fallin’ ” and “Runnin’ Down a Dream” — invariably drew inspiration from rock ’n’ roll’s glory years, when groups like the Byrds, the Zombies and Bob Dylan invented the brand of chiming guitar rock that Petty perfected.
Mr. Petty devoted most of his time leading up to the final tour to curating the playlist and conducting interviews with his personal heroes for a dedicated SiriusXM channel.
If there was a thread that ran through his work, from the roughhewn radio staples from the early years (“The Waiting,” “You Got Lucky”) to his slickly produced hits of the 1980s and 1990s (“I Won’t Back Down,” “Learning to Fly”), it was a quest for authenticity.
“If you’re phony, they will feel it in the farthest row of the arena,” Mr. Petty said in an interview with Esquire in 2006. “You have to really care. And you have to make yourself care time and time again.”
Thomas Earl Petty was born in Gainesville, Fla., on Oct. 20, 1950. He grew up with an abusive father and dropped out of high school at age 17 to join the bar band Mudcrutch, whose members, guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench, he continued to play with after the band’s breakup.
Moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, they formed the Heartbreakers with bassist Ron Blair and drummer Stan Lynch. Their self-titled debut album (which featured “Breakdown” and “American Girl”) didn’t initially make much of an impact when it was released, but following a tour of England the group began to get traction back home.
In a 1977 review of the band’s performance at Keystone in Palo Alto, The Chronicle’s pop music critic, Joel Selvin, wrote, “The band concentrates on concise songs, backed by powerful ensemble work that deemphasized individual solos in favor of a total band sound.”
By the time Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released 1979’s “Damn the Torpedoes,” the group had a string of hits including “Don’t Do Me Like That” and “Refugee,” which Petty followed with “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” a duet with Stevie Nicks that appeared on her “Bella Donna” LP.
In 1997, the band played 20 sold-out shows at San Francisco’s 1,100capacity Fillmore, during which, Selvin wrote, “It was one of rock music’s top outfits of the past 20 years relaxed and doing what it does best. This band is so unpretentious, so effortless, it’s almost easy to overlook how great it is. And when Petty’s enormous catalog and consistent excellence are weighed, he has to be considered one of the greatest in the history of music.”
The last show of the residency stretched to four hours.
“We weren’t promoting anything,” Petty would recall, speaking to The Chronicle two years later. “We didn’t have any agenda. And it was a very successful experiment for us. I think we enjoyed it more than anything we’ve ever done with the Heartbreakers.”
Petty’s most recent release, 2014’s “Hypnotic Eye,” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart. In 2015, Petty earned a writing credit on Sam Smith’s megahit “Stay With Me” for its similarities to his 1989 song “I Won’t Back Down.”
He was also a member of the 1980s supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, with Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne, and recorded as a solo artist.
“It’s shocking, crushing news,” Dylan said in a statement. “I thought the world of Tom. He was great performer, full of the light, a friend, and I’ll never forget him.”
Petty is survived by his wife, Dana; two daughters, Adria and Annakim; Dana’s son, Dylan; and Petty’s younger brother, Bruce. No services have been announced.