Petty takes his last dance
Tom Petty
Musician: b Gainesville, Florida, October 20, 1950; m (1) Jane Benyo (diss), (2) Dana York; 2d; d Los Angeles, October 2, 2017, aged 66.
One hot and steamy day in July 1961, Tom Petty was sitting by the pond in the backyard of his parents’ home in Florida when his aunt came by and asked if he would like to meet Elvis Presley.
The singer was in town to shoot a scene for the movie Follow That Dream and Petty’s uncle had been employed by the film crew as a gofer.
The 10-year-old boy’s audience with Presley was brief, but it was enough to determine the course of his life.
‘‘He didn’t have much to say to us. He sort of grunted in my way,’’ Petty recalled. ‘‘But for a kid at an impressionable age, he was an
With his long, straight blond hair and high cheekbones, everything about Petty suggested that he was born to be a star.
incredible sight.’’
The next day he traded his catapult for a pile of Elvis singles that his childhood friend Keith Harben had inherited from an older sister.
‘‘And that was the end of doing anything other than music with my life,’’ he said. ‘‘I didn’t want anything to fall back on because I was not going to fall back.’’
Four years later he formed his first band, although it would be another 12 years before Petty achieved rock’n’roll fame when his first hit, Breakdown, charted in 1977, the year that Presley died.
True to his word, there was no going back and he spent the next 40 years as one of the world’s most quintessential rock stars, selling more than 80 million records and scoring memorable hits with songs such as Don’t Come Around Here No More, Free Fallin’ and I Won’t Back Down.
His high-profile performance at Live Aid in 1985, seen by a television audience estimated at 1.9 billion in 150 countries around the world, was one of the highlights of the starstudded show.
Bob Dylan, who was on the same bill, was so impressed that he employed Petty and his band the Heartbreakers as his support act and backing band on his next world tour.
By then his star had risen so high that Dylan admitted that more people were turning up to see Petty than to see him.
With his long, straight blond hair and high cheekbones, everything about Petty suggested that he was born to be a star, while his music seemed to synthesise all of the best elements of rock’n’roll into a single package.
Unlike so many rock stars, he was celebrated principally for his music rather than his lifestyle. There was a vigorous rock’n’roll purity about his records that seemed to reduce the normal trappings of celebrity to an irrelevant side issue.
But, he had a reputation for being stubborn, a trait he captured on I Won’t Back Down, the autobiographical 1989 hit.
When his record label hiked the price of his album Hard Promises, he fought a principled battle in which he threatened to go on strike. His victory when they backed down cast him as a champion of the people against corporate greed.
On another occasion he punched a wall in frustration over a song’s arrangement, breaking his left hand.
When Petty and members of his closest family worked on a biography in 2015, his fans were genuinely shocked by the lurid detail when he told the writer Warren Zanes: ‘‘I was used to living in hell. I lived through being terribly abused as a kid and then I found myself in an abusive marriage. I spent a month not getting out of bed, just waking up and going, ‘Oh, f....’ The only thing that stopped the pain was drugs.’’
His addiction had its rooted in a troubled marriage to Jane Benyo, whom he had met when they were 17.
When success arrived, it meant Petty was hardly ever at home, and his wife turned to alcohol and drugs to ease her feelings of loneliness and isolation. On returning home one night from a recording session, Petty found his wife passed out in the hallway from a drink and drugs overdose. Concerned that she was fighting a losing battle with depression, he considered cancelling his 1986 tour with Dylan, but was persuaded to go ahead by Nicks, who joined him on the trip. When the tour was over he moved out of the family home and his wife became verbally abusive, phoning him obsessively and threatening suicide if he said he was hanging up.
Racked by guilt he turned to heroin. Petty’s problems deepened when his home in the San Fernando Valley burnt down in 1987.
Firefighters saved musical tapes and a guitar stored in his basement studio, but the rest of his possessions – including the signature ‘‘Mad Hatter’’ top hat he regularly sported on stage and in videos – were destroyed.
He was born Thomas Earl Petty in 1950, the first child of Earl and Kitty Petty.
An insurance salesman who had been in the air force, Earl Petty was a violent drunk.
Petty credited his mother with keeping ‘‘an element of civilisation in the house to show us there was more to life than rednecks’’. After meeting Presley, he persuaded her to buy him a guitar. With the violence and abuse all around him music was his ‘‘safe place’’.
By the early 70s, he had formed the band Mudcrutch with Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, who would work with him for the rest of his life in the Heartbreakers, the band he formed in Los Angeles in 1976. In the 1980s, Petty’s strippeddown, passionate take on the genre marked him out, along with Bruce Springsteen, as a standard bearer for authenticity in a sea of schlock. It led to him joining Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne as the youngest member of the short-lived supergroup the Traveling Wilburys. He was still touring with the Heartbreakers in 2017 and played his final show at the Hollywood Bowl a week before his death.