RIP Tom Petty

I really hope that this was not overdose- or otherwise drug-related. But I fully expect to be disappointed.

 

Fantastic quote. As a child of the 70s, I get exactly what he's saying here.

 

Hometown paper coverage:
Tom Petty delivered 'Southern accent' with a hard, smart edge

Gainesville native and rock legend Tom Petty dies at 66

 

Been listening to his catalog front to back today at work. Some of the deeper cuts are just great. Much more expansive than I realized.

 

I've been wrestling with this for 24 hours, trying to figure out why this shook me in ways that Prince and Bowie and Cornell didn't. Petty wasn't my favorite artist. I realized when he died that I didn't even own a copy of Full Moon Fever, just Petty's Greatest Hits and Wildflowers. But because no one I knew found Petty objectionable, he was the soundtrack for my entire teenage years in ways that no other artist could touch. Tom Petty songs were about drinking beer in someone's basement, itching to go to a party where there might be girls. They were songs you played when you drove around town with nothing to do, songs you played while you worked manual labor jobs in the sweaty misery of the summer. No one who put Petty on the stereo could be considered uncool. They might not be cool, but never were they uncool. He was too much of an original. In Montana, where I grew up, people would roll their eyes if you put on Garth Brooks or Dr. Dre or even Pearl Jam, but if you controlled the stereo at a party and you put Full Moon Fever on, the cowboys, the jocks, the valley girls, the punks, they'd all be cool with it. My entire understanding of Los Angeles neighborhoods can be traced back to Free Fallin. He was Into The Great Wide Open when I was 13, he was You Don't Know How It Feels when I was 17, and he was Wildflowers when all my friends and I were blowing in different directions off to college, never to be the same again. When I think of Petty, I think about a time in my life when nothing was certain but everything was possible, and this weird, clever man was cocking his head sideways as he looked into the camera, telling stories about vampires and longing and disappointment. I had no idea how woven into my memories he was until, suddenly, he was gone.

 

This is so fucking great....

 

Well said man.

 

Damn. This got to me a little bit. Well done.

 

Imagine you're in the first or second row,
center stage, at this concert. And then they do this song.

There's Tom Petty up there. With the Heartbreakers behind him.
And now you've got Stevie Nicks on the mic. And they're killing it on this song.

In my mind, one of the best live concert clips.
Everything you'd ever want from a rock band.

 

I remember hearing a bootleg where Petty brought Stevie out to do this and he said, "If you guys think we do a good job with this next one wait'll you hear Stevie sing it!"

 

Tom Petty's final interview: There was supposed to have been so much more

No, this wasn’t supposed to be the end of the road for Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, even though the group’s namesake talked about what might cause that to happen — one day, perhaps, far down the line.

“If one of us went down,” he said, “or if one of us died — God forbid — or got sick …,” letting his voice trail off at the thought of it.

“We’re all older now,” he said softly. “Then we’d stop. I think that would be the end of it, if someone couldn’t do it.”

Until then, he said, there would be no talk of any proscribed retirement day — for this singer, songwriter and guitarist, or his band of brothers.

“On the back side of your 60s, most people aren’t working,” he said with an air of pride. “This keeps us young. I think it keeps me young.”

The link above includes an hourlong audio clip of the interview, too.

EDIT: Direct link to audio clip here ... Tom Petty's last interview

 

I hope that it turns out that he simply had a major coronary while he was alone. I mean, that's a shitty way to go, lying there with your heart muscle dying for lack of blood, and then your brain because your damaged heart isn't pumping adequately... but I'm so tired of musicians I loved dying due to drugs. I don't doubt that Tom did his share, he probably did more than my circle of friends and I have ever seen, but you have to hope that with age came wisdom and restraint.

I don't suppose it really matters, he's dead and taken from us either way. I just think that I'd feel that much shittier about it, same as I did with Prince.