RIP Tom Petty

That quote is just so great and so sad at the same time.

 

How good is Waddy Wachtel? When he broke into "Hell's Bells" I got chills. He's played with Stevie since Buckingham Nicks, and with hundreds of people as a session guy. He was in Linda Rondstat's band for her run for Asylum from the late 70's till the early 80's, Hasten Down the Wind, Simple Dreams, Living in the USA. That was him on lead on her version of "Tumbling Dice". Helluva player. Did a lot of work with Warren Zevon, too.

 

A sideman like Wachtel would be a great character to build a Netflix series around. Each season would be a new era/band he or she is playing with, working in studios, maybe a dabbling into producing, a failed attempt at a solo career. Back to being a side-player. A year being in a house band on a late-night show, suddenly you are in a band where suddenly you are a "name" (like Clarence Clemons or in a group like Toto).

I think if Vinyl focused on a musician who bumps around genres as its central focus observing all the weirdness around them instead of the maniacal head of a label, it might have been better.

 

Played with Keith Richards's band for years too along with the great Steve Jordan on drums.

 

Wikipedia says he played with the Cowsills. (!)


" At the suggestion of Bud Cowsill (of The Cowsills), he brought Twice Nicely to Los Angeles in 1968 where they recorded a few demos, but after two years, Wachtel decided to work as a session player, recording with The Cowsills and produce their albums.[2]"

 

Very sad. Accidental drug overdose.

 

Absolutely sucks.

He cared so much about the tour/fans that he kept playing with that bad hip, so much that it turned into a pure break and he overdid it on the painkiller.

So many great songs we'll never hear.

 

So fucking sad.

 

Jesus Christ man that’s a helluva drug cocktail he had going there. Surprising he’d have been so careless after having kicked coke and heroin.

 

I'm not gonna be a guy who faults Petty for dying too soon, or dying of an overdose. Hell, he died doing what he loved, and don't take that as a tired board joke. He had a great tour at a late stage in his life, and maybe he relaxed a little too much at home on his final day, but so what? His hip was shot, he was in pain, toke up, tune out, whatever, dude ...

ON A POSITIVE NOTE WE NOW KNOW FOR CERTAIN HE WENT PAINLESSLY AND BEAUTIFULLY EXHAUSTED AFTER DOING WHAT HE LOVED THE MOST, FOR ONE LAST TIME, PERFORMING LIVE WITH HIS UNMATCHABLE ROCK BAND FOR HIS LOYAL FANS ON THE BIGGEST TOUR OF HIS 40 PLUS YEAR CAREER. HE WAS EXTREMELY PROUD OF THAT ACHIEVEMENT IN THE DAYS BEFORE HE PASSED.

If we are sad, we are sad for us. I don't fault Petty for how or when he died. He gave us everything he had.
HE WENT PAINLESSLY AND BEAUTIFULLY EXHAUSTED AFTER DOING WHAT HE LOVED THE MOST.

That's enough for his family, and that's enough for me.
Pinning some kind of nasty OD tag on Tom Petty would be bullshit.

 

Sorry to be the wet blanket, but NO. How many rock stars generated "great" new songs after the age of 66? And when was the last "great" Petty hit written?

It's a sad shame such an all timer died far too soon, but let's not pretend he was cut down before he'd shown all he could do. What we missed were opportunities to see some killer concerts as he rode out the end of his career. But his days of creating meaningful original work plainly seemed to have passed.

 

"creating meaningful original work"... 2016: