Singer, songwriter and guitarist Thomas Earl (Tom) Petty passed away Monday, Oct. 2, 2017 from cardiac arrest.
Born Oct. 20, 1950 in Gainesville, Fla. Petty found his love for Rock and Roll when he met Elvis Presley at 11 or 12. When he saw The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” he knew right then music was his destiny.
With one of the most iconic sounds in Rock and Roll, Tom Petty has become one of the best-selling music artists of all time with over 80 million albums sold. According to Billboard.com, Petty has charted more than two dozen songs on the Billboard Hot 100, with three of them reaching the top 10.
He has received many honors throughout his career. Some of the most prestigious include receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with his band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, in 1999; being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002 and receiving the Billboard Century Award on Dec. 6, 2005.
Petty’s music career started in 1970 when he formed the band The Epics, which was quickly renamed Mudcrutch. Mudcrutch signed with Shelter Records in 1974, and had on single, “Depot Street,” in 1975 before being broken up by the record company later that year.
After Mudcrutch was broken up, Petty started his new band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Initially the band struggled to find success in the U.S. with record stores struggling to sell their first self-titled album. However they achieved great success in the UK, especially after playing “Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll” on the British show “Top of the Pops” in 1976.
They continued touring through Europe with stops in multiple countries. After coming back to the states, they had to go state-to-state trying to garner more attention. In Aug. 1977 the tide turned when they played to a packed house at The Whiskey, which was a popular venue at the time.
After starting to become more popular in the U.S., they released their second album, “You’re Gonna Get It!,” in 1978. This was their first gold record, and reached number 23 on Billboard’s Top LP’s & Tapes chart that year.
After “You’re Gonna Get It!” was released, Tom Petty got into a legal battle when ABC sold Shelter records to industry giant MCA. To fight them he filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which, according to history.com, resulted in Petty being released from his “existing contract but immediately re-signing him to a $3 million contract with a brand-new subsidiary label created especially for this purpose.” This win by Petty ultimately changed the way contracts were done in the music industry.
While still going through the legal battle, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers worked on their next album “Damn the Torpedoes.” They had to do the recording in secret, otherwise MCA could have confiscated all of their work.
In 1979 after the legal dispute was settled, they released “Damn the Torpedoes,” which rapidly went platinum and eventually became certified Triple Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). This album was a breakthrough for the band, launching them into super-stardom with hits such as “Don’t Do Me Like That,” and “Refugee.”
In 1981 Petty found himself in another battle with MCA over his next album, “Hard Promises.” MCA was planning to raise the price of the album from the standard $8.98 to $9.98. Petty felt that this was an affront to the fans, so he threatened to either not release the album, or name it “$8.98.” He won this battle as well, which helped keep the price of records down for many years.
In the 80’s Petty continued to be extremely successful, releasing four albums as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, one as a solo album and one with The Traveling Wilburys (a supergroup you can read about on our website). This success in Petty’s career continued in the 90’s, but that success did not make him immune to problems in his personal life.
One of the struggles Petty faced in the 90’s, which only came to public light in 2015 following the release of Warren Zanes’ biography of Petty, was his addiction to heroin.
A multitude of factors led to his feeling of losing control of his life including a divorce and difficult dialogue with his ex-wife, as well as being distant from his children. He lived in seclusion and fell into a deep depression that led him to his addiction.
Petty says in the biography: “You start losing your soul. I wanted to quit. Using heroin went against my grain. I didn’t want to be enslaved to anything. I fear that if I talk about it, people will think, ‘Well, I could do it and get off.’ But you can’t. Very few people do.”
He ended up defeating the addiction and wants to make sure others know the dangerous repercussions it can have on addicts and their families.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ final album released in 2014, called “Hypnotic Eye,” debuting number one on the Billboard 200 charts. This was the first time it happened in the band’s career.
He continued to tour, with his last one ending just one week before his death. In an interview with Rolling Stone just after he finished touring, he said he was “thinking this may be the last trip around the country… I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was thinking this might be the last big one.” He was looking to spend more time with his children as well as his granddaughter.
Petty left behind a legacy as one of the premier American songwriters of his generation and a hard defender of artistic control and freedom.
“It was a gift I was given and what it means I don’t know,” Petty said in a 2009 interview with The Associated Press. “Johnny Cash once told me, he said, ‘it was a noble job.’ And I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Well, it makes a lot of people happy.’ … It does. It makes a lot of people happy. You can lose sight of that. People come up to me on the street and tell me how some song played a role in their life or how it got them through a hard time or this and that and I just think, ‘Damn, that’s what it is about.’”
Daniel Riley
Reporter