The story of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

A Gainesville kid catches the fever

The story begins in Gainesville, Florida, where Thomas Earl Petty was born on the twentieth of October 1950. His mother Kitty worked in the local tax office. His father Earl drifted through jobs, from running a grocery store to selling insurance, and he was a drinker and a gambler who beat his son with a belt. Tom later said his father could not accept a gentle boy who loved the arts. In the summer of 1961 an uncle working on the Elvis Presley film Follow That Dream, shot nearby in Ocala, took ten year old Tom to watch. Tom said Elvis seemed to glow. He came home a convert, and soon swapped his slingshot with a friend for a stack of Elvis singles.[1] [2]

Elvis lit the spark, but the Beatles showed him the way. When Tom saw them on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, he realised that a gang of friends could make their own music as a self contained unit. By fourteen he had a band called the Sundowners, and on his sixteenth birthday he joined the Epics, singing and playing bass. Gainesville's music scene revolved around a shop called Lipham's Music, where Tom, Bernie Leadon and the future Eagle Don Felder all worked at various times. Before music paid, Tom also worked briefly on the grounds crew at the University of Florida and even as a gravedigger. He graduated from Gainesville High School in 1968.[1] [2]

In 1970 the Epics grew into a new band called Mudcrutch. Tom played bass and sang, Tom Leadon, brother of the Eagles' Bernie Leadon, played lead guitar, Jim Lenahan sang, and Randall Marsh played drums. Marsh brought along his roommate, a shy guitarist from Jacksonville named Mike Campbell. Campbell played a battered cheap guitar, but when he tore into Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode, Petty asked him to join on the spot. Campbell was worried about the Vietnam draft, and Petty simply told him not to worry and join the group. It was the start of a partnership that would last nearly fifty years, with Campbell becoming Petty's chief co writer and co producer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mudcrutch became the most popular band in the area. They held down a residency at a club called Dub's Lounge and staged festivals at Mudcrutch Farm, a run down house on a large lot where several members lived. In 1972 Leadon and Lenahan left, and a keyboard player named Benmont Tench joined. Tench was a judge's son who had given his first piano recital at six and had met Petty as a boy in a Gainesville music store. He was studying at Tulane University in New Orleans when Petty phoned him at two in the morning and asked what on earth he was doing cramming for an economics exam. Tench never went back to college. Petty even persuaded his father, a circuit court judge, to give the boy a chance.[1] [2] [3]

Los Angeles and the birth of the Heartbreakers

In 1974 Mudcrutch packed up and drove to Los Angeles to chase a record deal. The week before they left, Tom married Jane Benyo, a Gainesville girl. After several rejections they signed with Shelter Records, the label run by Leon Russell and the English producer Denny Cordell, who had worked on hits for Procol Harum and Joe Cocker. The band recorded at Russell's studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a converted church, and at his home in Encino. Their only Shelter single, Depot Street, came out in 1975 and failed to chart. Late that year the label lost patience and broke the band up, keeping only Petty under contract as a songwriter and solo act. Petty was not happy about going it alone.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Heartbreakers came together almost by accident. In 1976 Benmont Tench organised a demo session in Los Angeles with Mike Campbell and two more Gainesville musicians, bassist Ron Blair and a hot tempered young drummer called Stan Lynch. Tench asked Petty to drop by and help with some vocals. Watching them play during a break, Petty decided this should be his band, and since he already had a record deal, there was no need to go hunting for one. By the end of the night they were Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Lynch remembered Petty laying down one rule. He could call anyone anything he liked, but he could never lay a hand on anyone in the band.[1] [2] [3]

The debut album, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, came out on the ninth of November 1976. Its closing song, American Girl, had been recorded on the fourth of July 1976, the day America celebrated its two hundredth birthday. Tench noticed the date at the time and thought it might one day be worth knowing. Phil Seymour of the Dwight Twilley Band sang the high backing parts, holding one long note with Petty by staggering their breaths. Another highlight, Breakdown, was reworked at two in the morning after Dwight Twilley suggested Campbell's guitar figure should run through the whole song. The take ran seven or eight minutes and was cut down to about two and a half.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

At home the record barely registered. Britain was another matter. The British music press loved the band's lean songs and almost punk attitude, and after a tour supporting Nils Lofgren the album reached number twenty four in the UK. They played Anything That's Rock and Roll on Top of the Pops, and Petty remembered British crowds charging the stage. American Girl reached number forty in Britain in August 1977. Word travelled back across the Atlantic, and Breakdown was reissued in the United States, where it became a top forty hit in 1978, helped by its place on the soundtrack of the film FM. The Byrds' Roger McGuinn, who thought American Girl sounded like one of his own songs, recorded a cover in 1977.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Fighting the label, and the breakthrough

The second album, You're Gonna Get It!, arrived in May 1978, reached number twenty three and became the band's first gold record, with I Need to Know and Listen to Her Heart on the radio. Then came a battle that defined Petty's reputation. In 1979 ABC Records, which distributed Shelter, was sold to MCA, and Petty's contract was simply passed along with it. He insisted it could not be transferred without his consent. MCA sued him for breach of contract, and in May 1979 he filed for bankruptcy as a tactic to escape the deal. The band wore T shirts asking Why MCA. After about nine months, he won a new contract with MCA's subsidiary Backstreet Records.[1] [2] [3] [4]

With the fight behind him, Petty made Damn the Torpedoes, released on the nineteenth of October 1979. It was co produced by Jimmy Iovine, fresh from Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith records, and cut at Sound City and Cherokee studios. The sessions were hard. Campbell said the band recorded Refugee around a hundred times, and at one point he walked out and left town for two days. Petty had nearly given Don't Do Me Like That, a song he first demoed with Mudcrutch, to the J. Geils Band, until Iovine talked him out of it. It became the band's first top ten single. The album sat at number two for seven weeks, stuck behind Pink Floyd's The Wall.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Damn the Torpedoes went triple platinum and turned the Heartbreakers into stars. Here Comes My Girl, written from a demo Campbell made the same week as Refugee, found Petty half talking the verses before the chorus lifted off. In September 1979 the band played the No Nukes benefit at Madison Square Garden, and in November they appeared on Saturday Night Live. Petty had never been comfortable being lumped in with punk or new wave. The Heartbreakers drew on the Byrds, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones rather than the Southern boogie bands around them in Florida, and Campbell later said they never joined any club.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Petty picked another fight in 1981. MCA planned to sell his next album, Hard Promises, for nine dollars and ninety eight cents, a dollar above the normal price. Petty complained loudly in the press, fans rallied behind him, and he even considered naming the record Eight Ninety Eight. MCA backed down. Hard Promises, released in May 1981, went platinum, and The Waiting became a big radio hit. The album had a working title of Benmont's Revenge. While it was being made, the band had hoped to meet John Lennon, who was due at the same studio. Lennon was murdered before that visit could happen, and early pressings carried a message to him etched into the run out groove.[1] [2] [3]

Hard Promises also featured Petty's first duet, Insider, with Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac. Nicks adored the band and had become close to Petty. Around the same time, Petty and Campbell wrote Stop Draggin' My Heart Around for the Heartbreakers. Jimmy Iovine, who was producing Nicks's first solo album Bella Donna and was also her partner, suggested she sing it. The band's track was kept and she sang over it, with Donald Duck Dunn playing bass in place of Ron Blair. The duet reached number three in America for six weeks, the biggest hit either Nicks or the Heartbreakers ever had, and its video was among the first shown on MTV's opening day in August 1981.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Line up changes, a broken hand and a burning house

Ron Blair was the first Heartbreaker to go. Worn out by touring and tense studio sessions, he quit after Hard Promises. Campbell later said Blair had been unfairly blamed when tracks did not work. His replacement was Howie Epstein, a Milwaukee musician who had played with John Hiatt and impressed Petty on a Del Shannon album Petty produced. At his audition Epstein asked to play Surrender, a Heartbreakers song that had never been released. He knew it from bootlegs. His high harmonies became a key part of the band's sound on Long After Dark, released in November 1982, with You Got Lucky and Change of Heart. Epstein played his first show with the band on the first of September 1982 in Santa Cruz.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Southern Accents, released in March 1985, began as a concept album about Petty's Southern roots, but it grew messy. Campbell later said there were confusing chemicals involved at the time. While mixing the opening song, Rebels, Petty got so frustrated that he punched a wall and badly broke his left hand, which needed surgery with pins, wires and screws. Late in the sessions Dave Stewart of Eurythmics arrived with a strange psychedelic song called Don't Come Around Here No More. Its video cast Petty as the Mad Hatter, ending with him eating Alice as if she were a cake. Feminist groups objected, but it won an MTV Video Music Award, and the single reached number thirteen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1985 the band played four songs at Live Aid in Philadelphia before a crowd of about eighty nine thousand. Then Bob Dylan came calling. He asked the Heartbreakers to be his backing band, and in 1986 they toured New Zealand, Australia, Japan and North America together, then Europe in 1987. Petty said there was nobody the band admired more. The experience shaped their own next record, Let Me Up, I've Had Enough, released in April 1987 and cut to sound like a live band in a room. Its single Jammin' Me grew out of a Campbell track, with words Petty and Dylan picked partly from newspapers and television.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Two ugly episodes hit Petty in 1987. In March he sued the tyre maker B.F. Goodrich for a million dollars over a television ad that used a sound alike singer and a jingle much like his song Mary's New Car. His management had already turned down the advertisers' request to use the real song. A judge ordered the ad off the air and the case was later settled. Then, on the morning of Sunday the seventeenth of May 1987, an arsonist set fire to Petty's house in Encino while he was at home. The upstairs was destroyed, but firefighters saved his basement studio, his master tapes and his favourite Gibson acoustic. The arsonist was never caught.[1] [2] [3]

Wilburys, a solo album and a secret contract

Touring with Dylan in Europe in 1987 brought Petty into the circle of George Harrison and Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra. In April 1988 Harrison needed a quick B side and gathered Lynne and Roy Orbison at Dylan's garage studio in Malibu. When he stopped at Petty's house to collect a guitar he had left there, he invited Petty too. The song they wrote, Handle with Care, was judged far too good for a B side, and the Traveling Wilburys were born, five famous friends posing as half brothers. Petty was Charlie T. Wilbury Junior. Their first album, released in October 1988, went triple platinum. Orbison died of a heart attack that December, and the other four made one more album in 1990.[1] [2] [3]

At the same time Petty was making his first solo album, Full Moon Fever, largely in Mike Campbell's garage studio with Jeff Lynne as co writer and co producer. Petty called it the most enjoyable record of his life. The first song finished was Free Fallin', written in about two days, and inspired by Petty's drives along Ventura Boulevard. On the day they cut I Won't Back Down, Petty had a terrible cold, so George Harrison boiled some ginger root and had him breathe the steam before he sang. Petty said the song was written in response to the arson attack on his house. Ringo Starr appears drumming in the video, though the record's drums were played by Phil Jones.[1] [2] [3] [4]

MCA, under Irving Azoff, first refused to release Full Moon Fever, saying it had no hits. Azoff left the company within months, and the new management changed its mind. The album came out in April 1989, reached number three and sold more than five million copies in America. Inside the band, it hurt. Benmont Tench found out from a crew member that the Heartbreakers record he expected was now a solo project. He admitted he was also deep in cocaine and alcohol at the time, and said missing the album let him go to rehab and saved his life. Stan Lynch hated playing the solo songs live, saying it made him feel like he was in a cover band.[1] [2] [3]

There was another secret. In 1989, while still owing MCA several albums, Petty quietly signed a deal with Warner Bros. reported to be worth about twenty million dollars for six albums. When the news leaked in 1992, some executives called it deceptive, while others pointed out that record companies rarely asked artists before selling themselves. Meanwhile the Heartbreakers made Into the Great Wide Open, released in July 1991 and again produced by Jeff Lynne. Learning to Fly spent six weeks at number one on the rock chart, and the title track's video starred Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway. Multi instrumentalist Scott Thurston, a former member of Iggy and the Stooges, joined the touring band around this time.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Wildflowers, and losing the drummer

Before leaving MCA, the band cut two new songs for a Greatest Hits album in 1993. One was Mary Jane's Last Dance, which had started life during the Full Moon Fever sessions as a song called Indiana Girl. Its video cast Petty as a morgue worker who takes home the body of a beautiful dead woman, played by Kim Basinger, and it won an MTV award. Greatest Hits went on to sell over ten million copies. It was also the last session for Stan Lynch. Petty said the drummer left right afterwards without really saying goodbye. Lynch had moved back to Florida and had to be persuaded to come back for it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Petty's first album for Warner Bros. was Wildflowers, released on the first of November 1994 and produced by Rick Rubin. It was credited to Petty alone because, he said, he and Rubin wanted more freedom than being strapped into five guys. Campbell, Tench and Howie Epstein played on it anyway, but Lynch did not, and English session drummer Steve Ferrone was chosen after auditions. The album was planned as a double, but Warner decided it was too long, and ten songs were cut. It sold over three million copies in America, and You Don't Know How It Feels won a Grammy. Petty considered it his finest work. One song on it, Don't Fade on Me, was later understood to be about Epstein's heroin use.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The drummer situation finally blew up in the autumn of 1994. Lynch had been furious about being left off Wildflowers, and Petty said he heard Lynch had been auditioning for another group and describing the Heartbreakers as not his main gig. On the second of October 1994 the band played an acoustic set at Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit in California. Petty called the atmosphere backstage misery. It was Lynch's last show. Manager Tony Dimitriades told him on the phone that he was out, and Lynch did not speak to Petty again until 2002. Lynch went back to Florida and built a second career as a producer and songwriter, working on the Eagles' reunion album Hell Freezes Over.[1] [2] [3]

For a while the Heartbreakers had no drummer at all. When they played Saturday Night Live in 1994, Petty called Dave Grohl of Nirvana, and after the show he offered Grohl the job. Grohl turned it down to work on the project that became the Foo Fighters. Tench said Grohl played him a rough cassette of those songs and told him he had to do it. Steve Ferrone took over on stage from February 1995 and became a full member a few years later. In 1996 the band made the soundtrack for the film She's the One, recycling several Wildflowers leftovers, and backed Johnny Cash on his album Unchained, which won a Grammy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Heroin, grief and a second marriage

The mid nineties were the darkest stretch of Petty's life. After long touring, his marriage to Jane Benyo fell apart, and they divorced in 1996. Depressed, Petty began using heroin. He later told his biographer Warren Zanes that heroin went against his grain, that he kept trying to cut down, then tried quitting cold turkey, and that nothing worked. He called it an ugly thing. With help from his girlfriend Dana York, he went into treatment and got clean around 1999. He credited Dana with saving his life. They married in Las Vegas on the third of June 2001, then again at home in Malibu, where Little Richard officiated and an all female mariachi band played.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That turmoil shaped Echo, released in April 1999 and produced for the last time by Rick Rubin. Petty later acknowledged it dealt with his divorce, and Campbell said it was hard to make because Howie was sick and Tom was going through a divorce. Epstein was missing from the cover photo because he failed to turn up for the shoot and Petty went ahead without him. Echo was the only Heartbreakers album with a lead vocal by Campbell, on I Don't Wanna Fight. Petty also put the single Free Girl Now up as a free MP3 download, a daring move at the time. Warner pulled it after two days, but it spread anyway on Napster.[1] [2]

Howie Epstein's addiction kept getting worse. In June 2001 he and his partner, the country singer Carlene Carter, were pulled over in New Mexico driving a stolen SUV with black tar heroin inside. Carter said the drugs were hers, and the charges were later dropped. At Petty's urging Epstein went into rehab, but by 2002 Petty said Howie was degenerating to the point where keeping him in the band was doing him more harm than good. In March 2002 the Heartbreakers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility. Epstein played that night, and so did original bassist Ron Blair, who then replaced him for good.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty third of February 2003 Howie Epstein died at a hospital in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after his girlfriend drove him there in distress. He was forty seven. MTV reported a heroin overdose, and friends said he had also been ill and taking antibiotics. Petty wrote that Howie was never not a Heartbreaker, and compared his death to seeing a dying tree finally cut down in the backyard. Epstein had also been a gifted producer, reviving the careers of Carlene Carter and John Prine, whose album The Missing Years won a Grammy. His old bandmates kept a bass guitar on stage in his memory. Petty's 2002 album The Last DJ, a bitter attack on the music business, reached number nine.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Elder statesmen and a first number one

In 2006, their thirtieth year, the Heartbreakers headlined Bonnaroo, toured with guests like Stevie Nicks and Pearl Jam, and went home to Gainesville, where they were given the key to the city on the twenty first of September. Petty joked it was much nicer than the one they got in Chicago. That year he also released his third and final solo album, Highway Companion, again with Jeff Lynne, which debuted at number four. In 2007 director Peter Bogdanovich released Runnin' Down a Dream, a four hour documentary about the band that won a Grammy. On the third of February 2008 the Heartbreakers played the Super Bowl halftime show in Arizona.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Petty kept looking back as well as forward. In 2007 he reunited Mudcrutch, bringing back Tom Leadon and Randall Marsh alongside Campbell and Tench. Their first ever album came out in April 2008, more than three decades late, and reached number eight. A second, simply called 2, followed in 2016. Petty also became a radio host, sharing records from his own collection on his show Buried Treasure from 2005, and in 2015 SiriusXM launched a Tom Petty channel. From 2004 to 2009 he voiced Lucky Kleinschmidt on the cartoon King of the Hill. In April 2010, five of the band's guitars were stolen from their rehearsal space in Culver City. Police recovered them the next week.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band's later records were looser and bluesier. Mojo, released in June 2010, was cut live in the studio and debuted at number two, the first album with Ron Blair playing throughout since 1981. Hypnotic Eye went back to the raw sound of their first records, and in August 2014 it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. After nearly thirty seven years on the chart, it was the first number one of Petty's career. Sales were helped by a deal that let concert ticket buyers claim a copy. Soon afterwards an agreement gave Petty and Jeff Lynne a co writing credit on Sam Smith's Stay with Me because of its likeness to I Won't Back Down.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Petty was notably relaxed about other people borrowing from him. When the Strokes admitted Last Nite leaned on American Girl, he said it made him laugh out loud. When radio hosts claimed the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Dani California copied Mary Jane's Last Dance, he said he doubted there was any bad intent and that he did not believe in lawsuits much. On the Sam Smith case he said these things can happen in songwriting. He was stricter about politics. He told George W. Bush's campaign to stop using I Won't Back Down in 2000, and later played it for Al Gore, and after his death his family said the same to Donald Trump's campaign.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The fortieth anniversary tour and the end

In February 2017 Petty was honoured as MusiCares Person of the Year. That April the Heartbreakers began a fortieth anniversary tour in Oklahoma City. Petty called it probably their last big one, saying they were all on the backside of their sixties and he wanted to see more of his granddaughter Everly. What fans did not know was that shortly before the tour began, Petty had fractured his hip, and he had just learned he had emphysema. He insisted on going ahead, playing fifty three dates in pain rather than letting down his band, crew and fans. In July, at Hyde Park in London, Stevie Nicks joined him for Stop Draggin' My Heart Around. It was the last time she saw him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The tour closed with three sold out nights at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. On the twenty fifth of September 2017, with original members Campbell, Tench and Ron Blair beside him, Petty ended the final show with American Girl, the song they had recorded on Independence Day forty one years earlier. Campbell said that afterwards they told each other they loved one another. Two days later Petty sat down with the Los Angeles Times at his Malibu home, proud and full of plans. He said the Heartbreakers still felt holy to him, and admitted that if one of them died or got too sick, that would probably be the end of the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Early on the second of October 2017, Petty's wife Dana found him unconscious and not breathing at their home in Malibu, in full cardiac arrest. He was taken to the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica and put on life support. Throughout the day, some news outlets wrongly reported that he had already died. He died that evening at twenty to nine, local time. He was sixty six. Reports at the time said he died peacefully, surrounded by loved ones. His memorial service was held on the sixteenth of October at the Self Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades. His Greatest Hits album climbed back to number two on the chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 2018 the Los Angeles County coroner ruled that Petty's death was an accidental overdose. His body held a mix of drugs including fentanyl and other opioids, two sedatives and an antidepressant. His wife and daughter Adria said he had been prescribed painkillers, including fentanyl patches, for emphysema, knee problems and above all the fractured hip, and that on the day he died he was told the hip had become a full break. They believed the pain was simply unbearable. They hoped his death might spark an honest conversation about the opioid crisis, noting that many overdoses begin with a real injury and a misunderstanding of how powerful these medicines are.[1] [2] [3]

Life after Tom, and a reunion

Petty had said the band would stop without him, and it did. The surviving Heartbreakers went their separate ways. In April 2018 Mike Campbell joined Fleetwood Mac, alongside Neil Finn, to replace Lindsey Buckingham on a world tour, at Stevie Nicks's urging. Afterwards he finally took his side band the Dirty Knobs on the road, something Petty had never allowed, and later brought in Steve Ferrone on drums. Benmont Tench became a fixture of tribute house bands and played on the Rolling Stones' Hackney Diamonds. In 2025 he revealed he had been fighting tongue cancer since 2011, and that in 2023 surgeons removed and rebuilt half his jaw. He still released a new solo album that year.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Petty's legacy also brought a family fight. His widow Dana was sole trustee of his estate. In 2019 his daughters Adria Petty and Annakim Violette sued her for at least five million dollars, saying their father wanted the three of them to share control equally. Their lawyer accused Dana of ignoring Tom's wishes, while her lawyer called the suit meritless. The dispute reportedly delayed plans for Wildflowers reissues. A settlement was reached in December 2019, with terms kept private. The estate went on to release An American Treasure in 2018, the long awaited Wildflowers and All the Rest in 2020, and a documentary about the Wildflowers sessions in 2021.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Old wounds healed too. Stan Lynch and Mike Campbell had not really spoken in twenty years when Campbell phoned in late 2021 and asked Lynch to drum for the Dirty Knobs. They met, apologised for being young and stupid, and toured together in 2022. Lynch said that at the 2002 Hall of Fame rehearsals he had finally told Petty what he needed to say, and Petty replied that he heard him. In September 2023 Campbell, Tench and Ferrone backed Bob Dylan in a surprise set at Farm Aid in Indiana. In March 2025 Campbell published his memoir, Heartbreaker, the first time a band member had told the story from the inside.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

For years Campbell said the Heartbreakers would never tour with another singer in Petty's place. But on the sixteenth of September 2026, at the Americana Honors and Awards at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the four surviving original members, Campbell, Tench, Blair and Stan Lynch, played together for the first time since Petty's death, with Chris Stapleton singing American Girl and Breakdown. Ferrone and Scott Thurston joined for You Wreck Me, and the band accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award. Campbell choked up, telling Tom he would miss rocking around with him. As of 2026, the estate had announced a box set of the band's earliest recordings, Origins 1971 to 1978.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Tom Petty and Mike Campbell. They met in Gainesville in 1970 and played together for almost fifty years. Campbell was the only Heartbreaker who shared songwriting and production with Petty, starting with Rockin' Around With You and going on to Refugee and Runnin' Down a Dream. There was friction too. When Campbell once asked for a bigger share, Petty simply said, but I'm Tom Petty. After the last Hollywood Bowl show, they told each other they loved one another.[1] [2] [3]

Tom Petty and Stan Lynch. Lynch was a powerhouse drummer and Petty's main harmony singer in the early years. Petty said Lynch could read the movement of his shoulder on stage. But Lynch resented the solo albums he was left off, and after the 1994 Bridge School show he was out of the band. They barely spoke again, though Lynch said he finally said what he needed to at the 2002 Hall of Fame rehearsals.[1] [2] [3]

Tom Petty and Howie Epstein. Petty hired Epstein in 1982 for his high harmonies and once said hearing Howie cover a line he could barely sing was what a great band was all about. Epstein's heroin addiction slowly wrecked that bond. Petty urged him into rehab, then replaced him in 2002, saying keeping him was doing more harm than good. After Epstein's death in 2003, Petty wrote that Howie was never not a Heartbreaker.[1] [2] [3]

Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks. Nicks met Petty in 1978 and became one of his closest friends, singing on Insider and the hit Stop Draggin' My Heart Around, and touring with the band so often she said she was a Heartbreaker for three months. In 1994 Petty refused to co write a song with her, telling her to go write it herself. The result, Hard Advice, was secretly about him. She last saw him at Hyde Park in July 2017.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Petty and Jimmy Iovine. Iovine co produced Damn the Torpedoes, Hard Promises and Long After Dark, and gave the band a far bigger sound. He talked Petty into keeping Don't Do Me Like That, steered Stop Draggin' My Heart Around to Stevie Nicks, and suggested Campbell take The Boys of Summer to Don Henley. He also vetoed Keeping Me Alive from Long After Dark, a decision Petty regretted.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne. The two became friends in 1987 and were bandmates in the Traveling Wilburys. Lynne co wrote and co produced Full Moon Fever, including Free Fallin' and I Won't Back Down, then produced Into the Great Wide Open and Highway Companion. His polished, layered style gave Petty his biggest hits, though Tench preferred how the band played those songs live. Lynne also shared the Sam Smith writing credit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Petty and George Harrison. Petty idolised the Beatles, and Harrison became a real friend after 1987. It was Harrison who pulled Petty into the Wilburys when he came to collect a guitar, and who treated his cold with ginger steam before he sang I Won't Back Down. Petty called Harrison the Wilburys' leader and manager. After Harrison's death, Petty played at the Concert for George in 2002 and later inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Petty and Bob Dylan. Dylan hired the Heartbreakers as his backing band for tours in 1986 and 1987, and Petty said there was nobody they admired more. The two co wrote Jammin' Me, played together in the Traveling Wilburys, and the Heartbreakers backed Dylan on Band of the Hand. Decades after Petty's death, Campbell, Tench and Ferrone backed Dylan again at Farm Aid in 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Petty and Rick Rubin. Rubin produced Wildflowers, the She's the One soundtrack and Echo, giving Petty a looser, more organic sound after the Jeff Lynne years. Rubin said Wildflowers scared Petty because he feared he could never make something so free flowing again. Through Rubin, the Heartbreakers also backed Johnny Cash on Unchained, and Petty's Highway Companion came out on Rubin's American Recordings label.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Petty and Dana York Petty. Petty credited Dana York with saving his life by helping him get treatment for heroin addiction around 1999. They married in 2001 and stayed together until his death, and it was Dana who found him in cardiac arrest in 2017. As trustee of his estate she later clashed with his daughters Adria and Annakim, who sued her in 2019 before a private settlement that December.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Petty and Earl Petty. Tom's father was a travelling salesman and, in Tom's words, a wild gambling drinker. He could not accept a gentle son who loved the arts, and he beat him regularly, sometimes with a belt. Tom was close instead to his mother Kitty and his younger brother Bruce, and he later wrote lovingly about his mother in Southern Accents.[1] [2] [3]

Tom Petty and Benmont Tench. They first crossed paths in a Gainesville music store when Tench was about eleven, and Petty later talked Tench's judge father into letting him quit college for Mudcrutch. Tench was hurt to learn of Full Moon Fever from a crew member, but called Petty the band's great songwriter. After Petty's death he helped curate An American Treasure, saying the process kept the music alive.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

• After meeting Elvis at age ten, Tom Petty traded his slingshot to a friend for a collection of Elvis singles. In 1961 Petty watched Elvis film Follow That Dream near Ocala, Florida. Back home he swapped his Wham O slingshot with his friend Keith Harben for a stack of Elvis 45s.[1]
• Before fame, Tom Petty briefly worked as a gravedigger. He also worked for a while on the University of Florida grounds crew, though he never studied there. A campus tree is even named after him.[1]
• Mike Campbell's draft number was eighty six when he joined Mudcrutch. In his memoir Campbell says he feared dropping out of school would get him sent to Vietnam. Petty waved the worry away and told him the band would take care of it.[1]
• Campbell's first electric guitar was a sixty dollar Guyatone. His very first guitar, a Harmony acoustic his mother bought from a pawnshop, was so bad he later called it unplayable. He auditioned for Mudcrutch on a cheap guitar too.[1] [2]
• A Gainesville DJ once introduced the band's debut on air as the work of Ted Petty and the Heartbreakers. Benmont Tench remembered hearing the first album played in full on a local station in October 1976, when the band was back in Gainesville rehearsing. The DJ got the name wrong.[1]
• The famous long high note at the end of American Girl was sung by two people taking turns to breathe. Petty and Phil Seymour of the Dwight Twilley Band staggered their breaths to hold the note. Campbell said the band called it the laser vocal.[1]
• Dwight Twilley suggested the guitar figure that runs through Breakdown. Originally Campbell's lick appeared only near the end. Twilley heard a playback and loved it, so Petty rounded up the band at two in the morning to recut the song.[1]
• Hard Promises was almost called Benmont's Revenge. That was the album's working title, a joke aimed at keyboard player Benmont Tench. The final title came from a line in the Stevie Nicks duet Insider.[1]
• Early pressings of Hard Promises carry a message to John Lennon scratched into the vinyl. The band had hoped to meet Lennon, who was due at the same studio. After his murder they etched a tribute into the run out groove of early US and Canadian copies.[1]
• Don't Do Me Like That was first demoed by Mudcrutch in 1974 and nearly given to the J. Geils Band. Petty thought it suited J. Geils. Jimmy Iovine sensed a hit and persuaded him to keep it. It became the Heartbreakers' only top ten single under their own name.[1]
• Mike Campbell wrote the music for Don Henley's The Boys of Summer after Petty passed on it. Petty felt it did not fit Southern Accents. Later, driving to hear a mix of their own single, Petty and Campbell found it playing on two stations in a row, and Petty admitted he regretted turning it down.[1]
• To coax a singer up to the final high note of Don't Come Around Here No More, Dave Stewart ran in wearing his underpants. Petty recalled that singer Stephanie Spruill hit the note and then burst out laughing. Stewart also brought in a cellist from the London Philharmonic Orchestra.[1]
• Stan Lynch met his girlfriend of five years on the set of the Don't Come Around Here No More video. She was Louise Wish Foley, the actress who played Alice, the character Petty's Mad Hatter ends up eating.[1] [2]
• The cover of Southern Accents is an 1865 Winslow Homer painting. It shows Homer's The Veteran in a New Field. The later Into the Great Wide Open cover used Jan Matulka's 1921 painting Autumn Landscape.[1] [2]
• Full Moon Fever contains a spoken message from Petty to people listening on CD. Halfway through, Petty asks CD listeners to wait a few seconds while vinyl and cassette owners flip their records over, a joke about the new format.[1]
• Ringo Starr drums in the I Won't Back Down video, but not on the record. The recording's drums were played by Phil Jones. George Harrison did sing and play guitar on the session.[1] [2]
• Mike Campbell talked George Harrison into playing the slide guitar solo on Handle with Care. Campbell said he was intimidated and thought his own solo was pedestrian, so he handed Harrison his guitar and slide. He says history proved him right.[1]
• In the Traveling Wilburys, Petty was Charlie T. Wilbury Junior. The line about the sweet smell of success in Handle with Care was his, he said, shouted out during a songwriting game Harrison ran at a barbecue.[1]
• The Into the Great Wide Open video was shot while Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway were on a break from another film. Their film Arizona Dream had paused production. Every Heartbreaker has a cameo, and manager Tony Dimitriades plays the record man who signs Depp's character.[1]
• Howie Epstein won his Heartbreakers audition partly by playing an unreleased song he had learned from bootlegs. Tench said Epstein asked to play Surrender, which the band had never released, and knew it perfectly.[1]
• Steve Ferrone was nearly named Tony Ferroni. A midwife suggested the Italian name because he looked Mediterranean at birth. At forty seven he learned his father's surname was Nicholson, and Petty assured him Ferrone was the better drummer's name.[1]
• Scott Thurston called himself a Sidebreaker, and the band nicknamed him Duckhead. Petty valued him as a neutral peacemaker, because Thurston was not from Florida and had not been there for the band's old feuds.[1]
• Warner Bros. refused to put a song called Girl on LSD on Wildflowers. Petty wanted it on the album. It ended up as the B side of You Don't Know How It Feels.[1]
• Rod Stewart had a hit with a song cut from Wildflowers. Leave Virginia Alone was one of ten songs dropped when Wildflowers shrank from a double album. Stewart recorded it in 1995.[1]
• Echo is the only Heartbreakers album with a lead vocal by Mike Campbell. He sings I Don't Wanna Fight. Howie Epstein is missing from the cover photo because he did not show up for the shoot.[1]
• In 1999 Petty gave away a new single as a free MP3, and his label pulled it after two days. Free Girl Now was among the first major artist singles offered that way. Warner was alarmed, but the file kept spreading on Napster.[1]
• Little Richard officiated at Tom Petty's second wedding. After marrying Dana York in Las Vegas on the third of June 2001, they married again at home in Malibu, with an all female mariachi band.[1] [2]
• Stevie Nicks once accidentally took home a tape of Mike Campbell demos meant for Petty. She wrote lyrics to one and began recording it with Fleetwood Mac, then proudly played it to Petty on the phone. He started shouting, and she had to drop it.[1]
• Stevie Nicks named Edge of Seventeen after mishearing Petty's first wife. Jane Benyo told Nicks she had met Tom at the age of seventeen, but her North Florida accent made it sound like edge of seventeen.[1] [2]
• Hypnotic Eye was Petty's first number one album, nearly thirty seven years after his chart debut. It sold 131,000 copies in its first week in 2014, helped by a deal that offered the album to concert ticket buyers.[1]
• Since October 2017, I Won't Back Down has been played at every Florida Gators home football game. It plays after the third quarter at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. In 2021 the University of Florida voted to award Petty an honorary doctorate.[1]
• Petty's song Love Is a Long Road was used in the first Grand Theft Auto VI trailer in 2023. The trailer drew over ninety million YouTube views in a day, and streams of the song soared almost overnight.[1]
• A tyre company once hired a Tom Petty sound alike after he refused to sell them his song. B.F. Goodrich's ad agency had asked to use Mary's New Car and been turned down. A judge pulled the copycat ad in 1987, and Petty's million dollar suit was settled out of court.[1] [2]
• Petty's first wife Jane joined a lawsuit over the 2008 fire in Universal's music vault. In 2019 she joined Soundgarden, Hole, Steve Earle and Tupac Shakur's estate in a class action suit against Universal Music Group, which disputed how much the fire had damaged.[1]
• A fire marshal once ended a Heartbreakers show at the Fonda Theatre early because the floor was over capacity. Petty had been warned mid set and joked about it, but after one more song the band was told to leave, and fans booed.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.