Tom Petty was born October 20, 1950 in Gainesville, Florida, son of an insurance salesman. It was the King himself that first inspired Petty to pick up a guitar. He met Elvis in 1961 when the rock legend was in Florida to film the movie Follow That Dream. It was then that Petty decided to follow his own dream. The next day he traded his slingshot for a friend's collection of Elvis Presley records. "And that," Petty recalled in Rolling Stone, "was the end of doing anything other than music with my life. I didn't want anything to fall back on because I was not going to fall back." Petty's schoolboy band was called the Sundowners, later changed to the Epics. By 1970, the Epics had evolved into Mudcrutch. After recording a demo tape in the living room of Mudcrutch member Benmont Tench, the band drove west to Los Angeles to find fame and fortune. Within a week of arriving in Los Angeles, Mudcrutch had offers of several record deals. They signed with Shelter Records in the Spring of 1974 and set out to record an album. After the disappointing release of their first Shelter single, "Depot Street," the efforts to finish the album dragged along and Mudcrutch eventually disbanded. Petty later reunited with two of the former Mudcrutch members, guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench, in a demo session. The trio met up with two other musicians who also hailed from Gainesville, bassist Ron Blair and drummer Stan Lynch, and a famous quintet was born. They called themselves Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers kicked the musical doldrums of the mid-70s in the face with their 1976 self-titled debut album. It featured a stripped-down-but-accomplished brand of rock that blended jumpy rhythm & blues rhythms, ringing guitars and keyboards, over which Petty grabbed listeners by their throats with his disarmingly blunt lyrics and extremely direct vocal style. Still, it took America a full year to catch up to the album. "Breakdown" became a Top 40 hit in 1977 after word filtered back that Petty was creating a firestorm over in England. By the end of the pivotal U.K. trek, the band was headlining the very same venues where they played as an opening act weeks earlier. 1978's follow-up, You're Gonna Get It!, proved the debut album's intensity was no fluke. Marking the band's first gold album, it featured the singles "Listen To Her Heart" and "I Need To Know." Throughout the band's history, Tom Petty has demonstrated that he "won't back down" from the principles in which he believes. While recording 1979's Damn The Torpedoes, Petty tried to renegotiate his contract when MCA purchased ABC Records (for which Petty recorded). Petty held fast to his principles for a long nine months -- he believed artists should own their songwriting copyrights -- and it drove him to bankruptcy even though he ultimately triumphed. It was a struggle that earned much attention, helping other artists in their own battles to hold onto their copyrights. The turbulence surrounding Damn The Torpedoes did little to stifle the album's success, and it counts among the greatest rock records of the 1970s. Featuring the songs "Don't Do Me Like That," "Refugee" and "Here Comes My Girl," it became triple-platinum and brought Petty superstardom and arena headlining status. In 1981 Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released the album Hard Promises amidst a new controversy. Petty resisted having the album released at a higher "superstar product" price for customers. After threatening to withhold the LP, MCA released the album at the lower price Petty wanted. The original lineup of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers changed in 1982 when bassist Ron Blair left the band. Howie Epstein, a bass player who had been working with Del Shannon, joined the group and made his debut with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at a concert in Santa Cruz, California on September 1, 1982 playing bass and singing backing vocals. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers continued to gather momentum throughout the 80's with critically acclaimed albums like Long After Dark (1982), Southern Accents (1985) and the double live set Pack Up The Plantation - Live! (1985) (which had a companion long form home video). Southern Accents produced Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' first video award, the MTV Video Music Award for Best Special Effects for "Don't Come Around Here No More." Throughout this period of success, there continued to be unusual twists and turns. Frustrated during the mixing process for Southern Accents, Petty broke his left hand after punching it through a wall. In 1987, Petty brushed with a tire company which ultimately withdrew a Tom Petty soundalike song from a TV commercial. 1987 also saw the release of Let Me Up (I've Had Enough), which featured "Jammin' Me," co-written by Bob Dylan, with whom they teamed up for a historic world tour in 1986 and 1987. In 1988 Tom Petty joined Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, George Harrison and Roy Orbison to record as the Traveling Wilburys. The Wilburys released two platinum albums, The Traveling Wilburys (1988) and Volume Three (1990). Petty received a Grammy Award in 1989 for Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal for his work with the Wilburys. Tom Petty made his solo debut in 1989 with Full Moon Fever, which he co-produced with fellow Wilbury Jeff Lynne and Heartbreaker Mike Campbell. Full Moon Fever remained in Billboard's Top Ten album chart for over 34 weeks and earned triple-platinum status, along the way spawning such hits as "I Won't Back Down," "Running Down A Dream" and "Free Fallin'." Continuing to stand up for his principles, Petty threatened not to play at a 1989 concert in New Jersey when authorities refused to allow Greenpeace to set up information booths in the lobby. Petty didn't back down, but the authorities did, and the gig went on. In 1990 Petty was acknowledged for his songwriting abilities when he received an ASCAP songwriter award for "Free Fallin'." Platinum success returned in 1991 when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released Into The Great Wide Open (produced again by the Petty/Campbell/Lynne team). The album produced the hit singles "Learning To Fly" (some of whose bleak imagery was inspired by the Persian Gulf War) and "Into The Great Wide Open" (a song that unflinchingly revealed -- with amusingly fresh insights -- the hollow core of the music biz' star-making machinery). 1991 also saw the recording of the long form home video Take The Highway, shot at the Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, California and the Lawlor Events Center in Reno, Nevada (released in early 1992). The 1993 release of the Greatest Hits album -- certified quadruple platinum and consistently charted in the Billboard "Top 200 Albums" chart since its release in late 1993 -- included two newly recorded songs, "Mary Jane's Last Dance" and "Something In The Air." The video for "Mary Jane's Last Dance" earned Tom Petty the Best Male Video award at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, an evening that was highlighted when Tom was presented with the highest honor, the Video Vanguard award, citing his longtime contributions to the field. 1994 brought the departure of long-time Heartbreaker drummer, Stan Lynch. After a triumphant 2-day gig at the 8th Annual Bridge School Benefit Concert at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California on October 1-2, 1994, Stan left the band to pursue producing and writing. There has been no permanent replacement drummer for the group. The first Tom Petty tribute album, You Got Lucky, was released in 1994 under the Backyard/Scotti Brothers label. The album features hip indie acts like Everclear, Silkworm, Edsel and aMiniature thrashing out classic Petty. Petty released his first album for Warner Bros. in late 1994. Titled Wildflowers, it went on to sell over three million copies and produced the hits "You Don't Know How It Feels," "You Wreck Me" and "It's Good To Be King." In 1996, Wildflowers scored two Grammy Awards: Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for "You Don't Know How It Feels" and Best Engineered Album (Non-Classical). The album also earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album. Other Wildflowers achievements included Tom's Best Male Video award for "You Don't Know How It Feels" at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards. The tour for Wildflowers marked the biggest and most successful concert trek in the history of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. As part of the tour, the group performed two sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl, producing a record gross figure for a multi-night engagement by a single artist at the venue. According to Pollstar, the group's trek was one of the Top Ten biggest grossing tours of 1995. The group set a precedent in January 1995 when VH1 made a limited number of the group's concert tickets available to its viewing audience before going on sale to the general public. It marked the first time concert tickets were ever made available by television, and the response was overwhelming, as viewers responded with an unprecedented 500,000 phone calls in the first fifteen minutes alone, flooding Ticketmaster's phone lines. The headline on Tom Petty's most recent Rolling Stone cover story in 1995 said it best: "TOM PETTY, KING OF THE ROAD." 1995 marked the release of Playback, a gold-certified six-CD boxed set that chronicled the band's work with 92 songs, 15 of them B-sides and rarities never before available on an album and another 27 never previously released at all. In the liner notes to Playback, Tom Petty observed that those who know the Heartbreakers only from their hit singles might not be familiar with the range of styles they have covered, from the Beach Boys influences of tracks like "You Can Still Change Your Mind" to the Nirvana-inspired hard rock of "Come On Down To My House" to various side trips into country, blues, psychedelic and surf music. "People had a mental picture of what we should sound like and if you played them something that didn't sound like "Refugee" or "American Girl" or "Even The Losers" they were puzzled," Petty reflected in the album notes. "I still go through that." In tandem with the release of Playback was a long-form home video of the same name that contains 17 videos by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The videos range from "Refugee" and "Here Comes My Girl" in 1979 (both created before there was VH1, MTV or any regular outlet for them) to the award-winning favorites "Don't Come Around Here No More," "Free Fallin'," "Into The Great Wide Open" (with Faye Dunaway and Johnny Depp) and "Mary Jane's Last Dance" (with Kim Basinger).
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' August 1996 release Songs And Music From The Motion Picture She's The One opened up an exciting new chapter for a group whose body of work spans three decades. She's The One contains 15 selections, 10 of which are featured in the film -- a wry romantic comedy from The Brothers McMullen's writer/director/star Edward Burns -- and five that are exclusive to the album. Tom Petty explained that he "actually wound up having more songs than I could fit into the movie, so I included them all on the album." The songs were written by Petty, except for "Climb That Hill" (Tom Petty/Mike Campbell), "Asshole" (Beck) and "Change The Locks" (Lucinda Williams). Tom also wrote the whole instrumental score for the film, marking the first time he has written music expressly for a motion picture. In creating the score, Petty said, "We just played. We didn't use computers and click tracks and stuff. The whole score was done live with no overdubs." The album was produced by Rick Rubin, Tom Petty and Mike Campbell. As a songwriter, Tom Petty was acknowledged in May 1996 with the prestigious Golden Note Award from ASCAP, honoring his vast array of best-selling and critically-acclaimed songs. Writing in the New York Times in 1995, Jon Pareles noted about Petty's songs: "They are tales of characters whose hopes are shrinking and who don't know what went wrong. Although he has been a rock hit-maker since the 1970s, Mr. Petty hasn't lost touch with the small-time life; his characters are sullen and bewildered, stubborn as well as restless. He gives them anthems like 'I Won't Back Down'; he also captures their doggedness in the face of set-backs. 'I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings/Coming down is the hardest thing.' And he knows that his narrators are not always nice guys; they can be selfish and oblivious, proclaiming, 'You don't know how it feels to be me.'" Tom Petty received UCLA's George And Ira Gershwin Award For Lifetime Musical Achievement in April 1996. Previous recipients of the university's award include Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald. Petty was the first artist of the rock era to earn this distinction. In 1996, Tom Petty was also selected to receive his own star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood (to be presented in 1997), an honor that not only acknowledges his musical achievements but his humanitarian involvement with such organizations as Greenpeace, the National Veteran's Foundation, USA Harvest, Rock And Wrap It Up and AmFAR (the American Foundation for AIDS Research). In the Playback liner notes, Bill Flanagan noted: "Yet for all the respect and affection that comes his way, Petty has never been granted a free pass, he has never seemed to quite reach the place where his eccentricities will be automatically indulged. He has had to work very hard to stay on top. Along the way, he has built a body of work that seems more impressive with each new addition to it. He is the tortoise who finally wins the race while the hares are all relaxing and reading their press clippings."
Bio written by: mr_mac |
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