Introducing The Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide: Tom Petty
Not backing down
Not backing down
As we celebrate 50 years of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in this new updated and expanded Ultimate Music Guide, the only melancholy aspect to the enterprise is that Tom Petty himself isn’t here to enjoy it.
Had he been, you imagine there may have been a customarily tasteful celebration: a short run of anniversary theatre shows, perhaps. Long on the hits. Compelling to the hardcore. Yet another career success, lightly-worn and delivered in what we might consider the classic Petty manner: with unshowy professionalism and complete self-assurance.
In one of the new additions to the magazine, Mike Campbell (for 30 years Petty’s lieutenant, both with the Heartbreakers and in his solo work) looks back on the Petty he knew, one year on from his passing. With no intimation of Petty’s brief illness ahead, the guitarist recalls for Graeme Thomson the atmosphere at the very last Heartbreakers performance at the Hollywood Bowl.
At the homecoming show of a sold-out tour, Campbell looks across at the singer. “His face was beaming; just so much happiness. I remember thinking, ‘This guy loves what he’s doing, and he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else than where he is right now, playing with the band in front of these people.’ His love of the craft and of the band and the music was contagious, and I felt it in that moment very strongly.”
What ended at the Hollywood Bowl began more humbly in Gainesville Florida where Tom Petty led The Epics as they became the uninspiringly-named Mudcrutch, and finally morphed into The Heartbreakers. While Petty’s name later became synonymous with laconic, relatable heartland rock, his tale began in these parts with a tour of the British Isles, conducted in a bread van, to crowds moved by the band’s fusion of 1960s melodic jangle with a pointed and purposeful new wave.
“Our first show was in Wales opening for Nils Lofgren,” Campbell recalled to Uncut in 2024. “We were getting more press attention in the UK than we were in America at the time for some reason, and the crowd was really with us. We felt like, ‘Wow, there’s people that really understand what we’re doing.’”
Whether with the Heartbreakers, solo, with his marquee name bandmates in the Traveling Wilburys or back with the reunited Mudcrutch (generously given another crack at the title in the new century), Petty always found a way to connect. And as you’ll read in these pages, that’s how it was right from the start.
“There’s a lot that is 80% stance and 20% music,” he tells Roy Carr in 1977. “It’s like, can the music catch up on the stance? I’ve thought a lot of I’ve thought about it a lot and it’s not right. The music should determine the stance, know what I mean?”
