Tom Petty traded a slingshot for Elvis records after watching the King film
In the summer of 1961 a ten-year-old from Gainesville, Florida, visited a film set in nearby Ocala where his uncle was working and saw Elvis Presley in person. Elvis glowed, Tom Petty later said. Days afterwards he swapped his Wham-O slingshot for a friend's stack of Presley singles.
Petty was born in Gainesville on 20 October 1950, the elder son of a tax-office worker and a travelling salesman, and grew up in a neighbourhood locals called the Duckpond. Seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show convinced him that a group of friends could make their own music. He graduated from high school in 1968 and took odd jobs, including a spell on the University of Florida grounds crew and briefly digging graves. Future Eagle Don Felder said he gave Petty guitar lessons; Petty remembered them as piano lessons.
His band Mudcrutch, which included Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, was a local draw, but its lone single, Depot Street, flopped in 1975. After the split, Petty grudgingly considered going solo, then joined Tench's new group, forming the Heartbreakers. Their debut did better in Britain than at home, and American Girl and Breakdown only reached number 40 after a UK tour. Damn the Torpedoes went platinum quickly, selling nearly two million copies on the strength of Refugee and Don't Do Me Like That.
In 1985 the band played Live Aid before 89,484 people in Philadelphia, and Bob Dylan invited them on a 60-date tour. Three years later Petty joined George Harrison, Dylan, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne in the Traveling Wilburys, a project born when Handle with Care seemed too good for a B-side. Their second album was cheekily named Vol. 3 to mock bootlegs sold as volume two. His 1989 solo record Full Moon Fever produced Free Fallin' and I Won't Back Down.
A Greatest Hits set later sold over ten million copies. Petty and the Heartbreakers entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, and he voiced Lucky on King of the Hill. He died in October 2017 at 66, a week after the band's 40th anniversary tour ended, having sold more than 80 million records.
Source: Tom Petty
