10.3.17 Hero of the Day: Tom Petty

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Bee-otch of the Day honors are awarded Monday through Thursday, Bee-otch of the Week is awarded Friday on Chuck69.com.

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A SPECIAL HERO OF THE DAY!

Name: Tom Petty
Age: was 66 
Occupation: rock legend
Last Seen: into the great wide open
Awarded For: being a real influence in rock

   

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With the mass shootings in Las Vegas, what the world needed was more bad news on Monday.

And we got it.

Monday afternoon, it was announced that Tom Petty had suffered cardiac arrest and was sent to a hospital in Los Angeles. A short time later, the media erroneously reported that the 66-year-old rock legend had died, though the truth was that his family decided to take him off life support. He officially died just past 8 p.m. Pacific time.

Petty did live a somewhat hard life; he was physically tortured by his father as a child, he dealt with heroin addiction, his marriage to his first wife ended in a disastrous divorce and his home even burned down by an arsonist. But, he made up for it by making some rememberable tunes.

He started out with a local band, The Epics, that evolved into Mudcrutch, which evolved into The Heartbreakers. They released their self-titled first album in 1976, which at first got little attention on the charts. However, the album took off in England, and soon here in America. The first single from the album, "Breakdown" was Petty's first top 40 hit, peaking at #40.

Soon, Petty and his band recorded hit after hit album. Their biggest hit came in 1981 with their duet with Stevie Nicks, "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around", which peaked at #3 on the pop charts. It was because of Nicks' chance meeting with Petty's ex-wife that led to her recording one of her biggest hits. She asked her when he met Tom, and she said "at the age of seventeen". Problem was, her deep, southern accent made it sound like "edge of seventeen". Now you know the rest of the story.

Tom was known for his work outside The Heartbreakers as well; touring with Bob Dylan and recording as "Charlie T. Wilbury, Jr." with The Traveling Wilburys along with Dylan, Jeff Lynne and the now-late Roy Orbison and George Harrison. Petty's groundbreaking 1989 album "Full Moon Rising" featured several hit singles, "Won't Back Down", which was inspired when his house burned down in 1987, "Runnin' Down A Dream", which was a tribute to Del Shannon and his biggest solo hit, "Free Fallin'".

Petty's career blossomed well through the 1990s with hits such as "Mary Jane's Last Dance" (with a rememberable video with a dead Kim Basinger), "You Don't Know How It Feels" and "Learning to Fly". He's also known for speaking his mind through his music; his 2002 hit "The Last DJ" was banned from many radio stations for being "anti-radio". It was about how corporations were ruining radio and how DJs no longer had any real freedom.

Petty also did some acting work, most-notably as "Lucky" from King of the Hill, the hillbilly who made a $43,000 fortune after he sued Costco when he "slipped on pee-pee on the bathroom floor". Coincidentally, the woman who played his TV wife from the show, Brittany Murphy is also no longer with us.

When news of Petty's passing was announced - officially and prematurely - tributes came roaring all around the world. For me, he helped to create the soundtrack of my teenage years, even if his music in my honest opinion had that hint of dad rock to it. But in the end, his music will live in infamy and on classic rock stations everywhere.

In Petty's world, it was good to be king.

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