Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes

Because the music guy who did it offered that information to the public, and the people who generally care are music fans. As this is a music discussion forum, where music fans gather to talk about music and their favorite artists, it's extremely appropriate.

 

Downloads only? I'm waiting for the Blu Ray Audio discs with a 5.1 mix. Can't do hi-rez downloads, nor am I really interested in them.

 

How about, Tom Petty is like Bud Light? And, um, I can only drink him with friends, never alone? And like no matter how much Tom Petty I consume, I always feel kinda lousy the next morning? Nah, this isn't really any more on point than the other one so I'll stop.

 

Glad to see the thread title was changed. The original one was tabloid level stuff.

Discussing his bio is relevant. Sensationalizing reports of his drug use is in poor taste IMO.

 

I'm planning to buy this. It looks like it'll shed more than Conversations by Paul Zollo, which was very, very good in its own right.

 

Could've been because he didn't have a fellow junkie and partner in crime that helped exacerbate the problem like Epstein did with Carlene Carter. Also, may have been due to the fact that some people are just luckier in that they have happen to have better physical constitutions than others (kinda like some people can smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and live to be 100, while others drop dead from lung cancer at 50). Hard to say, really.

 

She's the One is one of the best things Tom Petty has ever done--with or without The Heartbreakers. But looking back, some of the music on that album and from other albums from the '90's, does kind of sound--and this is from someone who never got involved in that stuff--"druggie." You know, "mellow."
Maybe I'm naive, but I never would expect to hear Tom Petty to be associated with the hard stuff. But the news goes a long way in explaining why Tom Petty put up with Howie Epstein and his drug problem within his band for as long as he did.

 

Maybe being the "boss" led him to being more "in control" of the drug(s) than someone who wasn't would be. Who knows?

 

Ugh, what happened, now it sounds like a 60 minutes segment.

 

That is really an impossible question to answer because you can replace Tom Petty's name with anyone elses and Howie Epstein's name with anyone elses and you still wouldn't have an answer. There just is no definitive answer. A year after the passing of Epstein, Petty sat down with Paul Zollo who would later write the book "Conversations with Tom Petty" for an interview where they broached many different subjects. Petty summed up Epstein's situation as thus:

Petty: He was a great, great singer. Just a fantastic harmony singer. I miss him. Tragic story. [Pause] It’s just a tragic story. I always think of people who have dope problems as people who have a lot of pain to kill. I kind of feel that I couldn’t really get a handle on where his pain was coming from. But he was clearly a person in a lot of pain.

Howie was such a loner. His life was always isolated. He was very gregarious and nice, and the sweetest guy you’d ever meet. But his life, his social life, was in another area. He always seemed very remote. He didn’t have much family; his mom and dad had died, and he had one brother who he sort of saw and one brother who he never saw. I think we were his family. The Heartbreakers is kind of the family unit for all of us. Because since we were kids, this has been the hearth. The Heartbreakers. And I don’t think any of us had much family outside of the group.

Zollo: It’s hard to believe there was such pain in his life, because he belonged to one of the world’s greatest rock bands.

Petty: Yeah. That’s something you really have to do: You have to say, “Hey, life is great. I mean, we’re really lucky boys. Look how great things are.” Because you don’t see it that way day to day. You get kind of caught up in life. You need somebody in your life to remind you. I have [my wife] Dana to tap me on my shoulder, and say, “Hey, this problem really isn’t that great. Take a look around. Things are really great.” I don’t think he had that person that cared about him in that way. I think there were people who said they did, but I don’t think they really did. Maybe I’m wrong, but you need that so much. You need somebody.

 

That's right, it was 1987 or so? One of the greatest injustices in rock music history. Not sure who would have a grudge against Petty to burn his house down, there are so many other famous artists who are far more political than him even in those rare moments when he does express a populist opinion which could offend a small minority of people.

 

I thought I read that interview in Rolling Stone.

 

Yep better judgement. Excuse me for thinking one of my heroes wasn't dumb enough to become smackhead.

 

Here's the rebuilt house: http://laist.com/2013/08/14/tom_petty_home_for_sale.php

 

Except that the heroin bit is being used to promote the book....It didn't turn up as the hook for the first advance story because somebody read the whole book and decided to focus on that.

 

Damn, I'm gonna burn my house down!!!

 

Pretty incredible that the fire (arson) started when they were home, which means someone else was in the house when they were, and no one ever found out who.

 

True and a bit icky. Heroin as unit shifter.

 

The arson was premeditated. So it wasn't a case of just some whack job showing up on the day in question and torching a wealthy man's house. According to Petty, the arsonist had identified the house and
surveiled it prior to setting it on fire. Police had found that someone had cut a hole in the fencing way up on a hill which allowed them the ability to watch the house. On the morning in question the arsonist simply made his way down the hill and set the house on fire. Petty and his family were having a barbecue on the day in question although whether the arsonist specifically selected that particular day to commit his crime is one of the many questions that has never been answered about this case.

 

Tom Petty on heroin. I always thought Tom started to lose his way, circa Echo, and my last CD of his was The Last DJ.

 

Could also be because heroin isn't necessarily deadly. With enough cash and access, Petty could easily have obtained medicinal grade heroin and used it in maintenance dosing for most of that time. Who knows how it went down. But the point is that heroin == death is not an absolute, and it's often the life style and/or lack of money that lead addicts down the darkest alleys.

I guess this adds credence to the rumors that Learning to Fly ("I'm learning to fly/But I ain't wings/Comin' Down/Is the hardest thing") is about his addiction.

 

Actually if the parameters for the time period given are to be believed, his issues with heroin succeeded his composing of "Learning To Fly". "Learning To Fly" was inspired by the Gulf War and the G.H.W. Bush administration that Petty did not hold in high regard. The lyrics about the rocks melting and the sea burning also reflected the Exxon oil spill that happened in the late 1980s. Specifically the lyrics about "Learning To Fly" came from a documentary about pilots and when broached on the topic of flying a plane, one of the pilots responded that the hardest part was "coming down" which Petty later appropriated for his song. From that point on he dovetailed a lot of the sentiment found in "Learning To Fly" into another song, "Into The Great Wide Open" which Petty has described as society in the early nineties heading into an unknown future which is a central theme of that album. "All The Wrong Reasons" details the wreckage of what the then middle aged baby boomers were finding themselves wading through and this theme is expanded upon in "All Or Nothin'" which is essentially a song about greed. There are a lot of hopeful songs on the record such as "Kings Highway", "Built To Last", "The Dark Of The Sun" and "You And I Will Meet Again" but there is a darkness there as well.

 

I don't mind the weed, but the Tom Petty concert I saw a few years back was the only show I've walked out of early- so much smoke in the air my eyes and lungs were on fire...

Conversations was excellent -quite candid in its own right- but this new one looks even better. I'll buy it.

Hard to figure Petty might have been smacked out in that whole Wildflowers/She's The One/Echo era...oddly enough, my favourite period of his.

 

I hope it's better than his 33 1/3 book on Dusty in Memphis.