Tom Petty - 1950 - 2017 RIP

It's a pity that a dedicated thread was closed here. This is making the news everywhere, on BBC and also here in Italy. I think that with all the love for Tom Petty, older artists and not only older should perform only in perfect health. Again also Bob Seger had to cancel his recent tour for a serious danger to his health and body integrity. Too much business sometimes...

 

Like so many others this could have been prevented, should not have happened, and Tom and countless others should still be with us. I'm not surprised at this as I said in a post going way back to when he died. I hope Tom's death will motivate others who are in pain and addicted to seek the help they need and motivate friends and family to increase their help for their loved ones. Tom is very much loved and missed. He was unique - an American guy who gave his heart to his music and performances and his fans gave theirs to him. It's still very difficult to find the words for all this.

 

I feel with both he and Prince it was an anxiety thing as much as anything else ......no shame.....just my opinion.....i recognize it in both of them.

Many performers get hooked to overcome nerves......like Eddie Van Halen by his own admission.

I know all three mentioned have had physical problems.....those problems can be exacerbated by years of drink/drugs.

I think it's a conversation worth having.

 

Is there a suggestion that Petty was using illegal Fentanyl? My impression is that he had obtained it legally through a doctor's prescription.

 

When I first read the headline regarding his autopsy results, it was titled "Petty Died From Drug Overdose". I was blow away by then and, honestly, quite angry at Petty. I then read the body of the article and a couple other articles on the autopsy results including the details on why he was taking the drug cocktail he was.

My feelings quite quickly changed from anger to sadness - extreme sadness. I truly believed the motivation for Petty to keep going (performing) was his love of music and his fans. All he wanted to keep doing what he'd been doing for decades before and his body was letting him down. All he was doing was trying to make that happen with the aid of prescription medication and that didn't work out for him at all. Truly sad IMHO ..............

 

THAT bit of information we'll never truly know. Perhaps his family might not even know. Looking for release, either due to pain or just recreationally, is a dragon folks seem to chase all on their own without making the gory details public.

I hate that it came to this and think about it this way: Tom died to make us happy by staying on the road, ALL in pain. It blows my frigging mind. We love the guy, but at the end of the day if he said, "look, my hip is destroyed and I can't tour right now - see you in 2018" or "I have to cancel the tour to get a new hip, new record coming as I heal...", I would have taken it. Sure, I'd be "internet disappointed", but in the long run it's all just hot air from us. I 1,000,000% would have taken his health and a year off instead of what we are now left with.

Tom getting older meant we were all getting older but we were doing it together, celebrating the human condition, good, bad, and ugly. Now he's gone, again, just to make sure his fans weren't let down. He loved music THAT much. He loved his fans that much. He loved what he did.

I'm sad. I'm angry. I'm filled with a great deal of emotion. Yes, the tour was a great deal of success and beautiful, but today, it just wasn't worth it.

Folks, if you need the help, GET HELP. It's available to us (and I don't want to get into a 2018 United States State Of Health Care discussion).

RIP forever Tom. We're hating that you're gone.

 

One of the articles I read - I can't remember which one but do recall it was from a 'reputable" site - indicated that all the medication found in Tom's system and which was physically located in his possession at his time of passing was prescribed bot him by medical doctors. That said, I don't recall it mentioning if all the medication was prescribed by the same doctor or not and, if not, that could be have been problematic

 

So sad to read that

 

That is one very brave statement Tom's family issued.
I would think the families of other celebrities might try to cover something like this up, thinking it might hurt the business brand going forward.
But not the Petty family.
Bravo to them for sharing this important information.
Damn the torpedoes, indeed.
Rest easy, Tom.

 

Maybe he knew he was gonna die, the smoking was doing him in (lung cancer), He said that’s why I won’t cancel the tour. Just a thought

 

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star
Like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are
How fragile we are

-Gordon Sumner

 

I think you maybe inadvertantly offended some people by insinuating he was touring because he had to, which wasn’t the case. Likewise with not cancelling. With petty, he was always one of those rock and roll lifers who lived the lifestyle to the end - the music was life for him. So I think there is an underlying thing you may not have realized you stepped into. A lot of raw emotions are out right now, petty means more to many more people than most singer songwriters. It’s personal for a lot of us

2nd, he was among the more wealthy of rock stars, and the heartbreakers have basically been printing cash for the last 15 years, with pretty major arena tours basically every year, and sitting on at least a several million dollar guitar collection, not to mention his high end studio attached to his house, which is also a large mansion. His affairs have been run by a shrewd management team going back to 1979 after he discovered how badly ripped off he was in his initial deal. Point is, if you knew all of that it is a little funny to mention not having health insurance as a reason to tour to death - I’m not even sure you need it when you have that much $$$. You write a check!

As for jay bennet, yea that was very sad and definitely an example of how things are out there for most musicians

 

I know where you’re coming from, and it seems like you’re interested in the topic, so take some time to read this - it’s long, but well researched and absolutely sickening The Family That Built an Empire of Pain

 

I find the news of how he died incredibly sad and tragic because it was so avoidable. If he could have just taken care of himself instead of medicating away the pain he could have lived for many more years. That’s the danger of opioids. Having had a few surgeries in the last few years and been prescribed opioids for the post surgical pain, I know how seductive they can be. I got off of them after a few days because I began to find myself looking forward to the next pill. I can easily see how someone could get addicted, particularly if you have chronic pain.

I’m just very sad that Tom Petty has to die this way and at such a young age.

 

Petty had enough wealth to become the Terminator
To compare Levon's success to Tom's is laughable.
Move on.
This is shallow and morbid.

 

Well now we're into speculation, and generally that sets off an unproductive discussion.

I will say this, healthcare, even with insurance, is an expensive proposition for a list of reasons that we should absolutely not talk about here on this Forum, imo. To think a musician would have to sell equipment to take care of themselves, is extremely sad to me, but actually does happen frequently to musicians not of Tom Petty's stature.

I know nothing about Tom's family dynamics, but Tom himself was stubborn, private in a lot of regards, and seemed to be intensely focused on his craft. And like many others in normal life probably didn't start thinking about these things until age and issues began to happen to him.

I think his comment regarding Howie Epstein's passing is revealing. To paraphrase, "We knew Howie was struggling, but as long as he came in and got the job done, who were we to tell him what to do on his own time. Maybe we should have."

There at the end is that survivors guilt, maybe we should have done something.
I'm pretty sure those in the Petty camp/family will be dealing with that for awhile.

The thing I can't wrap my head around is everybody knew that Tom was hurting, yet someone thought a 53 date tour was going to be beneficial?
It just seems to me that Tom was living on borrowed time, he knew it, and he forced himself to go out one more time, because I like to think that's ultimately what he loved to do, not to fulfill a contract, or to put his family in a more secure financial position while he could.

 

He had lung cancer?

 

Well, I'll tell u this story.
My father-in-law (who has passed) suffered a heart attack in his early 70s.
He spent a week in the hospital, with many doctors hooked on to his treatment team, when discharged he had a total bill of around
90k. With insurance covering 80%, that left him to cover 18k himself.

If Petty had no insurance to help defray costs, he'd need to sell a lot of guitars, equipment and memorabilia to cover surgery, recovery, and post treatment care. And think about all the old musicians that didn't make the money that Petty did, and later suffered from lack of care due to no insurance or money. It's a hard deal for sure.

 

My thoughts exactly. Well, that and that this thread has turned into quite the sh*tshow

 

It's very sad, regardless. And, I'm a casual fan at best. I can sympathize with how his fans must feel. The loss of 2 Allman Brothers members hit me hard last year.

 

I don'the think Tom Petty would want us to feel sad at his demise. He was smart enough to see others fade away, and see the consequences. He was rich enough to have funded his own hospital suite ala ElizabethTaylor.

But he didn't. Sorry to hear of his health problems. I don't think he wanted to do a slow fade to black. I think that is why he toured to the end.

 

As tempting and urgent as it may seem to dive into the deep end of opioid issues, health insurance, and other matters that veer into policy and politics, this is a music forum and this is a thread to honor Tom Petty the musician and artist.

Please take your arguments and bickering and playing internet doctor elsewhere, people.

 

He had emphysema (a respiratory disease) and coronary artery atherosclerosis, a hardening of the heart arteries due to his long time smoking habit, that I believe continued right up until his death. He simply couldn't give them up.

Just my opinion, but considering that, he was living on borrowed time as it was, then u throw in the roster of painkillers he was on, and that's hard various organs just by themselves.

I just get the feeling there's more here than what we're being told. He was into the Wildflowers project, not real enthused doing anything with the HBs much less touring, and bam suddenly hes doing 53 shows with the HBs in obvious medical distress so his fans could see him.
Tom's hardheadedness aside, it just doesn't make much sense to me why this happened.

Extremely upsetting as someone who heard him on the radio in Memphis in '76/'77.
His first appearance on the Midnight Special in '78 after I had moved to Florida, the guy was awesome and a star at that point. Everybody dug the guy.
And then going to school in Gainesville in the early 80s, he was already a legend in that town when I got there.
A homecoming concert there in '83, an epic show on a Monday night at Irving Plaza the night before Echo was released in '99.
It's hard for me to think about Tom for more than a few minutes without starting to get emotional.

 

It is very sad that two great artists, Prince and now Tom Petty, appear to have died under similar circumstances, perpetuating their fabulous careers while suffering tremendous physical pain. Fame is the dangerous drug here. Now that this is public knowledge hopefully others in a similar position will get better advice.

 

The big difference between the two is songwriting royalties. There’s a guy out here in Australia who set himself up for life just on the back of co-writing Pat Benatar’s ‘All Fired Up’.