Tom Petty’s death shook everyone who loved rock ’n’ roll

I saw Tom Petty shows and didn’t even know it.

Back in the early ’70s I was in college, at the University of South Florida in Tampa. There wasn’t much to do in the area back then, hardly any bars or clubs, and the only place to hear live music was this place on campus called the Empty Keg. State universities weren’t allowed to serve alcohol in those days, so it was basically just a snack bar where bands played.

There was this band from Gainesville called Mudcrutch that played there a time of two. I remember seeing them, I remember thinking they were a really good bar band, but I never gave them too much thought.

Six or seven years later, I went to a Patti Smith concert at the old Curtis Hixon Hall in Tampa. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were the opening act. I knew one or two of their songs — “American Girl,” which is still a favorite, “I Need to Know,” maybe one or two others — but I had never given the band a lot of thought. I had sort of moved away from mainstream rock ’n’ roll in my musical taste at that point much more into Talking Heads and Elvis Costello and the Ramones and stuff the radio didn’t play. I was at the concert to see Patti Smith, but this Tom Petty guy really impressed me. I remember thinking he had a innate sense of how to be a rock star.

It was only later that I read about his background and realized that I had seen him at the Empty Keg at USF with maybe 30 or 40 people in the audience. I might have spoken to him, might have even requested some radio hit that my 19-year-old self thought was great.

His sudden death, along with the back-and-forth news that he was either dead or not dead, hurt more than I expected. He was a year older than I, but he seemed ageless. He was as trim in 2017 as he was in 1977, he always had basically the same hairstyle. No one ever said he he was too old to for rock ’n’ roll.

Floridians, I think, felt his death a little more strongly than most other people, because Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers always seemed like a Gainesville band more than an L.A. band, even though the band was based on the west coast for its entire existence..

He seemed to be the epitome of rock ’n’ roll, cranking out music that he himself once described as “disposable crap,” that was consistently transcendent. His songwriting, and his band’s playing, never seemed to be influenced by anything else on that was current. It was steadfast and timeless, exploratory and eclectic while remaining fairly basic rock ’n’ roll. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who disliked Petty’s music.

“You couldn’t pin him down,” said Dana Lawrence, the front man for the Sarasota band Kettle of Fish. “ ‘Mojo’ was kind of a blues, R&B album, and then he’d do a Mudcrutch album that was more bluegrass. You never knew what he going to do.”

Lawrence is a huge petty fan, and at the Kettle of Fish show Friday at Blue Rooster in Sarasota the band will play several Petty songs as a tribute. But the Blue Rooster is more of a blues and Americana club so Lawrence said he won’t overwhelm the crowd with too much Petty.

He’ll save that for December at Blue Rooster, when Kettle of Fish always does a show that honors musicians who died in the past year. He’ll perform a Steely Dan song or two to note the death of Walter Becker, and songs from others who have or will pass on in 2017, but no matter who else dies he’ll do a lot of Tom Petty songs that night.

“I’ll do a whole set of nothing but Tom Petty,” he said. “Probably an hour or so.”

This story was originally published October 3, 2017 at 5:25 PM with the headline "Tom Petty’s death shook everyone who loved rock ’n’ roll."