He was a great performer, full of the light, a friend, and I’ll never forget him.”įormative Rockers Anything That’s Rock ’n’ Roll / American Girl On his death, his friend and former bandmate from the Traveling Wilburys, Bob Dylan, said “I thought the world of Tom. This selection of 20 of Petty’s finestreminds us of his sudden and cruelly early passing on October 2, 2017, and underscores what a huge loss he continues to be. “Once I got in a band, how could I take it seriously? This guy worrying about my hair touching my ears is gonna teach me something? I failed everything.”
“I didn’t go a lot,” he told Creem magazine in 1978. As a teenager, his very character was defined by music, to the exclusion of school studies. Our retrospective covers a 38-year span of studio albums with his beloved band, the best of his solo work, and of course his time as a member of perhaps the most impromptu supergroup of them all, the Traveling Wilburys.īorn on October 20, 1950, in Gainesville, Florida, Petty was playing locally from the age of 15. But Petty was far too nuanced a musician to be just a rocker. Many of the classic songs that we showcase here established Tom Petty as one of America’s prime exponents of urgent, intelligent, contemporary rock’n’roll, both with and without the Heartbreakers.