![]() ![]() ![]() Biographers consume their people to understand them. His unexpected death forced me to acknowledge, in a visceral way, the degree to which biographers bring their subjects in through the stomach as much as through the mind. He’d given me an experience that changed me. I approached my last few written pieces - for Rolling Stone, Vulture and Slate - as final thoughts, send-offs. Then the three days of press ended, and it got a little quiet around my house. The pile of songs Petty left us with had earned him a place in the present tense. I quickly understood that I wasn’t the only one struggling to use the past tense and, almost as soon, that none of us needed to. So for three days I did press, writing and talking about Tom Petty. Petty had entrusted me to write his biography, and this was part of the job, the last part. My agent, who had played an important role in the biography’s creation, gently suggested that I had some responsibilities, no matter where my head was at. Right after what many considered his most successful tour.Īfter I got the news, phone calls and messages started coming in. And since he’d never set out to make an album if it didn’t have a shot at it being his best, since his quality-control department was open 24 hours, his last recording - we all agreed - might not just take a hard look around at life’s closing years, it might be his greatest. It was in Petty’s character to give us some of that, help us see it. The woman’s question started a bookstore conversation about our need not just for movies and novels and poems that speak of life’s end but rock & roll that does the same. Most of the recorded music that speaks frankly of death was left for us by “hillbillies” and blues artists, musicians living decades earlier, people who sang about death because it was breathing on them. Wouldn’t he proceed as he always had and, when the lights began to flicker, give us a few songs that helped us see that place for ourselves? Wouldn’t he find some way to explore through music what happens at the end of a life? Yes, the woman said. He’d seen rock & roll leave the sock hop and do just fine. He had faith in rock & roll’s ability to go wherever it was needed, to age with the people who made it and listened to it and lived by it. Petty had always written from where he was, never tried to pull off a dye-job approach to song. But she was a real fan, and I think we both knew the answer to her question. The woman appeared to be in her mid-sixties, roughly Petty’s age, wearing a flannel shirt, not a trace of rock & roll on the outside. Two years before news of his death came to me in my kitchen, in the week Petty: The Biography was published, a woman at a bookstore event in New Hampshire asked what I thought Petty would do in the last stretch of his creative life. Jerry Lee Lewis alive and Tom Petty dead? That made no sense. But in Petty’s case, whenever I considered the possibility, I shook it off, sure it was just the mind’s play. ![]() It was hard not to look at Little Richard, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and, yes, even Petty. Prince, David Bowie, Chuck Berry, Gregg Allman, Glen Campbell. But in 20, the air stunk of rock & roll deaths. Tom Petty was a long-term relationship well before I met him, well before I stood up there as a guitar player in a Heartbreakers opening act, well before he approached me about writing his biography. Early on, around the time of the first albums, I had the feeling that Petty was giving me better direction than the adults who came and went, mostly went, in my life. I could chart my life in relation to his releases. Petty had been in the room with me (and so many of us) for more than 40 years. I’d thought about what this day might be like. And then the street outside my window looked different. Just that fast, I knew Tom Petty had died. I’m not sure how the constellations of thought come together, but they form quickly. WBCN - that’s where, at age 12, I heard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ first single, “Breakdown.” Tell me this isn’t true. The message came from a friend who had worked at WBCN in Boston. I was standing in my kitchen when I heard about Tom Petty’s death. He first met the singer in 1986, when Zanes’ band, the Del Fuegos, opened for Petty and the Heartbreakers. Warren Zanes is the author of Petty: The Biography. ![]()
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