'Television city? Man, that's where I need to be,' he thought.īut he still had to escape from the land of the lost in Florida and his father's idea of what his son should do in life. He and his younger brother, Bruce, were basically on their own. Nothing like Ozzie and Harriet's warm and fuzzy life existed in their world.īut he did see that everything great was coming from California – television city, Hollywood. None of the families on television were like his. 'And I think it was television that saved my life, that raised and educated me.' Realizing that he wasn't going to get an education in that household, he escaped into television. 'He beat me so bad that I was covered in raised welts, from my head to my toes. When Tom nailed the fin of a '55 Cadillac with a slingshot, his father 'beat the living s**t of me' with a belt. It took years for Petty, now 65, to get past feeling that his father, Earl, a salesman of 'really crappy plastic toys' or insurance was anything less than an 'a**hole' for the physical and mental abuse that colored his entire life. Hometown hit: In 1966, Petty formed a band in Gainesville, Florida that was popular locally but received little notice from the mainstream audience Zanes was in his own band, the Del Fuegos, when he first met Petty in Los Angeles and invited him to see his band perform, and Petty and his family agreed to be interviewed at length for the biography. The only thing that stopped the pain was drugs', Petty confesses to the author Warren Zanes in Petty, The Biography, published by Henry Holt and Co. 'I probably spent a month not getting out of bed, just waking up and going, 'Oh, f***'.
I lived through being terribly abused as a kid, and then I found myself in an abusive marriage'. On the long road to live his musical dream, he never envisioned years with a mentally ill wife who threatened suicide and his own dissolute escape into heavy heroin addiction that almost took his life at the height of his musical success. Petty, a Southern hillbilly from Gainesville, knew then what he wanted to do in his life after he escaped his dysfunctional home life with a father who was a drunk and 'beat the living s**t' out of him. “That’s how well I know him.” Sadly, with Petty’s death, Nicks would be left without her de facto mentor and was set to take his advice with her wherever she went.Rock icon Tom Petty traded his slingshot for a box of 45-rpm records after shaking the hand of Elvis Presley, when the King rolled through the town of Ocala, Florida in the mid-fifties. “I changed it because I knew Tom would not want me to say his name,” Nicks said.
She also revealed: “The chorus goes, ‘Sometimes he’s my best friend.’ It was really ‘Sometimes Tom’s my best friend‘. The advice that Nicks was given would result in her 2014 song ‘Hard Advice’ which is a thank-you note to Tom’s method of tough love which gave her the confidence boost she didn’t want to hear at the time but instead needed. You don’t need me to write a song for you.’ He said, ‘Just go to your piano and write a good song. You are one of the premier songwriters of all time. Nicks recalled: “I asked Tom if he would help me write a song. She had run into an old flame that had left her shaken to her core and asked Petty to help her create art out of this less than pleasant experience.
The Fleetwood Mac member was going through a turbulent period both personally and professionally following a stint in rehab. The songwriter would often come around to listen to mixes of the record, Nicks, the Petty super-fan, described hiding in the basement trying to listen to Petty work undercover which she jokingly likened to being “a secret reporter at the White House!” Iovine didn’t think Bella Donna had a stand out single so recruited Petty to write and perform ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ with Nicks, which would become one of her biggest solo hits and cement her long friendship with Tom.įollowing Petty’s tragic death aged just 66 in 2017, Nicks sat down with Rolling Stone and revealed the life-changing yet stern advice that he handed her back in 1994.