you play guitar, you’ve likely strummed “Learning to Fly.” And if you’ve driven a car while celebrating some achievement or another, you’ve almost certainly belted out “Free Fallin’” at the top of your lungs as you drummed the steering wheel, just like Tom Cruise in that indelible scene from “Jerry Maguire.”
That’s how widely the music of Tom Petty reached over the course of his decades-long career, which came to an unexpected close when this most universally beloved of classic rockers died at age 66 after he suffered cardiac arrest at his home in Malibu this year most tragic loss.
The singer, guitarist and songwriter — who thrilled tens of thousands of fans just months earlier in an acclaimed three-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl with his longtime backing band, the Heartbreakers perhaps Petty was the quintessential American rock star, with an iconic shades-and-long-hair look, a nasal voice gloriously unsuited to any other genre and a seemingly bottomless bag of tunes that felt as though he’d written them to soundtrack the specifics of your life.
Petty even had a song from his stripped-down 1994 solo album “Wildflowers” — about how hard it is to explain your feelings to another person, despite the fact that that’s precisely what his music did for a diverse audience that spanned generations and encompassed folks from various walks of life. In his typical plainspoken fashion, he called the tune “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”
Born and raised in Florida, where he started out with the band Mudcrutch, Petty didn’t take long to hit his stride after he moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and relaunched Mudcrutch as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The group’s self-titled debut, released in 1976, contained two of his most enduring songs in “American Girl” and “Breakdown” both of which showcased his ability to synthesize the music of his influences from Little Richard to Elvis Presley to the Beatles to Johnny Cash — in original material as catchy as it was emotionally legible.
“She was an American Girl raised on promises,” he sang over a jittery yet irresistible groove, “She couldn’t help thinking that there was a little more life somewhere else.”
Three years later, the Heartbreakers found commercial success to match their easy likability with 1979’s “Damn the Torpedoes,” which sold millions and spawned additional rock radio staples like “Refugee” and “Don’t Do Me Like That.”
Petty himself became a sharp-featured heartthrob in 1981 when he duetted with Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac in “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” a tune Nicks famously swiped from Petty for her first solo album, “Bella Donna.”
Yet if Petty burned bright from the beginning, he maintained a consistency over the next couple of decades . His continued relevance derived in part from Petty’s facility for the then-emerging art of music video; some of the singer’s elaborately designed clips, such as those for “Don’t Come Around Here No More” (a creepy riff on “Alice in Wonderland”) and “Free Fallin’” (with its swooping crane shot over Ventura Boulevard) are still among the most recognizable of the MTV era.
He also knew how to adapt his music to reflect the shifting sound of rock, whether it was emphasizing Benmont Tench’s eerie synth lick in “You Got Lucky” or building “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” around a heavy, low-slung beat Petty’s stint at the Bowl wrapped up a long tour meant to celebrate the Heartbreakers’ 40 years together. But in addition to the classics he did every night, Petty routinely played “Forgotten Man,” a noisy portrait of a guy in pain from his most recent album, 2014’s “Hypnotic Eye.” It was just one of the vivid tunes Petty wrote and recorded years after many in his position would’ve stopped searching for inspiration.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers perform Room at the Top and Swingin’ on Later… with Jools Holland in 2009
The Fat Angel Sings 