The Floridian lie about Tom Petty that he called a “huge urban myth”
Artists can be the biggest culprits of allowing mythology to spread and creating a legend surrounding them that is more interesting than the typically mundane truth. However, as Tom Petty discovered, sometimes, these illogical fan theories can enter a dark terrain.
These myths grow legs as the whispers get louder, and before you know it, people are taking it as the gospel truth due to it not being dispelled. In the case of Petty, after years of allowing a fabricated tale about his hit song ‘American Girl’ to spread like wildfire, he finally reached for the extinguisher.
The urban legend surrounding the track relates to the death of a student at the University of Florida, who locals said had tragically died by suicide after jumping from the Beaty Towers building in Gainesville.
Shortly after his song became a hit in 1977, word spread in Florida that it was the inspiration for Petty to write ‘American Girl’. While the death was never reported in any local news outlets, nor was there any recorded evidence that she even existed in the first place, that didn’t stop fans from latching on to the story.
Like any conspiracy theory, it was believed that Petty, who was born in Gainesville but left in 1974 for Los Angeles, had secretly spelt out the true meaning of the song in plain sight for all to see. In ‘American Girl’, Petty sings about how “cars roll by out on 441”, which refers to US Route 441, situated near Beatty Towers.
In the track, Petty also sings: “Well, it was kind of cold that night, She stood alone on her balcony, Yeah, she could hear the cars roll by, Out on 441, Like waves crashin’ on the beach”. Additionally, ‘American Girl’ features the lines, “If she had to die tryin’, She had one little promise, She was gonna keep”.
While it appears trivial, the apartments in Beatty Towers don’t feature balconies, which is the OJ Simpson glove moment that proves the story surrounding ‘American Girl’ isn’t true. Nevertheless, even with the evidence in front of them, that didn’t stop small talk in the local area, and it became a disturbing source of hometown pride for some in Gainesville.
Decades after the story gained traction, Petty finally put the rumours to bed in 2005 after it had grown from local whispers to making it to the internet era.
In the book Conversations With Tom Petty, he shared: “It’s become a huge urban myth down in Florida. That’s just not at all true. The song has nothing to do with that. But that story really gets around. They’ve really got the whole story. I’ve even seen magazine articles about that story. ‘Is it true, or isn’t it true?’ They could have just called me and found out it wasn’t true.”
Petty continued: “I was living in an apartment where I was right by the freeway. And the cars would go by. In Encino, near Leon [Russell] ‘s house. And I remember thinking that that sounded like the ocean to me. That was my ocean. My Malibu. Where I heard the waves crash, but it was just the cars going by. I think that must have inspired the lyric.”
Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell has also dispelled the Floridian myth and told SongFacts: “We used to have people come up to us and tell us they thought it was about suicide because of the one line about ‘If she had to die,’ but what they didn’t get was, the whole line is, ‘If she had to die trying.’ Some people take it literally and out of context. To me, it’s just a really beautiful love song.”
Seemingly, following Campbell and Petty’s comments on the subject, which took far too many decades to arrive, it has been accepted as a local urban myth rather than fact. The reality is, as Campbell said, that it’s just a “beautiful love song”, which also happened to be written on July 4th, likely influencing its title. Although this version of events is less sensationalistic than the Gainesville story, the truth often is.
