The biggest regret of Tom Petty’s career
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Credit: Musicisentropy
Tom Petty’s strange pre-fame job
Before Tom Petty was anointed as the next voice of blue-collar America, he was just another kid from Gainesville who dreamed of becoming a full-time musician. Still, it was no easy road for Petty, and he had to take on a gruelling job before becoming a professional.
Petty fostered ambitions to become a musician ever since he saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. He was one of the tens of millions who tuned into the programme to witness the Fab Four’s first performance on American television, and from that moment, Petty knew he wanted to one day step foot on stage too.
“Most magic is a trick, an illusion. But [when The Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show], this was real. Man oh man, was it real,” he recalled to Music Radar in 2009. “I think the whole world was watching that night. It certainly felt that way – you just knew it, sitting in your living room, that everything around you was changing. It was like going from black-and-white to colour. Really.”
He added: “I remember earlier that day, in fact, a kid on a bike passed me and said, ‘Hey, The Beatles are on TV tonight.’ I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me – and I thought to myself, ‘This means something’.”
His life was full of colour after this moment, and there was nothing else he wanted to do with his days. However, it didn’t immediately happen for Petty, even though he dropped out of high school to follow his passion at 17 and played bass in a local band.
Before forming The Heartbreakers, he rose to prominence with his previous group Mudcrutch who were huge in the Florida circuit but failed to make it nationally. They were popular enough that Petty could focus on playing shows and didn’t need to subsidise his income elsewhere, which wasn’t always the case.
“I took a grave-digging job because you didn’t have to look too sharp,” he told Rolling Stone in 2017. It was a role in which he was ill-equipped, and Petty realised this on his first day. He admitted, “I got my foot caught in the lawnmower on my first day.”
His stint as a grave-digger was unsurprisingly brief, as was his period as a groundsman for the University of Florida, and Petty knew this wasn’t his calling in life. The singer-songwriter was solely in the role for financial purposes and to fund his burgeoning musical career. Digging graves was far from a glamourous occupation, and the job only made Petty more determined to get out of Gainesville.
