Why Tom Petty looked at the Heartbreakers as “a religion”: “It’s holy to me”
Anyone who has been in the music industry longer than a few months needs some serious rocket fuel behind them. While plenty of artists ride the waves of success for as long as they can, the biggest names work to ensure every release feels like an extension of who they are. And while many heartland rockers saw their lives shift dramatically after hitting it big, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers seemed locked in from day one—tight, focused, and fully in control.
That’s not to say that every single member of the band enjoyed what Petty was doing. Everyone was more than happy to tell the rock legend when they thought something was crap or if he was aiming low than he should have been, and hearing about him making an entire record without them with Jeff Lynne on Full Moon Fever was bound to ruffle a few feathers when ‘Free Fallin’ became a massive hit.
But Petty always approached music with his heart first. The whole reason why he wanted to get out of Gainsville in the first place was to escape the kind of life that his parents had lived, and while he remained proud of his Southern roots on records like Southern Accents, he was more likely to come out with guns blazing if someone dared to say something against the way he played music.
And that didn’t exempt a few Heartbreakers. Stan Lynch was always vocal about how some pieces of their career didn’t sit right with him, and by the time the entire group started working on Wildflowers, Lynch was the first one to put his hand up and say that he didn’t like the material, eventually being fired after he refused to play one of their benefit shows for the new album.
Even though they lost a lot of members during their career together, it never stopped being a family. Some people might get divorced from the main relationship, but the whole reason why Petty wanted to keep going was because of how much they felt like the same bunch of kids that were playing Byrds tunes back in the day.
“There’s a holiness there. If that were to go away, I don’t think I would be interested in it.”
tom petty
The lineup may have changed, but up until his death, Petty always saw the Heartbreakers as a group with a power far beyond music, saying, “The thing about the Heartbreakers is, it’s still holy to me. There’s a holiness there. If that were to go away, I don’t think I would be interested in it, and I don’t think they would. We’re a real rock ’n’ roll band — always have been. And to us, in the era we came up in, it was a religion in a way.”
And considering what they went through in the 2000s, Ron Blair was one of the only reasons the band could continue. Petty had seriously entertained the idea of closing up shop once bassist Howie Epstein passed away, but by bringing back a part of the band’s DNA from the old days, it felt like the same group of guys had made up after all those years and began having even more fun in their twilight years.
It’s easy to call someone like Bono pretentious when he talks about the spiritual power of music and how rock and roll can change the world, but Petty never took any of that for granted. He knew that the music had changed his life for the better, and when he got onstage with the Heartbreakers, some feelings could be conveyed without anyone saying a single word.
