Tom petty biography video on george washington

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Tom Petty on the ‘Good Thing About Getting Old’: ‘You Know What’s Worth Spending Time on and What’s Not’

The seaside community of Malibu is a retreat for wealthy hedonists for good reason — there’s rolling surf and almost inevitable blue sky and golden hills and world-class sushi. The cost of paradise, beyond the mortgage payments, lies in hazards like traffic gridlock, rock slides, mudslides — and worst of all, wildfires. The rampaging flames can destroy a home, or a neighborhood, or even a life.

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Tom Petty knows this danger more keenly than most locals, because he has suffered through it — twice. In 1987, when he lived over the hill in Encino, his home burnt to cinders in an arson that may have had homicidal intent. Trapped in the house after hustling his family out a side door to the pool, he

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Tom Petty Wanted to man Every New Album an Evolution

Photo: Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

When I was in my late teens, there were records inom played a lot. The Gun Club’s Fire of Love was one. X’s Wild Gift was another. A Boston band called the Lyres gave me some of my favorite things to spin back when things were spun. But Tom Petty’s records were there before the others and remained after they were gone. He was the link between the early rock and roll we loved — Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard — and the musical future we hoped to call our own. I’m not sure there was another artist who so successfully migrated new approaches to record-making into his own process without losing his identity as an artist. The guy I first discovered when I heard “Breakdown” on WBCN in Boston was the guy I recognized in “Forgotten Man,” from the Heartbreakers’ last recording. “Don’t komma Around Here No More,” “Free Fallin’,” “Wildflowers”: three pretty different product

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Tom Petty

American rock musician (1950–2017)

Musical artist

Thomas Earl Petty (October 20, 1950 – October 2, 2017) was an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He was the leader and frontman of the rock bands Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Mudcrutch and a member of the late 1980s supergroup the Traveling Wilburys. He was also a successful solo artist.

Over the course of his career, Petty sold more than 80 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling artists of all time. His hit singles with the Heartbreakers include "American Girl" (1976), "Don't Do Me Like That" (1979), "Refugee" (1980), "The Waiting" (1981), "Don't Come Around Here No More" (1985) and "Learning to Fly" (1991). Petty's solo hits include "I Won't Back Down" (1989), "Free Fallin'" (1989), and "You Don't Know How It Feels" (1994).

Petty and the Heartbreakers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. Petty was honored as MusiCares Person of the Year