You never slow down, you never grow old."
R.I.P., man.
Even the losers get lucky sometimes.
I saw Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in concert only once, down in Irvine, California, with Jackson Browne as the opening act. My friend Jeff drove all the way to Los Angeles so we could go together, and the traffic was among the worst I have ever encountered. We finally got in as Browne played his last song.
But hey, we caught the whole Petty show, and both of us knew almost all the songs. I had just got my first cellphone, and I used the Voice Memo feature to record his performance of "Free Fallin'." Just the audio of that one song filled up all the memory of that phone.
My niece told me Petty had died on Monday, and I was bummed and emailed Jeff, who is eight hours ahead and might have never found out otherwise (not sure how the news works on the other side of the world). Oddly enough, his Wikipedia page said nothing about his death, and the most recent article had been about the last concert he performed, the week early in Hollywood.
Conflicting reports started to show up, some sources saying he had died that morning, but some saying his condition was unclear. The LAPD issued a statement that they had not, as reported, issued a statement about his death (and that the LAPD didn't tend to issue celebrity death statements), so for a while there, I kept doing new searches to find out whether he was gone or not. He had suffered cardiac arrest and been pronounced dead at his home, he had been taken to the hospital and doctors were attending to him, he was in a coma, he was resting and looking forward to spending time with his new granddaughter, and most dubiously, he was a twenty-four year old blond woman and had been bassist for Grand Funk Railroad.
But that evening, the news came again, this time officially, that he had died, and a couple of publications stated that, in true rock star fashion, the sixty-six year old had died twice in one day.
"Well, I know what's right;
I've got just one life.
In a world that keeps on pushin' me around,
I will stand my ground."
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