Many Petty tracks featured acoustic guitar and/or a blend of acoustic and electric, and there, again, Petty was a reliable performer. But Petty was also a really good, solid rhythm guitarist, and his strumming is, of course, at the root of nearly every song he wrote. You probably don’t think much about Petty as a guitarist after all, in that band, the magnificent, supremely tasteful, and underrated Mike Campbell did the heavy lifting with his arsenal of axes. People will be singing those hits forever: in bands, in karaoke bars, sitting around the living room with acoustic guitars, drivin’ around with friends blasting the radio/iPhone/whatever. He was such a cool, friendly, smart, down-to-earth, passionate, funny, no-bullshit guy-just like the music he and his glorious band made. I was a Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers fan from the beginning and was fortunate, as a rock journalist working for BAM magazine in Northern California in the late ’70s and early ’80s, to interview Tom and the band several times during those peak years. As the old blues song says, “Death don’t have no mercy in this land…” Hell, he had just finished a triumphant 40th anniversary tour with the Heartbreakers and was riding high as ever. The sudden, unexpected death of Tom Petty is another punch to the solar plexus.
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