05/05/2026
Great story, miss you Tom…..
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The night was September 25, 2017. The Hollywood Bowl. A warm Monday evening in Los Angeles. Seventeen thousand fans were there. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were closing out a forty year anniversary tour with the third of three sold out nights at one of the most beautiful outdoor venues in America.
What almost nobody in the audience knew was that Tom Petty had a fractured hip.
He had broken it before the tour even started. During a rehearsal, months earlier, he had slipped. The doctors told him he needed surgery. His wife Dana told him he needed surgery. His daughters told him he needed surgery. Tom told everyone the same thing he had told them about everything for forty years. He was very stubborn. He said, "I cant do that to my crew. I cant do that to the fans. I cant do that to my band."
So instead of a hip replacement, the doctors put him on a regimen of pain medications. Fentanyl patches. Other prescription opioids. Enough to get him through fifty three concerts without the audience seeing what it was costing him.
He toured anyway. From Oklahoma City on April 20 through twenty seven states, two countries, and over six hundred thousand tickets sold. Sixty one million dollars in revenue. The Heartbreakers fortieth anniversary tour. By every external measure, one of the most successful tours of his career.
By every internal measure, it was killing him.
The Hollywood Bowl was the ending. Three nights at the venue closest to home. The Florida born Petty had lived in Los Angeles since the mid 1970s. He had driven past the Hollywood Bowl on Ventura Boulevard a thousand times before he ever played it. The first time he had played the Bowl was in 1978. Now, almost forty years later, he was closing his life's road on the same stage.
He did not know it was the last show.
The setlist that night was a career retrospective. The opener was Rockin Around (With You), a deep cut from the very first album in 1976. Then Mary Jane's Last Dance. You Don't Know How It Feels. Forgotten Man, from his last solo album. I Wont Back Down. Free Fallin. Breakdown, the song that had finally broken him through to mainstream radio in 1978.
In the middle of the show, the band played Wildflowers, the title track of Tom's 1994 album, the album he had once told Rolling Stone was the closest thing to his pure heart he had ever made. The song is about freedom. It is about telling someone they belong somewhere out in the open. Tom sang it that night with the gentle weariness he had always brought to it, but slower, more deliberate, like he was singing it to someone in particular.
Forbes magazine, reviewing the show two nights earlier, had written that Tom seemed to not want the LA shows to end. The reviewer noted he was dancing more than usual. Joking. Leading the crowd through long singalong versions. The greatest gift, the article said, was watching him and the band having so much fun.
What the reviewer was watching, without knowing it, was a man saying goodbye to his life's work.
Dana Petty would later tell Billboard that Tom was in fine spirits the day before his death. She said, "He had those three shows in L.A. Never had he been so proud of himself, so happy, so looking forward to the future, and then he's gone."
The encore that final night was two songs. The first was You Wreck Me, a track from Wildflowers that had been a regular encore for years. The second was the song that had ended every show on this entire tour. The song that, for forty years, Tom had used to close almost every concert he ever played.
American Girl.
It was his first hit, more or less. The last track on his self titled debut album in 1976. The song that had failed in America, become a hit in England, and finally come home as one of the most beloved opening lines in American rock and roll. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds had once joked that he thought it was an outtake from a Byrds session he had forgotten about.
Tom had written it in an Encino apartment in the mid 1970s, listening to the freeway traffic that sounded like ocean waves. "She was an American girl, raised on promises." The song was about a woman, and it was about the country, and it was about the desperate hopefulness of being young in America.
Tom played it that night with the band that had been with him for most of forty years. Mike Campbell on guitar. Benmont Tench on keys. Ron Blair on bass. Steve Ferrone on drums. Scott Thurston on rhythm guitar. The same Heartbreakers, more or less, who had been there on the first album.
When the song ended, Tom thanked the crowd. He thanked them, in his own words, "for forty years of having a really great time." He said, "God bless you. Goodnight."
He limped off the stage. One fan in the front row would later post on Reddit that they had watched him limp off and thought, "I hope hes going to get some rest."
He went home to Malibu.
One week later, on the morning of October 2, 2017, Dana found Tom in cardiac arrest at their Malibu home. He was rushed to UCLA Medical Center. He was pronounced dead later that day. The cause of death, confirmed by the coroner, was an accidental overdose of pain medications. The fentanyl in his system, the same drug that had killed Prince a year earlier, had combined with other prescribed medications and been too much for his body. He was sixty six years old.
Dana would later release a statement on behalf of the family. "On the day he died he was informed his hip had graduated to a full on break and it is our feeling that the pain was simply unbearable and was the cause for his over use of medication." She would tell the LA Times something more devastating. She said, "He was very stubborn. If he hadn't gone on tour and had the hip replacement surgery instead, he would still be with us."
The kid from Gainesville, Florida who had survived an alcoholic father, a difficult marriage, a he**in addiction, and four decades on the road, had been killed in the end by his own loyalty to the people who had been with him.
He could not let his crew down. He could not let his band down. He could not let his fans down.
So he did the tour with a fractured hip. So he played fifty three shows when he should have been in surgery. So he stood at the Hollywood Bowl on a September night in 2017 and sang American Girl one more time for seventeen thousand people who did not know they were witnessing the end of an era.
The video footage, captured by fans on cellphones, has been watched millions of times since. You can see him at the front of the stage. The long blonde hair he had since he was a boy. The familiar Rickenbacker. The voice that had carried American rock and roll through five decades. He waves at the crowd. He smiles. He says goodnight.
He did not know.
But somewhere, somehow, the song knew. American Girl was always about the impossibility of staying still. About a girl, and a country, who could not help looking out the window at something else, somewhere else, something more.
Tom sang it one last time at the Bowl that night. And then, as the song says, he raised her hands to the sky one last time, and he was gone.
Eight years later, every car driving down Highway 101 with the windows down still hears him. Every dive bar at last call still plays him. Every kid picking up a guitar for the first time still owes him something. The Heartbreakers still tour occasionally with Mike Campbell leading. Dana keeps the foundation going. The songs do what songs do. They outlive the singers who wrote them.
But there will never be another night like September 25, 2017. There will never be another goodbye from Tom Petty. There will never be another rendition of American Girl by the man who wrote it standing on the stage at the Hollywood Bowl, smiling at a crowd of seventeen thousand people who would soon be telling each other for the rest of their lives that they were there.
That is what nobody tells you about the last shows. Most of the time, you don't know they were the last ones until later.
Tom did not know. The crowd did not know. The band did not know.
And maybe that is the gift, in the end. He played his last note as if he was going to play another one tomorrow. Like the rest of us. Doing our work. Keeping our promises. Hoping there will be more time.
Who still loves Tom Petty in 2026? Anyone who has ever stayed loyal to the people who loved them, even when it hurt to keep showing up.
#2017
