We got a gun and holster every Christmas. That was our thing.
—BRUCE PETTY
Earl Petty liked seeing his sons playing in the backyard. It was exactly what American boys that age were supposed to be doing. When they weren’t out back playing, armed and ready to shoot, they were watching every western they could on television: The Rifleman, Bonanza, Have Gun—Will Travel, Gunsmoke, Wanted: Dead or Alive. It was as if the boys were either watching the Indians die or taking care of the situation themselves, helping Earl kill off his people. When Elvis came into Tom’s world, however, Bruce Petty would have to handle the Indians on his own. Like so many young people in America, his brother was ready to replace the heroes of comic books and westerns with the rock-and-roll stars of the day. Or the day before, as was the case with Petty’s interest in midfifties rock and roll. He got his first taste of the music, of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard, a few years after they’d hit.
They say Tom Petty’s uncle Earl Jernigan had one of the rubber costumes from The Creature from the Black Lagoon hanging in his office. Jernigan worked with film crews that came to Florida for location work, so it’s a possibility. He was from the North, a little different from the other men in Petty’s world. The others were crackers, rednecks—there were a few different words for them. Jernigan was different and didn’t always suffer the others with grace. “He married into a crazy fucking family, and he knew it, and he stayed away from it,” says Petty. “So I didn’t even know until years later that he was in show business, doing television, doing movies, 110 episodes of Sea Hunt. I had no idea. I’m bitter about that, that I wasn’t better informed. But he didn’t want to have anything to do with anybody in my family. And I can’t really blame him.” Jernigan’s wife, Evelyn, Kitty Petty’s older sister, broke form the day she came to ask if Petty, ten at the time, wanted to join a few of his cousins and meet Elvis Presley. The star was in Ocala filming Follow That Dream.
Petty remembers a line of Cadillacs, every one of them white, pulling up on Ocala’s Main Street. Men with pompadours and mohair suits stepped from the cars, as if the whole thing was choreographed. When Elvis emerged, he was otherworldly in his beauty. You could dress up the star’s entourage to look just like him, but it would only underscore the contrast between Elvis and anyone around him. Presley’s was a freak beauty. Jernigan made introductions, and Elvis shook Tom Petty’s hand. The boy stared up at the star, unable to do more than that. Fans were everywhere in the streets of Ocala, making it difficult for the filmmakers. Within days, Petty says, he traded his slingshot for a box of 45s, many of them Presley classics. Elvis became a symbol of a place Tom Petty wanted to go. In time, the Beatles would be the map to get there. When it came, the British Invasion was, of course, a Copernican revolution. Ed Sullivan was the mechanism through which the core message was delivered: you can do this. A generation heard it. In fucked-up homes across America, an alternative was presented. For Tom Petty, from that point on it was going to be a battle about many things, the length of his hair and the state of his report cards among them, the opponents being father and school. But life would begin to display its offerings. He had only a few years to wait. Lying awake through those nights, waiting, he could see Elvis’s face, hear the songs in his head.
* * *
Petty got his first guitar, an almost unplayable Stella, in 1962, just two years before that Ed Sullivan performance. It wasn’t much more than a shape to hold, an idea with a strap. But it was enough. That was the same year that the Cuban missile crisis arrived to give Cold War anxieties a basis in reality. If you were living in America at the time, it was a scary moment. If you were living in Florida, it was some terrifying shit going down in your backyard. Earl Petty responded by building a bomb shelter. He arranged cinder blocks around a leveled area. The shelter would have to be aboveground. You wouldn’t dig too deep in that part of Florida because of sinkholes. They could pull your house down into another world.
Earl had in his mind an image of carefully stacked cans of beans and soup and peaches in heavy syrup, a small two-burner cook stove, bunks, board games, his wife and two boys in the lamplight. Security for his family in the face of uncertainty. His eldest son’s friends, over after school, looked on with interest. Later on they’d see pictures in Life, like the ones of the couple who honeymooned for two weeks in an eight-by-eleven-foot bomb shelter, and they’d think of Earl. He wasn’t the only man building such a box down that way—there was another just down the block—but he was the only one most of those kids knew personally.
The bomb shelter was never finished. But Earl was among those who did something—or almost did something—about the abstract fear that hung over the nation. Even as the work slowed, Earl remained attracted to the idea of showing his boys what it meant to be a man. Not that they picked up on it in the way he hoped. They never did. Particularly his eldest. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to be stuck in this bomb shelter with Earl,’” Petty says. “I asked him where the bathroom was going to be, and he points at a bucket. I’m thinking, ‘We’re all gonna shit in that bucket?’ We were aware that the Russians might drop a bomb on us. If you went through town, you’d see signs that said, ‘Public Fallout Shelter.’ And I knew we weren’t far from Cuba. But what could I do? Nothing. But my father’s solution didn’t have a lot of appeal.” The crisis passed. “The floor and the walls were done,” Bruce Petty recalls. “It was all concrete blocks, but he never even got a door on it. It just sat out there in the backyard. Still there, I guess.”
David Mason was friends with Tom Petty from second grade through junior high. Briefly a part of Petty’s first band, the Sundowners, later a founding member of Todd Rundgren’s Utopia and in Jackson Browne’s touring band, Mason recalls playing around in the unfinished bomb shelter. “The holes in the cinder blocks were filled with dirt,” says Mason. “I think there might have been an inner wall and an outer wall. No door, though. No roof. But I guess Mr. Petty wanted to protect his family.” Finished or unfinished, the bomb shelter served a purpose. Life at home was easier for the Petty boys when the enemy was out there. It distracted their father. Life was more complicated when the battle came inside. There wasn’t a bomb shelter for that.
“My father was nice enough to me in his old age,” Tom Petty says. “In his way, he tried to apologize. But I think he always felt that he wasn’t supposed to get too close to children. As a parent, you just made sure the kids didn’t die. You fed them and then you sent them out into the world. But you shouldn’t necessarily get to know them. And after he started beating me, I thought, ‘I’m not going near that motherfucker.’ Strange as it might sound, I think both my mother and my father were probably scared that I was gay. They were always trying to push me into playing baseball or whatever. And I just didn’t want to. I liked art, and I liked clothes, and, after the Beatles, I liked having my hair long. I’m sure Earl translated that into, ‘Whoa—he’s going the wrong way. He’s not doing what other boys are doing.’ And they didn’t know how much I loved girls, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring a girl home to that. I didn’t ever discuss a girl with them. I didn’t want my parents involved in that, in any fucking way.”
“I remember Tom saying, ‘My dad’s gonna kill me,’” recalls Tom Leadon, a neighbor first but finally one of Petty’s closest early musical collaborators. “He’d just gotten his report card. I was like, ‘What did you get?’ He tells me, two Ds and three Fs. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this could be the dumbest guy I’ve ever met.’ I was fascinated. Of course, I soon found out he wasn’t dumb at all. But he sure didn’t do much to connect at school.”
“Actually, that one was straight Fs, with a D minus in art,” Petty says. “Someone gave me some special ink so I could turn an F into a B, but it ended up eating the paper. Made it even worse. But I thought it was all kind of funny. I probably gave it a shot at school for about a minute. There was a point where I realized—especially in high school—that the men and women teaching me may not be as bright as me, and I couldn’t suffer that. I looked at them and thought, ‘I’m not really sure you know what you’re doing.’ I could excel at anything I had an interest in. Even a vague interest. Like in English. I got good marks, because I didn’t mind reading something. I liked stories. That hooked me. I could get into how words came together, how sentences were built, stories put together. All of that interested me. It was effortless. I used to get these horrible report cards, but there’d be an A in English. My mother would go, ‘Why do you only study for this class?’ But the truth was, I wasn’t studying for any of the classes … that just happened.
“With math and other subjects that didn’t interest me, I couldn’t bluff. I mean, once I had learned basic arithmetic, I didn’t see why I needed to learn more. I thought, ‘Nobody’s ever going to ask me to do an algebra problem, and I don’t give a fuck about this.’ I ended up skipping a lot of school. I remember taking chorus with my friend Mike Nixon later on. We skipped class all year long. Then Mike shows up one day and says, ‘The chorus recital is tonight. We gotta be there.’ I thought he was out of his mind. But he says we’ll fail if we don’t show. So we go, walk out into the auditorium with the entire chorus, kind of move our mouths along. The chorus teacher is just looking daggers at us down front. The school sent letters to our parents, and all this shit went down.” Petty shrugs. “I recognize that education is a good thing, but I just wasn’t made for school.”
The only draw for Petty was the girls. There was a string of obsessions that filled his mind with light. He could see a beautiful face and build something with it. For a kid dealing with trouble at home, those early crushes had the power to transport. It was the first promise of another life within the one he’d been given. “I remember all these girls. But I can’t remember a single teacher,” Petty says, smiling. “I had remarkable taste in women. I remember going to school for the first time and seeing this girl that was just drop-dead gorgeous. And, I mean, this was kindergarten. I made my way over to her and pretty much sealed the deal. This was my gal. If only it had lasted. She turned into the best-looking girl Gainesville ever had. So good-looking that in high school one of the teachers ran off with her.”
When Petty was at Howard Bishop Junior High, he discovered that the field had gotten crowded. “It was a small school,” Petty says. “And I found this one beautiful girl, Cindy, the prettiest girl there, and she showed some interest in me. I probably made more of it than she did, probably thought it was more real than she did. I imagine every guy she met wanted to take her out. But I still remember the day that it hit me that we weren’t an item like I thought we were. It was traumatic for me. I remember the walk home, just feeling … I got my heart broken.” If the initial feelings of love were outsized for a boy his age, so, too, was the crash. It changed him. After that it would be a matter of protecting himself, of being sure it didn’t happen again. He pulled back. There would be girlfriends, but the relationships he pursued would be safe, nothing, Petty made sure, that could hurt him.
“I’ll tell you something I’ve been thinking about lately,” Petty says. “That phrase, ‘getting your feelings hurt.’ I realized that what I equated it to in childhood was something almost paralyzing. When I ‘got my feelings hurt,’ I really couldn’t have felt worse. It was physical. My throat clamped up, and I just wanted to die. I would radiate pain. It took quite a while for this to change. It only dawned on me later in life that getting your feelings hurt can be lighter than that. You can get your feelings hurt without it crippling you. But as a young man, and as a child, there was something unusual going on. It wasn’t right. I was very sensitive, too delicate. I could be tough as hell in other areas, but when it came to, you know, emotional stuff, I could break like a twig. I felt like I had to protect myself, almost had to close part of myself down. I remember thinking, ‘Enough chasing these beautiful girls around junior high. I’m not cut out for this.’”
The trouble with his father, however, wasn’t something he could handle by shutting a part of himself down. A deeper distrust of adults spread in him. “There was something about him,” Tom Leadon insists, “something that would always set off the adults. Even when we were kids, Tom Petty was the guy that rubbed them the wrong way. They just picked up on it, even if he didn’t say anything. It was just his body language or something.” The abuse at home continued into junior high school, even escalated, and it was like a scent Petty gave off.
“My father got me out in the woods and on the water more than a few times,” he says. “And it was always like he had some point to make, something to teach me about who he was and, I guess, who I was or who he thought I was.” Earl Petty felt he needed to show his son that he could knock an alligator out, that he could swing a snake over his head and snap its neck. So he did. Tom remembered it, of course. It worked in that sense. But the son didn’t remember it the way his father intended. For a while, with too much friction between them, Tom went to live with his grandmother. But that didn’t last. In part because Earl felt that his authority was being challenged. “It lasted until he figured out I had gone,” says Petty. “Then he came over there, took me by the fucking hair, and dragged me home. It lasted until he kicked in her screen door, kicked it right off the hinges, bent the door, and beat the living shit out of me all over the house. I mean, one of the worst beatings I ever took. And then he brought me home.” Not long after, Petty found out that his mother, the one person who really knew Earl and might be able to protect her son, was sick.
As much as they could, Earl and Kitty kept her illness from their children. The boys knew enough to grasp that something was wrong, but no one told them exactly what was happening. While Earl had moved in and out of jobs during his sons’ childhoods, Kitty worked at the tax collector’s office, dealing with car registrations. She took Tom along with her to work one day, and he saw that she was happy there, loved by the people she worked with. Her natural warmth was in strong contrast to her husband’s country sensibility. Work, her eldest son realized, was an easier place for her to be. Getting sick would eventually mean she couldn’t even have that.
Kitty was the buffer between Tom and his father, a woman who’d gotten in a little too deep but would never consider getting out. It just wasn’t done. “She should have left him,” Petty says. “I don’t know why she wouldn’t leave him.” The health problems, which would only get worse, merely cemented a bad situation. But she didn’t have the heart to tell her sons a whole lot. The word “chemotherapy” was heard around the house well before one of Tom’s friends explained to him what it meant. Their mother was spending more and more time in her bedroom, the door shut. And then it was bouts with epilepsy. There were periods when she seemed better, but they didn’t last. Childhood in the traditional sense ended early, without anyone really noticing. At a certain point, the town would raise the boy.
* * *
Gainesville will always figure larger in Tom Petty’s story than the Los Angeles to which he relocated almost forty years ago. It’s more than a backdrop. Something connects a man to the hometown he pushes against to get going in the first place. And Gainesville was made for rock and roll. The University of Florida’s remarkable postwar growth aligned with the music’s golden years. Rock and roll was on the radio, played live in a network of clubs and at frat houses, coming out of cars, everywhere. The right equipment could be found at Lipham Music, where the local bands could hang out so long as their gig money found its way to the cash register. Gainesville was its own story. In so many ways, the town wasn’t part of the Florida that would carve its image into the popular fantasies of postwar America: the white sand beaches, acres of amusement parks, the limitless promise of space travel; no, the Florida to which Gainesville belonged was nothing but Georgia with a few miles tacked on and a university thrown in.
You could say that the university made the town. But the town didn’t just go away. This was the Deep South with a door punched in its side for strangers to walk through. And those strangers brought ideas and customs and diversions and long-playing records that would transform the lives of the locals. The town and the university cross-fertilized. “If you went a few miles down the road,” Petty insists, “you were back in redneck land, where the same rules didn’t apply.” In Gainesville proper, however, a new young America was beginning to realize itself. Because of that place and its particularities, Petty was, in mind and spirit, out of the family house years before he left the bedroom he shared with his brother. He was ready for a new family even before the Beatles arrived. But through the Beatles’ example, he was shown how to start one. The Sundowners would just be the first. From that point on, nothing was ever going to mean more to him than the band he was in. From the Sundowners to the Epics, Mudcrutch to the Heartbreakers, every decision would be made in relation to how he could best keep the band together. If family was bullshit and girls were a beautiful road to a lonely place, the bands might be different. That was the thinking. There was something in the Beatles’ faces that looked like freedom.
“When I was a kid, I would have loved to have been a rock-and-roll star,” Petty says. “I just didn’t understand how you got to be one. How did you suddenly have a mohair suit and an orchestra? But the minute I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan—and it’s true for thousands of us—there was a way to do it.” The Stella acoustic was replaced with a Kay electric. He found a couple guys in the neighborhood, Richie Henson and Robert Crawford, and they started getting together, identifying one another by the length of their hair. “Wooly Bully” was the first song Petty got on top of. Petty met Dennis Lee at a teen dance, and now they were three guitar players and a drummer. They called themselves the Sundowners. Before they actually made music as a four piece, they were already scheduled to play their first gig, intermission at a dance where a deejay was the main act. They played four instrumentals, including “House of the Rising Sun” and “Walk Don’t Run.” After they performed, a young man came up to the fourteen-year-old Petty, asked him if his band had ever played a frat gig, then asked if they wanted to. “It never stopped from that moment on,” says Petty.
Tom Leadon moved to Gainesville from San Diego in the summer of 1964. His father had landed a teaching job at the University of Florida, an assistant professorship in the university’s physics department. With ten kids in the Leadon family, all named after saints, there was a lot of unchecked activity in the home, but they always assembled for dinner. As their mother liked to remind them, they weren’t gypsies. But with that many children it was a fine line. While still in San Diego, Mrs. Leadon would pin a name and address onto her son Tom’s shirt. When they first arrived in Gainesville, the Leadons rented a place on Twenty-Third Street but moved to 412 Northeast Fifteenth Avenue the following year, where their father bought a plot of land and built a house. Behind them was a park. On the other side of that park was the Petty home.
The Pettys were at 1715 Northeast Sixth Terrace. Gainesville is divided into quadrants, with Main Street the north-south divider and University Avenue bisecting the town east-west. “If you go down Sixth Terrace along the park,” explains Tom Leadon, “past Sixteenth Avenue, the Pettys’ house is on the right. It’s a single story with what they call a ‘Florida room,’ which was really a porch that was a part of the house, tiled and all. Go up a step and there’s a living room with a dining area in it and a little kitchen to the right. Go straight back and there’s a hallway, with the parents’ bedroom to the left and Tom and Bruce’s to the right, a bathroom in between. That’s pretty much it.”
The neighborhood was largely working class. But, being a college town, there was a mix, even there in the northeast section of town. If Dr. Leadon was a professor at the university, that didn’t make them rich, but they were safely in the middle class. The northwest part of town was wealthier. Benmont Tench, his father a judge, lived over there. The southeast was black. The university was the southwest quadrant.
Tom Leadon was already a part of the Gainesville music scene before he met Tom Petty. One of his older brothers, Bernie, could play a good flattop guitar. Bernie knew and loved country music. But that didn’t mean he knew a lot about country people or about where that music came from. And neither did his younger brother. That would soon change. Just a few years later, Tom Leadon, with or without his mother’s permission, would start making his way across the park to the Pettys’ home. He’d even be invited in for dinner, where he would sit quietly, politely, mostly unable to follow the conversation because the accents were too thick. Except for his friend Tom’s. “Probably because he watched so much television,” Leadon figures. “He just didn’t sound like them. I could understand him.”
Before the two Toms met, however, the Sundowners got fully under way, with the band members’ mothers driving them to gigs. In the room that had once housed the inventory of Petty’s Dry Goods, there was now a rehearsal space, with just enough room for a drum kit, a few amps, and a few boys. Kitty and Earl Petty couldn’t fail to recognize that their son was up to something. They even checked the band out at the Moose Lodge. They might have been impressed, but not so impressed that they didn’t draw the line when the next bad report card came in. “My mother said, ‘That’s it. You’re out of the band,’” Petty remembers. “It killed me, so much so that she couldn’t keep it up for more than a week.”
The hot group in town at the time was the Continentals, which featured Don Felder and Stephen Stills. When Stills left the group, Bernie Leadon came in. Felder and Leadon had already been playing together, bluegrass stuff. With Stephen Stills gone, Bernie got an electric guitar, and the Continentals were over. The Maundy Quintet was born from the ashes. The group would hit the frat circuit hard and become a celebrated local band, competing against Duane and Gregg Allman’s early outfits in a few different battles of the bands. Bernie Leadon would eventually head west and, after playing in the Flying Burrito Brothers with Gram Parsons, join the Eagles, bringing Don Felder in not long after.
Tom Leadon was picking up plenty hanging around the Maundy Quintet whenever he could, going to gigs by age twelve. When a friend brought him by the Petty house so that they could listen to a Sundowners’ rehearsal from outside a window, Tom Leadon made indirect but significant contact with the neighbor who would eventually become his bandmate. But their paths remained separate for the time being.
David Mason, Petty’s childhood friend, returned to Petty’s life as a Sundowner, but only after playing with Felder in the Continentals—while still in middle school. “It blew our minds that he was in the Continentals,” recalls Petty. “But David Mason was that good.” When Petty called him to come play in the Sundowners, Mason went ahead and checked it out. “I was a little bit underwhelmed. In the Continentals I was around a lot of older guys,” says Mason, “learning a lot real quickly. This was different. Pretty soon I left the Sundowners and joined one of the college bands.”
They were kids. But the ones who could play would often mix with an older crowd. There was no distinction between varsity and junior varsity—strict divisions that applied elsewhere often didn’t in the world of local bands. For all of them, there was a perceived fluidity between what they saw on television, the Stones, Beatles, Animals, Dave Clark Five, what they heard on WGGG, and what they themselves played in venues like the Place and the Moose Club. They were a part of something much larger, even if their heroes seemed as distant as myth. Sixties rock and roll grew up furiously, without a whole lot of adult oversight or involvement. It was a true teenage movement. “There was a lot of stuff aimed at young kids,” explains Charles Ramirez, who was one of those teenagers and would later promote shows for Petty’s bands. “It really started to hit me when I was in eighth grade and saw Duane and Gregg Allman in the Allman Joys at the local American Legion hall.”
With matching suits, ruffled shirts, and Petty singing lead, the Sundowners played every weekend. Initially, Kitty Petty didn’t believe her son when he claimed that the money on his bureau was from playing shows. He was only fourteen and fifteen while in the Sundowners. Before that, she’d sneak him some money when he needed it, behind Earl’s back. Now he was making his own cash, and soon enough would be working at Lipham Music. From the parental perspective, it was a question of “How could it last?” From the teenager’s perspective, it was simply a matter of making sure it did.
“The first time you count four and, suddenly, rock and roll is playing—it’s bigger than life itself,” says Petty describing his first shows. “It was the greatest moment in my experience, really. I couldn’t believe it was happening, that we were making music. No one can understand what a blast to the moon that is unless they’ve done it. Once we got going, we covered James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, Animals hits, Paul Revere and the Raiders. It was a great period.” Playing the songs meant getting inside them. Even that early, Petty could find clues about what made a song work, what made one better than the next. He was quietly taking it all in, no aspirations beyond the next gig, learning to play bass, learning to sing. The fragility of what he’d found, however, its fleeting nature, hadn’t yet dawned on him.
“We did these gigs called ‘socials,’ which were these little gatherings hosted by fraternities,” says Petty. “You could do one of those around six p.m., then go play a dance somewhere. So we had a social and a dance one Friday night, and Dennis Lee, the drummer, is yelling at me as we load gear out of my house. He was a bossy guy, ordering me around. Earl leans out the window, says to me, ‘Don’t take that shit from him. You don’t have to be talked to like that.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I know.’ We got to the gig, and it keeps going. Dennis is just on my ass, laying down the law. And he hit my rage button. I said, ‘Give me any more shit, and I’m going to leave.’ He says, ‘I’d like to see that happen. I’d kick your ass.’ So I just turned to one of my buddies who was with me, told him to help me load my gear out. This is the way you are when you’re fifteen. I get my amp and stuff loaded out, turn around, there’s a fist in my face. My own drummer beat the living shit out of me. Beat me bad. The frat guys just stood around in a circle, cheering it on. I remember my mother crying all night because I was so fucked up. That was kind of the end of me working with Dennis Lee.” As fast as he was in a band, Petty was out of one. But knowing there was conflict with Lee, he was out ahead of this one. Maybe he was learning to take care of himself.
It was 1966 when the Epics asked Petty to join their group. Ricky Rucker, Rodney Rucker, and Dickie Underwood liked enough of what they saw in Petty and wanted him to come in as their singer. Not that the audition went particularly well. But they’d just canned their first singer, Herbie Bohannon, so the timing was good. “I remember sitting in their living room, having to sing a couple songs for them,” Petty says. “I did ‘Little Black Egg’ by the Nightcrawlers. Rodney responded by saying, ‘That’s the worst singing I’ve ever heard.’” Ricky Rucker convinced his brother to give the singer another chance, however, and by the audition’s end Petty was asked to do a gig with the band. The trouble between Petty and Dennis Lee eventually made the Epics look like a solution, if initially it was little more than what Petty calls “a busman’s holiday.” By the end of Petty’s first show as an Epic, he’d found himself setting his bass aside and fronting a band. “It was at Graham Hall, one of the university’s dormitories,” recalls Dickie Underwood. “Petty was like a wild man, all over the stage. That was probably the first time he got to be the front guy. And he loved it. And so did the people watching us. We all said, ‘This guy is good.’ So we told him that he’d have a lot more fun with us than he would with the Sundowners. That was our argument.”
The bass player the Epics had been working with, an “older guy” in his twenties, was let go. Though Petty remembers the trial gig being not at Graham Hall but one of the rougher places the Epics favored, after that first show he was out of the Sundowners and into the Epics, the new bass player, sharing lead vocals with Rodney Rucker. What really interested Petty, however, was the fact that the Ruckers had gigs booked. But he was made to realize that not all gigs are equal. “The Sundowners played more posh places than the Epics,” Petty explains. “Nice teen clubs and moose halls. The Epics would just play down and dirty fucking places, a whole circuit of hick towns.”
“Dickie and I would ride around and find these little places to rent, little halls,” says Ricky Rucker. “We found this one hole in the wall, the Orange Lake Civic Center, that we could get for like five dollars. We’d make posters and put them up. We’d sell Cokes at the show. We were good at getting gigs. When Petty joined, he was hanging around Tommy Leadon—I guess they met through Lipham’s Music—and I saw that Tommy Leadon was better on guitar than I was. I thought, ‘We could use this guy.’” The lineup solidified. Tom Petty and Tom Leadon were now in a band together. Rodney Rucker, not happily, was moved off guitar, becoming the Epics’ primary lead singer. They covered songs by the Rascals, the Stones. Leadon would slow down 45s to figure out the chord changes and solos. They had what Ricky Rucker calls a “primitive” sound.
* * *
By that time, Earl Petty had started to make it his business to try talking his son out of doing the music thing. But he couldn’t help himself: he did like the Ruckers and Dickie Underwood. Earl would appear out back when they were around. And they liked him too. “He approved of it when Petty started hanging around us,” Dickie Underwood insists, “because we liked to hunt and fish, and he was an old redneck from Marion County, out in the woods.” Ricky Rucker agrees: “He was like all the older men we ever knew, my brother and I and Dickie, so we got a kick out of him.” Tom Leadon puts it somewhat differently: “Dickie said to me several times, ‘Well, Mr. Petty likes us because we’re normal.’”
The Ruckers didn’t just like hunting and fishing; they liked drinking and chasing girls. A lot. “We always thought, ‘This is the ultimate party,’” Ricky Rucker explains. “It was all about meeting girls and going crazy, doing crazy things. Not jail-type things, but crazy. Tommy was all for having fun, but he had a whole thing about the music. He really wanted to play music.” The Ruckers and Underwood approved of that focus, as long as the music didn’t get in the way of being in a band.
Leadon and Petty began to distinguish themselves, shape their own views of how much time and energy a group should put into getting their show right. When Tampa’s Tropics, the band with whom Charlie Souza played, got a strobe light and raised their performances a notch with its effect, the Ruckers wanted one for the Epics. But that wasn’t all the Tropics did: they also spent time perfecting their dance steps, learning new covers, writing and arranging a few originals. Their show even had a James Brown portion that didn’t just feature Brown’s hits. It included the “cape routine” for which Brown was known. They had their theater down. The Tropics made it onto American Bandstand and were buying houses and cars with gig money. As teenagers. The Ruckers and Dickie Underwood didn’t put that whole picture together in the way Petty and Leadon did. “The biggest problem we had with Tom Leadon,” Dickie Underwood insists, “was that he took things way too seriously sometimes.”
The age difference between Petty, the even younger Leadon, and the rest of the band was defining. The two younger members sometimes felt like foot soldiers to the Ruckers. “A means to an end” is how Petty describes their role. At a 1967 gig at the Live Oak Civic Center, the Ruckers brought Don Felder along. “Felder had been hanging around the Ruckers for a while,” explains Petty. “I remember there were poker games and drinking and girls and all that. A moving party. Tommy [Leadon] and I were second-class citizens. I mean, even in Felder’s book—how many years later?—he calls the Epics the Rucker Brothers Band. The Rucker Brothers Band?”
At the Live Oak Civic Center, Felder started dancing, slow, with a local girl. If Gainesville was something of a safe haven for long-haired musicians, outside of the town you were back in Florida. Felder was forgetting this. While the Epics were playing, Felder made a move and went outside with the girl. Before long, her boyfriend, drunk, became aware of the situation and set out to fix things in the old way. Felder describes himself at the time as being “one hundred and twenty-five pounds soaking wet,” the girl’s boyfriend as “a linebacker.” The fight was only just beginning when Felder got his arm wrenched out of its socket. In a lot of pain, he signaled the Ruckers, who were in the middle of a song.
“I saw it from the stage,” Petty explains. “This guy starts mixing it up with Felder. And a circle forms around the fight. Rodney Rucker, our lead singer, leaps off the stage and straight into the middle of it. Then, of course, the fight grows. So Rick Rucker puts his guitar down, gets off the stage and into the middle of it, leaving three of us up there playing music. The last straw, to me, was when our drummer got up and left the stage to get in it. That pretty much stopped the music. And when you stop the music, you’ve really got problems.
“Almost my whole band was in this fight, and the odds didn’t look good. Leadon and I, as fast as we could, had to start getting our gear packed up. And somehow we got it—and the rest of the band—into the car, with guys throwing shit at us as we pull away. It was scary. A couple cars followed us out of town. For me and for Tommy, it was kind of a turning point, I guess. We realized that these guys are just not with the same program we are.” Felder went away with a shoulder that still dislocates today. Where was he when the fight really got going? “I was cowering in the corner.”
Adventures of that kind brought Petty and Leadon closer. They often met in the park between their houses to work out harmonies. If any one thing seemed to separate the decent bands from the really good ones, it was harmony singing. The two teenagers found they had a good vocal blend and worked to make it better still. By their last years at Gainesville High, Petty and his friend Mike Nixon would be smoking dope before the start of school and leaving together not long after homeroom, sometimes bringing Leadon along, going off to play music or listen to it or to hang out with other musicians. Leadon’s and Petty’s shared goal was in place early: to be in with a group of guys who all wanted it as much as they did. When Petty left the Epics for the first time, it was the only time he gave up, frustrated, on that ambition to find a band that shared their view of the world and their ideas for what could be done with it.