What really happened was this: we allowed the salesman into the sanctity of the home.
—RUSSELL BANKS
“The doorbell rang, and my father opened it,” Petty explains. “Letting this guy in who had something to sell him. This kind of shit actually went on in our home.” The man who stood there, smiling and extending his hand to Earl, was dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and tie. He could have been selling anything, from religion to toilet seats. In this case, he was peddling education, art school. And for whatever reason, the whole family was home to watch Earl welcome the man into the small living room.
Tom wasn’t usually around when the others were. Especially since he’d finished high school. He came in late, woke up late, left the house when everyone else was into their own things. But that day they were all there, and it was obvious that Earl didn’t see the salesman as a bother so much as a kindred spirit, as if they knew each other on the basis of a shared vocation. “He brought this guy in like they were old friends or something,” Petty remembers. “My dad points to a chair, welcomes his guest to sit, and takes a place opposite him.” As Earl settled in for the pitch, Kitty offered the man something to drink.
The salesman handed Earl, not his son, a brochure. The school was in Tampa. Making some reasonable assumptions about his audience, the visitor insisted that this kind of art school wasn’t the territory of the modern artists Earl might have seen featured in the Saturday Evening Post, the paint-splattering clowns up in New York City. This was a practical education, geared toward young people who wanted to get into the advertising field. There was a lot of money there, the salesman explained. “If there was one thing my dad thought I could do—and it was one thing—it was draw,” says Petty. “He thought I was good with a pencil.” Earl had seen a horse his son had sketched. He was surprised that it looked like a horse.
Likely the salesman had a good feeling. The head of the household, as he several times referred to Earl, had invited him in. The head of the household’s wife had offered him something to drink. If he could get that far, he was quite possibly in the game. Those were good days in the salesman’s line of work. The Vietnam War was fantastic for business. You could get school records, in this case Gainesville High’s, find out which families had a recent graduate who might be affected by the draft. Then it was a matter of knocking on some doors and doing your thing. You wouldn’t even have to mention the war, conscription, or any of that. You’d be selling deferment as much as higher education, but no one needed to talk about it that way.
“I wasn’t putting up any resistance, and we were talking about school,” Petty laughs. “So I think everyone was a bit confused by that.” The Pettys didn’t know a lot about their son’s girlfriend at the time, a young woman named Jan Mathews whom Tom had met at an Epics gig in Dunnellon. “She was really my first real girlfriend,” Petty says. “I wouldn’t say we were in love. We hung around a lot. She was a friend. My parents didn’t know much about her. I kept the two sides of life separate, even then.” The Pettys certainly didn’t get that Jan lived in the vicinity of the Tampa art school. They also didn’t know that, for the last time in his life, Tom was ready to see how it would go not being in a band. The Epics had worn him out. Sitting in the living room that day in Gainesville, listening as his father talked with the salesman, Petty thought that Tampa sounded like a solution to a host of problems.
“I took the Greyhound down to Tampa,” recalls Petty. “And when I got there, they put me up in this hotel the school was using as a dorm. The whole thing was just a little off. I got a roommate, this overweight kid, and we went record shopping together. I don’t remember what I got, but he picked up a Ventures record, which I thought was a little strange. I think it was 1969, you know? Not exactly a Ventures moment.” Once situated, what his teachers at Gainesville High said about him remained true: Thomas Petty didn’t “apply himself.” He failed to show up for a single class, wouldn’t know what the classrooms looked like or where exactly they were. He got by for a time, spending his days at the area’s beaches, hanging out in his room, or, occasionally, going to the library to read. But as far as school attendance records went, he didn’t exist.
The situation would quickly catch up with him. But not before he used the school’s job placement team to find work as a dishwasher at a barbecue restaurant in town. It was only open for lunch. On Petty’s first day, the owner watched from across the kitchen as his new employee stood, facing his first stack of greasy barbecue trays, unsure how to proceed. “I was clueless,” Petty says. “I’d gotten that far without picking up on some of the basics.” After an hour, the owner put the new guy on the meat-scraping detail. It didn’t require a lot of expertise. After long hours of smoking the meat, it came off the bone easily. Likely the owner would have admitted that it wasn’t a job for anyone with a weak stomach, but he was surprised when Petty threw up on the floor in the back. “The owner watched this,” Petty recalls. “And he says, ‘Okay, he’s not in the meat department.’” It was down to sweeping and mopping the place out after closing. That lasted for almost two weeks. Then Petty just stopped going. The school was onto him by that time, anyway.
The administrators couldn’t grasp why someone would pay for school but never go to a class. Petty had no answer for them. But Jan Mathews was the kind of girl rock and rollers know how to find. She bailed him out, got him a job at her father’s funeral home in St. Petersburg. She had to beg her father to make the hire. With a little additional pressure from his wife, the reluctant funeral director gave in. He didn’t like his daughter’s boyfriend, but he knew what he had to do to keep peace in his home. Petty lived out back, away from the main part of the funeral home, over the garage where the limos were kept. A few other men bunked there with him. Older guys. One of them was a junior manager by the name of Kermit, who had ambitions to become a funeral director. The other employees didn’t share Kermit’s sense for the sacred nature of their work. They would hide bodies on Kermit, do things with them that would have made loved ones uneasy. In his first few days, Petty watched as a couple of men put a monster mask on one of the bodies, pulled the sheet back over the corpse, and told Kermit to take a look, that this was the worst case of skin cancer they’d ever seen.
Petty cleaned the cars, kept track of the flowers that arrived for the more lavish funeral services—he took pictures of each bouquet, compiling photo albums of floral arrangements for the families of the deceased—and once went on a ride to get a body. He had his guitar but little luck finding places where no one would catch him playing. He had his girlfriend, but he couldn’t get to her very easily, since she was a few miles up the road at her family’s home.
“Then I was caught sneaking into their house for a little midnight love,” he says. “I’d walked all the way there, not that it was unusual for a guy my age looking for that kind of thing. But I was busted there in her bed. And it scared me so bad, I ran out the front door, jumped in the old man’s Lincoln Continental, and drove off. Her father’s car, for Christ’s sake. It had the keys in it, for whatever reason.” Petty drove far enough down St. Petersburg’s suburban streets, back toward the funeral home, to realize he had no place to go. When he returned, he went into the house. “This guy couldn’t even look at me,” Petty remembers. “I don’t know what went down while I was gone, but he was obviously afraid to fire me because of his daughter. I just thought, ‘This is a bad situation for everyone, and I don’t feel good about being somewhere I shouldn’t be.’”
The Epics weren’t happy when Petty left for Tampa. But no one in the band planned on stopping what they were doing simply because they’d lost a bass player. All the local groups had seen members come and go. Keeping a band intact was nothing anyone in town was particularly good at. Musicians dropped out along the way and always would. You’d lose one, put up an ad at Lipham’s, and hope to get another.
Tom Leadon brought Buzzy Mayhew in as Petty’s replacement on bass. Buzzy was a few years older than Leadon, a friend of his older brother Bernie’s from the Army Reserves and an employee at Lipham Music, alongside Rodney Rucker. The group put Mayhew on a crash course, teaching him the Epics set list. The rehearsals took place at the church downtown to which the band had relocated. It was an old stone building with some unused space that came their way through a member of the Jaycees who had seen the band and liked them.
Leadon remembers the band doing almost ten rehearsals with Mayhew. It was a lot in a short time. They were getting ready for a gig in Sebring that Rodney Rucker had lined up. By all accounts, Rodney Rucker made every effort to answer the phones at Lipham’s, because when someone called asking about a local band to hire, the Epics would have another gig booked. Old Mr. Lipham and his son Buster never seemed to catch on to Rodney’s gifts as an agent. Or didn’t care.
The Epics had played in Sebring before and gone over very well. They were favorites and planned to maintain that status. Ricky and Tom Leadon were singing harmonies behind Rodney. Mayhew had done well enough in the rehearsals. The feeling was good as they took to the stage, ready to carry the Epics into their next chapter. And then Mayhew seemed to forget everything he learned in rehearsal. He went cold.
* * *
Petty didn’t look up Leadon or the Ruckers straight away when he returned from Tampa. Instead, he found his old friend Mike Nixon and, for the first time, dropped acid. In the early hours of their trip, Nixon and Petty were in a friend’s apartment when they heard people at the door. Among the arrivals was the young woman who had broken Petty’s heart in junior high school, Cindy, whom he’d never stopped thinking about. Seeing his hair, which he’d grown out since high school, she told him how much she liked it. It went from there. “It was greater than great,” Petty remembers. “A huge night for me.” It was as though he was realizing the very connection that he’d most longed for. This wasn’t like what he had with his girlfriends. The small group stayed around the apartment, smoking cigarettes on the roof outside the kitchen window, before going out to where the interstate was being constructed, laughing and trying to skip stones on the water below the overpass where they stood.
Though LSD can’t promise certain results, it does sometimes deliver epiphanies, most of them too fragile to make it to morning. Petty had one. As their small group made their way around town, one apartment to another, in the kitchen of another friend they’d met up with, Petty saw it clearly: he was nothing and would be nothing if he wasn’t in a rock-and-roll band. It all seemed to come together in his head. It was as good a feeling as he’d ever known. But by morning, the Cindy part of it was gone. “She let me know it was just for that night,” Petty says. “And it scarred my brain all over again. In a matter of hours, I’d let myself believe another story, the one I’d wanted to believe for a long time. I only saw her a few times after that. But finally, she took me into a room at someone’s place and said, ‘You keep trying, but you-and-me isn’t going to happen.’ When I wrote ‘Even the Losers’ years later, that night came back. I obsessed over her so much. She’s probably in a lot of songs.” The band part of the epiphany, however, lasted beyond morning.
When Rodney Rucker called a few days later, asking Petty if he’d reconsider joining the Epics—“I think Rodney basically begged him to come back,” says Leadon—Petty knew exactly what he needed to say. He was back in the band, and he’d do everything he could to never be without one again.
As early as fourteen, Petty understood that people treated you differently when you showed up with a guitar and three other guys. It gave a kid an identity. It was even better if you rehearsed. Fresh from Tampa, still feeling the weight of insight after the drugs had worn off, Petty was in a better place, though without any more to show for it than he had prior to leaving.
* * *
By that time, Gainesville had continued to evolve as one of the country’s little recognized but important rock-and-roll towns. There as elsewhere, a collision of elements made the last years of the sixties something unplanned, unrepeatable, and almost perfect. Radios played R&B and soul music mixed with pop mixed with rock and roll, beautiful stuff that was coming on too fast to be categorized by color or sound. By virtue of the fact that no one yet knew exactly what they were doing, music was at its freshest and most inventive. In Gainesville, new bands were coming into being all the time, even if some of them, like mayflies, lived for little more than a day.
Petty might not yet have been bold enough to imagine it for himself, but he knew that because of rock and roll, some locals—otherwise shiftless southern kids, and more than occasionally Gainesville’s problem—were going to put together lives that weren’t based on catching catfish, trapping squirrels, working in the town’s turpentine factory, or gutting pigs in the local slaughterhouses. The feeling that universities were supposed to give, that feeling of possibility and promise, these kids got from playing in bands.
By the time he returned from Tampa, there were groups that were actually making records. A few locals left town, headed west to Los Angeles. Bernie Leadon quit the Maundy Quintet, arguably the best of Gainesville’s local bands, so that he could go after more. Not much later, he appeared on The Glen Campbell Show. Then he joined the Flying Burrito Brothers, with a couple guys from the Byrds. The Allman Brothers, the former Allman Joys from down the road in Daytona Beach, would show up to a Gainesville battle of the bands hosted by Lipham Music, just before they blew up as a national act. Things were happening. And in Petty, too, there was a shift. Another foreign substance entered his system. Ambition.