Breaking | Rock star Tom Petty dead at 66, after swirl of confusion about his condition
Traveling Wilburys supergroup bandmate Bob Dylan leads tributes to Petty, who had just embarked on a 40th anniversary tour with his regular band, The Heartbreakers
Veteran rocker Tom Petty, best known for hits such as Free Fallin’ and American Girl, died on Monday after he was found unconscious and in cardiac arrest, his manager said. He was 66.
Petty suffered cardiac arrest at his home in Malibu early on Monday morning and was taken to UCLA Medical Centre but could not be revived, his long-time manager Tony Dimitriades said in a statement.
“We are devastated to announce the untimely death of our father, husband, brother, leader and friend Tom Petty,” Dimitriades said on behalf of the family.
He died peacefully at 8.40pm local time surrounded by family, his bandmates and friends.
For several hours, there was confusion about whether Petty had died, after CBS News published his obituary on Monday afternoon. However, the Los Angeles Police Department later denied confirming his death, as initially reported by CBS.
Petty and The Heartbreakers embarked on a 40th anniversary tour of the United States this year and last played three dates in late September at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. The band was scheduled to perform two dates in New York in November.
Petty formed The Heartbreakers in the mid 1970s, but it wasn’t until the band’s third album Damn the Torpedoes in 1979 that their music really took off, with hits such as Refugee and Don’t Do Me Like That.
Petty also co-founded the 1980s supergroup The Traveling Wilburys with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne, penning hits such as End of the Line and She’s My Baby.
Dylan called his death “shocking, crushing news” in a statement to Rolling Stone magazine on Monday. He said Petty was “a great performer, full of the light, a friend, and I’ll never forget him.”
Florida-born Petty caught the rock’n’roll bug after he was introduced by his uncle to Elvis Presley, who was shooting the picture Follow That Dream on location in Florida in 1960.
He has said he began working on music in earnest after seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.
Amid his successes, Petty also suffered dark periods during a career spanning five decades.
Author Warren Zanes said in an interview with The Washington Post Petty had succumbed to the drug because he “had had encounters with people who did heroin, and he hit a point in his life when he did not know what to do with the pain he was feeling.”
Petty also suffered from depression, channeling his pain into 1999’s Echo, during which he was also dealing with a divorce. In 2002, he married Dana York and said he had been in therapy for six years to deal with depression.