An Enduring Everyman Hero

TOM PETTY: 1950-2017

- Meghan Saar

One of my favorite photographs of rock ’n’ roll frontman Tom Petty was taken on March 10, 1977, by Michael Putland. The singer, clad in a striped jacket over a black Heartbreakers T-shirt, neck wrapped in a scarf, blond hair to his shoulders, had his arms outstretched across the top of a couch and, above him, was an iconic Charles M. Russell painting, When Horseflesh Comes High.

Russell painted this oil in memory of a time when Stuart’s Stranglers, led by Granville Stuart, a former ranch boss of his, rode Montana’s Judith Basin range during the 1880s to track down and kill horse thieves. Russell’s romantic view focuses on the thieves, barricading themselves behind the stolen horses, as the vigilantes ride up on them.

The way cowboys feel about horses is how Petty felt about his guitars. So you can imagine the gut punch he experienced when his 1967 blond Rickenbacker 12-string was stolen in 2012 by a private security guard while the Heartbreakers band was rehearsing at a studio in Culver City, California, for an upcoming concert. Petty didn’t have to rely on vigilantes to recover his stolen property; the cops found and returned the singer’s Rickenbacker and his band’s other four guitars.

Petty remembered the first time he heard the unique tone of that guitar, on the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night album, released in 1964. “I didn’t know what it was, you know.... So I asked at the local music store what makes that sound, and they said, ‘Hey, that’s the Rickenbacker 12-string,’” Petty told Tony Bacon, author of the 2010 book Rickenbacker Electric 12-String.