People Come, People Go: Remembering Tom Petty
Photo via Facebook Back in the spring of 1989, I was an incredibly awkward 12 year old coming to terms with my parent's divorce and my mom dating again. My newly single mom would go out with her single friend, and I'd end up hanging out at her friend's house with her kids. One bonus is that her daughter and her daughter's friends were older, attractive girls. Seeing that we were teenagers, we watched a lot of MTV. Most of what they liked was the kind of heavy metal that terrified me, but there was this one video they thought was cool, and that didn't scare me. That was "Free Fallin'" from Tom Petty. Tom Petty shouldn't have been huge in 1989. 1989 was the time of Bobby Brown, Paula Abdul, and Guns n Roses. Petty was nearly 40 years old, and roots tinged rock and roll wasn't exactly lighting up the charts. But that's what has always been cool about Tom Petty: He was always just there, doing his own thing. While other "classic roc...