The Moment That Defined Tom Petty’s Future Career: “Like Nothing I’d Ever Seen”

Sometimes, a star is born knowing their life path will take them on a journey to celebrity and fame, but for rock icon Tom Petty, he had one key moment that defined his future career to thank for his success. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for Petty’s uncle landing a gig on the set of Follow That Dream, the hands of fate might’ve changed the landscape of rock and roll forever.

Luckily for Petty and heartland rock fans everywhere, the universe put Petty exactly where he needed to be at that moment—just mere steps away from the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley.

The Moment That Defined Tom Petty’s Career

As a young child growing up in Gainesville, Florida, Tom Petty would occasionally visit film sets where his uncle worked with his aunt. In 1960, Petty’s uncle got a job working on the Elvis Presley film Follow That Dream, and at some point during filming, Petty’s aunt took him down to the set to watch the cast and crew in action. His uncle briefly introduced him to Elvis, the film’s star, effectively and irrevocably changing his nephew’s life.

“He arrived in a fleet of white Cadillacs,” Petty recalled to Rolling Stone. “People were screaming, handing records over a chain-link fence for him to sign. I remember his hair was so black that the sunshine was glowing off of it. Just a nod and a hello made your skin tingle. I was high for weeks. It lit a fever in me to get every record I could, and I really digested it.”

The Heartbreakers frontman elaborated on this momentous occasion in Bob Kealing’s Elvis Ignited: The Rise of an Icon in Florida, saying, “He seemed to step out as radiant as an angel. He seemed to glow and walk above the ground. It was like nothing I had ever seen in my life” (via Gainesville Downtown).

The Follow-Up Inspiration That Locked Things In Place

In a 2014 interview with Q with Tom Power, the “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” singer said that, as a child, he equated Elvis Presley with the American Dream. “This was a kid from the south who had broken all the rules, had become his own man, and looked like he did whatever he wanted whether adults liked it or not. But that didn’t look like something you could be to me.”

Petty went on to say that there was no “being like Elvis.” You were either Elvis Presley or you weren’t, and unfortunately for an aspiring musician like Petty, he and everyone else were in the latter category. Nevertheless, that fateful, career-defining moment on a Floridian film set planted the seed of a dream to become a rock and roll guitar player.

Petty’s childhood friend Keith Harben told Gainesville Downtown that he gifted the aspiring guitarist with a collection of vinyl 45s of Elvis, which Petty listened to religiously as he learned how to play an acoustic guitar. Shortly thereafter, Petty heard the Beatles for the first time, and that seed of a dream finally blossomed.

“The Beatles. That looked like something that could be done,” he said. “These people look like they’re self-contained. They make music that they wrote themselves, and their music’s all there on the stage. They look like they’re really good friends, and they’re having a lot of fun. I’ll bet they’re not worried about bread, either.”

All these years later, one can only imagine how many people Tom Petty influenced the very same way Elvis or the Beatles did him.

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