None of the families on television were like his. 'And I think it was television that saved my life, that raised and educated me.' Realizing that he wasn't going to get an education in that household, he escaped into television.
'He beat me so bad that I was covered in raised welts, from my head to my toes. When Tom nailed the fin of a '55 Cadillac with a slingshot, his father 'beat the living s**t of me' with a belt. It took years for Petty, now 65, to get past feeling that his father, Earl, a salesman of 'really crappy plastic toys' or insurance was anything less than an 'a**hole' for the physical and mental abuse that colored his entire life. Hometown hit: In 1966, Petty formed a band in Gainesville, Florida that was popular locally but received little notice from the mainstream audience Zanes was in his own band, the Del Fuegos, when he first met Petty in Los Angeles and invited him to see his band perform, and Petty and his family agreed to be interviewed at length for the biography. The only thing that stopped the pain was drugs', Petty confesses to the author Warren Zanes in Petty, The Biography, published by Henry Holt and Co. 'I probably spent a month not getting out of bed, just waking up and going, 'Oh, f***'. I lived through being terribly abused as a kid, and then I found myself in an abusive marriage'.
On the long road to live his musical dream, he never envisioned years with a mentally ill wife who threatened suicide and his own dissolute escape into heavy heroin addiction that almost took his life at the height of his musical success. Petty, a Southern hillbilly from Gainesville, knew then what he wanted to do in his life after he escaped his dysfunctional home life with a father who was a drunk and 'beat the living s**t' out of him. Rock icon Tom Petty traded his slingshot for a box of 45-rpm records after shaking the hand of Elvis Presley, when the King rolled through the town of Ocala, Florida in the mid-fifties.
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