The last song Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played live

When Tom Petty passed away in 2017, the Heartbreakers were suddenly no more, and their final show at the Hollywood Bowl the week before ended things in style.
The last song Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played live

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(Credit: Alamy)

Music » From The Vault

Thu 6 February 2025 15:30, UK

In 2017, the Heartbreakers were struck by tragedy when their founder and frontman Tom Petty suddenly passed away at the age of 66. As one of the leading voices in the heartland rock movement from the late ‘70s onwards, Petty had made himself a star both as a vocalist and an incredible guitarist, and his co-founding members in Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench both declared that if any of them were to die, then the band would be no more.

The band had been consistently touring up until the time of Petty’s passing, and they certainly weren’t planning on calling it a day anytime soon. As a group, they’d only just wrapped up their 40th anniversary tour in September of the same year, having played over 50 shows in North America over a six-month period. The tour was a resounding success, and when they capped things off with a performance at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, most people thought that would simply spell the end of a chapter rather than the end of the band.

However, with Petty’s death coming just a week after the tour had ended, the curtains were inevitably drawn for the band following on from the members’ earlier assertion that things couldn’t continue without any of the three core members being alive. The Heartbreakers, after four decades of incredible success, were no more, and their 40th-anniversary tour had inadvertently served as a farewell tour to one of America’s most beloved bands.

With an extensive back catalogue to choose from, the band could’ve played any number of hits to mark the end of this landmark occasion, but instead of playing a track that was among one of the band’s most successful, they instead went with an early fan favourite to put an end to the lengthy tour. Finishing with an encore of ‘American Girl’, which was taken from their self-titled debut album, the track epitomises what the band were loved for, and is regularly regarded as not only being one of the band’s best, but a staple of the classic rock canon.

The song has often been praised for how it highlights the brilliance of Petty’s simple lyricism, and paints a portrait of the America that they lived in, with many mentions of their native Florida weaving their way into the song’s narrative. While Campbell has previously claimed that it was nothing more than a simple love song, and that he thought Petty made this clear in his straightforward storytelling, but the track was actually subject to a large amount of conspiracy over its subject matter.

Due to some of the lyrics alluding to a girl being on a balcony, and there being the line “if she had to die”, there had always long been speculation that the song refers to a girl committing suicide, with the location of the tragic event being from the Beaty Towers halls of residence at the University of Florida, close to where Petty had lived. However, he refuted the idea of this being the inspiration for the song and declared later that the track was actually penned while he was living in California.

As one of the band’s signature songs, the band couldn’t have gone out on many stronger notes than performing this track in front of an audience of adoring fans, and to have been present for this final concert as a Heartbreakers fan could likely only be described as a religious experience, despite the tragedy that followed it.

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Tom PettyTom Petty and the Heartbreakers



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