Adria Petty, the eldest daughter of the late Tom Petty, helped curate the new box set “Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Origins 1971-78”. In an interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, she recalled how her father raised her through music, introducing her to many great albums and artists. She also shared an interesting story from her teenage years, when he caught her listening to Aerosmith‘s 1989 album “Pump”, specifically the song “Janie’s Got a Gun”, and intervened, encouraging her to listen to other records instead.
Tom Petty’s daughter recalls her father convincing her not to listen to an Aerosmith album
“My dad would always walk in the room and throw a CD on the bed, a piece of vinyl on the bed, ‘Tell me what you think of this’ We would sit down after I listened to it a lot and discuss it, and I would listen to every record with my liner notes out, look at all the lyrics, look at who played on it, look at everything the artist intended, and then talk about it with him.”
“So there was a long love of music between us, just sort of, ‘Why is something good?’ There were a lot of things I liked in my teens that he was really upset by. In particular Aerosmith’s Pump was very concerning to him. When I was listening to, like, ‘Janie’s Got a Gun,’ he was like, ‘I need to intervene here’ and he went and bought me a bunch of records. Jimi Hendrix Experience, and I got (Bob Dylan’s) ‘Highway 61 Revisited’. I got essential things to listen to because he was getting a little worried.”
These days, she serves as the principal of Petty Legacy LLC, a company established in 2019 with her sister Annakim and their stepmother, Dana Petty, to manage his catalog and copyrights. She has been behind many of his posthumous releases in recent years. The new box set also celebrates the 50th anniversary of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, formed in Gainesville, Florida in 1976, which originally featured guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair.