Tom Petty completed his final tour with a hairline fracture in his left hip.
Petty’s longtime manager, Tony Dimitriades, reveals he advised the singer against embarking on his massive 40th anniversary tour of North America with his band Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers until he had the injury fixed, but the star refused to listen.
“I don’t know how it happened – I don’t think he even knew when it happened,” Dimitriades tells Rolling Stone magazine, recalling Petty’s response to his word of warning as, “Why not? I’ll do it (tour) in a chair if I have to.”
Petty, 66, had planned to visit medics about the fracture once he finished the trek in late September (17), just a week before his death on 2 October (17).
Meanwhile, the rocker had also been in the midst of organising a tour to celebrate his 1994 solo album Wildflowers, with the idea of expanding the project to include all of the tracks originally recorded for the disc and performing it in its entirety onstage.
Petty initially wanted to stage the shows this year (17), but put them on hold in favour of marking his anniversary with The Heartbreakers first.
“That would have been smaller-scale, away from the hits, (but) plans for that somehow evolved into, ‘It’s the 40th year. Let’s do this tour first,'” recalls Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell.
Petty even had his manager reach out to singer Norah Jones to join him for the Wildflowers sets.
“He asked me to call some people and see if they would come on the road and perform it with him,” Dimitriades explains. “One – and she said yes immediately – was Norah Jones.”
Jones had been among the artists to perform in tribute to Petty at the MusiCares Person of the Year event in February (17), and following the sad news of his death, she issued a statement detailing how much he had inspired her own career, praising the “sheer beauty of his songwriting”, and remembering her “hero” as “so cool” and “so disarmingly sweet”.
