Why Tom Petty Stopped His Daughter From Listening to Aerosmith

Adria Petty, the oldest daughter of the late Tom Petty, says that "my dad used music to raise me." And he didn't hesitate to exercise some fatherly intervention when she felt she was on the wrong path.

Adria describes the experience as something like a father-daughter master class. "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,'" Petty, who co-produced the new Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Origins 1971-78, tells UCR.

"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?"
They did not always agree, however. "There were a lot of things I liked in my teens that he was really upset by," Petty recalls.

"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."

Those experiences with her father have served Petty well in her role as a principal of Petty Legacy LLC, the company established with her sister Annakim and their stepmother Dana Petty during 2019 to manage Tom Petty's catalog and copyrights.

In addition to her ownership role, Adria has stepped up to curate and co-produce posthumous archival sets such as An American Treasure in 2018, the following year's The Best of Everything, 2020's Wildflowers & All the Rest, Live at the Fillmore 1997 in 2022 and a variety of other projects.

For Origins, which coincides with the 50th anniversary of Petty and the Heartbreakers' self-titled debut album, she worked with longtime Petty engineer Ryan Ulyate and managers Will Botwin and Scott Greer for a box set celebrating the Heartbreakers' first two albums and the road the band took to get there.

It contains remastered editions of the first album and 1978's You're Gonna Get It!, including extended versions of several tracks, and both audio and video live performances.

The centerpiece, however, is No Sleep Til L.A., which plucks a diverse collection of early Petty, Mudcrutch and Heartbreakers recordings -- some of which are new mixes of songs included on the 1995 compilation Playback -- as well as an EP dubbed The Cut Out Bin with five tracks Petty recorded on his own, before settling in with the Heartbreakers.

No Sleep Til L.A. is also available separately on vinyl and CD.

"We sequenced No Sleep...thinking two things," Petty says. "One side is the Troubadour, the other side the Whisky (A Go Go). So Side A is the Whisky, a little more New Wave edge, punk. Then we go into a country-rock, Laurel Canyon, Troubadour vibe on side two.

The unreleased material was drawn from a significantly larger universe of songs Ulyate found in the vaults, Petty says, and she's confident that, "I know what my father would want to come out, and not come out. I don't want people in the streaming era to be playing songs that aren't good."

The surviving Heartbreakers -- particularly Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, who have worked on some of the other projects -- were consulted for Origins as well. "Adria has been wonderful with curating the estate; I think she's doing a fantastic job, as is (Ulyate), just terrific," Tench tells us. "They're pretty much hitting it out of the park, and I appreciate the fact I'm consulted and I'm heard...and I'm glad people are getting to hear how we got to what we sounded like on those first two records."