Adria Petty charms an old, limping journalist who thinks her dead father, Tom, was and remains America's best-ever rock band-leader

Tom Petty and his daughter, Adria, who helps handle his estate and who I found charming.

After I told the young woman in the black, wide-brimmed hat how much I loved her father, her eyes moistened.

“Thank you for saying that,” said Adria Petty, her voice thickening a bit.

“You wreck me, baby,” I said in my head (I hope), as I held both her hands and – at the same time -- tried to fight away my own tears when talking about her father’s death.  

We spoke freely and openly, like old friends. I’m sure nothing I said was unusual to the kind and lovely managing partner of Petty Legacy, which oversees, as is obvious in the title, the continuing celebration of the life of the guy I contend was America’s top rock ‘n’ roll bandleader, musical poet and everyman.

Adria’s father, Tom Petty, died October 2, 2017, one of the heartbreaking events in rock music and on my life’s time chart.

I’ve long thought of Tom as being the greatest American rock star, and his death was something of a bleak surprise.

He died of an accidental overdose of opioids, which he had used as a way of dealing with serious ailments, including emphysema, knee problems and, especially, a fractured hip. 

If you are brave enough to watch his final performance, “American Girl,” which followed “You Wreck Me” as his encores of The Heartbreakers’ 40^th anniversary tour-ending show at the Hollywood Bowl on September 25, 2017, you will actually see the pain in his movement, his limping off the stage.

Just a week later, on the day he died, he had learned the fractured hip – which he’d traveled with for six months of shows – had become a full-on break, which the family surmised back then was the thing that sparked the deadly overdose.

America's best rock band-leader takes his final bow after ending his career with "American Girl." 

Enough about his death.  The fantastic body of work that he did as the leader of the Heartbreakers as well as his “solo” stuff and his role as chief henchman of The Traveling Wilburys is something I celebrate every day.

Tom is being saluted in “Petty Country: A Country Music Celebration of Tom Petty,” an album that played in the background during a release celebration Thursday night at The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

I don’t often get invited to events at the Hall of Fame. I used to, but I think I fell off the email list when my friend, protégé, pal and Hall of Fame hot-shot and most-human executive Peter Cooper died about a year and a half ago.  I guess he was the one who kept me on the list, although age and health concerns kept me away most of the time.

Fortunately, I remain on the mailing list for Tom Petty Estate and Big Machine Records, or I would have missed this one, too.

There was no way – not even the fact I need a cane to get around most of the time – that I was going to miss this event, which also included a peek at the new Tom Petty exhibit, a relatively tiny addition to the museum’s sprawling Western Edge exhibit.

I have to say this about that display: My friend, Peter, and I together “studied” Tom’s music, even writing – in Peter’s final weeks – some rather unprintable but fun examples of Tom and cohort Mike Campbell’s poetry and rhythm.  I believe firmly that the display would have been better if Peter had been kind enough to stick around and oversee.  But that’s a sort of Petty grudge; mainly because I miss my friend and the regular phone calls that we exchanged right up until the day that he suffered his fatal fall. Simply put, I miss my friend and I appreciate his expertise.  Whoever put this display together did a good job, so I’ll leave it at that. But I sure miss Peter.

But I made a new friend, CMHOF&M soundman Martin Frey, who took care of the music and the PA duties at the Thursday reception on the sixth floor of the museum.  I needed a place to sit down, as it was a standup cocktail-and-nibbles deal, and my back doesn’t handle those well.

So, a museum staffer got me a chair, which I put back by the wall near where Martin – former road sound man for Yes, Alan Parsons, Lonestar and others – monitored the music and then the microphones when the speeches began. He also is a kind gentleman, who insisted that I regard him as my friend (an honor), and he told me all kinds of road stories while also listening to my own tales of woe and frustration, a short essay on my career.

All of this is just background, though.    

My reason for going to the event was to be a part of the “nod” to Tom’s mammoth influence on American music.

Since there weren’t a lot of people there – I saw no recognizable CMHOF&M execs – I was especially proud to be a part of the crowd.

But my mission of expressing love for the man who was the very best that American music had to offer became even more personal, as I walked up to the charming woman in the black, wide-brimmed hat her father would have loved to wear.

“I love your Dad,” I told her again. “And that’s ‘love’ not loved. He’s gone, but his music lives on.”

I went on to say that the day Tom died, there was all kind of bleak news on our planet.  Everyone was reeling after a gunman took out a half-hundred spectators at a country concert in Las Vegas. An unbelievable horror, which has sparked absolutely no real change in gun-control laws in our country.

Suicide bombers in Damascus on that same day eliminated 15 innocent people.

A crazed knife-wielding terrorist stabbed two women to death at a Marseilles, France, train station.

All of those things affected me.

Tom’s death raised a few tears, though. In fact, for a few hours, it literally wrecked me. 

“I listen to your Dad’s music every day,” I told her, adding that the only other folks on that “I play daily” list are The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

“You can’t get much better than that,” she told me.

But it was my proclamation that her Dad was the best band-leader America has ever offered that seemed to touch her most.

“Most people don’t give him credit for his stagecraft, so I really want to thank you for that,” she said.

“Some people disagree with me, say ‘What about Bruce?’ …. But I just shake them off. I love Bruce and his shows, but there is only one Tom Petty,” I added.

“And I love the guy.”

She held hard to my hands, then excused herself. “I need to go find my daughter. She’s somewhere around here.”

Adria still was looking for Tom Petty’s granddaughter as I made my way to the elevator.

Two American girls.

Oh, yeah. All right ….