Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

It was two years ago that Tom Petty last breezed into Central Florida for a terrific concert at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach.

He had recently released an album, The Last DJ, but didn't feel obligated to cram the new material down anyone's throat. The show started with "American Girl" and ripped through 90 minutes of hits. That's generous, but it would take days to do them all.

Petty, a card-carrying member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, is the closest thing left to an old-school workingman's rock star. His tours, such as the one that stops tonight at the Ford Amphitheatre in Tampa, are rare enough now to be regarded as gems.

Yet there's a well-deserved Petty revival on the way, starting with the fall publication of Conversations With Tom Petty ($24.95, Omnibus Press, due in November). Timed to coincide with the Heartbreakers' 30th anniversary in 2006, it's a memoir of sorts in Q&A format with writer Paul Zollo.

An advance landed on my desk this week. It's insightful, breezy and loaded with recollections about Petty's formative years in Gainesville.

The stories include 11-year-old Petty's brush with Elvis Presley when the King was filming Follow That Dream in Ocala. ("A cosmic title," Petty says.)

There are tales about his first band, the Sundowners, which he formed to impress a girl, and about his dad punching an alligator.

Then there were the odd jobs: selling soda at University of Florida football games (briefly), mowing lawns, a stint as a gravedigger.

But Petty's adolescent life was consumed with music, whether it was learning piano from future Eagles member Don Felder in Lipham's music store or taking his statewide road trips with Mudcrutch.

(The pictures even include the front page of a 1980s Orlando Sentinel feature section with a story by then-staffer Jeff Zaslow.)

That's just the Florida stuff. The early stories segue into chapters about working with Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and George Harrison and a long reflection on the circumstances leading to the 2003 heroin death of bassist Howie Epstein.

The last 100 pages are Petty's observations about a wide range of his songs, including "American Girl." Petty wrote it on a big Gibson acoustic guitar when he was living next to a freeway in Encino, Calif., where the cars rolled by like the "waves crashing on the beach."

That road, coincidentally, was numbered 441, which happens to match the highway that runs through Gainesville. So the song came to be claimed (incorrectly) as a product of Petty's Florida roots.

There's also the myth that the song was about the suicide of a UF woman, but Petty says it isn't true:

"I've even seen magazine articles about that story," he says. "Is it true or isn't it true? They could have just called me and found out it wasn't true. But that song has been around for a long time now. And I'm very proud of it."

Petty has been around a long time, too. To his Florida fans, he'll always be a treasure of the Sunshine State.