Songwriting News: Sweet Music, Sweet Memories — Tom Pettys Last Concert (2024)

As dusk turned the Hollywood Hills to a dark crimson, and the warm air cooled off ever so slightly, the seats began to fill around us as the excitement grew and the atmosphere turned electric.

When he finally came on stage after his opening act finished, he was clearly in a great mood and super happy. He explained it had been a long grueling tour (we later learned he’d been in pain for much of it from a hip hair-fracture from previous on-stage activity), and how happy he was to finally be “back home” in Southern California — just miles from his Malibu home — and ready to show his gratitude to the appreciative crowd with a performance they wouldn’t forget.

We had no way of knowing, of course, how prophetic those words would be.

Six days later he was dead — an accidental fatal combo of a painkiller unknowingly laced with fentanyl — two weeks shy of his 67th birthday.

Although the night’s performance was everything we’d hoped for and more, finding out later that this was his final performance makes it all the more bittersweet every time I think of it.

His setlist that night was epic:

He started things off with Rockin’ Around, Mary Jane’s Last Dance, You Don’t Know How It Feels, Forgotten Man, I Won’t Back Down, Free Fallin’, and Breakdown.

From there, he kept the place rockin’ with Don’t Come Around Here No More, It’s Good to Be King, Crawling Back to You, Wildflowers, Learning to Fly, Yer So Bad, I Should Have Known It, and — of course — Refugee.

He closed things out with Runnin’ Down a Dream, then encored with You Wreck Me and — the very last song he ever played in concert — American Girl. How appropriate to end a career and life with that! American Girl — written for his self-titled 1976 debut album, listed among Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs Of All Times, from the iconic American Boy we all grew up singing to and loving!

It just doesn’t get any better than that!