It should have been a happy day. On May 17, 1987, Tom Petty, his wife Jane and their 5-year-old daughter were sitting down to breakfast at their home in Encino, California. Later that afternoon, the family planned a barbecue to celebrate Jane’s birthday.
Instead, they smelled smoke. Within minutes, the house was burning, and Tom Petty would learn that someone had done it on purpose.
Getting out alive
The house was built of wood, and the fire spread quickly. Tom Petty’s first move was to push his wife and daughter out a side door. He told them to go straight to the swimming pool and jump in if they had to, because the water could not burn.
Then he ran out the back with a garden hose to fight the flames. The hose melted in his hands, and he was burned himself. When he tried to get back out of the house, he realized the whole place was on fire. Remembering the safety films he had seen in hotel rooms, he got down on his stomach and crawled out beneath the smoke.
Outside, he saw that the family’s housekeeper had caught fire too. Her hair was burning. She was holding a hose and managed to put it out herself. Tom gathered his wife and daughter and headed down the driveway, where, he later said, the press showed up before the firefighters did. The family’s other daughter was not home that morning.
Everyone survived. Almost nothing else did. The family lost nearly all their belongings, with losses estimated at around one million dollars. The one room left standing was Tom Petty’s basement recording studio.
It was no accident
Investigators quickly found out what had happened. Someone had cut a hole in the back fence, up on a hill, and had apparently been watching the house. Early that morning, they came down and soaked the wooden back staircase in lighter fluid. An empty fuel can was found nearby.
Tom Petty later told author Paul Zollo that the attack went beyond trying to kill him. Whoever did it had tried to wipe out his entire family. The fear stayed with them for years. For a long stretch afterward, he would not even use the word “fire” in a song.
No one was ever charged.
“You didn’t get me”
After the fire, the family went out on the road and lived in rented houses. But Tom Petty loved that property, and he made a decision. He would rebuild, right where the old house had stood.
“You didn’t get me. I didn’t move an inch. And I’m still alive.”
That was the message he wanted the arsonist to hear. He called rebuilding the ultimate therapy.
The song he almost thought was too much
That same defiance went into “I Won’t Back Down,” which he wrote with his friend Jeff Lynne. Released in April 1989 as the lead single from Full Moon Fever, his first solo album, it is one of the most direct songs he ever recorded. There is no clever wordplay in it, just a man saying he will hold his ground.
That directness worried him. He asked Jeff Lynne whether the song might be a little embarrassing. Lynne told him no, it felt great. George Harrison, who was part of the circle around that album, joined in singing harmony when he heard it.
Jeff Lynne was right. “I Won’t Back Down” went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart and No. 12 on the Hot 100. More important to Tom Petty, it became the song strangers came up to him about. He said that out of everything he wrote, this one brought him the most feedback, usually from people telling him it helped them through the worst time in their lives.
A song with the fire inside it
Listeners have used “I Won’t Back Down” for their own battles ever since, from illness to grief to plain bad luck. Most never knew that it started on a birthday morning in 1987, with a family running for a swimming pool while their house burned.
The man who did it was never found. Tom Petty rebuilt on the same ground and gave the world a song about refusing to be moved.
Has this song ever carried you through a hard season of your own?