Tom Petty, Don Felder, and the Rock and Roll Capital of the Swamp

You would not necessarily predict that a mid-sized university town in north Florida, surrounded by scrub forest and cattle country, would produce two Hall of Fame rock guitarists from the same high school. But that is exactly what Gainesville did.

Tom Petty was born here on October twentieth, nineteen fifty, and grew up in a working-class neighborhood in northeast Gainesville. He was ten years old when his uncle took him to meet Elvis Presley on a movie set in nearby Ocala. The encounter rewired something in him. When the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show a few years later, the path was set. He graduated from Gainesville High School in nineteen sixty-eight before turning to music full-time.

Don Felder was born in Gainesville on September twenty-first, nineteen forty-seven, and also attended Gainesville High School. He was playing guitar by his early teens, trading knowledge with other local musicians in an unusually concentrated scene for a small city. Felder taught guitar at a local music shop and, during that period, learned slide guitar from Duane Allman.

By nineteen seventy, Petty had formed a band called Mudcrutch, playing bars and small venues across north Florida with musicians who would cycle through and scatter across the American rock landscape. Mudcrutch relocated to Los Angeles in nineteen seventy-four. Felder had already made his own way to Boston and then California by then. In early nineteen seventy-four, he was called to add guitar to a couple of tracks for a band called the Eagles. He was invited to join permanently shortly after.

Petty was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in two thousand two. Felder had been inducted with the Eagles in nineteen ninety-eight. Two musicians from the same Gainesville high school, both in the Hall of Fame, both writing songs that have been played billions of times.

In two thousand eighteen, on what would have been Petty's sixty-eighth birthday, the City of Gainesville renamed Northeast Park, a place where he had played as a child, Tom Petty Park.