Special Guest Blogger: Tom Petty

I may have come from the land of sunshine, trailers, and gators, but I was not the laid back cool guy that everyone assumed, i may have nailed the too cool to care vibe, but beneath it all i was a bubbling cauldron of psychological chaos long before the superstardom, the Traveling Wilburys, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and selling over 80 million albums.
I was a  quiet, artsy kid who would see Elvis and the Beatles on TV and thought 'I could do that' and i took some guitar lessons with a local resident who knew his way around the fretboard,  Don Felder, and played in a couple of local bands but soon we was cruising from Florida to Los Angeles in a VW camper van with band, my girlfriend, the open road, good vibes, a demo tape and of course, a little weed and once there we got a few nibbles from record executives.
I sensed bigger things on the horizon but the interest fizzled out and i drifted around LA, got married and my now wife gave birth to my daughter and we reformed the group, called them Heartbreakers and took a harder, sharper kick at the pop star can.
Strangely i was bigger in the UK at the start, the Brits really took to me before America but our album, 'Damn the Torpedoes' launched us there too although Britain seemed to just forget about me and i never had a top 25 single there afterwards but as my stardom took off, my marriage  was free falling and my wife's mental health was declining.
Sadly, her grip was loosening fast and we split although she did come back, once  at the end of the driveway in a limo, screaming and trying to get the driver to ram the gate.
By now i was a big star and my tours were anything but small-time and for the Heartbreakers’ 40th-anniversary tour in 2016, disaster struck before the tour even began.
During rehearsals, I slipped and fractured my hip. The sensible thing would have been to postpone the 53 date tour and recover but i did the furthest thing from that and carried on resulting in the fractured hip becoming a broken one.
In pain i drastically upped the pain killers which wasn't a wise move because my wife found me collapsed on the floor of our home and rushed me to the hospital but a full cardiac arrest, Heartbreakers to Heartbroken you could say, and that finished the job.