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The whole family saw him at this show.

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Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Setlist at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison

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Get the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Setlist of the concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison, CO, USA on September 14, 1999 from the Echo Tour and other Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Setlists for free on setlist.fm!

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Rock legend Tom Petty died this week at age 66. I've been a Petty fan since the late 1970s. His passing brought to mind one of his concerts in Iowa, the only time I saw him perform live.

On Feb. 19, 1990, three friends and I went to see Petty at Hilton Coliseum in Ames. There are two things I remember well about that concert.

PETTY'S DES MOINES CONCERT IN JUNE WAS AN INCREDIBLE SHOW

The first thing: Petty noticed two guys in the audience fighting. They had grabbed each other's shirts and were shoving each other; they had yet to come to blows.

Petty signaled to the lighting crew and pointed toward the two men, and a spotlight shone down on the audience section, and then focused just on the two guys shoving each other. Then Petty signaled to the band to stop playing and the music came to a halt.

The two guys shoved each other a couple more times, and then stopped shoving and just stood there, holding each other's shirts and looking around, apparently realizing the spotlight was on them, and that the concert had stopped because of them. They also must have felt the thousands of pairs of eyes watching them.

Petty said into the microphone, "Hey, man, fighting isn't the answer, peace is the answer." The two guys slowly let go of each other's shirts and just sort of stood there, stunned.

Petty signaled the band members to resume playing, and the spotlight turned away from the two guys in the audience, and the concert continued. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

Mark Lambert (Photo: Special to the Register)

The second thing: I was a lobbyist at the time, and the guys I went to the concert with were: another lobbyist (my late friend John Schacterle) and two legislators (State Sen. Al Sturgeon of Sioux City and State Rep. Brent Siegrist of Council Bluffs).

Two lobbyists (one a Democrat and one a Republican) and two legislators (one a Democrat and one a Republican). And we were all friends. I miss the days when in politics you could differ on policy and beliefs but still respect each other, hang out together, and be friends.

I hope we get back to that in politics someday. Because Petty was right - peace is the answer.

Mark O. Lambert is an attorney who lives in Polk City. He was formerly a lobbyist, a state administrative law judge, and a member of the Iowa Utilities Board.

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The night Tom Petty broke up a fight in Ames

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CLOSE Rock legend Tom Petty died this week at age 66. I've been a Petty fan since the late 1970s. His passing brought to mind one of his concerts in Iowa, the only time I saw him perform live. On Feb. 19, 1990, three friends and I went to see Petty at Hilton Coliseum in Ames.

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So true!

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Tom Petty will be eulogized in the coming days as a writer, as a singer, as a bandleader, and as a thoughtful and articulate interviewee. But let's not allow one of his greatest gifts to be forgotten: He was maybe the best writer of first lines in all rock music.

"Well, she was an American girl," begins his second single, " raised on promises "-six words of declarative scene-setting, and then three that somehow encapsulate an entire theory of both America and girlhood. And that set the pattern for Petty's long and fascinating career: on his best records and his weakest, he knew better than anyone else how to get you into a song.

That ability allowed him to compress his character sketches into diamonds. The lover in "Refugee," laying his cards on the table: " We got somethin', we both know it, we don't talk too much about it." The Southern wastrel of "Rebels," protesting, " Honey, don't walk out, I'm too drunk to follow." The one who made it out, announcing his return in "Down South": " Headed back down south, gonna see my daddy's mistress." The last is a nine-word line that starts with a cliché and ends up establishing what could be the premise of a novel.

And it allowed him to construct rock songs around constellations of contradictory feelings rather than a single passionate impulse. Any folkie can arrive at a mood of wistful regret by the end of the chorus, but if you want to make music with the immediacy of rock and the bittersweet ambivalence of post-Dylan singer-songwriting, which was pretty much Petty's project, you have to be able to fit passion and hope and disappointment into 16 words, all but one of them monosyllabic, like " I used to think that when this was all over/ You might feel different 'bout me," from "Letting You Go."

Petty's songs are typically in the past tense; the passion in them was vivid and present and, at the same time, always already over. " It was nearly summer, we sat on your roof," he wrote in "Even the Losers." "Yeah, we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon/ And I showed you stars you never could see/ It couldn't've been that easy to forget about me." It won't be.
Read more in Slate about Tom Petty.

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Tom Petty Was Perhaps Rock's Greatest Writer of First Lines

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Tom Petty will be eulogized in the coming days as a writer, as a singer, as a bandleader, and as a thoughtful and articulate interviewee. But let's not allow one of his greatest gifts to be forgotten: He was maybe the best writer of first lines in all rock music.

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Tom Petty, a Mainstay of Rock With the Heartbreakers, Dies at 66 (Published 2017)

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A singer, songwriter and guitarist, Mr. Petty melded California rock with a Southern heritage in hits like “American Girl” and “Free Fallin’.”

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Rolling Stones Review of Damn the Torpedoes- 1979

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Rolling Stones Review of Damn the Torpedoes- 1979

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Damn the Torpedoes is the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album we've all been waiting for - that is, if we were all Tom Petty fans, which we would be if there were any justice in the world, live shows for all, free records everywhere and rockin' radio. Mostly justice. Songs like "I Need to Know" and "Listen to Her Heart" from 1978's You're Gonna Get It and "Refugee," "Here Comes My Girl" and others from this year's model are bedrock - they will endure. Petty & Company have mined some solid veins: you can hear traces of the Byrds (sweet silver flights of twelve-strings, but without the moonshine) and the Band (though citified and sexier).

I don't mean that Petty turns rock & roll into ancient history, something to re-create and ironically allude to. In "Louisiana Rain," there's a touch of Jesse Winchester in the verses, a slide guitar from the Rolling Stones' "No Expectations," some Bob Dylan in the rhyming ("refugee" with "beanery," say) and a hum-along chorus that would make a Nashville outlaw proud. Also, night scenes from the highway and tales of the hitchhiker as poor wayfaring stranger, last of the unbiased observers. A Reader's Digest condensed version of the Sixties, right? Wrong. The familiar riffs are just there because they belong: old stuff too fine to waste.

"Louisiana Rain" is a convincing slice of American gothic. Petty takes a middle position between rock's romantic visionaries and urban nihilists - his observations are as flat and down-to-earth as his heartland twang. Bobby McGee may whistle up a ride from Baton Rouge straight through to the Coast, but Petty's road, like yours and mine, is a series of long waits and short hops, bad weather and weird scenes in four-in-the-morning restaurants.

An innovator or an ironist only half as good might be easier to write about than Petty and his middle ground. Believing in a lover and expecting her to succumb to temptation at any minute (roughly the situation of "Listen to Her Heart") is so crushingly normal that it's hard to sell. But, for Petty, rock is neither a cash crop nor a code of honor, not salvation or a cultural neutron bomb. The Heartbreakers haven't duded up the music with myth. In their book, playing rock & roll doesn't need this or any other justification. It's what we'd all be doing if we could.

A viewpoint that matter-of-fact is simultaneously arrogant and self-effacing, which is part of Petty's charm. Who, you wonder, is going to feel sorry for a guy who looks like a Lutheran angel on Avenue A - in other words, maximum street-pretty - when he complains about girls not leaving him alone? Except that in "What Are You Doin' in My Life?" Tom Petty never takes the attention for granted. And, better yet, the girl's shameless persistence is working: Petty sounds more helpless in every verse. Still, he sings "I didn't ask for you" with enough of a gulp to suggest that he knows he sort of did. Low-slung guitars and all that jumping around with a microphone - after all, ladies get ideas.

Obviously, matter-of-fact doesn't have to mean humdrum. Petty and the Heartbreakers avoid the curse of craft and the Creedence Clearwater-Dave Edmunds trap of faintly dowdy classicism. They're eager enough to dress for success and hungry enough to show their teeth. In the past, they've flirted with black leather and bombast, intimations of tough-guy, flower-power pop and an occasional nervous New Wave beat. And carried off a lot of it. But what makes Damn the Torpedoes their best album yet isn't so much its sound (though that's clearer and punchier than before, thank heaven and coproducer Jimmy Iovine) but its assurance. Mechanical rhythms are hip, but something more fluid makes better time with the flowing organ and guitar surges Petty uses so well, and Damn the Torpedoes glides like a supertanker. What starts out tough ("Someone must have kicked you around some"), and might have stayed there, turns tough-minded ("You don't have to live like a refugee") - certainly a more durable attitude.

Best of all, sparks fly. "Here comes my girl," Tom Petty sings, and it might as well be Christmas and heaven and summer vacation all at once. Maybe it's the way the chorus soars into harmony after the spoken introduction, maybe it's the way the phrase comes simple and straightforward after the self-conscious swagger of the verse. Whatever the case, "Here comes my girl" sounds like a line you've heard a thousand times before - and the only one that will ever say it all.

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Damn the Torpedoes is the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album we've all been waiting for - that is, if we were all Tom Petty fans, which we would be if there were any justice in the world, live shows for all, free records everywhere and rockin' radio. Mostly justice.

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Prolific artist.

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Here is the discography of Tom Petty , who was an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Petty released 13 studio albums as the lead singer of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in addition to three solo albums.

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Look at that smile.

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He looks elven!

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Who hasn't taken comfort from this song from time to time?

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This is the song that is playing in my head when I am up to bat in a softball game