“I got my ass kicked a lot because of my hair—threatened all the time. I remember driving on the interstate, pulling into truck stops. Our band would walk in, and the whole room would laugh. Some of them plain-ass wouldn’t serve you: ‘You gotta leave.’”
“One time, our van broke down. We pushed it into a gas station, and they made us push it off, just because we looked the way we did.”
“The shit I went through — there were probably four or five guys in all of Gainesville with long hair in 1964. I got booted out of school so many times, told to get a haircut before I came back — all that furor if your hair came down over your ears a bit or was kind of thick in the back.” — Tom Petty, as told to Rolling Stone in 2009.
Just like his music, there’s something very inclusive and charming about Thomas Earl Petty’s sun-kissed golden locks. You really can’t talk about Tom without mentioning the hair that has ‘mass appeal’ written all over it. Being both a native Floridian and adopted Californian, Petty (depending on the period) settled remarkably effortlessly into the backwoods hillbilly, acid-dropping hippie, clean cut no-nonsense American, and stoned-out-of-his-gourd surfer looks. There were a few missteps along the way (see: futuristic cowboy and mad hatter), but there were also sublime moments of true hall-of-fame hair glory (this feathery 1980s blow dried do probably made Stevie Nicks very proud).
