If you’ve been to a home football game in the past year, you’ve experienced the electricity that ignites the stadium as “We are the Boys from Old Florida” fades into “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty. Phone flashlights glow throughout the stadium as about 90,000 people belt the chorus at the top of their lungs. It’s our way to pay homage to the Gainesville great who we lost a year ago next week. I can’t speak for everyone else, but every time I hear that song it makes me proud to say I also live in Gainesville, if only for a few short years.
When I think about living in Gainesville, it’s sometimes easy to be pessimistic. Most of my daily thoughts include the heat, the rain, my insane course load and the fact that it usually seems like nothing fun ever happens in Gainesville. In the past year, I have definitely thought more than once that it’s pretty crazy a music legend like Petty could originate from a such a dull place.
Before Petty died, I didn’t know much about him. I knew he grew up in Gainesville, and I could rattle off the titles of some of his biggest hits. Other than that, I didn’t have much knowledge of his musical career or his rise to fame — so this week I decided to change that. I started reading "Petty: The Biography" by Warren Zanes. Not only did I learn about the late musician’s rocky climb to the top of charts across the world, but I also learned a little bit about Gainesville too. For those of us who view Gainesville through the lens of a college student who just wants to get out of here, it’s natural to think that Petty existed in a bubble and that his contributions to the musical and cultural revolution of the ‘70s and ‘80s had nothing to do with where he grew up, but I would argue that isn’t true at all.
Gainesville, along with most of Florida, became a hub for aspiring musicians during that era. Petty and his peers were rule breakers. The musicians who inspired him — Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Allman Brothers Band — represented a cultural shift in America. Young people were not content to sit back and let the norms of the post-World War II world dictate their lives; they were pushing against it with every fiber of their beings. Musicians in Gainesville, from legends like Petty to those whose sounds never made it past the city limits, played an integral part in that movement with every gig, and we would be remiss to discount that.
It has been about 50 years since the height of that revolution, and it seems like we are right in the midst of a new cultural shift in America. Once again, young people are making waves in the fabric of society to stand up for how they want their country to operate. We hear it in our music, we see it on social media and we talk about it with each other every day. Students on this very campus are staging demonstrations to let their superiors know that they won’t go unnoticed. We might not be in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago or any other city we consider a cultural hub in America, but that does not mean our culture isn’t shifting right in front of us.
Attend some local bands’ gigs, talk to your peers and find your own way to express yourself and your thoughts. We may not fully appreciate it now, but we just might look back in a few decades and realize that our experience in Gainesville was not all that different from Tom Petty’s.
Katherine Campione is a UF journalism senior. Her column appears on Fridays.
