How Tom Petty Got His “Brain Scarred” and a Major Life Epiphany at a 1960s House Party

Some of the most important epiphanies we’ll encounter in life are also the most painful. And when you already have the sensitive artist temperament of Tom Petty (who described one such revelation as “brain-scarring”), these experiences can be even more hurtful and fruitful. Of course, it’s impossible to say how Petty might’ve felt that night. But we’d say it’s safe to assume he was happy with the cards fate ended up dealing him, including the song that came out of the experience, “Even The Losers”.

Petty’s critical discovery happened in the late 1960s at a house party. The musician took LSD with some other attendees and set off on a house-hop around Tampa. In tow was a woman named Cindy, on whom Petty had an intense childhood crush. When he saw her that night, he realized those feelings were very much still there. While jumping from friend’s house to friend’s house, Petty realized something crucial to his artistic development.

“He was nothing,” biographer Warren Zanes wrote in Petty: The Biography, “and would be nothing if he wasn’t in a rock ‘n’ roll band.” Whatever wayward feelings Petty had toward music at that point, his night on LSD with his junior high crush sealed the deal. But that was the easy discovery to make. The information he would crash into the following morning would be the main inspiration for his 1979 track, “Even The Losers”.

Tom Petty’s “Even The Losers” Was Inspired by a Boyhood Crush

Artists tend to be on the sensitive, egotistical side. Tom Petty was the first to admit he was no exception. In Warren Zanes’ biography of Petty, the musician confessed that he had a tough time handling negative emotions when he was younger. One circumstance in which he had to try was when his childhood crush, Cindy, didn’t reciprocate his feelings. That’s why spending the night together all those years later meant so much to Petty.

But by the next morning, Cindy made it clear she wasn’t interested. “She let me know it was just for that night,” Petty recalled. “And it scarred my brain all over again. In a matter of hours, I’d let myself believe another story. The one I’d wanted to believe for a long time. I only saw her a few times after that. But finally, she took me into a room at someone’s place and said, ‘You keep trying. But you-and-me isn’t going to happen.’”

The moment stuck with Petty so much that, even a decade later, he was thinking of Cindy when he wrote “Even The Losers”. “I shoulda known right then it was too good to last / God, it’s such a drag when you’re living in the past.” Petty told Zanes, “I obsessed over her so much. She’s probably in a lot of songs.”

In the end, Petty’s night of discovery wasn’t all bad. That might have been the night Cindy broke his heart for the second time. But it was also the night he realized being in a rock ‘n’ roll band was his calling. Considering the album “Even The Losers” comes from is Damn The Torpedoes, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, we’d say he accomplished his goal.

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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