Tom Petty's Florida
Deep Tracks: Through the Cracks
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, site of '74 Tom and Jane wedding
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, site of '74 Tom and Jane wedding
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, site of '74 Tom and Jane wedding
100 NE 1st St, Gainesville, FL 32601
https://maps.app.goo.gl/RyxUMjswceQLUoAV8
Tom Petty and Jane Benyo were married here in the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Gainesville on March 31, 1974 -- before leaving for California the next day -- April 1st, April Fool's Day -- with the hope that Mudcrutch would hit the big time.
The wedding was held the day after Mudcrutch had a concert across town at Westside Park. This event, the night of March 30th, served as a fundraiser for the band's gas money to bring band members and equipment in multiple vehicles out west. To read about Mudcrutch's farewell-to-Gainesville concert, go here on this website:
https://tompettytrail.com/teen%2B-years
Note that the church -- the building itself -- is not the same one in which Tom Petty and Jane Benyo were married, although it is still located in the same location. This is explained on the church's website: "During a 1991 spree of Florida church fires set by a mentally ill arsonist, our church burnt to the ground. While the building didn’t survive, our parishioners’ spirit did. In a resolute demonstration of fire-proof faith, they rallied and rebuilt the church on the same site as an expanded version of the 1907 original."
Officiating the wedding ceremony was Rev. Earle Page, who became the church's longest-serving rector.
Photo by Shawn Murphy
Alachua house, owned by Tom and Jane from 1991-1998
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, site of '74 Tom and Jane wedding
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, site of '74 Tom and Jane wedding
6123 NW 109th Pl, Alachua, FL 32615
https://maps.app.goo.gl/5nyynektgQxeZfDk6
Tom Petty and Jane Benyo’s Alachua house from September 1991 to August 1998. They purchased it from Tom’s brother, Bruce. Note that today this is a gated community with a security guard at its entrance. It is also home to Turkey Creek Golf Course, which is a public course.
Should you go here, remember that this is a private home, located in a residential neighborhood in a gated community, so must be treated with respect for the property owner and neighbors. That includes no trespassing on private property!
Photo by Shawn Murphy
Benmont Tench house, where Mudcrutch recorded in living room
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, site of '74 Tom and Jane wedding
Benmont Tench's junior high school, where he was 'a musical genius'
321 NW 23rd St, Gainesville, FL 32607
https://maps.app.goo.gl/gbnp5Y5wL2o2fNDm9
Childhood home of Benmont Tench, keyboardist for Mudcrutch and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Benmont started piano lessons here in the living room at age 6, using the same piano teacher used by his father. He took lessons through his teen years, including from a University of Florida music professor. Throughout Benmont's childhood, his parents made him practice one hour a day, enforced by an egg timer. While Benmont detested this regimented practice, he took advantage of the time by exploring diverse musical genres.
After attending high school at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., Benmont majored in art at Tulane University in New Orleans, from where he would drop out to join Mudcrutch to pursue a career in music. Mike Campbell talked about Benmont being brought into the Mudcrutch fold for Warren Zanes' 2015 book Petty: The Biography.
"Benmont was a kind of nerdy little guy that would come watch us play," Campbell told Zanes. "He was from a very different world, wore glasses, a turtleneck, went to prep school, came from a rich family. I just thought, 'Oh, he's just a college kid, and we're cool, out in the world with girlfriends, smoking pot and taking drugs and playing music. And then he played the piano. I was like, 'Whoa!' He could play circles around us" (pg. 77).
When Benmont broached with his father, a circuit court judge, the topic of dropping out of college to join the band, "all hell broke loose," Tench told Zanes. Benmont was told that if didn't return to college, he'd be on his own for living quarters in Gainesville.
"That's when Tom [Petty] came over to talk with my father. I think he went into my father's study. ... I have no idea what Tom said. It was just the two of them. But my dad was a formidable character," Benmont told Zanes.
About this intervention, Petty told Zanes: "He was a judge, so this wasn't the crowd I usually hung with. But he heard me out, back there in the office, surrounded by books. Looking back, I'm not sure where I got the balls to do that kind of thing. But I just told him that this was all going to work out. There was a plan, I assured him" (pg. 79).
In the fall of 1973, with the intent of recording an album's worth of music, Mudcrutch rehearsed and recorded eight songs over two days in the front living room of the house. For recording engineer Rick Reed's account of these sessions, read this transcript from an interview that was part of the research that Marty Jourard did for his 2016 book Music Everywhere: The Rock and Roll Roots of a Southern Town, which is found at a companion website:
http://www.gainesvillerockhistory.com/RickReed.htm
During the summer of 1986, while Benmont and the Heartbreakers were on tour with Bob Dylan for the True Confessions tour, University of Florida student Nancy Steigner interviewed Judge Tench as part of its Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. The interview helps establish the footprint of the Tench family in the history of Gainesville. In it, Judge Tench dotes on all four of his successful children. In doing so, about Benmont he says: "And he is an amazing young man, a thoroughly amazing young man. I am intensely proud of him."
During the interview, he tracks his son's interest in classical music and the piano from childhood to adulthood. The judge, who was also an accomplished piano player, marvels at his classically trained pianist son's ability to play anything from gospel and classical to the American songbook and rock and roll.
To read the interview, go here (the referenced portion about Benmont can be found on pages 16-19):
https://original-ufdc.uflib.ufl.edu/UF00024774/00001/29x
Should you go here, remember that this private home, located in a residential neighborhood, so must be treated with respect for the property owner and neighbors. That includes no trespassing on private property!
Photo by Shawn Murphy
Benmont Tench's junior high school, where he was 'a musical genius'
Benmont Tench's junior high school, where he was 'a musical genius'
Benmont Tench's junior high school, where he was 'a musical genius'
3215 NW 15 Ave, Gainesville, FL 32605
https://maps.app.goo.gl/QJRR6oW35bBpdurr8
Before heading off to Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, for his high school years (where he graduated from the class of ’71), Benmont Tench attended here at Westwood Junior High School (since renamed as a middle school) along NW 15th Avenue in Gainesville. At Westwood he was a standout student musician in the school band, according to fellow student David Hammer.
By then, Tench could play the guitar and piano. He learned to play the guitar strings when he became old enough to embrace rock and roll, but he learned the piano keys much earlier. Tench started piano lessons at age 6 in the living room of his family home (321 NW 23rd St.). Benmont had the same piano teacher used by his father, an attorney and circuit court judge who was also a talented recreational musician. Benmont took lessons through his teen years, including from a University of Florida music professor. Throughout Benmont’s childhood, his parents made him practice one hour a day, enforced by an egg timer. While Benmont detested this regimented practice, he took advantage of the time by exploring diverse musical genres.
Hammer told me that the Westwood band and chorus teacher, Joe Johnson, organized a fundraiser to bring in a remote recording studio from elsewhere in Florida.
“We actually recorded an LP on the stage of the Westwood ‘cafetorium,’” Hammer recalled. “Benmont was the student Musical Director for both sides of the album. Even then, everybody knew he was a musical genius. I think it was the next year that his dad sent him off to boarding school.”
Years later, a photograph was taken of Tench wearing a Westwood t-shirt under a jacket.
“Those were the shirts we had to buy at the beginning of every year for PE class at Westwood Junior High School,” Hammer explained. “You were supposed to write your name on the front of them.”
In this photograph, we see a wide-eyed, bearded-and-bespectacled Benmont wearing his old Westwood physical education class t-shirt, on which he has purposely left the nameplate area blank. In it, he is seen with Mudcrutch bandmates, including Tom Petty.
Today, March 7, 2025, Benmont Tench’s second solo album, “The Melancholy Season,” is released. If you wish to purchase this album, or get tickets for the forthcoming limited-engagement West Coast tour, go here:
Tench was profiled by The New York Times on Feb. 27. Should you read it, you can learn about the new album, his Gainesville roots, his career with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, serving as a respected studio and touring musician for a who’s who list of musicians, and the ups and downs in his life – including his recent cancer surgery during which his left jaw needed to be replaced.
“The doctors took half my jaw out,” Tench told the reporter, “took a piece from my leg, muscle and bone to rebuild it.”
Read the article here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/arts/music/benmont-tench-the-melancholy-season.html
Photo of Westwood Middle School today courtesy of Google Maps
Tench Bldg., home to family businesses, Benmont worked as kid
Benmont Tench's junior high school, where he was 'a musical genius'
City Hall, where Benmont Tench's grandfather was mayor in 1935-36
115 S Main St, Gainesville, FL 32601
https://maps.app.goo.gl/zNgLxDZ2HbbLNA7y8
The Tench Building was built in 1887 (see building peak from Main Street for this notation). It is not named after Benjamin Montmorency Tench III, or Benmont, the keyboardist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Mudcrutch. Currently the site of an artist studio, it once housed the law practice of Benmont's father, Benjamin Montmorency Tench II, an attorney and circuit court judge for nearly 50 years, and prior to that an office for his grandfather, who ran the B.M. Tench Shoe Store (where Benmont started working at age 10), and a great uncle, a dental surgeon.
Photo by Shawn Murphy
City Hall, where Benmont Tench's grandfather was mayor in 1935-36
Benmont Tench's junior high school, where he was 'a musical genius'
City Hall, where Benmont Tench's grandfather was mayor in 1935-36
200 E University Ave, Gainesville, FL 32601
https://maps.app.goo.gl/gXFV9wwsumVj4VmaA
On an inside wall of city hall (not in the mayor's office) are photos of previous mayors, including B.M. Tench, 1935-36, who was the grandfather of Benmont Tench, the keyboardist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Mudcrutch.
To see this portrait, a security guard escort is required.
Photo by Shawn Murphy
Santa Fe College, where Tom Petty dropped out, Mudcrutch played
3000 NW 83 St, Gainesville, FL 32606
https://maps.app.goo.gl/bDtud67FX8TrTYAQA
It was at this college that Tom Petty, who was in the recently formed Mudcrutch, enrolled just long enough to avoid the Vietnam War draft, before dropping out.
Later, Mudcrutch performed concerts in 1971, 1972 and 1973 in the Auditorium. At its 1971 show, Mudcrutch shared the bill with RGF, which included Ron Blair, a future member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
This college is also where Stanley Youngerman Lynch was a longtime psychology professor. He was the father of Stan Lynch, a Gainesville native who was the drummer of the band Road Turkey before becoming the first drummer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Professor Lynch was a supporter of his son’s interest in learning the drums.
To learn more about drummer Stan Lynch and his father, see this entry from The Petty Archives:
https://www.thepettyarchives.com/archives/miscellany/interviews/2003-stanlynch-stars
To learn more about professor Stan Lynch, read his 2022 obituary from The Gainesville Sun here: https://www.gainesville.com/obituaries/pgai0127952
Photo courtesy of Santa Fe College
Greer’s Farm, where were held Woodstock-inspired music festivals
9291 NE 140th Ave, Williston, FL 32696
https://maps.app.goo.gl/HDtw3cSEkHSBWgW48
A farm in northern Levy County was the site of two Woodstock-inspired music festivals in 1971 that were organized by the Rose Community Center, a concert production enterprise formed by Bruce Nearon and Charles Ramirez, eventually assisted by Jeff Goldstein, which produced many concerts, with local and national acts, in and around Gainesville during the early 1970s.
The Gainesville Music Festival on May 22-23, 1971, was the first concert held at Greer’s Farm (today known as GHC Farms, Inc.). This two-day festival included musical acts such as Mudcrutch (with future Heartbreakers Tom Petty, Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench), RGF (with future Heartbreaker Ron Blair), Lynyrd Skynyrd (although then spelled Lynard Skynard), Power, Celebration, Shoe Shine Boys, and many more lesser-known bands.
Greer's Farm was also the site of the two-day Dusserah Festival on May 29-30, 1971. Musical acts in the scheduled lineup of the intended 36-hour concert included Mudcrutch, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Moby Grape, the Amboy Dukes (with Ted Nugent), Iron Butterfly, Dion, and Tom Paxton, New England Rock Ensemble, and Game. On the second day of the festival, a half-dozen local and state law enforcement officers, overseen by Levy County Sheriff Pat Hartley, raided the concert grounds and arrested eight attendees for drug use. In doing so, clubs and tear gas were used by the officers. This was at a time when possession of a single marijuana joint could result in a one-year jail sentence.
To learn more about these festivals, pick up Marty Jourard’s 2016 book, Music Everywhere: The Rock and Roll Roots of a Southern Town, and read pages 117-120.
Peggi Young, landowner of the 197-acre farm, offered to the Rose Community Center the northern part of her rural property as a site for these 1971 festivals after locating a suitable venue in Gainesville was problematic, if not impossible.
In 2023, the Alachua Conservation Trust (ACT) awarded G.H.C. Farms conservation land status and acknowledged Peggi Young’s role in caring for the natural habitat on her rural property. ACT protects private land through conservation easements, to date 6,600 acres.
To learn more about this, read the ACT press release here:
https://www.alachuaconservationtrust.org/ghc-farms
Should you go here, remember that this is private property, so must be treated with respect for the property owner and neighbors.
Photo of GHC Farms property from Google Maps, courtesy of Alachua Conservation Trust press release
The Lynx, host of book club event for Tom Petty's biography
601 S Main St, Gainesville, FL 32601
https://maps.app.goo.gl/LbUBQ78aT8nM7GaV8
The Lynx, a bookstore on South Main Street, is a stone's throw from Depot Park -- and even closer to Heartwood Soundstage, where the bookstore and music venue hosted a collaborative book club July 31, 2024, discussion about Warren Zanes' 2016 book, Petty: The Biography.
Join the bookstore's email newsletter list, called the Lynx Watch, for notices about future events:
Photo courtesy of The Lynx
The Gainesville Sun, the newspaper that documented Tom Petty
2700 SW 13th St, Gainesville, FL 32608
https://maps.app.goo.gl/6ZaYhVEXYPME6k9e6
The Gainesville Sun has existed since the late 1800s, covering news like any daily newspaper in and around the city. But since the early 1970s the coverage has included all things Tom Petty. The newspaper has documented the music, life and legacy of Tom Petty from the Mudcrutch era to this day with the annual Tom Petty Weekends. It even published an article about this website, Tom Petty Trail, in November 2024. That article is found here:
Rewinding the clock to June 1973, the Gainesville Sun profiled Mudcrutch at a time when it had established a name for itself in Gainesville, across Florida and elsewhere in the Deep South, and toured extensively throughout this circuit. But this regional fame had not yielded the fortune that comes with national fame. The reporter, John Bartosek, hangs out with the band in a “standard two-bedroom apartment on the northwest edge of the city” that seems to serve as their home base (1976 NW 2nd St.). Later in the article, he shadows them to a show at The Keg (203 SW 16th Ave. in Gainesville; go here to see Tom Petty Trail’s mapped Trail Stop for the venue that was once at this address: https://tompettytrail.com/dreamville-ghosts ).
Bartosek’s story is a time capsule worth revisiting. It is a fascinating fly-on-the-wall piece that combines overheard conversations and observations of the band members off and on the stage. He introduces us to the band, which then consisted of Tom Petty, Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench (although the article misspells the first name as Ben Mont), Randall Marsh and Danny Roberts. It’s clear from the story’s lead that Tom Petty is the band’s leader:
“Tom Petty has a one-track mind. It’s on music.
Bass guitarist for ‘Mudcrutch,’ that seemingly eternal Gainesville rock and roll band, Tom talks about everything. But somehow it all gets back to music.
‘It's our life,’ he says quietly.’”
To read Bartosek’s article, you can find the original as a PDF along with the digitized version, thanks to The Petty Archives, here:
https://www.thepettyarchives.com/archives/newspapers/1970s/1973-06-24-gainesvillesun
To read more of The Gainesville Sun’s stories about Tom Petty, or to see its published photographs, here is a starting point for your online search:
Note that paywall usage fees charged by the newspaper may apply.
Bobby’s Hideaway, where Petty, Tench & Lynch played in disco band
17301 NE US Hwy 301, Waldo, FL 32694
https://maps.app.goo.gl/kAqHfJWoBS3QFMjd9
Tom Petty and Benmont Tench, while home in Gainesville for a holiday visit with family in 1975, were guest musicians for a night in a “disco/lounge band” named Southpaw, which played here at what was then Bobby’s Hideaway, set back from U.S. 301 in Waldo, Fla., on the edge of the woods – a place that Marty Jourard described as “redneck package store/lounge/live music venue.” And in 1977, Petty, Tench and Stan Lynch all guested in Southpaw with Jourard and the other band members.
Jourard had played in a handful of Gainesville bands, among them in 1972 was Road Turkey with future Heartbreaker Stan Lynch. By 1975 he had learned to play multiple instruments, including saxophone and keyboards, and had joined Southpaw, a band that played R&B, soul, funk and disco songs in the age of disco. Among their setlist was “Cut the Cake” by the Average White Band, which included Steve Ferrone, future drummer of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, on the album’s original recording. Southpaw had a 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. periodic gig at Bobby’s Hideaway.
“The cover band I was in (Southpaw) played Bobby’s half a dozen times in late ’75,” Jourard explained in a discussion thread on Gainesville Rock History, a Facebook group he created and moderates. “Petty and Benmont would come back to Gainesville around Christmas in those early years. And according to my diary notes from 1975: ‘DEC 27: Bobby’s Hideaway with Petty, Ben” and other band members. Jourard added that “New Years Eve 1975 was a jam with Petty, Ben, Sandy Stringfellow and Jeff Jourard at Bobby’s Hideaway.”
In addition, Marty Jourard notes that in 1977, Petty, Tench and Stan Lynch “came out once when we played.”
To learn more about Southpaw, which Jouard calls a “disco/lounge band,” and to see a photo of them in their white suits, you will find it on this Jourard bio page, “My Life Of Music”:
http://www.jourard.com/MyLifeofMusic2.htm
Allan Lowe, a member of the Dixie Desperados, reported in this GRH discussion thread that at Bobby’s Hideaway “one weekend” in 1977 he was on stage with his band when “Tom and Jane Petty were there sitting in a booth – how cool.”
To learn more about the Dixie Desperados, go here:
https://thedixiedesperados.com/bio
About Bobby’s Hideaway, Jourard noted: “Bobby’s had a reputation as a rough sort of place and it was not frequented by hippies or long hairs. … I heard many tales of parking lot fights. It seems that whoever wanted to fight went there for that purpose. … Bobby’s was a historically redneck bar famous for fights in the parking lot, a serious roadhouse that catered to a very rural clientele.”
Note that the most of the above information, and all of the quotations, about Southpaw and Bobby’s Hideaway was acquired from the following sources: “The Live Music Venues of Gainesville,” a list that Jourard compiled for his Facebook group Gainesville Rock History; a Gainesville Rock History discussion thread about this venue, including Jourard sharing his diary entries from this time; Jourard’s overview of Southpaw on his “My Life in Music” bio website; and Jourard’s brief autobiography for a self-named website.
At some point before Bobby’s Hideaway owner Bobby Lee Bryan’s death at age 85 in 2009, the bar had closed and the building was purchased by Asher G. “Jerry” Sullivan, who owned a handful of strip clubs: four in Georgia and North Carolina, one in nearby Micanopy. Sullivan attempted to open in this vacant building an adult store that purveyed magazines, videos and sex toys, yet met resistance. When protesters assembled there in 2006, Sullivan orchestrated a counter-protest with “a truck full of bikini-clad women,” according to coverage by The Gainesville Sun. Further community pushback ensued, including physical damage to the building. In 2006 Sullivan filed a lawsuit against Alachua County, claiming it was being overly restrictive with its regulations for opening an adult business.
The proposal eventually fizzled. In 2006, Sullivan died at age 47.
To read the 2006 article from The Gainesville Sun about this, go here:
At last check, February 2025, the building was Toomey Tools, according to Gordie Bennett, who has lived in Waldo for the last 30 years.
Photo of Bobby’s Hideaway in 1999 courtesy of Marty Jourard
The original Sonny's BBQ, where Petty dined, got x-country takeout
2700 NE Waldo Rd, Gainesville, FL 32609
https://maps.app.goo.gl/AiJfEirNYtbXvCwG9
Tom Petty liked his barbecue, especially if it was from Sonny’s BBQ on NE Waldo Road in Gainesville, according to several sources. One of them, who asked to keep his name out of my dispatch, was a fellow Gainesville musician who referred to himself as “a close friend of Tommy’s” which I can confirm that he was. He said he and his band also ate here, as “did everybody.”
Like Petty, this close friend also eventually left town to pursue a music career based out of California, where there was a yearning for a taste of Sonny’s BBQ from back home.
“In the early years of the L.A. Gainesville transplants, mid-seventies, whoever went back to Florida to visit was reminded to bring back a quart of their BBQ beans and a couple pounds of ribs to split among us,” he told me. “It was sort of a ritual, I brought them back several times along with others. We’d meet at a house and dig in.”
While in Gainesville, Petty eating Sonny’s BBQ while he was in Mudcrutch in the early 1970s was one thing, but trying to eat there while he fronted Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was another. Petty told his close friend about one instance that shows the price of regional versus national fame.
“When Tom was famous and came back to town it was not easy,” Petty’s close friend told me. “He and Alan Weidel (known as “Bugs,” he served as the Heartbreakers’ equipment manager and guitar technician for the band’s entire career) once went to a Sonny’s (either the original on NE Waldo or the second restaurant on Rt. 441 in south Gainesville; he’s unsure which one), but as word spread that he was there, it got very dramatic, almost riot-like I imagine, and he and Alan quickly stood up, paid and ran to the car while people chased it. He didn’t retell it as a happy experience.”
Petty also ate Sonny’s BBQ when on vacation with his family on Crescent Beach in St. Augustine, according to this close friend who vacationed in a nearby beach house. There, however, Petty was not recognized by fans, so could hang loose. To read about the Tom Petty Trail stops for the former Petty family beach house and the Sonny’s BBQ in St. Augustine, look in this section of the website:
https://tompettytrail.com/buried-treasure
The neon sign along NE Waldo Road in Gainesville for Fat Boy’s BAR-B-Q restaurant, which Sonny Tillman opened in 1968, showed a smiling, chubby man in a chef’s hat, an apron, and bare feet. In 1977 the restaurant’s original “fat boy” moniker was eventually trimmed down to a somewhat leaner name, Sonny’s Real Pit BAR-B-Q. With it came a revamped sign, which was westernized to show a smiling, chubby man in a cowboy hat and boots. The name and the original location still stand today, although there are other franchised Sonny’s BBQ restaurants throughout the South.
To learn more about the Sonny’s BBQ story, read this Florida History overview:
https://floridahistoryblog.com/sonnys-and-fat-boys-bbq/
In August 2024, Sonny Tillman turned 95. Gainesville’s Main Street News profiled him and his business, which can be found here:
https://www.mainstreetdailynews.com/food-drink/sonnys-bbq-celebrates-founders-birthday
In December 2024, Sonny Tillman reminisced on Facebook: “A lot of smoke up the chimney since I got too old to enjoy the days of old but you guys and ladies make me proud. I miss the smoke in my eyes and the sweat on my brow but really love the memories of the years past and all the wonderful family members and the thousands of friends and the millions customers who made SONNYS what it is. Thank you all.”
Photo by unknown photographer, courtesy of restaurant's Facebook page