Trail Stops

100 NE 1st St, Gainesville, FL 32601

https://maps.app.goo.gl/RyxUMjswceQLUoAV8

     Tom Petty and Jane Benyo were married here March 31, 1974 -- the day 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 

Photo by Shawn Murphy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

https://thelynxbooks.com/

Photo courtesy of The Lynx

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:

https://www.gainesville.com/story/entertainment/2024/11/29/tom-petty-trail-gives-fans-map-to-explore-musical-icon-in-gainesville/76404032007/      

    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 (the address of this location is currently unknown to me). 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:

https://www.google.com/search?as_q=gainesville+sun&as_epq=tom+petty&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=&as_occt=any&as_filetype=&tbs= 

Note that paywall usage fees charged by the newspaper may apply.