(Credits: Far Out / Tom Petty)
Sat 3 January 2026 18:29, UK
The greatest musicians of all time never want to stop learning. Even though most icons of a genre could rest on their laurels and past glory, true musicians are explorers, always looking for a person who can teach them a different angle when it comes to playing an instrument. When Tom Petty was coming up the ranks in his native Gainesville, though, he got some guitar lessons from one of the best.
As Petty was putting together his first band, Don Felder was also showing his chops in the scene and would later join the Eagles after being dubbed ‘Fingers Felder’ for his chops as a session guitarist. When Felder returned to Gainesville, he had seen Petty in passing playing bass in a handful of local acts.
Felder is one of the more underrated members of the Eagles’ group. Without his performance on guitar, there is a great chance that they simply would have reached the heights they did. But he saw something in Petty that was worth putting extra effort in to.
During a conversation with WMMR, Felder mentioned teaching Petty the ropes on guitar, remembering: “Tommy was playing bass and singing and fronting the band, and he really didn’t want to be the singing bass player. He wanted to play guitar, so I started teaching him guitar in this music store and going out to see him and teaching him at his house”.
While Petty was originally working with bands like The Epics, his stint in Mudcrutch saw him behind the four-string again, which earned him a record deal. Whenever Felder would visit home again, he would mention how much of a spark he saw in Petty. Felder noted: “He had a great stage presence and a commitment that he could sell on his presence which was great, and a lot of people might have the talent, they just don’t have the commitment and charisma to get it across, and Tom has it in spades”.
Don Felder displaying his skills. (Credit: TaurusEmerald)
After drafting Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench into the group, Mudcrutch was destined for stardom until they were dropped after their album bombed. Instead of coming back to Gainesville, Petty convinced Campbell to stay before building an entire band behind him, putting his name on it as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
When Petty was cutting his teeth making his first album, the Eagles were reaching their peak, with Glenn Frey and Don Henley writing the crux of what would become Hotel California around the same time that Petty wrote ‘American Girl’.
Although Felder remained a musical older brother figure for a while, the tides seemed to be turning towards the end of the 1970s. Despite their huge tour dates, Felder was becoming more fed up with his role in the band, not being able to sing as much as his bandmates and feeling like they weren’t paying him enough in royalties.
That animosity would continue to the end of the decade, as Felder cut The Long Run with the band while everyone was messed up on cocaine. Petty wasn’t in the best situation either, declaring bankruptcy after his label claimed to own the copyright on all of his songs. While things looked bleak on both fronts, Petty turned his anger into ambition on Damn the Torpedoes, creating some of the biggest hits of his career.
The end of the Eagles happened not long afterwards, with Felder and Frey getting into a heated argument onstage at a charity gig. As Felder started to reach the end of the line with the Eagles in the early ‘80s, Petty was just getting started, riding the momentum of Damn the Torpedoes and creating simple songs devoted to America’s heartland.
While both Felder and Petty took different career trajectories over the years, Felder remained defiantly proud of his former student. He spoke to Billboard after Petty’s death: “Growing up together in Gainesville and seeing one of my students blossom as an incredibly gifted musician and songwriter has been one of my most fulfilling experiences in this life”.
Petty had another Eagles connection. Without his dissatisfaction with his Heartbreakers’ bandmate’s song, ‘Boys of Summer’, there’s a chance Don Henley would have had a much quieter solo career. ”I just wrote the best song of my life to your music,” were the eternal words that came blaring out of Mike Campbell’s phone a few days later after Henley had penned the lyrics to Campbell’s song.
Henley had cracked the elusive topline vocal melody. ‘The Boys Of Summer’ was born; a perfectly trite title for 1984. The song soon became inescapable upon release. But more importantly for Henley, it had been written on a Linn LM -1 drum machine, an era and a revolution apart from the sort of traditional instrumentation that The Eagles had favoured. Thusly, not only was it popular enough to pronounce Henley as a figure at the forefront of culture rather than an unknown face behind a drumkit, it also made it clear that his solo career was no legacy act.
Music has a habit of finding its way to the surface, whether that is Felder helping Petty learn guitar or Henley picking up the Heartbreakers’ scraps and making them perfect pop.
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