One of the projects that had been put on hold when Petty died was an expanded reissue of Wildflowers — all of the tracks for the intended double album plus additional, unreleased songs — followed by a tour showcasing Petty’s breakthrough writing on that record.“That would have been smaller-scale, away from the hits,” Campbell says. But “plans for that somehow evolved into ‘It’s the 40th year. Let’s do this tour first.’ ”In a 2014 conversation with Rolling Stone, Petty recalled the unique genesis of Wildflowers, pointing to a day when his co-producer, Rick Rubin, played him the Beatles’demos for their 1968 double LP, The Beatles. “It hit me how strong the songs were,” Petty said, “with just a couple of acoustic guitars. I would try to write in the same fashion. I started to hear a whole new kind of thing coming out.”

Petty was flattered when Hillman asked if he could record his own version of Wildflowers′ title track for Bidin’ My Time. “It is a song of pure love — agape," Hillman says, using the ancient Greek word. “Then you look at it now. It’s almost prophecy: ‘You belong in that home by and by.’Most of Tom’s stuff — you could describe it as minimalist. But less is more.”

Petty returned to the Wildflowers project before his 40th Anniversary marathon was over. “He asked me to call some people,” Dimitriades says, “and see if they would come on the road and perform it with him. One — and she said yes immediately — was Norah Jones.”

“It’s so hard to believe it’s even happened,” Dhani Harrison says of Petty’s death. He remembers, as a child, a Christmas in L.A. with the Petty and Harrison families — Dhani and Adria playing Nintendo with their rock-god dads. And there was the day that an advance copy of Full Moon Fever arrived at Friar Park, the Harrisons’ English estate. George put it on his jukebox, Dhani says, “and just had it on repeat.”

Earlier this year, Dhani stopped by Petty’s house to play him some new music: Dhani’s first solo album, IN///PARALLEL. “He put the record on in his studio, put his head in his hands and listened to the whole thing from start to finish,” Dhani recalls. At the end, “he looked at me, gave me this big, beaming smile, and said, ‘Guess you found your target demographic.’

“He was so proud, like a dad,” Dhani says. “I’m sure thinking about that in the future will make me lose it. What could be cooler in the entire world than for your target demographic to be Tom Petty?”

Petty characterised his roots and ambition this way, in the title song of his 1985 album, Southern Accents: “I got my own way of talkin’/But everything gets done, with a Southern accent.” He was born Thomas Earl Petty on October 20th, 1950, in Gainesville, Florida; a brother, Bruce, arrived in 1958. Their mother, Kitty, “was a very kind, good person,” Tom said in 2009. Their father, Earl, was “Jerry Lee Lewis if he didn’t play the piano. He was scary and violent. He beat the living hell out of me.”

In 1961, an uncle working on the local set of an Elvis Presley movie, Follow That Dream, arranged for Petty and some family members to watch the filming and meet the star. “He’d met my aunt before,” Petty recalled. “She said, ‘Elvis, this is my nephew and my niece.’ He said, ‘Hi, how are you?’ Then he went to his trailer.” In that moment, Petty claimed, Presley “made my life.”

Aside from a few odd jobs in his youth — in a Gainesville musical-instrument store, as a groundskeeper at the University of Florida, short stints in a barbecue restaurant and a funeral home — Petty only played, wrote and recorded music for a living, until his death.

Another epiphany came in 1965 when Petty — then a member of a local combo called the Sundowners — went to Jacksonville for his first concert, headlined by the Beach Boys and featuring two British Invasion bands, the Zombies and the Searchers, who became crucial influences on Petty’s lashing-jangle charge and pocket-grenade songwriting with the Heartbreakers. Petty later discovered that Campbell, who grew up in Jacksonville, also went to that show.

The two finally met in Gainesville, where Campbell was supposed to go to college but instead ended up playing with Petty in Mudcrutch. “We connected instantly, like we’d known each other already,” the guitarist says. There was also “this thing that set us apart from the other musicians in town — this drive to write our own songs.”

By 1974, the future core of the Heartbreakers — Petty, Campbell and Tench, another Gainesville native — had played on Mudcrutch’s debut single, “Depot Street.” Released the next year, it was a commercial bust on Shelter Records that eventually broke up that group. Petty later got a solo deal with Shelter but turned to Campbell and Tench again to form a band — with Petty’s name up front, playing his songs. “Mike and Benmont are good, smart people,” Petty said in 2014. “They were cool with it right away.” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers — with Blair and original drummer Stan Lynch, both from Gainesville — released their self-titled debut album in November 1976, then hit the road in earnest.

“The influences were obvious — the Byrds, a lot of the Merseybeat stuff,” Wolf says of Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1977 sets opening for the J. Geils Band. “But Tom would close the show by doing ‘Shout.’ It’s a challenging song to do, once you’ve heard the Isley Brothers’ version. I was always amazed how they did it their own way. And every night, they got multiple encores.