BY 1997, TOM PETTY’S LIFE WAS in shambles. His latest album, She’s the One, had bombed commercially, and he’d just fired his longtime drummer, Stan Lynch of the Heartbreakers, after years of acrimony. Even worse, his 20-year marriage had just come to a bitter end. Living in a tiny house he calls a “chicken shack,” he found a new way to deal with his pain: heroin. Before long, he was hooked. “Tried to go cold turkey, and that wouldn’t work,” he says in the new book Petty: The Biography. “It’s an ugly fucking thing.”
The book, by author and former Del Fuegos guitarist Warren Zanes, marks the first time Petty has ever talked about his heroin abuse publicly, but it’s far from the only dark moment in the book. Petty…