A guy I used to babysit just saw him in concert, too. When he was a kid, my older sister babysat for some other kids in our neighbourhood while their parents went to the concert for Full Moon Fever. Her payment that night was a concert shirt that I still have somewhere. My daughter Irene’s godmother and I used to listen to the album together; I remember trying to get the brother of the guy who saw him in concert to sing “Free Fallin'” when he was like five. I remember seeing the various music videos—”Don’t Come Around Here No More” and “Out in the Great Wide Open” and “Last Dance With Mary Jane”— on MTV and VH1. And the Traveling Wilburys. And so much Tom Petty. And now, there is no more Tom Petty.

It’s not quite as hard as David Bowie, but it’s hard. For most of my life, Tom Petty has been a mellow, easy-going presence in my life. The music, yeah, but the man himself always just seemed like such a chill guy. Sure, he was the ominous and creepy Mad Hatter in the “Don’t Come Around Here No More” video, but some of the stuff I knew him from best, he was just a narrator in someone else’s life. (Or a roadie named Bart.) Growing up, I always connected strongly with music I was just a little bit young for—music that had come out when people older than I were of an age to connect with music. And there, starting in about seventh grade, was Tom Petty.

Unlike Bowie, he didn’t really act. I don’t know if that was by choice or because he wasn’t offered roles, though he’s the slightly scary Stanky in Made in Heaven, an obscure movie even at its best. Most of his credits are for music; most of his video credits are for concerts. But he did do some acting in several of those videos. The “Don’t Come Around Here No More” video is most famous that way, of course, but he did several videos where he was playing characters. Of course, he didn’t have any lines, so who knows.

He worked with the greats. The Traveling Wilburys, of course, with Dylan and Harrison and Orbison and Jeff Lynne. Johnny Cash, who covered “I Won’t Back Down.” Don Felder of The Eagles was one of his first guitar teachers. I can’t help wondering how it must have felt, being a boy who watched The Beatles on Sullivan and deciding that being a musician was what you wanted to do, to then go on and do two albums with George Harrison.

Does he really belong on this site? Yes. Definitely, yes. Even leaving aside that we routinely cover other media than movies, even leaving aside that small handful of acting jobs. His songs have been in movies and will continue to be. No, not as often as some other musicians we’ve talked about here, but Tom Petty’s mellow, low-key presence will remain with us even though the man himself is gone.