Stevie Nicks Recalls Seeing Tom Petty’s Ambulance Just Before His Death
Stevie Nicks grew close to Tom Petty while working on her debut solo album. Decades later, she still considered him one of her best friends. She shared that she was inexplicably drawn to the ambulance light on the night he was transported to the hospital. Later, she realized that it was carrying Petty to the hospital.
Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty were close friends
When Nicks and Petty first met, he didn’t know what to make of her. She was a superfan of his music, and he was a bit less excited about her work.
“We were a little wary of Stevie,” he said in the book Conversations With Tom Petty, per American Songwriter. “We didn’t quite know whether to like Stevie or not, because we kind of saw this big corporate rock band, Fleetwood Mac, which was wrong, they were actually artistic people. But in those days, nobody trusted that sort of thing and we just kept thinking, ‘What does she want from us?’”
Eventually, though, Nicks wore him down. Petty helped her with her debut album, and they formed a lifelong friendship.
“She came into my life like a rocket, just refusing to go away,” Petty said in the book Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes.
She realized she saw the ambulance taking him to the hospital
On Oct. 2, 2017, an ambulance transported Petty to the hospital. He died that night. Nicks says that she was awake in her apartment and noticed the siren light.
“[The night he died] I was up watching TV in my apartment that has this view all the way to the pier, and then all the way back to Point Dume,” she told The New Yorker. “And, all of a sudden, I just looked over to the right and I saw this little red dot way far away down toward Malibu, and I went over to the window and I just stood there and I watched it come all the way up and kind of slow down, when it stopped at the street before me.”
She shared that while the light transfixed her at the moment, she later realized that she was watching Petty’s ambulance.
“I realized, after Tom died, that that was Tom in that ambulance,” she explained. “Because then I went to the hospital the next morning, and that’s exactly when he left his house in Malibu and went to the hospital.”
Nicks said that the shock of losing one of her best friends was very difficult to handle.
Stevie Nicks says she still feels a connection to Tom Petty, Prince, and her mother
Nicks’ version of spirituality includes the belief that she still has a connection to the people she loves after death. She began to believe in this after her mother’s death.
“When my mom died, on the twenty-eighth of December, 2011, I started noticing that I would be looking for stuff, like a specific piece of jewelry,” she explained. “I just looked and looked and looked and couldn’t find it. And then I would say, like, ‘O.K., Mom, where is it?’ And I swear to god, I would turn around and put my hand down and there it would be right under my fingers.”
After Prince and Petty died, Nicks continued speaking with them to foster the connection.
“So this really gave me a certain religious thing that I never would have had before,” she said. “Sometimes when I walk on stage, if I’m really nervous, which isn’t often, I will say to Prince, ‘Prince, walk with me.’ And he does. I believe he just suddenly is there with me. And I feel Tom.”
