Olympia’s female Tom Petty cover band is ‘runnin’ down a dream,’ but not the one you think

The Heavy Pettys, playing Saturday in Olympia’s West Central Park, might well be the world’s only all-female Tom Petty cover band.

They’re pretty sure, because they’ve searched.

“You can Google it really hard and never find one,” said Sharon Brown, the band’s rhythm guitarist and one of its lead singers.

In any case, the Pettys are very likely the world’s most unusual Tom Petty cover band.

Three of the six — keyboard player/percussionist/singer Thea Davis, singer/acoustic guitarist Chrisstine Gulrajani and bassist Chris Novelli — had never been in a rock band until they joined their sisters in paying tribute to, as they jokingly call him, St. Tom. (Longtime friends Davis and Gulrajani went through a phase where they made prayer candles of iconic musicians, and after Petty’s death, they made one for him.)

Two more — Brown and drummer Robin McClymonds — hadn’t been in bands in decades.

Only lead guitarist Valee Kyo, who moved to Olympia a few years ago, had played with other bands in recent years, but this, for her, is something different.

“Playing with the Pettys is a dream come true,” she said.

The women are all middle-aged or older — ages 48 to 66 — and they’ve noticed that many of their fans are, too. Though Saturday’s concert will be just their second public gig, the Facebook event post lists 86 people “going” and another 713 “interested,” a majority of them women.

“I keep running into women who say, ‘August 31st, right? See you there,’ ” Davis said. “We have fans who have our one and only gig in their calendars.”

All that would be surprising enough, but there’s something even more startling.

Not one of the band members was a longtime fan of Petty, a singer-songwriter-guitarist whose career spanned four decades until his death in 2017. Not one ever saw him perform live.

So how did they get here?

Davis had an epiphany of sorts. (She didn’t use that word to describe it, but she does feel “a mystical connection” to Petty.)

It happened some 25 years ago while watching “The Silence of the Lambs.” She saw the scene where Jodie Foster’s character is driving and singing along to Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “American Girl.”

“I totally related to that moment, and in that moment, I fell in love with Tom Petty,” Davis said. “Later, someone asked me, ‘If you could be any musician, who would you be?’ and I said, ‘Tom Petty.’ And yet I didn’t really listen to his music or anything.”

It was just a few years ago, though, that she begin running down that dream. She and Gulrajani, who often got together to sing and play, picked up a book of Petty’s songs after watching a documentary about his life.

“We were sort of amazed at how great the songs were, and I said, half as a joke, ‘Hey, we should start an all-female Tom Petty cover band.’”

After that, she pretty much kept saying that until it all came together in early 2018.

“For me, it really started as a joke,” Gulrajani said. “It was bizarre how it all came together.”

Part of the appeal is the songs themselves, Brown agreed.

“He’s a master of the hook,” she said. “He’s a great writer. The songs sound simple, but they’re really complicated.”

But while Petty — and Davis’s fascination with the idea of an all-female cover band — brought the women together, there’s more to this band than that, the members agreed.

“Tom Petty wasn’t entirely the focal point,” Gulrajani said. “Yeah, we’re a Tom Petty cover band, but the thing that was underneath it was that to varying degrees we are all women who postponed the idea of being in a band.

“It felt really palpable when we started to get know each other that there was this longing in each person,” she said. “We wanted to do this, and we went for it.”

Heavy Pettys

• What: Olympia’s all-female Tom Petty tribute band, which made quite a splash with its debut show during spring Arts Walk, wraps up West Central Park’s summer concert season.
• When: 7 p.m. Saturday
• Where: West Central Park, 1919 Harrison Ave. NW, OIympia
• Tickets: Free, with donations to the nonprofit park appreciated
• More information: aparkforus.org