Facing the Music

"Every recording he made as an artist was in the top five on the West Coast. He had two fan clubs at the time, plus the publishing companies and the record company, as well as the television, the radio show and entertaining," Petty wrote. "Of course, as a 'star' he was always under threat of his life."

In 1986, he was supposedly living the good life. He owned a $650,000 California estate with 14.5 acres of lemon groves. Neither the property nor Petty's claims of fame on the hit charts could be confirmed.

Petty kept the faith in God that he rediscovered in 1980 but decided to give stardom up for a 1978 Winnebago and the dream of the musical instrument he believed would be revolutionary: the Guitorchestra.

"I was determined to develop this thing," he says.

Viewing the archaic-looking device, with its buttons and levers, most people would probably wonder what the point was. After all, by the time he was done "inventing" it, synthesizers had been available in electronics stores--let alone pawnshops--for years. Nevertheless, Petty is unwavering.

"The sounds are totally authentic. With a keyboard you are limited to this half and this half. Here, when I play this I can bend the strings like an orchestra...I developed the sounds, and they are far superior to anything on the market. What you can do with your feet and your hands and all that at the same time you just can't do that with a keyboard," he says over the twangy sound of Petty playing "Amazing Grace" on the instrument on a 10-year-old video.

Petty says he played on the PTL Club regularly and provided videotape that indeed appears to show him on the television show demonstrating the Guitorchestra from his Winnebago. A spokeswoman for Jim Bakker, the head of the now-defunct original Praise the Lord Club, says it is impossible to say how many times Petty may have appeared on PTL because records from the show are gone.

On the tape, Petty's voice is sort of like Willie Nelson's, but like the instrument and Petty himself, the package just misses the mark.

"It's the story of my life. I'm not aware of anyone other than Al Petty using it," he says of his Guitorchestra. "It's that good."

So it bombed, and that's when Petty, the child prodigy musician and superstar, began his ill-fated quest for cash. He doesn't blame the Guitorchestra directly but claims his debt caused his shift from music to finance.

"People think that at 61 years of age, I just crawled out from under a rock and decided to make some money," says Petty, now 69. "Nothing could be further from the truth. I never tried to make money for money's sake in my life until I was 61, and the reason I did it is because of seven years of this thing, and I went hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt."

---

In just a couple of years of applying himself to the world of finance, Petty had become a familiar figure to the Tyler-area Better Business Bureau. One day in 1995 or so, he pulled up to the bureau in an old lavender Cadillac. He emerged carrying a VCR and television. He was there to make a sales pitch. When Petty dropped by the bureau, it was usually to try to defend or pitch one of his new, pre-TeleCom2000 ideas.

Bureau employees might have guessed what the Bible-quoting genius was doing there. He was constantly selling "revolutionary" ways of making people rich that were just variations of the same old pyramid marketing schemes, says Kay Robinson, who has been with the bureau since 1985 and now serves as its president.

In the same conference room where Petty made his pitch seven years before, Robinson and two other longtime employees sit amid a stack of files generated by Petty's various capers and borrowed by the FBI. They talk and laugh about him almost nostalgically, the way three high school teachers might reminisce about a colorful troublemaker now all grown up.

"We always knew when Al was starting another deal," Robinson says, "because we'd start getting phone calls."

With fresh complaints arriving about Petty's latest endeavor, skeptical bureau employees watched as Petty made his pitch.

"He came here and set up a TV and VCR, and he started selling this deal," Robinson says. "What he did was convince us more instead of less. I mean, it's right there, and you're saying it, and you're doing it, and it's a pyramid scheme."

Into the video player went Petty's "Auto Drivers Research Association," an Austin-based and now apparently defunct "fraternal membership" organization that promised a free car worth up to $140,000 every year and monthly paychecks for "test drivers."

All you had to do to "test drive" a brand-new car of your own for a year was pay $1,200 in annual dues and then get 50 of your friends to agree to do the same. For reporting important data--whether the seats were comfortable, if the horn sounds all right--investors would start receiving checks right away, company literature assured. That kind of operation, often called a pyramid scheme because it requires an ever-growing base of investors to sustain the investors who came first, mostly involves getting friends to buy at a premium what you are promised for free.