I Petty the Fool Brings Tom Petty’s American Rock Songbook to Sneekers (cancelled)

NOTE: This event was cancelled due to the nor’easter.

I Petty the Fool Brings Tom Petty’s American Rock Songbook to Sneekers. Saturday night, the Connecticut tribute band takes over the longtime Groton music room for an 8 p.m. show built around one of rock’s most enduring catalogs.

The Sept. 26 performance brings I Petty the Fool back to southeastern Connecticut after a busy year that has included appearances around Connecticut and Rhode Island. Current regional music listings confirm the Saturday show at Sneekers Cafe.

For anyone who knows Tom Petty only from a handful of radio staples, there’s considerably more material for a tribute band to explore.

Petty’s career with the Heartbreakers stretched across four decades, while his work with the Traveling Wilburys and his solo albums added another layer to a catalog that moved comfortably between rock, folk, country and the jangling guitar sound associated with his Florida roots.

I Petty the Fool has built an entire show around it.

More Than Free Fallin’

The Connecticut-based group bills itself as a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers tribute and has become a regular presence on the New England circuit. Other venues hosting the band describe its approach as faithful to the records rather than a loose reinterpretation of Petty’s music.

That leaves them with an unusually deep songbook.

There’s the early Heartbreakers period that produced Breakdown and American Girl. The band’s commercial peak brought Refugee, Don’t Do Me Like That and The Waiting. Petty’s enormously successful solo period added Free Fallin’, I Won’t Back Down and Runnin’ Down a Dream, while the later years produced songs including Learning to Fly, Mary Jane’s Last Dance and You Don’t Know How It Feels.

What ties much of it together is Petty’s economy as a songwriter.

The songs rarely depend on elaborate arrangements. Instead, Petty and the Heartbreakers built them from memorable guitar parts, choruses that arrive quickly and lyrics that could communicate defiance, disappointment or freedom without overexplaining any of them.

That simplicity is deceptive.

A convincing Tom Petty tribute has to reproduce not only recognizable melodies but the interplay that made the Heartbreakers sound like the Heartbreakers in the first place.

I Petty the Fool has been taking that approach around the region throughout 2026. The band played the North Stonington Agricultural Fair in July, while other recent bookings have included New Park Brewing in West Hartford and the Charlestown Rathskeller in Rhode Island.

A Neighborhood Music Room Since 1984

Saturday’s setting is considerably more intimate.

Sneekers Cafe has occupied 568 Poquonnock Road in Groton since 1984, combining a neighborhood restaurant and bar with a long-running schedule of live music. The venue describes itself simply as offering “great food & live music since 1984.”

That longevity matters.

Rather than a theater-style tribute show where the audience sits at a distance from the stage, Sneekers puts the band into the kind of neighborhood bar setting where much of this music has lived for decades.

And Tom Petty’s songs are particularly well suited to it.

They’ve survived changing formats, changing generations and changing definitions of rock music largely because so many of them work in exactly this environment: a band, a room full of people and choruses almost everyone already knows.

On Saturday night, I Petty the Fool gets an entire evening to work through them.

More information is available at the Event Website link below.

Details

Event: I Petty the Fool: Tom Petty Tribute
Date: Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026
Time: 8 p.m.
Venue: Sneekers Cafe
Address: 568 Poquonnock Road, Groton, CT 06340
Music: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers tribute
Phone: 860-445-1967

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