Petty's Hippie Hair Made Him Second-Class Citizen in Florida

Rocker Tom Petty can understand what African-Americans had to put up withas they struggled for equality - because he was treated like an outcast for refusing to cut his hair.

The American Girl hitmaker was always threatened for his hippie look, growing up in rural Florida, and he'd often get treated like a second-class citizen because of his hair.

He explains, "I got my a** kicked a lot because of my hair... I remember driving on the interstate, pulling into truck stops. Our band would walk in, and the whole room would laugh. Some of them plain-a** wouldn't serve you".

And he recalls one particular hard-luck story in a new Rolling Stone magazine interview "Our van broke down. We pushed it into a gas station, and they made us push it off, just because we looked the way we did.

"It made you see what black people were going through. It was nowhere as severe, but you sympathised right away".