Ron Blair (born Ronald Edward Blair, September 16, 1948, in San Diego, California) is the original bassist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He was the band's bassist from 1976 to 1981. In 2002, he returned to the group after a 21-year hiatus, replacing his own replacement, the late Howie Epstein.

His father was a Navy man, so the family relocated every few years throughout the U.S. as well as within Japan and Hong Kong. As a teenager in Japan, Ron was in a locally famous rock band. But it was the music scenes in Macon, Georgia, and Gainesville, Florida, where Blair felt most at home. In Gainesville, Blair was a member of the band RGF.

Blair eventually moved to Los Angeles, and there teamed up with fellow Gainesville musicians Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, and Stan Lynch. Campbell and Tench, along with Tom Petty, had been members of the popular Gainesville band Mudcrutch. Mudcrutch had relocated from Gainesville to Los Angeles, but subsequently broke up.

After the breakup, Tench recruited Campbell, Blair, and Lynch to record demos in the hopes of getting a new record deal. After observing one of their sessions, Petty asked if they would like to assume his current recording contract with Shelter Records and start a band. (Denny Cordell, President of Shelter, seeing Petty's potential, had kept him under contract while releasing the other members of Mudcrutch). Blair went on to play on the band’s first four albums, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, You're Gonna Get It!, Damn the Torpedoes, and Hard Promises and one track on Long After Dark before his departure in 1982.

Stevie Salas is an American guitarist known for his work on George Clinton's albums, his collaborations with Koshi Inaba of B'z, and Hardware. He was in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, providing the fingerwork for George Carlin's guitar solo.

He has worked with many in the music industry, including Steve Vai, Rod Stewart, Sass Jordan providing guitar for several of her albums, T.M. Stevens, Justin Timberlake, among others. He helps create studio bands for American Idol and continues to tour in Europe and Japan, as well as release his solo albums.

In 2007, the UK independent record label, Invisible Hands Music, released his first-ever career retrospective, The Sun And The Earth.

Salas attended high school in San Diego, where he played in a rock band called This Kids, which toured the Southwest and released two EPs. In 1985, Salas moved to Hollywood to pursue his dream of becoming a professional musician. He lived there for a year without much success, almost starving to death (Salas says he lost 20 pounds (9.1 kg) because of hunger). In 1985, he received a job as custodian for a small recording studio in Los Angeles where one night at 3a.m. he was awoken by George Clinton, who was looking for someone to play some chords on a song he was making. Salas offered his services. When he went into the studio, Salas said he began to play all sorts of weird stuff on the guitar and in turn, he was hired to play some tracks on George Clinton's 1986 release, R&B Skeletons in the Closet.

Thomas Earl "Tom" Petty (born October 20, 1950) is an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He is the frontman of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and was a founding member of the late 1980s supergroup Traveling Wilburys and Mudcrutch. He has also performed under the pseudonyms of Charlie T. Wilbury, Jr. and Muddy Wilbury.

He has recorded a number of hit singles with the Heartbreakers and as a solo artist, many of which remain heavily played on adult contemporary and classic rock radio. His music, and notably his hits, have become popular among younger generations as he continues to host sold-out shows. Throughout his career, Petty and his collaborators have sold 60 million albums.

Tom Petty was born and raised in Gainesville, Florida, and attended Gainesville High School. His interest in rock and roll music began at age 10 when he met Elvis Presley. In the summer of 1961, his uncle was working on the set of Presley's film Follow That Dream in nearby Ocala, Florida and invited Petty to come down and watch the shoot. He instantly became an Elvis Presley fan and soon traded his Wham-O slingshot for a box of Elvis 45s. In a 2006 interview on the National Public Radio program Fresh Air, Petty said that he knew he wanted to be in a band the moment he saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. One of his first guitar teachers was Don Felder, a fellow Gainesville resident, who would later join the Eagles. As a young man, Petty worked briefly on the grounds crew for the University of Florida, but never attended as a student. An Ogeechee lime tree that he planted while employed at the University is now called the Tom Petty tree.

Keith Douglas Scott (born July 20, 1954) is a Canadian guitar player. He is best known for his long-term collaboration with the singer-songwriter Bryan Adams. He has also worked with Cher, Tina Turner, Bryan Ferry, Tom Cochrane, Craig Northey and other musicians.

Scott was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, where his father played jazz piano and his mother sang occasionally. His own introduction to music was playing flute in a school orchestra: anecdotally, it said that he chose the flute because he lived quite far away from the school and did not want to drag a large instrument case around with him. While still at school, he learned how to play the acoustic guitar and, by the time he was 17, he had acquired a used 1960s Fender Stratocaster, which was to become a trademark instrument. Many of his musical influences are also associated with this instrument: Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, for example. During his career, he has used other instruments and recently the Gretsch company produced a "Keith Scott Nashville Gold Top" signature guitar, to Scott's specifications as a thank you to Scott for using his orange Gretsch for the video for "Everything I Do" filmed in Sherwood forest.

Terence William 'Blondie' Chaplin is a musician from Durban, South Africa who first became known to international audiences through his brief stint in the early 1970s as a singer and guitarist for The Beach Boys. Chaplin was also listed as a co-producer, sang lead vocals with fellow South African musician Ricky Fataar (drummer) and composed, with Fataar, "Here She Comes" and "Hold On Dear Brother" on the twenty-third official Beach Boys album, Carl and the Passions - "So Tough", released in 1972. He is well known in recent years as a long term backing vocalist, percussionist and acoustic rhythm guitarist for the Rolling Stones on their tours.

Blondie Chaplin, along with drummer Ricky Fataar, joined the Beach Boys when original drummer Dennis Wilson suffered a hand injury which left him unable to play the drums for almost two years. For the Beach Boys, it was a period in which long-time member Bruce Johnston had departed the band, and one-time leader Brian Wilson's participation in the group was very limited. As a result, Chaplin and Fataar joined the Beach Boys as full-fledged members and not merely as backing musicians. Chaplin left the group in 1973 after a dispute with the Beach Boys' management; Fataar remained with the band until the following year (and has performed with Bonnie Raitt's band since the 1980s).