Initially commissioned to promote Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ 1982 album Long After Dark, Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party captured an irreverent and revealing portrait of Petty at the height of his fame. Only shown once on MTV before slipping into cult status, the film is being shown in cinemas this weekend to mark what would have been the singer’s 74th birthday.
In this extract from our Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers feature in the latest issue of MOJO, Grayson Haver Currin speaks to director Cameron Crowe and Petty’s daughter Adria about a side of Petty rarely seen…
IN THE EARLY 80s, TOM PETTY WAS NOT exactly an easy or candid interview. His public fights with his record labels, first over an unfavourable contract and then over an attempt to charge more for his albums, provided easy fodder for inquiring journalists. But he started going only skin-deep, choosing to talk more about the basics of production or the outline of his past rather than the real stuff that motivated his songs. After evading Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore for days after losing his voice in 1979, Petty finally responded to a conceptual question about antiheroes with, “You know, I don’t think about these things that much.”
But in an earlier Rolling Stone interview, before the songs of 1979’s Damn The Torpedoes catapulted Petty, journalist Cameron Crowe captured a much more open person, an endlessly quotable prankster who talked about switchblades in his boots and who could badmouth Elvis Costello and Johnny Rotten in a single thought. Recognising this rapport, Danny Bramson – the head of Backstreet Records, the Heartbreakers’ home since …Torpedoes – contracted Crowe to make a documentary about Petty they could deliver to MTV to promote 1982’s Long After Dark.
Petty was in, with one caveat: it needed to be weird. “This idea of it being a self-satisfied portrait, he was not into that,” Crowe remembers. “He wanted it to be cool and irreverent and not look like the corporate thing he’d just come out of a battle with. If he was going to splash around in these waters, fame by way of corporate promotions, he wanted it to be something that wouldn’t be a compromise.”
Indeed, there are few portraits of a rock band so disarming, real, or goofy as Heartbreakers Beach Party, named for an antic 1980 Heartbreakers number about a seaside cook-out. It was screened after midnight just once on MTV. Crowe soon got a call from MTV executive Chip Rachlin, saying it wasn’t fit for the channel, then barely a year old. It became an object lesson for Crowe, still years away from making Say Anything and Singles, not to bargain. “Tom was quietly proud it aired only once, so it became like Cocksucker Blues,” he remembers, laughing. “You had to be there.”
When Petty’s daughter Adria saw the footage last year as part of an archival dump, she was stunned. She remembered the film being shot in her family home when she was seven, and she recognised the assorted rooms of her childhood. But she didn’t expect to see her sometimes-enigmatic father opening up so much about songwriting, whether showing Crowe how American Girl owed more to Bo Diddley than Roger McGuinn or how much patience waiting for the lyrics to The Waiting required.
Petty wrestled with the ridiculousness and convenience of limousines, how to keep his concerts safe without making them sanitised, and how to deal with the honours and riches of fame while remaining a rebellious kid from the Florida swamps. It pulled open a window on a period of Petty’s career during which he’d kept things opaque. “He’s talking about his recording process, all this stuff he was pretty cryptic about later in life,” Adria remembers. “That was insane.”
During one of the poignant final scenes, Petty sits in his home garden and tells Crowe about reconciling his public and private images, or how he has realised there is no costume.
What’s in his life makes it on record and vice versa. “I hate those rock stars or any artist who goes, ‘Well, there’s me, and then there’s the character,’” he tells Crowe. “It’s you, man.”
Crowe remembers it well, with the kids playing and Jane cooking inside. That was the stuff of Life After Dark, with Petty letting his world bleed onto tape – even if he didn’t always want to explain it. “That was bold at the time, because you were supposed to have a persona that was bigger than life,” Crowe says. “He said, ‘I’m not bigger than life. Life is bigger than me, and I’m just a guy living my life.’ That showed in his later stuff.”
Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party is in cinemas globally on 20 October. Get tickets HERE.
“There was a lot of cruelty in the room sometimes…” Get the latest issue of MOJO to read the inside story of how fame, drugs and doubt pulled The Heartbreakers apart. More info and to order a copy HERE!
