Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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Baby boomers are a nostalgic lot. Don’t you remember that 1982 album by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers called “Long After Dark”? Their 5th album, it contained “You Got Lucky” and “Change of Heart.”

Director Cameron Crowe – he gave us “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Almost Famous” – decided to do a documentary about the band. He called it “Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party.” While Crowe’s feature film debut was 1989’s “Say Anything,” this music documentary was actually his first foray as a director.

The documentary, about the making of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ album “Long After Dark,” only aired once on MTV in 1983. Then it got “lost.”
Now resurrected, the original 16mm reels have been re-mastered and re-released.

Over the course of his career, Petty sold more than 80 million records worldwide. His hit singles with the Heartbreakers include “Breakdown” (1976), “Don’t Do Me Like That” (1979), “Refugee” (1980), “The Waiting” (1981), “Don’t Come Around Here No More” (1985) and “Learning to Fly” (1991). Petty’s solo hits include “I Won’t Back Down” (1989), “Free Fallin’” (1989), and “You Don’t Know How It Feels” (1994).

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.

Petty died of a drug overdose in 2017, one week after the end of the Heartbreakers’ 40th Anniversary Tour.

Born in Gainesville, Florida, Thomas Earl Petty’s interest in rock and began at the age of ten when he met Elvis Presley (his uncle was working on the set of Presley’s film “Follow That Dream” in nearby Ocala).

“The minute I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show – and it’s true of thousands of guys –there was the way out. There was a way to do it. You get your friends and you’re a self-contained unit. And you make the music. And it looked like so much fun. It was something I identified with. I had never been hugely into sports … I had been a big fan of Elvis. But I really saw in the Beatles that here’s something I could do. I knew I could do it. It wasn’t long before there were groups springing up in garages all over the place.”

So here at summer’s end, enjoy a beach party with a true rocker.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com