The long-lost film showing why Tom Petty never backed down

Arson, heroin, bankruptcy… Cameron Crowe’s film Heartbreakers Beach Party offers raw insight to Petty’s struggles – and his resilience

In the film Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party, there is a scene in which Petty and director Cameron Crowe shoot the breeze in the singer’s home in Encino, California, at 2am. In a basement in which the songs from his then forthcoming album, Long After Dark, from 1982, had been written and demoed, the two men can be seen kneeling before a box containing a young lifetime of memories. With the possibility of drink having been taken, chuckling away, the pair unpack and discuss a selection of Petty’s singles, promotional photographs, rejection letters, and more. 
Not much from this scene still exists. Five years later, on the morning of May 17 1987, an arsonist, who the Los Angeles Police Department suspected had been monitoring the property for some time, burnt the house down. Tom Petty was eating breakfast at the time, with his wife and one of his children, when he smelled smoke. In what seemed like seconds, the windows had turned black as fire consumed the wooden building. Ushering his loved ones into the swimming pool in the back garden, the then 37-year-old attempted to extinguish the blaze with a hose that melted in his hands. 
“I crawled under the smoke, got out through an open door, and at that point I saw my housekeeper was standing about 50 feet away from me with a hose,” he recalled in the book Conversations With Tom Petty. “And she caught fire. Her head caught fire. Her hair went up. And I yelled at her, ‘You’re on fire!’ And she took the hose and put it on her head, which actually saved her… Literally everything I owned was burned. I think there was one little corner of the house that didn’t burn. Luckily, it had a couple of guitars and stuff there. That was about all that didn’t burn.”
That fate would rob Petty of everything save for the instrument with which he earned his living is a snug metaphor, not only for his exalted career, but for Heartbreakers Beach Party, too. Shot during the making of Long After Dark and its subsequent world tour, the film was originally screened by MTV, in 1983, only once. Along with 20 minutes’ worth of bonus footage, its release in cinemas this week for two nights only (October 17 and 20), is the first time its reels have been seen by the public in more than four decades. 
With Petty himself as the blonde-haired, tombstone-toothed all-American boy, the film is a paean to the joy of good fortune, the swagger of youth and the majesty of rock and roll. “Back then, we were a gang,” reflects Mike Campbell, the Heartbreakers’ lead guitarist. With its participants dressed in leather jackets and classic sunglasses, the grainy aesthetic lends the picture a carefree and timeless quality. 
The travails of the music industry, in the form of a heroin addiction that would bedevil Petty and extinguish the life of bassist Howie Epstein, in 2003, lurk with menace in an unseen future. Until then, though, it’s boys on a bus having nothing but fun. It’s party time all the time. 
Naturally, the music, too, carries an air of immortality. “It just comes naturally to me,” Petty says of the songs that seemed to fall from his fingers without effort until his death in 2017. The sight and sound of the band working up material from Long After Dark, with producer Jimmy Iovine at the Record Plant, in West Hollywood, is an exercise in organic rock and roll during a time when many artists were leaning into reverb and synthesizer-heavy production techniques that would date their music within the space of about five minutes. Not here, though; for 90 minutes, the worst aspects of the 1980s are absent from every frame. 
It sure looks like a charmed life. No bedtimes, no “proper jobs”, no uptight types telling the boys what they can and cannot do. There’s cigarette smoke, cold beer, and an evident delight at every aspect of the rock and roll lifestyle. As a tour bus transports its passengers through a sun-scorched landscape of desert and shrub, at 7.30 in the morning, with evident delight Petty plays a song to camera on a rosewood acoustic guitar. “I’m stupid,” he sings. “I’ve been stupid since the day I was born. Yeah, I’m a dumbass, baby, I’m stupid, right on.” (In keeping with this theme, it might have helped if someone involved in the production of Heartbreakers Beach Party had noticed that the title could use an apostrophe.) 
Fine, but decades-long careers in this game don’t happen by accident. Petty’s initial fixation with music may have been born of happenstance – after meeting Elvis Presley on the set of the appropriately titled 1961 film Follow That Dream, as an 11-year-old, he immediately swapped his slingshot for a stack of The King’s seven-inch singles – but everything that followed was the result of a tenacious and singular vision. Never mind the waterfall fluency of songs such as American Girl and The Waiting, in matters relating to business, there was always a fight to be had. As Crowe’s film makes clear in its substantive asides, when it came to scrapping for his due, Petty could duke it out with the best of them. 
After extricating himself from a financially disadvantageous royalty arrangement, Petty came out swinging once again when his record label, Shelter, was scooped up by the Music Corporation of America. In refusing to align to a new company without first giving his consent, in a drastic move, instead he filed for bankruptcy. As MCA launched a lawsuit, at the recording studio in LA at which Petty and the Heartbreakers were recording their third album, 1979’s Damn The Torpedoes, the musicians began mislabelling cans of tape they feared would soon be seized by marshals. 
“We had a really bad record deal,” he explained to the author Paul Zollo. “And we felt we’d had a little bit of good luck with the first two records, and we deserved a better deal. They didn’t see it that way, of course, so I had to dig my heels in and refuse to work if they wouldn’t make me a better deal. They also owned all my publishing, which I didn’t think was fair because when the deal was made, I didn’t even know what publishing was. So a fast one had been pulled on me, and I wanted to make it right.”
He went on. “That problem took five or six months of digging my heels in, kind of a Mexican standoff. We even did this tour called ‘Why MCA’. Because they sued me, and it went on for a while. But in the end it worked out.” It certainly did, but in the strangest of ways. The dispute was settled when Petty signed with Backstreet, a new label with preferable personnel owned by – you guessed it – MCA. 
He wasn’t done there, either. After discovering that his new paymasters planned to increase their record prices, from $8.98 to $9.98, Petty was pictured on the cover of Rolling Stone tearing a dollar bill in half. Despite inspiring Mick Jagger – not always the greatest champion of low prices – to privately insist that the Rolling Stones LP Emotional Rescue should also be sold at two cents shy of nine bucks, Petty was the only artist to speak publicly on the matter. As ever, his fists were raised. Had he not won this latest battle with MCA, the triple-platinum Damn the Torpedoes would have been titled $8.98. 
“That was quite a struggle,” he once said. “That caused me quite a lot of pain. Because I didn’t have a line of artists backing me up. It seems to me that, maybe if they’d listened to me, then things wouldn’t have been as bad as they became. I could see then that you can’t price this music out of reach of the common person. That’s who your audience is. I really didn’t want it hung on me…. [But] the strange thing is, I not only got away with it somehow, but it really did hold prices down for years. Which I was really proud of. It was years before they could really do it, before they could get away with it.”
Years later, long after the record and concert industries had got away with it, Petty was still fighting the good fight. Released in 2002, The Last DJ album contains the track Money Becomes King, in which a once vibrant rocker raises his ticket prices to the point at which his core audience is exiled to the nosebleeds while losing the quality that made him special in the first place. Assuming the identity of a disenfranchised narrator, Petty sings of a rich but jaded sell-out who “rocked that golden circle, and all those VIPs, and that music that had freed us, became a tired routine”. 
Because Petty’s visits to the UK were so infrequent, I’m pleased to report that the outrageous chunk of money I once paid to an online touting service to see him play was well worth it. Seated in the stalls of the Royal Albert Hall, in the summer of 2012, I could only grip myself with excitement as Petty opened his account with Listen To Her Heart. “You think you’re going to take her away, with your money and your cocaine,” he sang of a man who had no chance in hell of stealing his gal. Straight away, I’d got what I’d come to savour: fluent and apparently effortless rock and roll from a man who’d take your face off if provoked. 
Best of all, I think, was the time he did this on behalf of his country. Broadcast just 10 days after the fall of the Twin Towers, 2001’s America: A Tribute To Heroes television concert featured a host of artists in sombre and contemplative mood. U2 sang Peace On Earth, Billy Joel performed New York State Of Mind, while Jon Bon Jovi unfurled an acoustic rendition of Livin’ On A Prayer. 
Going against the grain, though, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers chose to play a smash hit single from his blockbusting solo album Full Moon Fever. Staring straight at the camera, its message was unequivocal, not only for the night itself but for his life in general. “You can stand me up at the gates of Hell but I won’t back down,” Petty sang. 
Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party is in cinemas on October 17 and 20
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