Tom Petty’s ‘Long After Dark’ Gets a New Day in the Sun: Adria Petty on Curating the Deluxe Reissue and Sensitively Mining Dad’s Vault

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ 1982 “Long After Dark” album probably doesn’t count as one of the band’s “tentpole albums,” in terms of being one of their biggest blockbusters, or a seismic shift in direction — but it’s also a record that probably no real fan would want to do without. Tom Petty in so-called maintenance mode beats almost anyone else reinventing the wheel. And the sound of him writing and recording great rock songs on the crest of his band’s initial wave of success is, album title notwithstanding, a sunny place to revisit.

To that end, there’s a new deluxe reissue of “Long After Dark” that contains a bonus LP’s or CD’s worth of additional tracks, including several previously unheard studio takes that Petty seriously considered putting on the original album. Adria Petty, Tom’s eldest daughter, has taken the lead in steering archival projects like this one toward release, working closely with Petty producer-engineer-vaultkeeper Ryan Ulyate and the two mainstays of the Heartbreakers from start to finish, guitarist Mike Campell and keyboard player Benmont Tench. With this release, they’re again fulfilling a mission that Tom Petty inadvertantly coined in one of the outtake titles here: “Keeping Me Alive.”

Fans agree that Adria has proven to be a thoughtful and eloquent keeper of the legacy. In a conversation with Variety, she finds the balance between noting that some real keepers got left on the cutting-room floor of the “Long After Dark” sessions, while not overstating that as any tragedy, making the case that the Jimmy Iovine-produced project (his last with the band) may have come out in the form that best suited it at the time. She also discusses what has become apparent with this release — that there will not be a one-size-fits-all approach to deluxe reissues, and some, like this one, will get less expansive, more budget-friendly packages than others. Adria also gets into the joy of resurrecting, with Cameron Crowe, the long-lost “Heartbreakers Beach Party” documentary that played last weekend in theaters. (See our earlier interview with Crowe about that here.)

Any one archival project is going to be welcome unto itself, but it must add an extra layer of fun for you to be putting out a deluxe edition of one of his seminal records and have had a movie in the vault from the same time frame to put out along with it. “Long After Dark” is unique in that regard.

I’m excited because this is a project we delight in. We’re doing it for delight, you know. Opening the ’82-83 archive with, first, the discovery of some film that was decaying, and then realizing it was attached to Cameron’s film, restoring that film and then peeking into the music archive and realizing how rich it was, as well… it was done out of pure dorky fandom by me and Cameron late last year, and turned into what you see before you.

Was resurrecting Cameron’s film something that was on your mind for a while, and you were thinking we need to find the right time to do that, or was it even hovering on your radar?

No, it wasn’t. We have this great archivist that’s been testing film for vinegar syndrome, and she found a bunch of the raw film reels for “Heartbreakers Beach Party,” which we didn’t realize we had in our position. They weren’t labeled. We took them to Cameron and we got really excited about restoring his film, and then we thought maybe we should put a record out with it. What do we have from this era? And we found an incredible trove of unreleased material and important material, of ongs he had written for other people and things like that during that time, and it felt like a really good and fun thing to work on.

But it’s also something from a disillusioned era, like the one we’re sitting in right now, where there’s a little bit of a need to just accept: Yeah, it is a little dark in here right now, but we’re gonna be all right, and we’re gonna get to the other side. The good times are not over, and we take seriously what we see around us and we live with hope. And something about the record and the movie, looking at all of it… and just those lyrics from “Straight Into Darkness,” I think for me and Cameron, the “I don’t believe the good times are over” line… You know, something about it felt so good for right this second. And it has been one of the most easy and fun projects that we’ve done at the estate, to be honest with you. Really joyful.

How difficult is it to decide to know how big or extensive a project to do when you’re approaching an archival project? Every fan hopes that every album from the catalog will get some kind of deluxe treatment at some point. And not everything necessarily merits a “Wildflowers”-sized super-deluxe compilation. So when you are deciding how big to make a project, do you look at either how popular the album is, or how much material there is in the vault?

I mean, the ultimate point of releasing anything at all is to elevate what’s already there and not ruin it. And to do a great service to dad and the Heartbreakers and what’s in their archive… You know, he died at 66, so he didn’t have time to reflect on his old work. He was still making new work. He was thinking definitely about winding down and starting to do this work, but he hadn’t even begun to contemplate it, and he knew there was a lot of stuff that he needed to go back through in the archive. Our job is to make sure we don’t leave him in a place where that work is undone. With some other artists that I know of, who got cancer or something, they would tell their spouse, “There are these projects left in the archive,” or they would leave instructions. For me, the instructions really are the critical voice that my dad has in my head — about how to listen to music, how he would sequence his records, how he would present us his records when he felt they were done or close to it.

There is a dialogue, from the sequencing process to the marketing process, that is humble and pure and fan-driven. And so each record has to meet a dad standard, and it has to be something the fans will truly enjoy. It can’t be a rehash. It can’t be a third take. It needs to be something of merit and quality that lives with the rest of the quality Tom determined for himself. So that’s how we decide the size of it: that the quality level is there, and it’s not gonna be a rip-off. It’s not something that you’ve had already come out four years ago, or even 20 years ago. It’s something that really deserves to be a release that can be physically treasured.

With this one in particular, I felt like we had been pushed to do so many larger deluxe configurations — and those often pay for doing better consumer configurations. But with this one, I really felt like, even though we had about 40 minutes of additional music, I wanted to make it very accessible, financially — just because I think “Long After Dark” needs to be discovered, and I would rather it be discovered than be deluxed out. If it had another half-hour of (top-quality studio) music, it probably would’ve been a bigger set, but it didn’t.

I’ve got my own favorite bonus tracks on this deluxe edition. Do you have yours?

Great. Well, tell me what those are. I’m dying to know.

I always love getting the hear the original versions of songs that an artist ultimately decided to farm out to someone else, rather than release himself. That’s the case here with “Ways to Be Wicked,” which became Lone Justice’s debut single, and “Never Be You,” which became a solo Maria McKee “Streets of Fire” soundtrack cut, and “Keeping Me Alive,” which became an excellent Williams Brothers album track.

With “Keeping Me Alive,” you could tell he felt that should have been on the record. … That stuff that was left off is an important part of who he was at that time, in terms of an identity. And I think what ended up on the record was more of a dark slice of who that identity was at that time.

Tom is quoted in the liner notes as saying at a later point that this album felt like “treading water” a little bit, albeit “a good little rock and roll record.” Do you think that there was an attempt to have some kind of a through line, or a streamlining of the sound, that led to some of the songs being on the cutting room floor? It seems like some of the more light-hearted stuff didn’t make the cut, and there was a suggestion that Jimmy Iovine was maybe not as much into the songs Tom was writing that had a country-er sound.

I mean, look, Jimmy, Iovine is such an intelligent guy. He’s so impressive to me, the more I talk to him now, when I’m asking him about a little gold record that he did in these years. Even this record might have been somebody else’s greatest achievement, and it’s like a small achievement for Jimmy. But he does have a mural of the “You Got Lucky” music video on his wall in his house. And I think has fond feelings about how he sequenced this record, and its sort of identity and ethos in the Reagan/coked-out ‘82 of Los Angeles. I think most people with the top down had this record playing that year, you know? So it’s not like it wasn’t a successful vision he had as a producer, with the band, that was very successful at the time.

I think in retrospect, when you had this master songwriter and master band recording with him, that there’s a more extensive vision for the record that Tom was speaking about in “Running Down a Dream” (Peter Bogdanovich’s Petty documentary). And it was noted by him in our archives a few times that he felt there were four or five songs that should have been on there. Two of them were “Keeping Me Alive” and “Turning Point,” but what the others were beyond those, I don’t know.

In retrospect, is there a better album there than the one everybody got? I don’t think so. I don’t think that there’s an easy-to-sequence record where you cram those four songs in and the record makes sense. I also know that there’s a couple of stranger songs that at the time they thought were the big songs (instead of what became the actual hits) — I can’t remember which song it was; maybe it was “The Same Old You.”

So it’s really the benefit of hindsight that we’re looking at it with. And I could never guess how to sequence a record better than Tom and Jimmy. But I think that when you look back at the archive at the body of work that was recorded — not a finished record, but an archive full of songs — there’s something very rich there that you might playlist with other records. Like, “Keeping Me Alive” and “Turning Point” might be things that feel better with “No Second Thoughts” [from the earlier “You’re Gonna Get It” album] or “Wildflowers” [which came a decade later] and other acoustic-driven music.

“Long After Dark” still feels like a pretty straightforward rock album compared to what came next, “Southern Accents,” where he was getting more conceptual about things in certain ways and experimenting more with different musical approaches. So it might be a little bit of the end of an era, or the close of the Heartbreakers’ first act. And certainly Cameron’s film, too, captures the band just being a band on the road, toward the end of that initial blast of energy that was still happening for the group, even quite a few years in.

Yeah, they’re still on the road. They’re still young. They have young kids, and they’re with their hometown girlfriends or the girls that they met shortly after they got to L.A. And I think everybody can still drink. Everybody can still do a little drugs. Everybody can still be a little crazy. Everybody can go on the road for four months or whatever. Do you know what I mean? Like, the drummer’s got porn on his music stand [in Crowe’s film]! Do you know what I mean? They have not quite reached adulthood. Tom might have. But as a group, they have not fully reached that adulthood that they would reach. It’s just amazing to see them still in this post-“Damn the Torpedoes”/”Hard Promises” mode.

And I think you’re right, they changed out of that mode. They’re really trying to figure out how to be them, but not be a packaged them. And I think that it all kind of fell apart a little bit for a few years before it fell back together. They had been a band for seven years at that point, and had a lot of hits, so they toured those hits for a few more years while they were working themselves out, I think, with, “Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough)” or “Southern Accents” or something like that. Those records feel a little lost sometimes when I look at them, but I might go back and open the archive and see something totally different. You know, I felt that way a little bit about this one before cracking it open. But, yeah, it’s definitely the end of an era with them, I think, with this record.

There is a path through all these things that can only be viewed in hindsight, and it can feel fortunate that there was as much directionality as there was, amid the things that happen more haphazardly.

I often think, looking at dad’s work and the archives that we open, about what it’s like if you’re a musician or a writer and you’re thinking, “How do I even get started? How do I get the stuff out? How do I write it down? How do I get it to my band? How do I get this done?” Our archives are such a roadmap for actually being an autodidact and doing that. You know, my dad was so incredibly brave to take responsibility for this whole band and all these people for so long, and to always have a plan, you know? I think for all of us, the greatest loss is that we don’t have this leader, this person to look up to or to seek approval from. Because he was, as Benmont said, a benevolent dictator. We all really looked to him to tell us what to do. But he left a lot of instructions behind if you dig around.

This was an era in which you could see him and the band taking themselves very seriously with the music but also, in the film, being a little goofy.

It’s very interesting to see my dad, with this very weird Cameron Crowe movie with the most misleading title ever, to market something as a beach party! You know, that’s so unhip. I love that he thought the whole world would understand that reference to “Beach Blanket Bingo” — and, like, we’re still trying to explain it 30, 40 years later! He was just doing all of this sort of un-marketing marketing, like, “Hey, we’ll be cowboys in space.” It’s amazing to see how effective it was, his flights of fancy with how to deliver his music to the world or how to explain or present it.

In the epilogue to Cameron’s movie where you introduce outtakes, you remark to Cameron that there weren’t a lot of times where your father actually sat down and relaxed with someone at length, talking on the record.

No, so it still holds kind of a special place because of that. For Tom to give more than an hour-long interview to someone and consistently give them access to his home and his life and his band, that never happened again. I mean, during “Full Moon Fever,” there was a lot of promo and a lot of stuff like that, but it would always be very controlled. This was not controlled at all.

As far as the overall scope of what you have in mind for the catalog, people always are hopeful that, one by one, you’ll get around to commemorating every album with deluxe editions. I think some fans sort of think, “I hope I live long enough that they go through the whole catalog.”

Well, I mean, I don’t know if we’ll do the whole catalog. I think that, because I’m 50, I don’t have that much time, that I can do all 40 years of the Heartbreakers. But I think we’ll get around to a lot of it. My focus is definitely on the things that are real troves, like this — real windows into the work that need to be preserved, and finding where there’s important work that hasn’t been seen, and while Mike and Ben are still alive to tell me if they want it out there or not. And obviously the more tentpole records we’ll definitely get out at some point.

But what we’re really gonna do, ultimately, is just try to keep the spirit of the Wonka factory alive. You know, we want to run a good business with good ethical character, with happy people inside of it, and keep putting good energy out into the world with Tom’s music and do it the way that he liked us to do it. So I think that with that quality being the standard bearer, you’ll see a lot from us, but it will be stuff that meets the standards he set for us. So that’s always challenging.