Heartbreakers Beach Party

“I’d love to get old and keep hearing these songs on the radio.” - Tom Petty on how he’d define success

Growing up in the suburbs in the late 70s and into the 80s, the midnight movie was a salvation, a place where you could go and gather with your fellow weirdos. There was always Rocky Horror somewhere but a lot of those theaters also used to have the Saturday midnight rock and roll feature. There was a lot of Song Remains the Same and Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, both of which I hated with every fiber of my being, but being able to convince someone to go with you to one of those meant you had barter for later showings of The Kids Are Alright or The Last Waltz or Rock and Roll High School (although I am reasonably sure that never came to the suburbs and was something I saw at the 8th Street Playhouse, although apparently they couldn’t show the Ramones and the Who together because there was always some damage to the seats). It was something I could convince my parents to go see at the Ridgeway Theater or even in South Norwalk at the SoNo Cinema because it was local and it wasn’t a movie and I wasn’t crossing state lines and there was no alcohol involved? Who knows, I never questioned it or even thought about it too hard lest my brain waves jar the magic forces that convinced my parents to acquiesce and have them change their minds.

I thought about all of that today when I went to see a Sunday matinee showing of Heartbreakers Beach Party, an extended EPK (electronic press kit) that he directed (it’s his directorial debut!) and hosted which was apparently broadcast at 2am on MTV exactly once and never seen again. That means it wasn’t a true EPK because if it had been there would have been VHS tapes sent out and someone would have hung onto them (says the woman who has various EPKs in her attic from her time at Warner Bros.). But enough people saw it that it developed its own mythology and even though allegedly the tapes had been lost, they’ve been rediscovered and cleaned up and were screened in movie theaters twice this week. 

I’ll shatter the mythology: Heartbreakers Beach Party is live footage, footage of Cameron interviewing Tom (and sometimes the rest of the band), and outtakes from the “You Got Lucky” video shoot. It's not as amazing as the myth but it was also well worth the money to go see it in the theater. It’s 90 minutes plus an additional 30 minutes of additional outtakes, and I hope they’re going to release it because there is no reason for them to not let it just be out there. I would definitely watch it again and if I’d seen it on Thursday night I probably would have shown up today to catch what I missed.

It’s different to see rock and roll large on screen, it’s different to see it with other people in the room. This audience wasn’t as reactive as when I saw Stop Making Sense but it still had enough warmth and breath that it really dropped me back into the 80s when this was a thing I did with regularity, the only way you could see rock and roll on screen back then, the communal breath and uplift and elation, the quiet (or not so quiet) conversations between friends, the wisenheimer with shouted observations we all laughed at. 

What’s unique is that Heartbreakers Beach Party gets to exist in a vacuum. It wasn’t updated. It blissfully exists in the world of 1982, when it would be totally normal to drive around in a limousine smoking cigarettes and Stan Lynch has a music stand next to him in the studio with a girly mag open to the centerfold. (I was idly curious as to whether that was deliberate for some kind of inspiration or if that’s just what Stan Lynch was reading between takes. It could honestly be either, given what we know about him.) This is a world of record stores, of radio call-in shows, of headbands and spandex. I don’t ever want to be 22 again but man this was a time machine right back there. 

The focus on the video for “You Got Lucky” is delightful. Yes, it was the lead single for Long After Dark but this was when videos could be a huge thing and this one was very different than others because it wasn't a straight performance, it wasn't live footage, there was a treatment. I am sure it was some kind of MTV video premiere, the Blade Runner/Mad Max vibe of the thing was very culturally relevant at the time and even though you look at it now and it is as low budget as all get out, it was still fun and matched the image of the Heartbreakers as a band of brothers, the kind of rock and roll band camaraderie decades of reading Rolling Stone had codified as real and true.

TP in the top hat, Mike Campbell in the Bono Fly-esque shades (that weren’t Fly shades yet because we were a decade out from that era and probably came from Poseur, the beloved New Wave clothing store in LA whose catalogs were legend), the rest of the band rolling in on a motorcycle/sidecar setup which looks janky as hell, and when they take off at the end of the video you can clearly see Benmont Tench white-knuckling his grip for dear life. They’re showing the video in its entirety because it is the centerpiece of the promotional activities, and again, this film gets to exist in a vacuum, it gets to exist in a time where Tom Petty hasn’t died and we’re getting an inside, backstage look into an artist we love. That was magic. It always was.