New box set celebrates Tom Petty
Collection features 60 songs, ranging from Heartbreakers hits to unreleased tracks
Adria Petty opens her laptop and shares with a visitor home movie footage that her father shot in 1980. Her face lights up as the video and film director takes in the shaky camera work, projecting childlike joy at how much fun her rock & roll star dad, Tom Petty, was having on tour that year.
Adria, 44, discovered the footage – which she edited into a new video for the previously unreleased song “Keep A Little Soul” – while going through her dad’s effects after his death October 2 at age 66. The song appears on a forthcoming four-disc box set mining her dad’s considerable trove of archival recordings, photos and memorabilia that have gone into Tom Petty – An American Treasure, scheduled for release September 28.
In the nearly four-decade-old Super 8mm film, Petty, then 28 and basking in the acclaim from his breakthrough third album Damn the Torpedoes, is clearly in great spirits as he revels in the rough-and-tumble glories of the life on the road, something he’d only dreamed of as a scrawny kid in Gainesville, Florida. He’s clowning around some inglorious hotel room, getting shots of himself in the bathroom mirror, then turning the camera on his Heartbreakers bandmates goofing off on a hotel balcony.
Adria then makes a confession.
The abruptness of his death shocked millions of music fans, but that says nothing of the seismic quake it represented for his family, friends and band mates.
“When my dad died and everybody was in this really hopeless place, I listened to Tom Petty Radio a lot, which I didn’t do before,” she said, referring to the channel on SiriusXM satellite radio that premiered in 2015 and features a 24/7 playlist packed with the music of Petty, the Heartbreakers, the Traveling Wilburys rock superstar juggernaut and other Petty-adjacent rock, folk and blues records the show’s namesake loved.
“Besides having the DNA, as a layman, I’m also just a huge fan, and I always had a lot of respect and awe for my dad’s craft and his authenticity,” she said at the kitchen table of the house in Venice, Californion, she’s just about to vacate to move to New York.
“So I would listen to Tom Petty radio and they would say ‘Tom Petty, American treasure.’ I would hear these fans calling in, and I’d be crying on my way back home,” she said. “I started thinking about what an American treasure he was as a songwriter. There was so much of the catalog that people didn’t hear in those concerts for the last 20 years that spoke to who my dad was.”
She says “Have Love Will Travel” and “Keeping Me Alive,” recorded about two decades apart and which appear on An American Treasure, are works that capture the “energy of my dad just sitting and strumming his guitar.”
She adds, “When he died, I realized how many conversations we had when he was just sitting in there strumming his guitar.”
All told, An American Treasure encompasses 60 tracks, from cornerstone hits including “Breakdown,” “Refugee,” “Listen To Her Heart,” “Free Fallin,’” “I Won’t Back Down,” “Louisiana Rain” and “Anything That’s Rock & Roll” to never-released songs such as “Keep A Little Soul,” “Gainesville,” “Bus to Tampa Bay,” “Two Men Talking” and “Lonesome Dave.” The new set duplicates just one track – a demo recording of “The Apartment Song” – from the 92-track, six-CD Petty box set Playback from 1995.
In compiling the set, Adria worked with her stepmother, Dana Petty, guitarist-songwriter Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench, founding members of the Heartbreakers, and longtime Petty recording engineer Ryan Ulyate.
“We just want to share his brilliance with everyone,” Campbell said. “The stuff that’s left off the records is so good, and I think he would be proud to have these things come out and have people experience them. He wrote them. Some of them were finished, some weren’t. He would have liked them to have been heard.”
THE SET also includes a smattering of tracks by Mudcrutch, Petty’s early-’70s Florida band that preceded and included core members of the Heartbreakers. That group reunited in 2008 and has since released two studio albums and done a couple of tours.
“American Treasure came about because I was sitting around with a bunch of people and we were all lost in this pretty deep hole,” Adria said. “I was talking to Mike and Ben, kind of begging them about ‘How do we carry on without my dad being the creative voice who makes decisions? How do we get familiar with what’s not been released and begin to take in 40 years or more of a life?’”
What to include and what to leave off wasn’t always an easy choice. “We argued a lot,” Campbell said. “Really – a lot.”
To help ease their own pain, and that of legions of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers fans, the An American Treasure organizing quintet eventually settled on 60 tracks, many of them studio recordings never previously released. There are also dozens of live performances and alternate takes of classic songs and deep cuts, some framed with the chatter among musicians before and after recorded takes.
For Adria, the goal was personal – not to remind the world of her father’s more than two dozen singles that made the Billboard Top 100 or 10 Top 10 albums, among 20 that Petty placed on the Billboard 200 Albums chart over four decades.
“My dad wasn’t a walking anthem,” she said. “I started to think of my dad as being at one with his Dove guitar, writing songs all the time.
“I really wanted this to highlight him as a songwriter,” she said. “I want fans to know what it was like for me, hearing him strumming his guitar down the hall, working on a song, and then hearing that song being finished and recorded.”
She’s describing a process that Petty himself said never grew old.
“I compare songwriting to fishing: There’s either a fish in the boat, or there’s not,” Petty said in that final interview, in which he expressed enthusiasm about various future projects.
“Sometimes you come home, and you didn’t catch anything, and sometimes you caught a huge fish,” he said. “That was the work part of it to me. To play live was fairly easy. That’s simplifying things a lot, but that part of it didn’t seem as challenging to me as coming up with a song.
“It’s all about songs. If I look back at it, I just think about I always had to write another song. We always needed another hit song. In those days, that’s how it worked; you brought out a song for the radio. And I got pretty good at that. I would just always be writing.
“It’s kind of a lonely work. Because you just have to keep your pole in the water. I always had a little routine of going into whatever room I was using at the time to write in and just staying in there till I felt like I got a bite.”
The new box is a testament to that work ethic. Campbell, Tench, Ulyate, Dana and Adria Petty stress that the unreleased material is anything but rejects. At various points in separate interviews, all marveled at one track or another that had never seen the light of day.
“Our criteria,” Campbell said, “is that Tom was sitting here with us. Would he approve of this or not? And a lot of times, you’d go, ‘He wouldn’t like this stuff. He wouldn’t want anybody to hear this.’
“But the other stuff, I think if he was here, he’d say, ‘There was some validity to it, I’m proud of that, and it should be here.’ So we always kept him right by our side through this whole process.”
Tench concluded, “It’s been good for me to go through and hear this stuff. It’s validating, it keeps it alive. A friend of mine said, when my mother passed away, that people pass away, but the love doesn’t leave. This whole thing has been proof of that to me. And the music is an aspect of the love, and the music does not leave.”