When we first told you this past spring about the documentary Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free, people had the same immediate and universal reaction: “Great, but where can I see it?” It took quite a while to secure a distributor, but I think it was worth the wait, because YouTube has bought it and has made it accessible worldwide for FREE! In fact, you can watch the whole thing below for nothing more than a few 5 second interruptions during the course of the 90 minute film. You know the kind where you can skip ads in 5 seconds? Yep, that’s it!
| Cynically speaking, the film serves as a promotion vehicle for the re-release of Wildflowers with all of the deleted songs that had to be cut back in 1994 when the seminal album was released. But I don’t care, I love watching Petty docs. This one features unearthed and never seen 16mm film footage that captured TP and company, along with producer Rick Rubin, as they tried new tricks and a new approach to recording. Petty has called Wildflowers his best album, and that’s saying something. |
But the most interesting part of the film may be the present-day interviews with Rubin and Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, as they not only talk about the two year period from ’92 to ’94 during which the album was painstakingly crafted at a leisurely pace, but also talk about Petty’s own reflections on the work once it was out and into the world. Petty’s daughter, Adria Petty, provides an even more personal angle – reflecting on how one song’s lyrics tipped her off to the fact that her parents’ marriage would probably be ending after the album was finished. She was right. She’s also able to talk of her dad’s personal growth, going into therapy for the first time in his life, and what moving to Los Angeles meant to him. And as many TP-related things as I’ve seen, I don’t ever recall hearing this much from the affable Steve Ferrone, who famously replaced Stan Lynch as the Heartbreaker’s drummer, but here we see how that process played out. To me, the definitive Tom Petty documentary is the four-hour Runnin’ Down A Dream that Peter Bogdanovich directed and released in 2007. But as exhaustive as that film is in capturing the band’s trajectory, this new release has a lot that wasn’t available then. |
