Review: Expanded Vinyl Reissue of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' 'Long After Dark'

Because their videos were staples in the early days of MTV, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers always had a vague new-wave whiff, even though they were really sixties-rock revivalists in the jangly Byrds/Love mode. They actually embraced some specific semblance of new-waveyness when experimenting with synthesizers on their first post-MTV LP, Long After Dark. The video for the synth-laced "You Got Lucky' even had a sort of futuristic Mad Max-on-a-budget feel. However, the foundation of the track was pure Arthur Lee-toughness, and that barely compromised rock and roll attitude flushed through the rest of the album, too. 

Gestures toward eighties modernism weren't necessarily unwelcome, but it was the songs that made Long After Dark yet another fine album in an impressive succession that started with Damn the Torpedoes and continued striding through Hard Promises. Along with the snarling "You Got Lucky", there's the elegant "Straight Into Darkness", the strutting "Change of Heart", the yearning "Deliver Me", the searing "One Story Town", and a host of other strong songs. Although it rarely gets the recognition of the two albums that preceded it (apparently, Blender magazine awarded it one star—one star!—in a 2008 review), Long After Dark sounds a very worthy successor to my ears.

So I was happy to hear that Universal Music was reissuing it on vinyl with an extra LP's-worth of bonus material. That bonus disc features are a few performances recorded for French TV, including an acoustic reading of John Sebastian's "Stories We Could Tell", a song that would also find a place on the Pack Up the Plantation live album of 1985. There's are a couple of so-so outtakes called "Never Be You" and "One on One" and a couple of excellent ones called "Turning Point" and "Ways t Be Wicked", both of which had already appeared on 1995's Playback comp, but the latter is included here with its original drum track. The daffy "Heartbreakers Beach Party", in which TP promises a shindig complete with potato salad and mosquito repellant, were on that comp too, but in a truncated edit a minute shorter than the one on this new extended edition of Long After Dark. A sluggish cover of "Wild Thing" will make no one forget The Troggs, but it's still nice to have all this stuff, especially since there is so little song overlap between the bonus disc and the proper album.

As for the quality of that proper album's remastering and pressing, the music sounds significantly quieter and slightly less dynamic when played against my 1982 copy on Backstreet Records, but at least neither the highs nor the lows have been overheated. Overall, this new remaster of Long After Dark sounds clean and warm. Both vinyl discs are pressed flat, quietly, and with properly-centered spindle holes.