Sunday Cinema | Tom Petty & Heartbreakers NYE 1978

Here’s good news for Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers’ fans -the iconic group is about to announce an extensive North American tour and reveal details of the new Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers album, Hypnotic Eye. The band already has festival dates set for Outside Lands in San Francisco and for the Lockn’ Festival in Virginia, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to figure the tour will take place in the late summer. For today’s Sunday Cinema column, we want to look back at one of the most important shows in the band’s history.

In 1978 Petty and the Heartbreakers were riding a huge wave of success brought on by their first two albums and were about to blow up the next year after the release of Damn The Torpedos. The band celebrated the end of 1978 and the beginning of 1979 with a three-show New Year’s run that culminated on the 31st at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, CA. Just one day earlier the Heartbreakers were the second-to-last band to headline the famous Winterland in San Francisco before the Grateful Dead closed out the historic venue on New Year’s Eve. Petty’s performance in Santa Monica, which is real close to the group’s adopted hometown of Los Angeles, was stuffed with the best songs off the Heartbreakers’ first two albums and provides an incredible snapshot of just where the group was at that moment in time.

The show was filmed for a television broadcast, which never happened, and an hour’s worth of pro-shot footage was finally released a few years back. In addition to the many tunes from 1976’s Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and 1978’s You’re Gonna Get It! performed in Santa Monica are an early version of “Refugee” laid down before the band recorded the song in the studio and a celebratory cover of The Isley Brothers’ “Shout” just after the start of 1979. Let’s check it out:

1. Intro
2. I Need to Know
3. Surrender
4. Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It)
5. Casa Dega
6. Refugee
7. You’re Gonna Get It
8. Mystery Man
9. American Girl
10. Breakdown
11. Too Much Ain’t Enough
12. New Year’s Announcement
13. Shout (The Isley Brothers cover)