US Festival '82, Glen Helen Regional Park, San Bernardino, CA, 9-4-1982 - Day 2, Part 6: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

The sixth act presented here from Day Two of the 1982 US Festival is a set by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers.

I can't believe how lucky I am to be posting this, the complete set from this band, which is probably the first time it has been made publicly available anywhere. I was minutes from posting a 55-minute-long version when I got lucky. You see, when I originally searched the Internet for music from this festival, all I could find was that 55-minute-long version, which consisted of the second half of what is here (from track 104 to the end). But I figured there almost certainly had to be more, since Petty was the big closing act of Day Two and it would have been odd if his set was less than an hour long, meaning it was shorter than nearly all the other sets from the festival. Also, I'd found a mention of one song performed that I didn't have ("The Waiting"). So, while writing my write-up just before posting the album, I thought I'd do one last search for a more complete set list, at least.

To my surprise, I found a Reddit post I'd previously missed that not only gave the full set list, but had links to YouTube videos of ALL the songs I'd missed! It turns out that, back in 2018, the official Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers YouTube page posted videos of all the songs from the never bootlegged first half of this set, but none from the commonly bootlegged second half. It was almost like they knew which songs were available and only posted the missing ones. 

But, in a twist, none of the posted videos were labeled as from the 1982 US Festival. No source info was given at all. Apparently, years went by with hardly anyone noticing the missing portion of the set actually was available. But those videos are still on YouTube, and if you closely compare these videos with the video of the second half of the concert, one can tell they're all from the same concert, due to the clothes Petty and his band members are wearing. Plus, there are occasional shots of the massive nighttime crowd of 200,000 people, apparently the largest crowd by far that the band ever played for, or would ever play for.

So I was pretty psyched to find the length of this set had doubled with those newly discovered songs. Adding to the good news, the second half I was already aware of had great sound quality, but this newly discovered first half sounded just as good. (It seems they're all different pieces of the same film footage.) Now, the entire thing can be heard with sound quality just as good as a typical official live album

That's what I'm presenting here, the full set. I would think this immediately has to become of the best and most important Petty concert recordings that is publicly available, because it's a great recording of a great performance of one of the band's most important shows in their long career, performed in front of their biggest ever crowd. 

However, note that I've previously had lots of trouble with copyright issues when it comes to Petty's music. I'm sticking my neck out to post this, and I'll probably get in trouble for it. So get it while you can!

Note that the YouTube videos of the first half of the concert did have some problems. Namely, they consisted of the full songs, but little else. In a few cases, there was some banter by Petty that was included too, but those were just brief comments directly relating to the song just played or about to be played. I think it's pretty likely there was more general banter that got cut out. The reason I think this is because most of the applause at the ends of songs got cut out too. Even the start of the first song, "American Girl," got cut out, and I patched in a few seconds from a different 1982 live version to fix that. 

There was nothing I could do about any missing banter. But for the missing applause after each song, I found bits of cheering from the second half of the concert and patched those in so there would be a normal amount of cheering after each song. And I edited it all carefully so it sounds like one continuous recording, instead of having fade-ins and fade-outs between all the songs in the first half. (Thankfully, the second half comes from one continuous video, so there wasn't anything missing there.) 

On top of that editing, I made some other edits to improve the sound quality. Petty's voice was a bit low in the mix, so I fixed that with the UVR5 editing program. And sometimes there was too much crowd noise during the songs, so I reduced that with the MVSEP editing program. I think the final result sounds great. This is a must-have for any Tom Petty fan!

Now, let me address the song selections here. At the time of this festival, the band was close to releasing their next album, "Long After Dark." But that wouldn't come out for two more months, at the very start of November 1982. Despite that fact, the band played two songs that would appear on that album, "You Got Lucky" and "A One Story Town." The also played four cover songs that hadn't appeared on any of their albums at the time: "I'm in Love," "Louie, Louie," "Shout," and "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star." Furthermore, they played every original hit the band had had by that point, plus some deeper album tracks. 

As an aside, not long before this concert, the bass player for the Heartbreakers, Ron Blair, quit due to burnout. He was replaced by Howie Epstein. Epstein's first concert with the band was on September 1, 1982, making this his second concert with the band. He would stay with the band until 2002, when he would be replaced by Blair again.

Oh, and there's one little bit at the end that amused me. In my post about the Kinks set earlier on Day Two, I told a story about a big dispute between the Kinks and promoter Bill Graham, who helped organize this festival. At the end of this set, you can hear Graham thanking all the bands who performed that day. When he gets to the Kinks, there is a veeeeeery long pause before he decides to mention their name.

This album is an hour and 37 minutes long.

91 American Girl (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
92 Listen to Her Heart (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
93 A Thing about You (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
94 talk (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
95 Here Comes My Girl (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
96 talk (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
97 The Waiting (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
98 I Need to Know (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
99 I'm in Love (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
100 Don't Do Me like That (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
101 Louie, Louie (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
102 talk (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
103 You Got Lucky (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
104 A One Story Town (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
105 A Woman in Love (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
106 talk (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
107 Kings Road (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
108 Breakdown (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
109 Refugee (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
110 talk (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
111 Shout (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
112 talk (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
113 So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
114 talk (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
115 Even the Losers (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)
116 talk (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers)

https://www.imagenetz.de/duouD

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/tbosTewJ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/yRPx88413Y2ooH1/file

The cover photo comes from this exact concert.