The Tom Petty album didn’t want to make again: “The record got a bad reputation”
Not every album is meant to stand the test of time. Someone looking to document their lives during one time period is always susceptible to having a few of their iconic tracks become dated as the years go on, whether it’s because of dated vernacular or trying to put too fine a point on something a bit too contemporary. And while Tom Petty was perfectly within his right not wanting to revisit The Last DJ again, it might be one of the most engaging listens that any rock star had ever made in the 2000s.
Granted, it was a miracle just to see Petty ready to kick ass and take names again, though. There had been some questions surrounding his health going into the making of Echo, and after losing Howie Epstein during the making of this record, it was bound to be a bit harsh listening to a man bruised and broken by the years.
But The Last DJ isn’t some wounded veteran; it’s a cry of anger. For the last few years, Petty had been looking around at where the music business was headed and didn’t like what he saw. A lot of rockstars were now being invented on game shows like American Idol, and for as great as their stories were, Petty thought that the age of artists with something real to say had started to become a thing of the past.
While it’s not really a concept album from skin to core, this album is still a damning critique of what Petty was seeing under the hood of the American music industry. ‘Joe’ was the kind of black humour from what is sure to be a greedy label CEO, while tracks like ‘Dreamville’ are beautiful snapshots of what small-town America looked like when it was still about the joy of hearing the chime of an electric guitar.
And from day one, Petty wasn’t looking to do anything less than go for the throat. He had already been the one who sued his own label and insisted that the price of albums stay within reach of his fans, so looking out for the little guy was just part of his daily routine at that point.
Still, he felt that The Last DJ may have had a bit too much social commentary than he intended to make, saying, “I don’t know a lot about the music business, but I knew there was enough metaphor there to write a sort of moral play and use it as the vehicle…But the record got a bad reputation. I don’t know if it’s something I’d do again, but I’m kind of glad I did it.”
Petty may have asked some hard questions, but it’s not like they didn’t demand some answers, either. If anything, the modern state of music is more or less a result of the kind of dark future that the heartland rocker predicted on this album, especially when describing the way that some manufactured pop stars get chewed up and spit out by the corporate machine and have nowhere to go afterwards.
But just like the final track ‘Can’t Stop the Sun’ implies, Petty wasn’t looking to go anywhere once he spoke his mind. The lawyers and suits may have been more than a little bit uncomfortable having this kind of record on their roster, but Petty knows that no matter what happens, artists should still be treated like people and not assembly-line figures that have been focus-group-tested before they hit primetime.
