The album Tom Petty used to insult his label
The music business is not exactly the greatest place for any creative artist. As much as people might like to see it as a massive environment that breeds the best in their talent, it’s still a business at the end of the day, and the greatest bands in the world always have to deal with the higher-ups breathing down their necks, waiting for them to strike gold on their own. Tom Petty was never one to flatter his label, though, and The Last DJ was the first time he got the chance to tell them how he really felt.
By the end of the 1990s, there was a good chance that no label was going to give Petty any trouble ever again. After a fierce bidding war after Petty wanted off of MCA Records, he eventually settled with Rick Rubin on Warner Bros, where he proceeded to make some of the most interesting music of his later years, like Wildflowers.
Although Petty was having the time of his life when working on the record, everything caved in when he began toiling on Echo. Reflecting on his frail state of mind after divorcing his wife, Petty was not looking on the bright side, with the LP featuring many pieces either pleading for some type of love or trying his best to keep a level head through it all.
Once he found himself on stable ground with his new wife, Dana, Petty went into the studio for The Last DJ with another target on his mind: corporate pigs. From the title track alone, he was ready to go to war with all of the suits that he had seen who wanted nothing but the next product instead of nurturing their artists.
While the album was intended to be a concept record at first, half of the story-driven tracks would be shelved for more radio-friendly fodder, like the jaunty romp ‘You and Me’ or the beautiful love song ‘Like A Diamond’. On the other side, Petty doesn’t hold anything back in terms of how he feels about the scumbags of the industry.
Of all the songs Petty ever wrote about being jerked around, ‘Joe’ may be his most scathing indictment of his business partners. Taking on the role of a corrupt music executive, Petty talks about prostituting artists for all they’re worth, thinking that the real music comes from those who are willing to sell out their artistry by doing whatever the label says.
While the musicians of the world may have liked Petty for calling out the industry, writing a whole album for a label talking about how they are shitheads wasn’t going to earn him any favours. When showing them the tracks, Petty remembered his higher-ups being shocked at first, telling Runnin’ Down a Dream, “When I played it for them, you could have heard a pin drop. And after a few seconds, one of them sheepishly speaks up and says, ‘Well, that’s not about us is it?’”.
Even though the album is seen as one of the lower lights in Petty’s catalogue, he did make some decent points about where the industry would be going. Although Petty entered the age of streaming and the death of the CD with ease in the 2010s, the idyllic childhood that he spoke about in a song like ‘Dreamville’ is forever a thing of the past.
