The album Tom Petty wanted to play instead of his hits: “Just as satisfying”
Any band can get tired of playing the songs everybody wants to hear when they perform. The hits might pack the biggest punch when they play them live, but there’s no reason to think that they can’t either be improved in some way or discarded altogether after a few too many tours. Some songs deserved to be retired after a while, but Tom Petty was already a much different person than the punk kid who wrote songs like ‘American Girl’ when he reached the 2000s.
He had turned himself into one of the leading voices in Americana music, but there were also moments when he didn’t play nice with the record industry. The Last DJ introduced him to the 2000s market as a crotchety old man in some respects, but given the world that we live in now, where no one understands the value of music, it’s not like he didn’t have a fair point when talking about the horrors of the record industry.
Petty always prodded at the industry whenever he could, but it’s not like he didn’t know how to play the game, either. He wanted the chance to make mainstream rock and roll, and while many suits got in the way of that when he made his classics like Damn the Torpedoes, no one writes a song with as many hooks as ‘Refugee’ or ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’ and doesn’t expect it to get on the radio.
That’s because Petty always catered to his influences from the glory days of rock and roll, but those influences started to shift when he reached the 2010s. He had been indebted to everyone from The Beatles to The Byrds, but as he grew into his elder statesman phase, he was as much in tune with what the blues rockers of old were doing like old-school Fleetwood Mac and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and Mojo was the kind of seasoned record he needed to get out of his system.
Since the whole was a stripped-down bluesy affair, Petty even thought about not playing any of the band’s signature hits on the tour and catering to his bluesy tunes, saying, “If I wasn’t worrying about that at all, I probably wouldn’t play any! But I kind of feel a little obligated that people have gone through quite a bit to get to these big gigs, and they have some expectations of what they’d like to hear. I think we have a lot of other songs that we can play that will be just as satisfying.”
It’s not like you can’t see his point, either. The whole point of Mojo was to make the kind of heavy record that Cream would have been proud to see, so going from something as heavy as ‘Running Man’s Bible’ into the smooth sounds of ‘Free Fallin’ was bound to be jarring. But when looking at all the new tunes next to the old ones, it’s not like people would be itching to use the restroom during the new songs.
Petty was always the kind of artist who got better with age, and even if some of the tunes were more downtempo than usual, there’s a reason why a song like ‘I Should’ve Known It’ survived up until the final tours he played. There was some magic on Mojo, and even if it went on a bit too long, it was something that the heartland rocker needed to get out of his system to move on.
And given the road he was going down, it’s a shame that he passed away far too soon after this phase of his career started. The modern rock sound gravitated towards those bluesy tunes again with the rise of bands like The Black Keys and Cage the Elephant in the 2010s, so hearing Petty play off of the new kids would have made him look like the rock and roll grandpa that could still throw down whenever he got the chance.
