‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’: The end of an era for Tom Petty
Lifetime artists have been known to have different phases in their careers. Most people can pinpoint the different eras of a group like Pink Floyd, and despite his reputation for being one of the most optimistic people in the world, some of the back pages of Paul McCartney’s discography show a much different side to the ‘Cute Beatle’. Although Tom Petty had already started to shift his style by the early 1990s, ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ is the real torch-passing moment when the Heartbreakers became something different.
Because when the group first started, it was always about getting that one magical take in the studio. During the making of Damn the Torpedoes, for instance, Petty worked the group down to the bone to get just the right sound for tunes like ‘Refugee’, ultimately recording over 100 takes of the song before finally settling on a performance that they thought would be good enough for the radio.
There might be a certain naivety that comes with that, but the group’s work with Bob Dylan honed their chops a lot more. They could switch up the style of a song on a dime, but when Petty started working on his own with Jeff Lynne, something strange happened going into Into the Great Wide Open. The band were still happy to be working on the tunes, but having tracks that sounded better as textures made them feel like they took a backseat.
But Petty wasn’t looking to tone his sound down. If anything, he wanted to go even deeper, and when hooking up with Rick Rubin, he found the perfect middle ground for the group to work in. They still needed one more single for a Greatest Hits album, though, and that meant Petty having to deal with drummer Stan Lynch.
Lynch had already grown sick of having to take a backseat ever since Full Moon Fever, so now that he was being told to play mellow music, he had no desire to work on the material again. Given that this was the best-of collection of all their best moments, Lynch decided to eventually show up, playing on the knock-out hit ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’.
Considering the lyrics about someone going back to an old flame once again, hearing Lynch playing on the record feels almost ominous as if all of them knew that their time together was almost over. Despite everyone being proud of it, though, Lynch didn’t even bother to stick around, eventually moving back to Florida and being fired when they got Steve Ferrone to play the tunes on Wildflowers.
So, really, ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ feels almost prophetic of the band’s demise as the heartland rock gang that everyone knew. They would still be playing with many original members, but without Lynch, part of that naive energy that they had back in their prime was lost forever.
That’s not to say that any of their later records were worse off for it. If anything, many of the post-1994 Heartbreakers albums are actually better, but a bit of that personality was gone when Lynch left. They may have needed to let him go to hold onto their sanity, but after years together, Greatest Hits felt like more than just a retrospective. It was the death knell for one era of the Heartbreakers.
