The song Tom Petty didn’t want to record: “It irked me to no end”
The art of writing songs is baked into Tom Petty‘s DNA. Although he may have fed off the rest of his band throughout his career, his eternal search for that one beatable song would take him through decades of hit singles. While working on his career renaissance in the mid-1990s, Petty wasn’t eager to live in his glory days again.
Towards the end of the 1980s, Petty had become friendly with rockers like George Harrison and Bob Dylan, eventually becoming a part of the rock and roll supergroup The Traveling Wilburys. After clicking with fellow rock journeyman Jeff Lynne, Petty thought the ELO frontman’s ear for production would work well on his next solo record.
Becoming the first proper Tom Petty solo outing, Full Moon Fever didn’t sit well with the other members of The Heartbreakers, thinking that Petty hung them out to dry. Regardless of how they felt about the songs, Petty went through a resurgence in popularity thanks to the power of singles like ‘Free Fallin’ and ‘I Won’t Back Down’.
While Lynne would hang around for the next Heartbreakers album, Into the Great Wide Open, Petty wanted a more authentic sound for his next solo outing. Enter Rick Rubin. Having worked with the biggest names in hip-hop and thrash metal, Rubin’s love for Petty’s material informed the sessions for Wildflowers, bringing in the rest of The Heartbreakers to create Petty’s sturdiest collection of songs in years.
While working on the project, though, Petty got a call that a greatest hits album was due to his old label MCA. Despite being well into the recording process, Petty was upset about having to put his new record on hold, telling CBC, “Part of the obligation was that I had to deliver a new song for this album. It irked me to no end that I had to do this. I didn’t want to turn around and give something away.”
Instead of recording in the same studio, Rubin encouraged Petty to go to a separate studio with the band to retain the spirit of the session. Bringing back drummer Stan Lynch, Petty decided to finish off a song that he had in the vaults for a while entitled ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’. Featuring the most fiery performance out of Lynch, the song would become one of the last contributions that the drummer made to The Heartbreakers, quickly being let go for Steve Ferrone.
Even though there has been built-up animosity between Petty and Lynch over the years, Benmont Tench remembers the sessions being relatively warm when working on the track, recalling in Runnin’ Down a Dream, saying, “That’s one of the last songs that Stanley ever worked on with us, which is cool. He played his ass off on that record”.
Serving as a breather from Petty’s usual output, the band quickly set up shop at their usual studio. Across tracks like ‘It’s Good To Be King’ and ‘Crawling Back To You’, Petty started to expand his horizons in the studio, featuring lush orchestration and walls of different guitars against each other. While ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ may have been a chore for Petty to record, it serves as a bridge connecting the two phases of his recording career.
