The Tom Petty song inspired by marijuana
It’s impossible to separate the history of music from the history of drugs. Especially when considering the way that music has twisted and changed since the hippie days of the 1960s, that winding path is like one big trip as different substances and subcultures converge. In the world of rock music, you’d be hard-pressed to find an artist who hasn’t at least hinted towards the illicit. Tom Petty certainly did.
They say that weed is the ultimate gateway drug, and the music world seems to prove that well. It was in 1964 that the Beatles started wandering down a path that changed their sound forever. Sure, they met the inspirational figure of Bob Dylan, but then the folk star gave them a spliff. From that moment on, as they dove deeper into the world of mind-altering substances, the Fab Four were forever hazier.
From the jazz world of Louis Armstrong to the beatnik space of Allen Ginsberg and the New York underground scene, weed has had a place across all genres and forms. Considered as a kind of tool for liberation and creative freedom, artists have believed for decades now that a little pot could relax you to the point of divine inspiration.
That’s something that alcohol can’t do. No one’s ever finished a bottle of wine or downed several beers and said, “Ah, I feel so at peace and so in tune with myself and my body.” But that’s exactly what Tom Petty was trying to say in one song. So, really, he didn’t have a choice but to turn to the green.
Firstly though, Petty was keen to share a disclaimer: he was neither endorsing nor villainising the drug. “Every blue moon or so, I might have a toke on somebody’s… cigarette,” he told VH1. “It’s an OK way to live your life, but it’s not to be advised. I’m not going to say it’s good or bad.”
But when it came to trying to articulate the search for that specific quality of relaxation, he knew that only marijuana would cut it for the track, ‘You don’t know how it feels to be me’.
“I wrote this song a while back and I was trying to do this character in the song who was kind of down and looking for some company,” he explained. “And instead of having him say, ‘Let’s have another beer’ – they always have to have that in the song – I thought this guy should roll another joint.”
The final lyrics go, “Let’s roll another joint / And turn the radio loud / I’m too alone to be proud.” As the character in the song seems to surrender to being down and out for a moment of self-pity, alcohol wouldn’t have suited the scene, pushing it too far into tragedy. Instead, the mention of marijuana gives the track the hazy, lazy feeling it needs. “People come, people go / Some grow young, some grow cold,” Petty sings, capturing the ‘ce sera sera’ feeling that weed can bring you.
But, naturally, mainstream media weren’t quite so on board. While mentions of alcohol are commonplace in music, drugs are censored. However, the censored version somehow came out even worse. “The strangest thing happened. I wrote this song not thinking that it was controversial in any way and I nearly left this song off the album ’til the very end, and we put it on,” Petty said of the song. But as it hit the radio and MTV, the clean version simply took the word “joint” and attempted to muddle it by reversing it, sounding like a made-up word.
“Imagine my surprise when this song comes on television and they say, ‘Let’s roll another ‘noojh’,’ which sounded worse to me than joint,” Petty joked, “Because, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a ‘noojh’, but it sounds really wicked”.
