“It had been around for a while”: the Tom Petty song that wouldn’t exist without Rick Rubin
Any great producer usually knows how to squeeze the most out of whatever artist they are working with. Even if the album itself doesn’t work the best as a whole, the producer is the one who helps tie everything together and make everything seem coherent from one track to the next. Although Tom Petty had a wealth of great producers to work with him throughout his career, one of his iconic anthems wouldn’t have existed if Rick Rubin hadn’t been there to track it down.
But there was never any logic in trying to tell Petty what to do. The whole purpose of his best material was the fact that it was his vision from start to finish, and when any record company higher-up tried to get in his face about it, he was more than happy to go in the exact opposite direction if it meant getting what he wanted.
While his work with Jeff Lynne went over perfectly fine on Full Moon Fever and Into the Great Wide Open, Rubin was the perfect foil for Petty in terms of getting what he needed out of the Heartbreakers. The last record the band made had sounded too clinically produced, and by having Rubin in the room, the focus shifted to sounding far more organic, usually favouring the band playing together in the room rather than building a track from scratch.
And upon listening to Wildflowers, the band would never sound more cohesive. The album may be credited solely to Petty, but this is every bit a Heartbreakers record from the first to last track, whether it’s hearing all of them cut loose on the song ‘Honey Bee’ or listening to them deliver the standard rock and roll swagger on ‘You Wreck Me’. There were still some loose ends to tie up, though, and Rubin managed to unearth a song that needed to be dusted off.
Despite Petty not wanting to go back to his past for a Greatest Hits album, it was the only way for him to get out of his contract with MCA before moving to Warner Bros. That meant bringing back former drummer Stan Lynch for a tune, and despite Rubin representing the future of the group, ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ came to life after the producer felt Petty was on the verge of a hit.
Even though the song had been demoed back in the 1980s, the band never thought much of it until they were short of material, with Mike Campbell saying, “That song took on a few shapes. It was written in my garage. We liked the song and Rick Rubin suggested we cut it. It had actually been around for a while, just the basic riff and that chorus. We cut the song, and [Tom] was singing the chorus, and he decided he just couldn’t get behind singing about ‘Hey, Indiana Girl’, so we went back, and about a week later, he came in and said, ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ so he changed the chorus to ‘Last dance with Mary Jane’.”
Given how the band’s relationship with Lynch was falling apart, it’s also fitting that Petty made that subtle lyric change. The drug reference might be as clear as day, but thinking about it as one last go-around with an old flame is perfect for their scenario of working with their old bandmate one more time.
The thought of putting a new record on a collection of greatest hits may have been cheap, but it ended up being one of the biggest hits that Petty ever had, even eclipsing a few of the major singles on the record. While Rubin would eventually guide Petty through the next handful of albums, this was his way of shoehorning himself into the band’s earlier legacy.
