The Tom Petty song that celebrates marijuana: “I’m not going to say it’s good or bad”
Most musicians find it difficult to describe the temperamental nature of creativity.
For Tom Petty, though, it’s fairly simple. “There’s either a fish in the boat or there’s not,” he once said. “Sometimes you come home and you didn’t catch anything, and sometimes you caught a huge fish. But that was the work part of it to me.”
For Petty and countless others, going along like a surfer waiting to ride the next wave of inspiration often meant taking ideas for what they were, often at the expense of expectation. With popularity, however, there’s also a different sort of pressure, an unspoken cleanliness rule that means singing about drugs and other forms of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle – especially in an explicit manner – is one sure way to stir controversy.
Just look at The Beatles: the absolute picture of clean-cut harmlessness earned the gasps of the collective puritans the moment it became clear they enjoyed a joint every now and then (more than every now and then). And beyond the divisiveness of records like Revolver, Paul McCartney saw it as something genuinely beneficial to the creative process, not just a recreational means to an end that existed only to piss off someone’s mother.
“When we started to get into pot, it seemed to me to be quite uplifting,” McCartney said in 1994. “It didn’t seem to have too many side effects like alcohol or some of the other stuff, like pills, which I pretty much kept off. I kind of liked marijuana, and to me, it seemed it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding.”
He added: “In a stressful world, I still would say that pot was one of the best of the tranquillising drugs. People tend to fall asleep on it rather than go out and commit murder.”
No matter your position, it’s difficult to argue against McCartney’s point, which is also probably why Petty once felt compelled to write ‘You Don’t Know How It Feels’, the song he used to declare his love for the infamous escapist drug loud and proud: “But let me get to the point, let’s roll another joint / And turn the radio loud, I’m too alone to be proud / And you don’t know how it feels / You don’t know how it feels to be me.”
Another trend owned by a certain former Beatle, the term or concept to “roll” a joint became the point of contention, with the radio editing the lyric to “hit” to draw attention away from the implication. “Every blue moon or so, I might have a toke on somebody’s… cigarette,” Petty quipped during VH1’s Storytellers. “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.”
He added, “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. 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.”
Similar to McCartney, Petty used the context of the story to push its benefit over any other means, like reaching for a pint, a far less fitting camaraderie for someone in the weeds of a depressive state and experiencing a bout of malaise-fueled loneliness on top of it all. The funny thing is, Petty also wrote the song not thinking it was anything controversial at all, despite how much he celebrates falling into the pits of smooth relaxation: “I woke up in between / A memory and a dream.”
