Mary Jane's Last Dance

You are tuned to THE ZOO, and the cut coming out of the speakers is one of those songs that never quite left the request line. “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, off the 1993 Greatest Hits package. Four minutes and thirty-five seconds of dry guitar, a chorus you can sing before the second pass, and a story that still refuses to settle into one meaning. If you came up on freeform album rock, this one sits in the same drawer as the deep cuts you kept for the long stretch between commercials that never came.

The record was a contractual handshake, not a victory lap. Petty and the Heartbreakers were on their way out of MCA and over to Warner Bros. MCA wanted one last album on the deal. Petty did not want to dump a pile of old singles into a sleeve and call it a day, so the agreement became a greatest-hits set with fresh material attached. Out of that obligation came the song that carried the whole package onto rock radio and kept it there. Greatest Hits went on to become one of the best-selling compilations of its era, and a lot of the reason people kept buying it was the new track sitting near the front of the sequence.

The bones of the song started in Mike Campbell’s garage. The Heartbreakers were jamming, Petty was playing one of Campbell’s guitars, and a riff fell out between other ideas, the kind of thing a band almost throws away because nobody has written a title on it yet. The working name was “Indiana Girl.” The first chorus went something like “Hey, Indiana girl, go out and find the world.” They liked the track. Rick Rubin, who was in the room as the band moved toward the sessions that would also feed Wildflowers, heard enough in it to say they ought to cut it. Petty sang the chorus, sat with it, and decided he could not get behind “Indiana girl” as the hook. About a week later he walked back in with a better idea. The verse stayed put. The chorus became “last dance with Mary Jane.”

Campbell has been plain about what that change did. The Indiana lines are still right there in the opening: she grew up in an Indiana town, grew up tall and grew up right, with them Indiana boys on an Indiana night. When the chorus hits, the song opens up. Campbell’s take, given years later, is that it can be whatever you want it to be. A lot of listeners hear a drug reference, and if that is the reading you bring, the lyric will hold it. It can also be a goodbye love song, a last turn around the floor with somebody who is already gone. Petty never pinned it to a single explanation, which is part of why the thing still works on a rock station three decades down the road. The harmonica, the spare arrangement, the way the vocal sits just a little behind the beat, all of that leaves room.

Rubin, Petty, and Campbell share the production credit. Rubin later remembered being handed a cassette of unused ideas, not a stack of finished gems, and catching the guitar figure in the space between two other songs, almost like somebody had just tuned up and played the first chords that came to hand. That is the Rick Rubin method in miniature: strip the gloss, keep the part that already sounds like a record. The tracking was also a farewell. These sessions were the last time original drummer Stan Lynch cut a Heartbreakers side before he left the band in 1994. Steve Ferrone would take the chair after that. If you listen for it, Lynch’s feel is all over the backbeat, the same pocket that had been under “Refugee” and “The Waiting” since the late seventies.

MCA issued the single on November 16, 1993, with “The Waiting” on the flip. It climbed to number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, Petty’s first top-twenty pop hit of the nineties, and it sat at number one on the Album Rock Tracks chart for two weeks. Canada took it to number five. It reached number two in Portugal and number seven in Iceland. For a band that had already delivered “American Girl,” “Breakdown,” “Don’t Do Me Like That,” “Free Fallin’,” and “Learning to Fly,” this was proof the antenna was still up.

The video is its own piece of station lore. Petty plays a morgue worker who takes a dead woman home, dresses her, and dances with her before carrying her out to the water. Kim Basinger is the woman in the wedding dress. Petty had wanted Sharon Stone for the part and did not get an answer, so the call went to Basinger. She later said the two of them were so shy they barely spoke on the set, and that the dress was heavy enough to stay in her memory. The cave at the end of the clip is at Leo Carrillo State Park on the California coast, a location that has turned up in more films and television shows than most rock fans ever count. The clip got heavy rotation on the video channels and locked the song to a picture: Petty in black, the bride who never wakes up, the last dance that is not really a dance.

The man who wrote it was Thomas Earl Petty, born October 20, 1950, in Gainesville, Florida, and gone on October 2, 2017. He came up in a college town with a record store, a radio dial full of British Invasion and Southern soul, and a band called Mudcrutch that included Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench before the name changed. The Heartbreakers settled in Los Angeles and cut their debut in 1976: Petty, Campbell, Tench, Ron Blair on bass, Stan Lynch on drums. Howie Epstein would later take the bass chair for a long run. The run of albums that followed still reads like a freeform library. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, You’re Gonna Get It!, Damn the Torpedoes, Hard Promises, Long After Dark, Southern Accents, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), Into the Great Wide Open, and the later sets that kept the name on the marquee. Solo, Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers stand with anything the band put out under the group name. In between he joined the Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne, and somehow made a supergroup sound like a front porch.

Petty’s gift was the plain line that still cut. He wrote about girls leaving town, about not backing down, about the great wide open, and he sang it in a voice that never tried to sound like anybody from England. The Heartbreakers matched him with Campbell’s guitar, Tench’s piano and organ, and a rhythm section that knew when to lean back. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. The catalog never really went out of style on stations that still play albums instead of formats. “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” is the late chapter that sounds like the early ones: a riff, a story, a chorus you can holler, and no extra furniture.

Put it next to the rest of the Greatest Hits set and you hear the whole arc in one sleeve. The early MCA singles, the Jeff Lynne shine of the Full Moon Fever years, and then this dryer, darker new track that proved the band could still knock a hole in rock radio without dressing up. Campbell has said the meaning is yours to keep. On THE ZOO we just let the record play and let the Indiana girl, whoever she was, take the last turn around the floor.

The official home for the catalog, the store, and the estate’s news is tompetty.com. The fan club, Tom Petty Nation, lives on that same site at the fan-club page. The band’s Facebook page is facebook.com/tompetty, and the big listener hangout is the Tom Petty Nation group. Instagram is @tompettyofficial. On X the handle is @tompetty. When you want the station that still treats this like a request instead of a relic, you are already in the right place at THE ZOO.