“Mary Jane’s Last Dance” has an obvious double meaning ⎯⎯ “One more time to kill the pain,” Petty seemingly succumbs to marijuana to either mask his sorrow or trigger the psychedelic hallucinations. “Well, she moved down here at the age of 18 / She blew the boys away, it was more than they’d seen / I was introduced and we both started groovin’ / She said, ‘I dig you baby but I got to keep movin’…on, keep movin’ on…” Later, he recounts falling in and out of love with the wayward wildflower. “She grew up in an Indiana town / Had a good lookin’ momma who never was around / But she grew up tall and she grew up right / With them Indiana boys on an Indiana night,” he opens, staging one of the most bizarre pop songs of all time. As Petty’s protagonist, a goofball mortician, struggles to come to terms with a former lover’s absence, he attempts to relive the past. I never knew what the song was really about (but I guess no one does), and years later, that melody would haunt my most devilish of nightmares. The scenes zipped past my eyes: him dressing a woman’s (played by Kim Basinger) body up in a wedding dress sitting her at long wooden dining room table with ruby red lipstick glistening in the moonlight and his slow march to the shoreline, where he finally learned to let her go into the cresting waves. The visuals flirted with Texas Chainsaw Massacre moodiness, cool blues, greys and whites flooding my vision. There was something morbidly comforting about the harmonica warbling throughout the song’s soft-rock arrangement.
#Tom petty last dance with mary jane tv
There was no underlining padding, and as I sat perched and transfixed in front of her 20-inch box TV set, my knees rubbed raw. Her basement bedroom, constructed from one-half of our dusty and dank car garage no one ever used, was strewn with purple-vomit carpet. I was seven at the time, and my older sister Katrina watched MTV nonstop ⎯⎯ you know, during its heyday when the network actually played music videos.
Following Tom Petty‘s tragic death earlier this week, I got to thinking about the song’s eery, Beetlejuice-esque visual, one of the first clips I ever saw in my life. If you know me at all, you know I have a love of horror movies ( Halloween being my personal favorite), so an eager fascination with “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” doesn’t come as much of a surprise. When he carries his lover’s lifeless corpse down the front steps of his macabre-style home, I remember being terrified ⎯⎯ and mesmerized.
#Tom petty last dance with mary jane series
Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly series showcasing an album, single, music video or performance of a bygone era and its personal and/or cultural significance.
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