Behind Mary Jane’s Last Dance

“Mary Jane’s Last Dance” is a song written by Tom Petty and recorded by American rock band Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. It was recorded on July 22, 1993, while Petty was recording his Wildflowers album, and was produced by Rick Rubin, guitarist Mike Campbell, and Tom Petty. The sessions would prove to be the last to include drummer Stan Lynch before his eventual departure in 1994. This song was first released as part of the Greatest Hits album in 1993. It rose to No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming his first Billboard Top 20 hit of the 1990s, and also topped the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart for two weeks.

Asked if the song was about drugs, Heartbreaker guitarist Mike Campbell said, “In the verse there is still the thing about an Indiana girl on an Indiana night, just when it gets to the chorus he had the presence of mind to give it a deeper meaning. My take on it is it can be whatever you want it to be. A lot of people think it’s a drug reference, and if that’s what you want to think, it very well could be, but it could also just be a goodbye love song.” In the rest of the interview, Campbell said that the song was originally titled “Indiana Girl” and the first chorus “Hey, Indiana Girl, go out and find the world.” He added that Petty ‘just couldn’t get behind singing about “hey, Indiana Girl,”‘ so he changed the chorus a week later.

The music video, which won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Male Video in 1994, features Petty as a morgue assistant who takes home a beautiful dead woman (played by Kim Basinger). He then tries to bring her back to life by acting as if she were alive, putting her in front of a television set and then dressing her as a bride, sitting her at the dinner table and dancing with her with no effect. A scene in the video featuring the dead woman wearing a wedding dress in a room full of wax candles is loosely based on a passage from the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations. The plot also has similarities with the French movie Cold Moon, itself inspired by a Charles Bukowski short story (“The Copulating Mermaid of Venice”). Later, Petty is shown carrying her to a rocky shore and gently releasing her into the sea. At the end of the video, Basinger, who is seen floating in the water, opens her eyes.

Besides Cold Moon and Great Expectations, the plot of the video also bears some semblance to the final segment of the 1987 Belgian film Crazy Love (which in itself, is like Cold Moon, also inspired by the writings of Charles Bukowski, in particular “The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California”). However, only in the video for “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” was any sexual contact between Tom Petty and Kim Basinger (“the corpse”) not shown despite being implied. Also unlike in the later music video, there was no “gotcha ending” in Crazy Love.

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