I’ve been reviewing albums by this artist for ten years now – almost as long as the Odyssey has existed. It all started with Disc 293 and “Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough)”. I guess a decade later, I still haven’t.
Disc 1580 is…. The Last DJ
Artist: Tom Petty
Year of Release: 2002
What’s up with the Cover? Regular readers will know I enjoy a good Giant Head cover, but this is the lesser-known Giant Hair cover. This particular mop of hair looks a bit sere and could probably use some conditioner.
How I Came To Know It: I was digging through Tom Petty’s catalogue a good 15-20 years ago, and buying up everything I’d missed along the way. This was one of them.
How It Stacks Up: I have 16 Tom Petty albums. Of those, “The Last DJ” comes in at #13, bumping “She’s The One” down one spot in the process. This being my penultimate Tom Petty review, there will be no full recap. For those people who find this strange, you are probably using ‘penultimate’ wrong. Please stop doing that.
Ratings: 3 stars
In a riveting scene in Peter Bogdanovich’s 2007 Tom Petty documentary, “Runnin’ Down a Dream” an irate Petty tears a strip off a couple of record execs that are pushing what (in Petty’s view) is a shit song on his buddy Roger McGuinn. It showcases Petty’s long-abiding derision for the empty commercial aspects of the music business.
“The Last DJ” is the album version of that outburst, a hate letter for all that was (and has always been) the worst aspects of an industry that simultaneously fuels great art, but also lines the pockets of some shady characters with other people’s inspiration. The result is an uneven record, where the best moments tend to be fueled by Petty’s angry melancholy.
Things get started with the title track, a song that is both celebratory and tragic. Celebratory because of the titular character, who, “plays what he wants to play” and tragic because he is the last of his kind, in a sea of moral turpitude.
This is the first in a quartet of songs that leads of “The Last DJ” with a lot of criticism of the music industry that is nasty, to the point, and leaves little room for alternate interpretations. “Money Becomes King” is the transformation of art into product, and even the gentle and soothing piano of “Dreamville” which is dreamy only in that it hearkens back to a time when people made music for music’s sake and didn’t sweat the bottom line.
The final entry in this opening salvo is the album’s finest track. “Joe” is sung from the perspective of the Soulless Record Exec, and Petty’s depiction is scathing. “Dreamville’s” soothing tones are immediately prior, and here they are juxtaposed with a gritty grimy blues inspired number. The song has dozens of great lines, but the second stanza sums it up best:
“Go get me a kid with
a good-looking face
Bring me a kid can
remember his place
Some hungry poet son-of-a-bitch
He gets to be famous,
I get to be rich.”
Later in the record Petty expands his theme away from this singular focus, but that flavour of disappointment carries through the record.
A good example is “Blue Sunday,” a song with a gentle quavering guitar, telling the tale of two down-and-outs that find each other at a 7-11. The song is romantic in its way, but mostly it is a weary and worn strum, where peace of mind is little more than a few moments of comfortable silence in a car, followed by a sleep in the back seat. As the chorus reminds us, this blue Sunday is “blue, with shades of grey.”
Musically the record shows a lot of range. At times Petty is channeling the Beatles, and at others he scorches things up like it was early Zeppelin. The playing is solid and Mike Campbell’s guitar is particularly good and grimy on a couple of solos.
Sometimes the experimentation left me wishing Petty had painted a bit more in the lines, but that wouldn’t have caught the restless spirit of a record trying to push past the bounds of commercial expectations. Mostly I liked the way Petty free-ranges around styles, all the while never losing his penchant for penning timeless melodies. This record has deep cuts with chord progressions most musicians wish they could steal for their hits.
But there is only one Tom Petty, and now there isn’t even that. Fortunately he left us with an amazing collection of work. “The Last DJ” proves that even when he was in the depths of anger and frustration, that talent never left him.
Best tracks: The Last DJ, Dreamville, Joe, Blue Sunday, Have Love Will Travel
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