Today would have been Tom Petty’s 75th birthday. I’m a longtime fan of Petty’s music and he was definitely one of the most talented and interesting of the famous rock musicians, and I want to pay some respect to one of my musical heroes. The Last DJ is one of my favorite songs of his, and its lyrics provide a lot to discuss, in my opinion it is a perfect rock song.
“You can’t turn him into a company man, you can’t turn him into a whore” What a great line to open a song. I realize he wrote the song about the music business, but these lyrics offer other things to think about as well. After all Tom himself said “The album was about more than radio. It was about disappearing freedoms in a lot of different places.” I don’t think Tom Petty took politics too seriously, but I wish famous rock musicians like Petty wouldn’t hang out with politicians at all, and unfortunately Petty performed for Clinton/Gore in 2000. George W. Bush was a lousy president, but I’m skeptical that Gore would have been any better, and the very skeptical George Carlin pointed out in his American Dream routine “Politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t, you have no choice”, a similar skepticism to the Who song lyric “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, and the Pink Floyd lyric “Mother, should I trust the government?”. The longtime libertarian writer James Bovard has exposed abuse of power by politicians in both of the major political parties, and in 2000 he published his book “‘feeling your pain’: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years”. If Clinton-Gore had been great on liberty, there would have been more excitement for Gore back in 2000, but instead as Bovard pointed out, they also did a poor job, so no wonder it was such a close voter turnout for Gore as it was for W.
The problem with being buddies with politicians, especially campaigning with and making endorsements of politicians is that when these politicians sign terrible legislation or get America involved in unnecessary military conflicts, the musicians then likely feel that they can’t criticize the politicians. We might be able to make some progress in the cause of liberty if famous people would publicly criticize politicians of both parties rather than keeping quiet about the party they favor.
“And he won’t play what they say to play”
It is amazing that so many rock musicians who are supposedly rebels act like “company men” and hang with politicians that are all about setting rules and regulations. These musicians apparently don’t put two and two together, forgetting what politicians do, which is creating laws that are enforced. Fortunately Tom didn’t get himself too much involved with politicians as compared to some of his peers. There are some rare exceptions to my general rule that famous musicians shouldn’t hang out with politicians; Arlo Guthrie had endorsed congressman Ron Paul’s book “End the Fed”, because I believe Arlo was wise enough to realize that Ron Paul was over age 60 and for many years had taught a consistent message of liberty in congress, and Arlo realized that central banking has contributed to much human suffering throughout the world. Many politicians are indeed “company men” or “whores” who care first and foremost about getting votes to maintain their job security and fundraising- the liberty of their constituents be damned. Many politicians would never want to end central banking, and I’m sure many are also fully on board with wanting to implement a central bank digital currency (more on that here: https://brandoncoale.blog/2025/05/24/transcript-of-video-the-danger-of-digital-currencies/). Rare politicians like Ron Paul care much more about the freedoms of people and the future of their country than getting reelected and fundraising. If Ron Paul had been elected president in 2008 or 2012, I’m sure he would have told friends like Arlo Guthrie to feel free to publicly criticize him and hold him accountable to campaign promises.
Fortunately there are many other things besides publicly challenging politicians that famous people with name recognition can do, and indeed Tom Petty would occasionally use his name recognition to do kind things for his fans to try to help them out. The main one that is well documented was when his Hard Promises album was due to be released in 1981 at a new MCA Records price of $9.98, Petty fought the record company and won to keep his new album at $8.98.
“Well its really funny, but at the time $9.98 seemed like an outrageous price for a record.” –Tom Petty
Indeed, Tom’s memory on this was spot on. The economics history about this is interesting, and the documentary “Money For Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve”, narrated by actor Liev Schreiber, goes into financial history and discusses this time period. The documentary explains that in 1971, a dollar was worth $1.00, but by 1976 a dollar was worth $0.63, and by 1981 a dollar was worth only $0.45. There was a recession that began in 1981 that up to that point was the longest recession in post-war history.
“Some folks say they’re gonna hang him so high cause you just can’t do what he did. There’s some things you just can’t put in the minds of those kids”
These two lines are a great defense of the freedom of speech, and hint that there are people in America who take it on themselves to be the “speech and thought police”. Sadly there are people who want to regulate speech in America. Unfortunately some western European countries regulate speech, and it would be nice to see famous American musicians refuse to play concerts in any country that asks them to change their lyrics.
After some comments from attorney general Pam Bondi last month, some people in America were worried that America would get “UK-style commie speech codes”. Evidently in the UK there are open-ended laws that have put police officers in crazy situations, in which they are expected to arrest people like Graham Linehan (creator or co-creator of the sitcoms Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd) for speech on social media that he had posted while in the United States. Linehan wrote “The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two- five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets.”…”To me, this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech”.
Apparently this has gone on for some time; I saw a 10 year old article on The Guardian’s website about the famous actor John Hurt (1940-2017) and it made it sound like there is a law for UK bars where a man isn’t allowed to make a pass at a woman in the bar. The article quotes Hurt as saying “We’ve become obsessed with the dangers of alcohol – you get newspaper articles that are entirely over the top. There’s political correctness as well. I wonder who instigated that? Where does it come from, and who says what is or is not politically correct?”. According to the article, Hurt said he would not know how to get a date in the modern world for fear of harassment.
Two of Petty’s rock music peers who have had no fear about speaking their mind in recent years are Eric Clapton and Roger Daltrey. Roger said “It’s becoming so absurd now with the AI doing all the tricks it can do and the woke generation, it’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing you just know that it’s the route to nowhere, especially when you’ve lived through the periods of a life that we’ve had the privilege to. I mean we’ve had the golden era, there’s no doubt about that, but we came out of a war, we came out of a leveled society completely flattened, bomb sites and everything and we built that, we’ve been through socialist governments, we’ve seen the communist system fail in the Soviet Union. I’ve been in those communist countries while they were communists; I’ve seen how (laughs) ‘wonderful’ (really?) it was. (laughs)” There are several good movies about what life was like in those “command and control” countries, including Gorky Park starring William Hurt, Farewell (L’affaire Farewell) starring Guillaume Canet and Willem Dafoe, and the 2006 German movie The Lives of Others.
I agree with Daltrey’s warning, and while Tom Petty may not have agreed with everything Clapton or Daltrey says, I’d like to think he would still be friends with them and would say they should have every right to say what they want to say in public without fear of getting arrested as Linehan was.
Two American musicians who were good about freedom of speech were Jim Morrison and Petty’s friend Johnny Cash. Morrison’s famous incident was using the word “higher” on Ed Sullivan when he was asked not to, and Cash sang Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” with the original line “I’m wishing Lord that I was stoned” on his TV show when he was asked not to.
An excellent documentary on free speech for people who are interested is the documentary “Mighty Ira” about the American free speech hero Ira Glasser, available to rent or buy on all major streaming platforms.
“Well he got him a station down in Mexico and sometimes it’ll kinda come in, and I’ll bust a move and remember how it was back then”
When John Lennon sang “Imagine there’s no countries”, I doubt he felt that literally there shouldn’t be countries, but if he did, that was a terrible idea. I don’t want to imagine what it would be like to live in a country like the twentieth century’s Soviet Union or modern day North Korea and for it to be very difficult to escape to another country. But fortunately the fictional DJ in Petty’s song was able to relocate to the country of Mexico and apparently the radio station he worked for allowed him to play the songs he wanted to play. I wouldn’t want to lose American citizenship, but I have heard of some Americans moving to Mexico for the lower cost of living (I remember one of my Uncles said he moved out of a nice suburb of Dayton, Ohio when he retired because the property taxes on his home were around $10,000 per year; OMG that’s 5 figures!), yet keeping their American citizenship, so maybe this is what the DJ in Petty’s song did. Petty did go on to practice what he preached about playing what he wanted to play, because he eventually became a DJ himself on Sirius XM radio.
“There goes the last human voice”
When I think of politicians and government, I think of jails, prisons, courthouses, cronyism, military wars, large bureaucracy and inefficiency, rising prices, paying taxes, tax forms, regulators wanting to monitor and control our automobiles (even a remote “killswitch” for our autos has been proposed by government regulators), and other red tape. Some of those things may be necessary, but I certainly don’t think of any of them as “human”, which again is why I wonder why so many famous musicians want to be friends with politicians. Why a musician with memorable and beautiful songs would want to associate themselves with the cold institution of government is astounding to me.
Regarding Artificial Intelligence, if Petty were alive today, he would probably speak out about using AI in music, and I think he‘d probably put in a good word for Justine Bateman’s CREDO 23 film festival, the first “no-AI” film festival.
“I know your not trying to ____ him [Roger McGuinn] around, but you are if you make him do this song, because sometimes the commercial road, thinking that’s the road to take, isn’t always the road to take. Sometimes it’s doing stuff from your heart, and being really honest with people works much better.” -Tom Petty
Over 30 years later, I still have my Greatest Hits CD and Wildflowers CD, here is a picture of them:
I always liked the cover artwork of the Greatest Hits CD. Regarding Howie and Benmont smoking, I think this is to show the rock and roll attitude that “We don’t fear death”. I don’t fear death, but I want a good quality of life until then, and I don’t want to weaken my throat and lungs due to smoking, but I’m glad that tobacco is legal for those people who do want to smoke. I do like the fearless rock and roll attitude, and the no fear attitude reminds me of a true story that a friend told me about a Mennonite church he went to in the summer 2020. The leader of the church shamed him because he wasn’t wearing a mask due to covid-19, and my friend wouldn’t wear one, so he left this church that he had been attending since before covid and never went back. It is one thing if an employer or business required people to wear masks, but I feel my friend did the right thing by leaving that church, and visiting other churches that didn’t require masks. Seeing people with masks on their face all the time isn’t human, and I remember listening to Eric Larson’s podcast during that time and he said would eventually leave his job working at a hospital if they were expected to wear masks all the time in all hospital locations forever, since it was so depressing to see everyone walking around with masks on their face. Fortunately the hospitals in Michigan eventually allowed staff to not wear masks in the hallways.
“The album that really made me a fan was the Full Moon Fever album. I must have listened to that album a thousand times, just over and over and over again, and didn’t stop for a year or two years. That was my album of choice.” -Rick Rubin
I bought the Greatest Hits CD in late 1993 or early 1994, I don’t remember the exact date, but it was within a month or so after it was released. I remember listening to the Greatest Hits CD almost every day in 1994 (I’m very glad the band was under contract to put it out), and listening to Wildflowers quite frequently in 1995. Since then I’ve ripped both of them to mp3s along with my other Tom Petty CDs, so I still listen to songs by Tom Petty every day, but the mp3 player is on shuffle.
“I was so against the Greatest Hits, I had the thought that the songs really should be part of the albums that we made them for. But it was a contractual obligation that we do this greatest hits album. I was really against the idea of writing a new song for it, which they wanted. I thought how can it be a hit if I haven’t written it yet, how can it be on the greatest hits? So I took a song that I started during Full Moon Fever and finished it, and that became Mary Jane’s Last Dance. And the album went on to sell 10 million records, so what do I know?” –Tom Petty
The Greatest Hits CD was indeed very popular at the time, though myself and the friends I knew who bought it didn’t buy it just because it had “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”; we bought it because we didn’t own all previous CDs of Petty’s, but we were very familiar with all the great singles we had heard on FM radio, and we wanted to own a copy of those singles on one CD. I seem to remember my friend Rick J. buying a copy around the same time I did (we may have actually bought our copies on a trip to the record store together, I can’t remember for sure), and I also have a nice memory of an evening in 1994, I think it was in the fall, of hanging out with friends Jake L. and Wes C. where Jake and Wes couldn’t get Petty’s song “I Need to Know” out of their heads, and during that evening Wes finally said enough was enough and pulled into a store in our area that was similar to a modern day Wal-Mart, only a bit smaller, and we went into their music section and he bought his copy of the Greatest Hits CD.
Here is a great quote about Tom Petty from Chris Hillman to close my blog post:
“Here was a man who was an incredibly big rock star, but he had more of a grip on humility than any of us can aspire to, and I’m a Christian. We aspire to have that virtue of humility. He had it. Every morning, he would come into the studio with a tray of coffee. He didn’t have one of his employees bring it. One time, I drove up and I was getting stuff out of the car, and he said, ‘Let me take that for you.’” -Chris Hillman
Brandon Coale Notes 
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