"Last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain."
Great song about marijuana, yeah? Well, maybe not so much. The original line was:
"Hey Indiana girl, go out and find the world."
Petty thought that sounded pretty weak, so he put recording the song on hold and came back a week later with the new lyrics. Listen to the current song, but change the Mary Jane reference to another reference to an Indiana girl, and there's no reason at all to suspect it's about drugs. I'm not saying Mary Jane isn't a drug reference, but I will say that it wasn't originally a song about drugs.
The interesting thing is, besides the fact that this song goes down with Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds as one of the all-time most drug-referenced songs not written about drugs, Tom Petty thinks there's a connection between Mary Jane's Last Dance and another song of his, American Girl. According to an interview with Mojo Magazine in Jan 2010 (which I can't a transcript for online, so this is hearsay and may not be true), Petty says that Mary Jane from Mary Jane's Last Dance is the girl from American Girl "with a few hard knocks."
An American Girl's Last Dance? Sounds good to me.
Sources:
Lyrics to Mary Jane's Last Dance
Songfacts.com interview with Mike Campbell, lead guitarist of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Songfacts.com Mary Jane's Last Dance trivia
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