Posted in: News, Trivia Q & A | No Comments | September 26, 2021
Q What movie star danced Mary Jane’s Last Dance with Tom Petty?
A. Kim Basinger
Recorded on July 22, 1993, while Petty was recording his Wildflowers album, and was produced by Rick Rubin, guitarist Mike Campbell, and Tom Petty.
This song was first released as part of the Greatest Hits album in 1993. It rose to #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 went on to say that their producer, Rick Rubin didn’t agree singing about “hey, Indiana Girl,” so Rubin changed it 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 dead woman (played by Kim Basinger) for a dinner date. 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 has also 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 is seen floating in the water with her eyes open.
During the final scenes of the video, Tom is seen carrying Basinger through a cave before placing her in the water. The cave is located at Leo Carrillo State Park, California where many movies and television shows were filmed.
