Petty complaints
Aging rocker is behind the times

By Jim Sullivan, Globe Staff, boston.com 10/18/2002

Did you ever see or hear something expressly written to strike a certain chord and have it strike the opposite effect?

That was the case for me, watching Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on ''Late Show With David Letterman'' recently. Petty, looking more skeletal than ever, played ''The Last DJ,'' the title track from his latest CD. The song sounds like jangly, textbook Petty in his semi-languid, mid-tempo mode. The gist of it is impossible to miss from the first verse. ''Well you can't turn him into a company man/You can't turn him into a whore/And the boys upstairs just don't understand anymore.''

The refrain bemoans the loss of ''your freedom of choice'' and the DJ who is ''the last human voice.''

A couple of verses later Petty is whingeing: ''As we celebrate mediocrity/All the boys upstairs want to see/How much you'll pay for/

What you used to get for free.''

Get it? Noble old-school DJ who wants to play the songs he thinks are cool: Good. Corporate radio world of today: Bad.

I wouldn't disagree that vehemently except ...

The hip, self-programming DJ - the hero of free-form FM radio or progressive radio of the early 1970s, those precursors of album-oriented rock, classic rock, active rock, and modern rock - died out a long time ago in almost all major markets.

Today's DJ is more likely to be concerned with his rap, his patter, his rapier-like wit than he is the music he plays. If you've ever been to a radio studio, you will not likely find the DJ grooving to the music he's playing. You may not even hear the music being played in the studio.

Face it, a radio station is supposed to earn revenue. If you don't care for revenue-producing stations, go left of the dial to the college realm. Boston has scads of these and they're high quality.

Petty's simplistic song comes off like an all-too-typical old man's whine. (Note to reader: I'm a lot closer to Petty's age than I am to the guys in Blink 182.) You can almost envision Petty sitting on the porch gathering up the young'uns who want to go out and play and pinning them down with this ''Back in my day'' story. They think: ''Let's humor grandpa. Maybe we'll inherit something.''

The melody is so cushy, so familiar, so, well, B-level Petty-esque that it just sticks for a moment and floats on by, without any of the drama of ''Breakdown'' or ''Even the Losers.'' There is no tension in the treacly tune. Which doesn't mean it hasn't been widely played on AAA radio, the home for many middle-aged rockers and fans. Everyone can shake their heads sadly and bemoan the passing of an era.

In 1979, Elvis Costello was in town. He'd just played a sharp set at the Orpheum, which was highlighted by ''Radio Radio,'' his brilliant and vituperative anti-radio rant. He'd performed it earlier in the year on ''Saturday Night Live,'' switching to the song at the last moment and incurring the wrath of producer Lorne Michaels.

Sang Costello: ''I wanna bite the hand that feeds me/I wanna bite that hand so badly/I wanna make them wish they'd never seen me.''

I ran into Costello at the now-defunct punk club the Rat in Kenmore Square after his Orpheum show, and couldn't help but ask whether he risked being blackballed for his stance.

Nah, he said with a smile.

''I figured the stations that don't play it wouldn't have played it anyway and the stations that do play it figure it's not about them.''

Hmm. Clever. But isn't the song about them, too? ''Yes, it is,'' he replied.

Costello nailed it. Petty is floating in the ether of misguided idealism.

Thanks to John Foyle