Songoftheday 4/1/19 - She grew up in an Indiana town, had a good-lookin' mama who never was around...
from the album Greatest Hits (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #14 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 10
Today's song of the day comes from the classic rock band from Florida, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, who had landed a #1 rock radio hit and a top-40 pop success in the summer of 1991 with the song "Learning To Fly" from their eighth studio album together Into The Great Wide Open. After a long tour behind the album, their break was extended with a Greatest Hits set, which included two new songs as well as hits from Petty's first solo affair Full Moon Fever. This pair of recordings would be their last with drummer Stan Lynch, who would go on to retire in Florida (he also helped with the Eagles' reunion record Hell Freezes Over). The first of the tracks, "Mary Jane's Last Dance", was a spaced-out trippy number that sported an eerie music video with Petty keeping a very-dead Kim Basinger along for the ride...
"Mary Jane's Last Dance" became Tom Petty's tenth top-40 hit with the Heartbreakers (and last with the band) in March of 1994. The song spent two weeks at #1 on the Mainstream Rock radio chart in Billboard magazine. Internationally, the single climbed all the way to #5 in Canada, and was a top-40 hit in the Netherlands (#26). The second "new" track from Greatest Hits, a cover of the British #1 hit "Something In The Air", missed the pop chart, but went to #19 on the Mainstream Rock list, as well as peaking at #26 in Canada. Finally, the song "American Girl", which had been a fan favorite but never reached the pop chart in the U.S. (it was a top-40 hit in the UK in 1977), "bubbled under" the pop Hot 100 at #109.
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's Petty and the band on the Video Music Awards show in 1994...
and again later that year in concert in California...
Forward up to another live gig in 1999...
and finally, in concert in 2006...
Up tomorrow: Dance/soul singer is a little turned on.
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