Quit jammin’ me
It’s not over
No news is good news but news is here to stay
Tightening the thumb-screws from day to day
— Mark Heard, “Nothing is Bothering Me”
They’re flooding the zone. A Texas-sized flood. In the news. In social media. In Washington. The courts. Relentlessly. Turned up to 11.
The flood isn’t new. The flow rate may have changed, but the difference is more in quantity than in kind. We can perhaps see the results of the then-current onslaught in “Jammin’ Me”, a single from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1987 Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) release:
You got me in a corner
You got me against the wall
I got nowhere to go
I got nowhere to fall….You’re jammin’ me
You’re jammin’ me. As in jammin’ me up.
Petty, the story goes, took Mike Campbell’s music to Bob Dylan for help with the lyrics when he and the Heartbreakers were touring with Dylan in 1986, on the True Confessions tour (running February through early August that year). “Jammin’ Me” is notorious for some seemingly inexplicable lyrics, including a puzzling triplet juxtaposing references to Vanessa Redgrave, Joe Piscopo, and Eddie Murphy (famously raising Murphy’s ire).
A key might be found in a heuristic reportedly used to jumpstart the lyrics. As Campbell recounted to Carl Wiser at Songfacts (“Mike Campbell,” Songfacts, November 15, 2003):
“Jammin Me” was interesting because I wrote the track and gave it to Tom, and he held it for a while and didn’t do anything with it. Then I guess he was working with Bob [Dylan] one day, and they came up with some words — I guess they were picking words out of a newspaper or off the television, and Tom said “Oh, I’ve got this track of Mike’s” and they inserted those words over the track.
I had recently heard this technique mentioned on a SiriusXM channel as part of the song’s backstory, and I was interested in seeing how far it played out. (List songs are a thing; one can imagine many ways of generating the list. A recent favorite of mine is Juliana Hatfield’s “Everything’s for Sale” from her Weird album.)
In neither case were any specifics given, but these seem easy enough to come by. So:
Take back your angry slander
Take back your pension plan
Take back your ups and downs of your life
In raisin-land
The reference to the “ups and downs of your life in raisin-land” appears to be ripped, nearly verbatim, from the title of Peter King’s May 15, 1986, Los Angeles Times story, “Would-Be Staple : Ups, Downs of Life in Raisinland” about the California raisin industry.
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There’s other apparent low-hanging fruit:
Take back your insurance
Baby nothing’s guaranteed
Take back your acid rain
Let your TV bleed
Consumer liability insurance was in crisis mode by early 1986, naturally resulting in plenty of media coverage, including a Time Magazine cover story, “Sorry, America, Your Insurance Has Been Cancelled,” on March 24, 1986. And acid rain? Just some of the fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that hit in April of 1986. (“Ain’t it a shame,” Bruce Cockburn would pen in May from Cologne, “about the radium rain.”)
Or this :
Take back your Iranian torture
And the apple in young Steve’s eye
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had resigned in September 1985, founded NeXT almost immediately thereafter, and personally funded (taking a 70% ownership stake in) a spin-out from Lucasfilm, Ltd. (namely, Pixar). All of this was media fodder leading up to “Jammin’ Me.” And the day before the “Raisinland” article, the Los Angeles Times carried a piece on the Iranian torture of former Iraqi POWs (Kathleen Hendrix, “Three Iraqi Ex-POWs Tell of Iranian Torture”).
Granted, this might all be coincidental. Post hoc, propter hoc fallacy, anyone? Still, even this cursory glance at the media landscape suggests that the hypothesis of news-induced improv has some legs.
Back to that Eddie Murphy dust-up:
Take back Vanessa Redgrave
Take back Joe Piscopo
Take back Eddie Murphy
Give ’em all someplace to go
What? Why? In American Songwriter, Jim Beviglia writes that “it’s an odd trio to assemble”, adding: “good luck finding any connection to them [Piscopo and Murphy] and Redgrave, the distinguished British actress of stage and screen.” He then wonders, “why call them out at all?” Certainly, the call-out didn’t endear Petty to Murphy (the comedian giving the perhaps apocryphal bumper-sticker response, “F*ck Tom Petty”).
Good luck finding any connection to them and Redgrave. Well, should we expect any deep connection? Based on the above, the relevant connection is presumably just their availability in the media. Redgrave, for her part, appeared in the role of Renée Richards for the CBS production of “Second Serve”, airing in May of 1986 (see the New York Times preview); she was also at the time appealing a judgment in a legal spat with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Piscopo and Murphy had left Saturday Night Live in 1984. However, Piscopo had an ABC network special in May (previewed in the New York Times here), and the Brian De Palma comedy, Wise Guys, in which Piscopo starred with Danny DeVito, had been released the month before. Murphy was between films — Beverly Hills Cop was released in 1984; The Golden Child wouldn’t hit theaters until December. This one is more of a poser, though Murphy performed in June at the Pacific Amphitheatre (Costa Mesa, CA), which was announced and reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. But he did appear in Piscopo’s TV special (which was noted in the preview linked above).
Whatever the case, none of this should diminish this Petty and the Heartbreakers tune. Or its current (if unhappy) relevance. We know this flood. We’re knee-deep in it. At least. You can look away, but it’s not over. But ‘you’ who? Pronouns can be tricky things, with reference shifting with the contextual tides. Maybe it’s us who who can, but shouldn’t, look away, who need to see squarely through the bullshit — distractions, lies, exaggerations, irrelevancies — to stand firm and hold the line with something of Petty’s grinding perseverance. ’cause it’s not over.
And, yeah. Quit jammin’ me.
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