#krkd

Spring Arcade Building. DTLA. 2/2/15

METADATA: Tom Petty - "The Last DJ"

Tom Petty sure sings about a lot of last things – dances with Mary Jane, times you’re gonna hurt me, and DJs, to name a few. But for music lovers, the concept of the last DJ is by far the saddest. Released on the eponymous 2002 record, the song details the exit of the last true, blue radio disc jockey, his job and the airwaves taken over by The Man. This having been Petty’s eleventh studio album, he knew a thing or two about what it takes to get songs on the radio. I’ll get more in depth on the greasy subject of payola when I cover Pink Floyd, but the gist is: since the beginnings of the music industry as we know it today, circa the '40s and '50s, executives have been looking for any leg up they can get. Somewhere along the way, they made the dangerous discovery that they could bribe DJs (with cash, vacations, cars, etc.) to get their newest singles played on the radio; and what’s more, if they out-bribed the other label guys, they could dominate entire market swaths.

So back to Petty. The DJ he sings of refused to be bought out by the corporations and refused to play the payola game, so he gets run out of town, professionally speaking. He ends up running a station in Mexico whose frequency sometimes reaches California, prompting our mourning narrator to race to a listening point and tune in for as long as the signal holds. But the Last DJ didn’t only take his show on the road – he took our listening freedom with him. In his place, we “celebrate mediocrity” and the label execs, now forced into a vicious bidding cycle of their own creation, “wanna see / How much you’ll pay for what you used to get for free.”

For a split second in the music video, there’s footage of LA’s old KRKD tower. Until January of this year, the tower was in severe disrepair and was set to be demolished. KRKD was an AM/FM rock station pair in the '60s and '70s, until they respectively became KIIS AM and FM, the former becoming a conservative talk show format and the latter becoming one of LA’s most influential Top 40 stations. I wonder what inspired Petty to write the song.