Ask a casual music fan about Tom Petty‘s connection to Prince and they’ll likely point you to the pair’s blistering cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Recorded live at the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, that performance begins with Petty leading an all-star band of musicians—including Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, and the Heartbreakers‘ own Scott Thurston—through a faithful version of the Beatles song. After the final chorus, Prince materializes onstage in a cloud of his own charisma, Telecaster in hand, and launches into a three-minute guitar solo. Epic and electrifying, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” marks the first and only time Petty and Prince shared a stage.
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Two decades before that gig, though, Petty turned his love of Prince’s music into inspiration for the left-field pop hit “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” The year was 1984, and Purple Rain was the most popular record in America. Looking to explore new territory on the album that would become Southern Accents, Petty became a fan of Prince’s willingness to move beyond the style of his earlier releases. “I saw Prince doing what looked like an attempt at psychedelia,” he told author Warren Zanes in the book Petty: The Biography, “and I loved it. It inspired me.”
Petty wrote “Don’t Come Around Here No More” with Dave Stewart. Stewart had attended a party at Stevie Nicks’ house earlier that decade, after playing a gig in L.A. with Eurythmics, and he’d watched as she kicked her then-boyfriend Joe Walsh out of the home with the words, “Don’t come around here no more!” That phrase lodged itself in Stewart’s mind and eventually became the song’s chorus. Once Nicks heard a demo of the song with Petty’s vocals, she gave her blessing for the Heartbreakers to record it.
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On paper, “Don’t Come Around Here No More” is a straightforward breakup anthem, delivered from one partner to the other. It’s punchy and pissed-off, beginning with a literal shout of frustration. “Hey!” Petty yells, joined by three backup singers: Stephanie Spruill, Sharon Celani, and Marilyn Martin (whose soft-rock duet with Phil Collins, “Separate Lives,” reached No. 1 in America in November 1985, the same month Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers documented the Southern Accents tour with the live album Pack Up the Plantation: Live!). From there, Petty makes his way through a hit-list of commands, essentially filing a musical restraining order against his no-good lover.
Whatever you’re looking for—hey!—don’t come around here no more, he sings during the song’s chorus. The music behind him is psychedelic and trance-like, with electronic drums that rumble into the ether and an electric sitar that conjures up an atmosphere of mushroom-addled mysticism. The lyrics, though, are sharply barbed and to-the-point. Petty doesn’t want to cast a spell; he wants his ex to leave.
I don’t feel you anymore; you darken my door, he sings during the second verse, his voice bitter, his words leaving nothing to the imagination. The guy is fed up. He doesn’t want company. He’s not accepting visitors at the moment. Throughout the song, he even punctuates many of his lines with exclamations of “Stop!” That word has an arresting effect, as though he’s sticking out his arm to physically block his ex-lover’s advancements.
“Don’t Come Around Here No More” was accompanied by a music video directed by Jeff Stein, who played up the song’s psychedelic undertones with an Alice in Wonderland setting that’s as creepy as it is trippy. The video’s heroine is even turned into birthday cake, partially consumed by the attendees of a tea party, and eventually swallowed by Petty. Those visuals helped make “Don’t Come Around Here No More” a staple on MTV, as well as a five-time nominee at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1985. The video muddies the song’s original intent, though, and it also skips nearly 30 seconds of Mike Campbell’s guitar solo, which adds so much light to the song’s darker corners.
At its heart, “Don’t Come Around Here No More” isn’t about a fairytale-worthy mushroom trip. It’s a song grounded in reality and frustration. Leave it to Tom Petty to make such an angry lyric sound so entrancing.
Photo by Michael Montfort/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
