Jammin Me: Bob Dylan working with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell

By Tony Attwood

Jammin Me is not recognised by BobDylan.com as a Dylan song, but he certainly was one of the three co-writers.  It was released on the Heartbreakers album “Let me Up (I’ve had enough)” and as a single.

Mike Campbell in an interview said that he wrote the track, gave it to Tom Petty who then did nothing with it for a while and then had some extra lyrics added by Dylan.  Campbell in fact suggests,  “I guess they were picking words out of a newspaper or off the television” which is certainly one way of working…

“I wasn’t there when Bob wrote the words to it, but I was pretty thrilled to hear that he had contributed to it. We just went in and recreated the demo to it.

Heylin suggests that lines such as “Take back your acid rain, let your TV bleed” and “Take back your Iranian torture and the apple in young Steve’s eye,” sound very much like Dylan contributions.

According to Rolling Stone the song is about a man, “overwhelmed by the volume of disconnected news generated in the disinformation age”.   Indeed the album’s theme is generally agreed to be about people “who are reeling from media assaults and shattered relationships”, but who still want to hold on and make some sense of it all.

As to who wrote what, Tom Petty said that Bob wrote the verse about Eddie Murphy.  He also suggested that Eddie Murphy didn’t appreciate the commentary, although Tom Petty said that there was nothing personal in this – it was just about the total media overload.

The song and the album became a hit and received positive reviews from the likes of Rolling Stone.

The song has a real Tom Petty feel – you only have to hear those chords to know who is going to be performing and how it’s going to go.  Here are the lyrics and there is a link to the song below.