How many songwriters get to say they wrote a hit with Bob Dylan? Jammin’ Me, the opening track and lead single from Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), carries one of the most remarkable credits in rock: Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and Mike Campbell. Born on the road while the Heartbreakers were serving as Dylan’s backing band, assembled from words plucked out of newspapers and television broadcasts, it is a four-minute howl about information overload that sounded like a novelty rant in 1987 and reads like prophecy now. It also topped the rock chart for a month and climbed to No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 — not bad for a song its creators essentially collaged together.
Backing Bob: The True Confessions Tour
The collaboration grew out of one of the great secondments in rock history. The pairing began in September 1985 at Farm Aid, where Dylan, unimpressed with the pickup band originally assembled for him, turned to the Heartbreakers — and was so pleased that he kept them. Dylan invited the band to back him on the True Confessions Tour, a 60-date trek through Asia, Oceania and North America in 1986, with European dates following in 1987. “I don’t think there is anyone we admire more,” Petty said of Dylan — and now his band had to learn, and then inhabit, the most storied songbook in rock, night after night. In the same stretch, the Heartbreakers also played dates with the Grateful Dead, completing an education no conservatory could offer: the two greatest American songbooks of the era, absorbed from inside the bandstand.
The education ran both ways. Dylan’s 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded included Got My Mind Made Up, a Petty composition credited to Dylan and Petty, and Dylan’s own album sessions that year were cut with the Heartbreakers behind him. That same year Dylan recorded Band of the Hand, the theme for Paul Michael Glaser’s film of the same name, backed by the Heartbreakers and a choir of backing singers that included Stevie Nicks, with the record credited to “Bob Dylan and the Heartbreakers” — the closest thing to a joint billing the two camps ever released. Somewhere inside that intense apprenticeship, a new song began to take shape from an unlikely direction: a track Mike Campbell had written and handed to Petty, which Petty, busy and distracted, had simply shelved. It is worth pausing on the apprenticeship itself. The Heartbreakers had arrived in the mid-1980s as a hit band in search of its next identity; Dylan treated them as what they were — one of the finest working bands in America — and put them to work on material that demanded instinct over polish. Petty emerged from the tour with his songwriting loosened, his sense of economy sharpened, and a collaborator’s confidence he would draw on for the rest of his career.
Picking Words Off the Television
Campbell later told the story to Songfacts: he wrote the music and gave the track to Petty, who held onto it without doing anything. “Then I guess he was working with Bob 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 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.”
The words Dylan and Petty harvested became the song’s famous laundry list of mid-1980s media saturation: Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo and Vanessa Redgrave name-checked as symbols of a culture coming at you all at once, “the apple in young Steve’s eye” nodding to Steve Jobs and the young Apple empire, the narrator begging the noise to back off and let him think. It is crucial to the joke that none of these people had done anything except be famous at high volume — the song is not an attack on them but on the feed itself, the sensation of a mind being jammed like a radio signal. Dylan, who had spent the decade being misread by the same machinery, knew the feeling intimately; Petty, a working rock star watching cable television multiply the channels, was learning it in real time. Not everyone name-checked was amused. “The verse about Eddie Murphy, that was all Bob,” Petty later admitted. “Which embarrassed me a little bit, because I remember seeing Eddie Murphy on TV really pissed off about it. I had nothing against Eddie Murphy or Vanessa Redgrave. What Bob was talking about was media overload and being slammed with so many things at once. And times were changing; there weren’t four television channels anymore.”
A Studio Album Dressed as a Live One
Jammin’ Me opened Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), released in April 1987 — an album deliberately recorded to sound like a live performance, using a technique the band borrowed from Dylan, in a conscious reaction against the synthesizer sheen of the era. The method suited the material: Rolling Stone‘s review described an album full of people “reeling from media assaults and shattered relationships,” holding on and trying to make sense of the world, and Jammin’ Me is that theme at its most frantic and funny. The recording itself is pure Heartbreakers economy — Campbell, unusually, handling bass as well as lead and rhythm guitar and percussion, Tench’s piano needling through the mix, Stan Lynch driving the whole thing like a bar band at closing time. Issued as the first single on April 6, 1987, with Make That Connection on the flip, the song shot to No. 1 on Billboard‘s Album Rock Tracks chart and stayed there for four weeks. It was Petty’s third single to top that chart, after The Waiting in 1981 and You Got Lucky in 1982, and it reached No. 18 on the Hot 100, with top-40 showings in Canada and New Zealand besides.
Critics enjoyed the racket. AllMusic compared its groove to the Rolling Stones’ Start Me Up and called it “positively infectious”; Rolling Stone praised the raw guitar chords and Benmont Tench’s honky-tonk piano fills; Cash Box singled out the strong, earnest vocal and gritty, guitar-based production. For a band supposedly in a commercial lull, the Heartbreakers sounded remarkably like a bar band having the time of its life.
From Media Overload to the Wilburys
The song became a live weapon, performed with what AllMusic called “astounding results.” During the band’s celebrated multi-night stands at the Fillmore in 1997 and 1999, Petty strapped on a lead guitar himself and took Campbell’s role on it. Curiously, it was left off the band’s 1993 Greatest Hits despite its chart pedigree, but the compilers made amends: it anchors retrospectives on Playback (1995), Anthology: Through the Years (2000) and the posthumous The Best of Everything (2019).
The album the song fronted had a curious afterlife of its own. Petty later distanced himself from Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), and in Warren Zanes’ 2015 biography he expressed strong regrets about having walked away from the record before he felt it was fully finished. Yet time has been kind to its opener: as the streaming era re-sorted Petty’s catalog by affection rather than by campaign budgets, Jammin’ Me kept resurfacing — on the compilations already mentioned, in classic-rock rotation, and in every retrospective argument about the most fun the Heartbreakers ever sounded on record. It was also, though nobody knew it at the time, the last big pop hit of the band’s eighties run, the closing flare of the era that began with Damn the Torpedoes — and the bridge to everything that came next.
Above all, Jammin’ Me stands as the first fruit of the creative circle that would reshape Petty’s career. Within a year of its release, the man who had spent 1986 backing Bob Dylan was in the Traveling Wilburys alongside Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne — a band that began as casually as Jammin’ Me had, friends in a studio following an accident of scheduling, and produced the most joyful records of all their late careers. The Dylan connection never really closed: the two camps kept circling back into each other’s orbits, and Petty spoke of the True Confessions apprenticeship for the rest of his life as a kind of graduation. Time has also given the song’s throwaway jokes a strange second life — the name-check of the young Steve Jobs, tossed off when Apple was a scrappy computer company, now lands like a dispatch from a vanished media universe, a reminder of how recently the flood the song complains about was a trickle. The song’s complaint, meanwhile, has only sharpened. In 1987, being jammed by four television channels turning into forty felt like a crisis of modern life. Heard today, in an age of infinite feeds, Jammin’ Me sounds less like a period piece than like the first dispatch from a world we now all live in — filed, fittingly, by two of the greatest songwriters America ever produced, reading the newspaper and shouting back at it.