“Zombie Zoo” (1989)

Tom Petty made seven albums with the Heartbreakers and then made his first solo album in 1989, Full Moon Fever. FMF included one Heartbreaker and all of the Traveling Wilburys except Bob Dylan. Most of the songs were co-written by Jeff Lynne. Lynne is equally skilled at making good albums greater (this one) and great albums more terrible (see: the Beatles). Shortly before he died in 2017, Petty gave his last interview to Rolling Stone and said he hated that FMF ended with “Zombie Zoo” because there were much better songs that got left off that album. FMF remains beloved but I’ve never met a Pettyhead who was diehard for “Zombie Zoo.” The story goes that Lynne and Petty went out to Anaheim to ask all the oldsters to join up as the Wilburys and they met some fans at a diner, some mohawked punkers. Petty asked where they’d been playing and they said the Zombie Zoo. Popular nightclub for spooks and creeps in L.A. in the mid to late Eighties.

These lyrics probably took all of five minutes to jot on the napkin before their food arrived. Personally, I think it’s a great example of uptempo naysaying, of condemning with faint pastiche. It’s just some geezer—TP’s nasal hillbilly persona cranked to eleven—passing judgment on a cute little drop out in white lipstick who loves to dance and only comes out at night. You know, regular teenage girl stuff. Petty told Paul Zollo in 2005, during the epic Conversations book interviews, that the only reason it got on the album was that Lynne “really campaigned for it. I would have cut it out. But there it is” (240). As if Petty didn’t have complete control. He should’ve owned up, so I’m subtracting one sac from what is otherwise a wonderfully corny little piece of pop nonsense. 4 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—Megan Volpert