The 100 Top Music Videos
By Elysa Gardner
Rolling Stone #667 - October 14, 1993

14. Don't Come Around Here No More | Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers | 1985
"The first thing I remember about the conception of this video," says Tom Petty, "was Dave Stewart saying that when he heard this song, he pictured himself on top of a giant mushroom, playing the sitar." Petty explains that he and Stewart, who co-produced Petty's 1985 album, Southern Accents, knew from the start that they wanted something "really, really different" for the video of "Don't Come Around Here No More," the first single off that album, "because we thought it was a very unusual single anyway. There was sort of a psychedelic resurgence going on at that time, and we were having a lot of fun with it." That sense of trippy gaiety was carried over to video, a feast of colorful, often distorted images based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Directed by Jeff Stein with assistance from Kathy Dougherty -- and a lot of creative input from Petty and his band -- the video commences with Stewart atop his mushroom, beckoning to a model dressed like Alice, who winds up as the guest of honor at a tea party presided over by Petty, in the guise of the Mad Hatter, who devours with his cohorts the cake into which Alice ultimately transforms. "The cake was Jeff Stein's idea," remembers Petty, "and we had to do that whole scene in one take, since there was only one cake."