MIKE CAMPBELL - HEARTBREAKER
23/04/2025
Mike Campbell has written a rock music memoir full of grace, humility and gratitude.
Near the end of a well written, most enjoyable and gripping read, Mike Campbell describes his feelings around the time of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ final studio record Hypnotic:
There were moments then here I could see it all so clearly. I could close my eyes and see the whole epic story of the band, from struggling to make to all the way to the present. It almost seemed like a myth, like an ancient adventure pulling us all in its wake.
Heartbreaker tells us that epic story. About a young poor boy in Gainesville Florida who made it to the top of the world. From a freezing hut in the countryside of Florida to a beautiful house with a recording studio and animals in the garden, in the heart of LA. Mike Campbell tells rags to riches a Holywood story.
The engine of this story is the young boy’s genius. He can play guitar. However, this boy needed his friend to front the story, to drag him across the world. The Tom Petty in Heartbreaker is a complex kid to steal one of their titles. He’s full of warmth, humour and goodness but also selfish drive, totally focused commitment and a little arrogance.
Campbell’s grace made him a loyal friend to a front man who didn’t always treat him well. Whatever Petty threw at his band mates and however the rest reacted Campbell stayed true. He had a natural inferiority complex which comes across as humility and he stayed ever grateful to the life that he got to live as guitar player with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.
“To me, being grateful was the key to everything. It was what made it possible for me to get through the hardest times in the band. Simple gratitude. Simple thanks for the blessings I had been given. For the life. For the music. For the crew. For the fans.”
Campbell tells the story of the band’s rise with great detail. The way songs came together, how producer Jimmy Iovine worked, how tours went, the management and legal complications and the drug addictions. Closer and more devoted than Petty is, his wife Marcie who has done the entire journey by his side.
Underneath the Petty tower, Campbell became a musician in his own right. Working up tape after tape of song ideas for Petty, a few taken and many discarded he gave one to the Eagles’, Don Henley, and had a massive hit with Boys Of Summer. It all ended with him starting his own band The Dirty Knobs and becoming a guitar player for Fleetwood Mac.
In between, Mike Campbell from Gainesville met and played with all the greatest musicians ever. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers became Bob Dylan’s band for a couple of years and this is perhaps the best writing on the inside track of that relationship. Then there is George Harrison and Jeff Lynne who became part of the family including The Travelling Wilburys. Johnny Cash, Paul McCartney, Joe Strummer… and a beautiful story of how his mother opened the door to Mick Jagger.
You get that feel for the gratitude. Michael Campbell has lived the life and his early years were not pointing to anything like this. Petty putting the old Gainesville mates together in Mudcrutch, thirty years after they broke up is an amazing chapter in the Petty career, as though he’d learned grace from his guitar player.
In the last pages of the book we have to deal with Tom Petty’s death. I hated it coming towards me as I read. There is grief. Yet, Petty’s joy on the 40th Anniversary Tour is consolation.
Afterwards we hear about how he tried to finally sing a Petty song during a Dirty Knobs’ gig and when he broke down during Southern Accents and the crowd sang it home. Better still is when they did do a Petty Tribute evening and reaching for his lifelong guitar techie Chinner for a guitar as he introduced the next song he looks up and it’s Tom’s wife Dana handing it to him. I burst into tears!
I have admired Mike Campbell since at least Damn The Torpedoes. I knew he was so important to Petty’s sound. I knew he was a great guitar player. When I reviewed the one Petty concert that I am so grateful that I experienced. My conclusion was all about Campbell.
Something happening on that stage was meeting me in the very depth of my spiritual life. As Mike Campbell dug his fingers deep into the fret board of one of his plethora of guitars and eked out this sound that was loud, melodic and beautifully piercing my soul was raised to a higher plain, ecstatic at living this life and energised to live it more to the full.
I too am grateful. Thank you Mike Campbell for that moment and telling me yours and Tom Petty’s story so beautifully and honestly.