In his new memoir, “Heartbreaker,” Mike Campbell recalls an afternoon in the early ’70s when Tom Petty — Campbell’s bandmate in a Gainesville, Fla., cover band called Mudcrutch — played one of his songs. As Petty strummed the chords to his future FM radio staple “Don’t Do Me Like That,” Campbell told Petty, “I’d give my right arm if I could write a song like that.”
Campbell at the time was a gifted guitarist raised by a single mom, trying desperately to pull himself up from poverty by turning pro. When he met Petty, he was working awful minimum-wage jobs and seriously thinking about enlisting in the military. “I wanted to play guitar to avoid getting a real job or joining the Air Force,” says Campbell. “As long as anyone was going to pay me a buck to play, that is what I was gonna do.” Campbell also wrote songs — they were good, not great. Petty, in contrast, wrote well and quickly. Years before either tasted any success with the Heartbreakers, Campbell decided to work hard and work smart: Petty was a standout talent, and Campbell would stay the course with him.
Campbell became one of rock’s greatest sidemen — the man to the left of Petty onstage during the entire 40-plus-year run of the Heartbreakers’ career, right up to their final show at the Hollywood Bowl on Sept. 25, 2017, a week before Petty’s death at 66. It was a role he spent years cultivating.
“Heartbreaker” is a tale of endurance and patience rewarded. In short order, Petty became, well, Tom Petty, and Campbell became a guitar god. A master of the perfect guitar part, Campbell’s ringing solos are tattooed on our brains as indelibly as Petty’s playful snarl. They worked so well together that when Petty made solo albums outside the band, he enlisted Campbell to write, produce and play. “You cross paths with somebody and you make a left or a right turn, and it can define your whole life,” says Campbell from his home in Woodland Hills. “If I hadn’t met Tom, or if I had quit early when things got hard, I don’t know where my life would have gone.”
Things were difficult for years as musicians slipped in and out of Mudcrutch, and the band put in the hard miles — playing hundreds of bar gigs across the South, searching for the right alchemy that would distinguish it from every other excellent cover band in Florida. There was a cavernous Gainesville bar called Dub’s, and the group played there nightly for weeks on end, occasionally throwing in one of Petty’s chiming, Byrds-inflected originals. “Back then,” Campbell writes, “everybody was trying to sound like the Allman Brothers. Nobody was playing … short songs with sweet harmonies and big choruses.”
The band played for drunk and angry bikers, accompanied wet T-shirt contests, engaged in screaming matches with greedy club owners. Some frustrated band members dropped out; Campbell knew better. He knew Petty was his golden ticket. “We were young and we had a dream,” says Campbell. “We weren’t really convinced we would get anywhere, but we dreamed of it.”
According to Campbell, Petty, only 19 at the time, arrived fully formed. Blustery, self-confident and bursting with ideas, Petty was always thinking five moves ahead of everyone else in the band. “He had the ambition and the drive to do something great and not get sidetracked or settle for less,” says Campbell. “But in many ways, we were a lot alike, especially in terms of what music we loved.” It was Petty who knocked on record label doors with a demo tape in his pocket, until Shelter Records President Denny Cordell discovered him and launched the band. “I was never going to compete with him for leadership,” says Campbell, “but I could be the guy filling in the gaps. I could drive him and make him better.”
Perhaps more than anything, “Heartbreaker” is a primer on how to effectively work in a band with an alpha male. Campbell learned how to become a conciliator and a mediator — how to let trivial gripes die, to smooth things over for the greater good, to not let greed get in the way of the big picture. Petty could be volatile and erratic — he knew he was the straw that stirred the drink — but he always encouraged Campbell to write.
“Tom was extremely confident,” says Campbell. “I had songs of my own, so I followed him and contributed the best I could.” Rather than force-feed his songs into the group, Campbell would gently nudge Petty with a cassette of skeletal chord progressions or a refrain or a chorus in the hope that Petty might sniff out a song. That method of collaboration would yield classics, but not without some trepidation on Campbell’s part.
“At first, I was unsure about my writing,” says Cambpell. “I like to hone my writing before I show it to anyone, even my wife. There were times when Tom would take a long time before listening to my stuff, but then he would come up with something incredible. I prefer that to sitting eyeball to eyeball with someone in a room..”
Petty and the Heartbreakers blew up in 1976 when their self-titled debut album yielded the anthems “American Girl” and “Breakdown,” but as the stakes got higher, so did the internal and external pressures. Campbell did his level best to ensure that cooler heads would prevail, that the band wouldn’t collapse under the weight of expectations.
1979’s “Damn the Torpedoes” was the first of their mega-selling albums, but it almost broke the band. As Campbell recalls in his memoir, producer Jimmy Iovine and his engineer Shelly Yakus pushed everyone so hard in the studio that it began to feel like psychological warfare. Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch bore the brunt of the torture; on numerous occasions, Lynch stormed out of the studio, only to be coaxed back when no one else worked out (Lynch left the band in 1994).
Campbell recalls playing at least 70 takes of “Refugee,” a song that began life as a Campbell riff before Iovine, Yakus and Petty signed off on it. “It was not easy because Tom was very direct and he didn’t suffer fools, and he pretty much told the truth,” says Campbell. “There was just a lot of pressure to be great.”
There was also the issue of money. Early on, the Heartbreakers’ first manager, Elliot Roberts, laid it out in no uncertain terms: Petty would receive 50% of the profits and the band would split the other half. This arrangement, according to Campbell, created ill will for years with Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench. At one point during the “Torpedo” sessions, Campbell and Petty exchanged words about Campbell wanting a larger cut for his work, to which Petty uttered three words: “I’m Tom Petty.” End of discussion.
“To be fair, Tom gave me a huge cut on ‘Full Moon Fever,’” says Campbell in reference to Petty’s multiplatinum 1989 solo album. “There was a generous side to him too.”
More importantly, Petty and Campbell would co-write songs that millions of people now know by heart: “You Got Lucky,” “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl.” As Petty accepted more songs from Campbell, Campbell’s confidence as a songwriter blossomed, and he branched out beyond the band, co-writing with Don Henley the megahits “The Boys of Summer” and “The Heart of the Matter.” “Tom made me believe in myself,” says Campbell. “We were always able to talk through stuff and come back to love and respect. That’s why we stayed together for so long.”
