Mike Campbell Reflects on Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ ‘Really Poor’ Beginnings & Avoiding ‘Stupid’ Topics In His Memoir
The guitarist and songwriter looks back on his struggles and successes in Heartbreaker: A Memoir.
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The depth and detail in the 464-page Heartbreaker: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing) is impressive — and surprising.
To Mike Campbell as well.
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The Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist tells Billboard that he was actually keeping a journal when the band (then known as Mudcrutch) moved to Los Angeles in 1974 from the members’ native Florida. “I did it for the first couple of months,” Campbell recalls. “Every day the entry was, ‘We went into the studio. We couldn’t get the track. We couldn’t get the track.’ It was so depressing I just quit writing it down. But the stuff was still stuck in my memory.” And he credits his co-author, novelist Ari Surdoval (Double Nickels), with helping to pull those out of him.
“As I started thinking back on my memories, a lot of things just popped out that I didn’t know were in there,” Campbell says. “It’s kinda crazy how the mind works.”
Heartbreaker offers the proverbial long, strange trip through the 75-year-old Campbell’s life from an impoverished, single-parent upbringing in Florida through his discovery of guitar and music, the Heartbreakers’ ascent and his own success as a sideman and songwriter (starting with Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” in 1984), right up through his current endeavor leading the Dirty Knobs, a band he formed as a side project more than a decade ago which has become Campbell’s primary musical outlet since Petty’s death in 2017. It’s spirit-lifting in spots, heart-breaking in others, and it offers a deep and revealing dive that will please Petty fans and guitar geeks alike.
“I didn’t want to write a sex, drugs and rock n’ roll book,” Campbell says. “I wanted to talk about the creative energy for the songs and the personal relationships between me and my bandmates. And I wanted to show the struggle it took to get where we got; it wasn’t just handed to us, and I wanted to tell the whole story of how we started out really poor and sacrificed for many years before we saw any income. So that was my basic thing.
“Mostly I wanted to touch base on the creative mystery of songs and where they come from. I set those boundaries at the beginning — we’re not gonna talk about stupid things that every rock star writes about. I don’t find that very interesting.”
Campbell does check off all those boxes with Heartbreaker. There’s minimal sex; he’s been married to his wife Marcie for nearly 50 years, and their meeting at a Halloween party is sweetly recounted in the book. There are some drugs — his own use as well as his bandmates, including Petty’s heroin addiction — and plenty of rock n’ roll, documenting not only the Heartbreakers but also Campbell’s Forrest Gump-like connection to the likes of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac (whom he toured with during 2018-19), Johnny Cash and more.
“I did find myself just looking around and going, ‘How did I get here?’ a lot,” Campbell says with a laugh. “When a song would come, ‘Why me? How did I get so lucky that this song came out of the air to me, of all people?’”
Amidst his positive intentions, however, Campbell is also brutally honest about the sometimes-turbulent inner workings of the Heartbreakers, ranging from Petty’s ascent to frontman status and the group’s business structure to the delicate dynamics exacerbated by forceful personalities.
“I wanted to be real, and I wanted to be truthful,” says Campbell, who co-produced several Heartbreakers and Petty solo albums, as well as the posthumous 2022 box set Live at the Fillmore 1997. He also co-wrote Billboard Hot 100 top 40 hits such as “Refugee,” “You Got Lucky,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream’ and others. “I don’t want to dwell on other people’s drug and alcohol problems. I have not read the book Tom put out (Conversations with Tom Petty, 2005), but I understand he talks about all that himself. I wanted to illuminate my relationship with my brothers in the Heartbreakers. We all come from the South and we grew up in a very similar way, and I wanted to show how special that brotherhood was. I wanted to let people look behind the curtain, see a little bit about what it’s like being in a band like this.
“Bands are very delicate creatures. It doesn’t take much to break a band up. You have all the egos and personalities and sometimes wives or girlfriends get involved, money…. But our group, the music always outweighed it. It was so important to keep the music alive that nobody’s wives or arguments over money, as far as I was concerned, was ever going to break it up. It was too special…and we cherished it.”
To that end Campbell says he shared excerpts of the book with those who were mentioned, including Petty’s daughter Adria, who’s been running the estate, keyboardist Benmont Tench, Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Jeff Lynne and others. “I wanted them to sign off that they were comfortable with it,” Campbell says. “Nobody had anything but thanks for how I treated them. Nobody said, ‘No, you can’t put me in the book.'”
“The parts that I read I thought were great,” says Tench, who’s waiting for the audio version of Heartbreaker, which Campbell recorded himself, to come out. “Mike’s memory is much more reliable than mine; I’m glad he’s writing it, and not me.”
Campbell’s great affection for Petty and the other Heartbreakers aside, he considers Dylan — whom he met during sessions for Dylan’s 1985 Empire Burlesque album before the Heartbreakers joined him on tour during 1986-87 — the most surreal character in the book. “He is a mystery genius, a beautiful creature,” Campbell notes. “He’s so enigmatic, but so brilliant. I’ve met a lot of my heroes, from George Harrison to Johnny Cash; they’re all intimidating and have the aura. But Bob has this special thing around him that’s intriguing ’cause he’s so brilliant and he’s so mystical and so hard to read. But he’s so good.”
A surprising thread throughout Heartbreaker, however, is Campbell’s professed insecurity, an inferiority complex that finds him taking much of the blame for any of the band’s shortcomings of failures. “That’s a therapist question,” he says when it’s pointed out. “I think maybe if I dig deep and look at it, maybe my parents’ divorce affected me in a very deep way, where my whole world was broken apart. Throughout my whole life I’ve tried to build a world that won’t break up, and keep it together — my band and my marriage. So maybe that’s why. Maybe it’s genetics. I don’t really know the answer, but…I’m still here doing it, so I think I’m dealing with it alright.”
Campbell has three author appearances slated so far for Heartbreaker: March 19 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark; March 20 at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn; and March 21 at Strand in New York City. Meanwhile, he’s been working on songs for the Dirty Knob’s follow-up to last year’s Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits, with, he says, “several songs I’m excited about” already in hand. The quartet, which now includes former Heartbreakers drummer Steve Ferrone, will join Chris Stapleton for All-American Road Show stops on June 12-13 in Grand Rapids, Mich., and will be playing a selection of summer shows with Blackberry Smoke starting July 25-26 at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.
“I’m just busy,” Campbell notes. “I love my band and I love the songs I’m doing and the crowds we have so far. I’m writing all the time, and I’m happy. I’m really blessed. It’s been a great life, and it’s not nearly over.”
