On the Shelf
Heartbreaker
By Mike CampbellGrand Central Publishing: 464 pages, $32If you purchase books linked on our website, The Occasions could earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges assist impartial bookstores.
In his new memoir, “Heartbreaker,” Mike Campbell recollects a day within the early ’70s when Tom Petty — Campbell’s bandmate in a Gainesville, Fla., cowl band referred to as Mudcrutch — performed one in all his songs. As Petty strummed the chords to his future FM radio staple “Don’t Do Me Like That,” Campbell instructed Petty, “I’d give my right arm if I could write a song like that.”
Campbell on the time was a gifted guitarist raised by a single mother, attempting desperately to drag himself up from poverty by turning professional. When he met Petty, he was working terrible minimum-wage jobs and severely enthusiastic about enlisting within the navy. “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 additionally wrote songs — they had been good, not nice. Petty, in distinction, wrote properly and shortly. Years earlier than both tasted any success with the Heartbreakers, Campbell determined to work onerous and work good: Petty was a standout expertise, and Campbell would keep the course with him.
Campbell grew to become one in all rock’s best sidemen — the person to the left of Petty onstage throughout your entire 40-plus-year run of the Heartbreakers’ profession, proper as much as their remaining present on the Hollywood Bowl on Sept. 25, 2017, per week earlier than Petty’s loss of life at 66. It was a job he spent years cultivating.
(Grand Central Publishing)
“Heartbreaker” is a story of endurance and endurance rewarded. In brief order, Petty grew to become, properly, Tom Petty, and Campbell grew to become a guitar god. A grasp of the right guitar half, Campbell’s ringing solos are tattooed on our brains as indelibly as Petty’s playful snarl. They labored so properly collectively that when Petty made solo albums outdoors the band, he enlisted Campbell to write down, 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 residence 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.”
Issues had been tough for years as musicians slipped out and in of Mudcrutch, and the band put within the onerous miles — enjoying a whole bunch of bar gigs throughout the South, trying to find the appropriate alchemy that may distinguish it from each different wonderful cowl band in Florida. There was a cavernous Gainesville bar referred to as Dub’s, and the group performed there nightly for weeks on finish, often throwing in one in all 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 performed for drunk and offended bikers, accompanied moist T-shirt contests, engaged in screaming matches with grasping membership house owners. Some annoyed band members dropped out; Campbell knew higher. 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.”
“I was never going to compete with him for leadership,” Mike Campbell says of Tom Petty, “but I could be the guy filling in the gaps. I could drive him and make him better.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Occasions)
In line with Campbell, Petty, solely 19 on the time, arrived totally shaped. Blustery, self-confident and bursting with concepts, Petty was at all times pondering 5 strikes forward of everybody else within 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 document label doorways with a demo tape in his pocket, till Shelter Information President Denny Cordell found 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.”
Maybe greater than something, “Heartbreaker” is a primer on the best way to successfully work in a band with an alpha male. Campbell discovered the best way to change into a conciliator and a mediator — the best way to let trivial gripes die, to clean issues over for the better good, to not let greed get in the best way of the large image. Petty could possibly be risky and erratic — he knew he was the straw that stirred the drink — however he at all times inspired Campbell to write down.
“Tom was extremely confident,” says Campbell. “I had songs of my own, so I followed him and contributed the best I could.” Moderately than force-feed his songs into the group, Campbell would gently nudge Petty with a cassette of skeletal chord progressions or a chorus or a refrain within the hope that Petty may sniff out a track. That methodology of collaboration would yield classics, however not with out some trepidation on Campbell’s half.
“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,” however because the stakes bought larger, so did the interior and exterior pressures. Campbell did his degree finest to make sure that cooler heads would prevail, that the band wouldn’t collapse underneath the load of expectations.
Mike Campbell, left, and Tom Petty of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers carry out at San Francisco’s Previous Waldorf Nightclub in 1977.
(Richard McCaffrey / Getty Pictures)
1979’s “Damn the Torpedoes” was the primary of their mega-selling albums, but it surely nearly broke the band. As Campbell recollects in his memoir, producer Jimmy Iovine and his engineer Shelly Yakus pushed everybody so onerous within the studio that it started to really feel like psychological warfare. Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch bore the brunt of the torture; on quite a few events, Lynch stormed out of the studio, solely to be coaxed again when nobody else labored out (Lynch left the band in 1994).
Campbell recollects enjoying at the least 70 takes of “Refugee,” a track that started life as a Campbell riff earlier than 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 additionally the problem of cash. Early on, the Heartbreakers’ first supervisor, Elliot Roberts, laid it out in no unsure phrases: Petty would obtain 50% of the earnings and the band would break up the opposite half. This association, in keeping with Campbell, created unwell will for years with Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench. At one level in the course of the “Torpedo” classes, Campbell and Petty exchanged phrases about Campbell wanting a bigger minimize for his work, to which Petty uttered three phrases: “I’m Tom Petty.” Finish of dialogue.
“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.”
Extra importantly, Petty and Campbell would co-write songs that tens of millions of individuals now know by coronary heart: “You Got Lucky,” “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl.” As Petty accepted extra songs from Campbell, Campbell’s confidence as a songwriter blossomed, and he branched out past 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.”
Mike Campbell at residence in Woodland Hills.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Occasions)
