FTV: Heartbreaker

 

     Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers enjoyed the ride of a lifetime.  There are only so many rock ‘n’ roll bands that can ascend into the rarified air of stardom as they did over their 41 year run.  It all came to a screeching halt when Petty died in 2017 thus ending the long term partnership between Tom and his right hand man, guitarist Mike Campbell.  Petty never put anything on a record without Campbell’s input, including TP’s platinum-selling solo albums.  Campbell admits that having a dynamic front man like Petty was fine with him because he is, by nature, a shy person who does not at all mind being a wallflower.  Everything that has been written about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers gives Campbell his due, but with that said, there is a lot more to know about him.  The stories this intensely personal guitarist shares in his 2025 book (Heartbreaker:  A Memoir Grand Central Publishing) are a refreshing peek behind the curtain of his life before, during, and after he and Petty began climbing the record charts.

     Mike Campbell was a service brat whose father served in the Strategic Air Command (SAC).  His parent’s marriage was already breaking down by the time Mike landed in Okinawa after his father was transferred to Kadena Air Force Base.  The family first moved to Jacksonville, Florida until he could send for them.  Even though Jacksonville was his mother’s home turf, Mike was not at all happy about returning to her roots.  The paper mills along the Trout River belched smoke and his description of the atmosphere will be familiar to anyone who lived in Ontonagon during the paper mill years:  “The ‘smell of money’ is what the locals called it.”  By the way, the Ontonagon plant was a ‘corrugating medium’ producing mill, not just a ‘paper mill’.

     Mike  slogged through school at John Gorrie Elementary:  “I was the new kid.  I didn’t know how long I would be there.  I kept to myself.”  Life in Jacksonville was no picnic and their short stay in Okinawa was no better.  The Campbells were there long enough for him to finish eighth grade but things broke down completely when his father shared the news that he was leaving their mother.  The family was sent back to the last place Campbell wanted to be:  Jacksonville. The truth be told, they had nowhere else to go.  Life was tough as his mother’s job options were limited.  They jumped from one low rent rat hole to the next as the bills piled up and they were evicted.  Checks from Campbell’s father also became infrequent and then stopped all together.

     Mike’s focus became owning a guitar:  “All I had was two shirts and one pair of jeans and one pair of old sneakers.  But all I wanted was a guitar.  A guitar. A guitar. A guitar.  It was all I thought about.  I had no idea why I wanted one so badly, but it was the Beatles, of course.  Every single day that I was fourteen, the Beatles topped the charts.  In April of 1964, the top five songs were all Beatles songs.  Every day from January to May, and then August to December it was ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, ‘I Feel Fine’, and ‘Love Me Do’.”.  Mike knew their finances wouldn’t allow for such a frivolous purchase yet when he was sixteen, his mother managed to find a well worn acoustic guitar at a pawn shop.  It was a beat up Harmony with f-holes like a violin and a bunch of dings and scratches.  The action was poor and it was a wonder he could even play it.  He dug into the Mel Bay beginning guitar book that came with it and began teaching himself to play (lessons were out of the question).  Mike didn’t want to put it down and he played it until his fingers bled, … and then went back for more.

     Sitting on the front porch of one of the rat-hole duplexes they were renting, Mike was approached by a greaser looking fellow who came out to have a smoke.  He watched Mike strum for a bit and said, “You pass me that box and I might be able to show you a thing or two.”  He showed Mike some tricks that his Mel Bay book didn’t mention.  The crash course ended when this thin pale man in a white t-shirt showed him how to play a simple shuffle.  The greaser dude sang a verse of a hillbilly song, ending with, “Shooooo-weeee – A White Lightning.  See what that gets ya,” and he handed back the guitar.  Campbell recalls, “I never saw him again.  Where had he come from?  Where was he going?  He looked like he had just stepped off the chain gang and was headed for a bar fight.  Cool, tough, and ready to rock.  If that was being a guitarist, I was in – for life.”

     Campbell and Michael Bell (a pal from school) started to get together at Bell’s house to listen to records and compare notes about playing guitar.  Bell played Dylan’s first album, and then showed Mike how to play Baby Let Me Follow You Down.  Campbell was a quick study and over the weeks, he learned to play the changes forward, backward, and upside down.  He experimented with different ways to find the same chords up and down the fretboard.  During one of his father’s rare phone calls from Okinawa, Mike told him, “I need a guitar.”  When his dad said, “You already have a guitar,” Mike said, “I need something different.  I need an electric guitar.”  No promises were made but a few months later, Mike came home from school to find a cardboard box on the front stoop addressed to him.  Inside, wrapped in Japanese newspapers was, “A little mutt of a guitar, a short cord, and an allen wrench.  It was a Guyatone LG-130T that a Japanese company was pumping out by the thousands.  They sold for about fifty bucks and were being sold to kids dreaming of being Beatles.”  There was no case.  He found that if he plugged it into the mic jack on the old Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder he had bought, it reminded him of Dave Davies’ guitar sound with The Kinks.

     Armed with his new axe, a book called ‘How to Play the Beach Boys’ by Carl Wilson, and a copy of the live album The Beach Boys in Concert, his guitar lessons went into overdrive.  Looking at the photos of Carl’s hands forming chords, Mike suddenly realized there were multiple ways to play the same chords extending up the neck.  He was trying to play along with Carl on the live album’s last track, Johnny B. Goode, but it was too fast for him to play.  One afternoon, he noticed the chords were the same as White Lightning, the song the greaser dude had shown him on the front stoop of their duplex:  “[It was] just A, D, and E.  But how could Carl play that intro, and those fills, so fast, never losing the beat?  And then it occurred to me to make the A a different way.  Instead of making it like the greaser showed me, on the second fret, I played it like the picture of Carl’s hand in the book, with the F shape on the fifth fret.  The fretboard opened up like a secret room behind a bookcase…I stared down at my hands in shock.  It had been there the whole time.  All of a sudden I was playing Johnny B. Goode.”

    Mike’s grades in school were good but his future plans were murky.  All he wanted to do was play guitar and not end up getting drafted and shipped off to Vietnam.  After mistakenly being summoned to see the school guidance counselor (Miss Collier was expecting a Michael Carter), his plans changed.  With the misunderstanding corrected, she looked at his file and questioned why he wasn’t making plans to attend college.  Finding out more about his home situation and the poverty level existence the Campbells were experiencing, she took the bull by the horns.  Miss Collier called the admissions office at the University of Florida to tell them he would be applying.  She then called Kadena AFB in Okinawa and got them working on the paperwork for an Air Force loan because Mike’s father was a service member.  At the end of the summer of 1968, Campbell stepped off the bus in Gainesville toting his Guyatone guitar and an almost empty suitcase.

     A naturally shy person, one of Mike’s first friendships he formed in Gainesville was with a lanky surfer dude from Boca Raton who introduced himself at the dorm.  A born tinkerer, Hal had built himself a bass guitar (saying, “How hard can it be to play bass?”) and the two began to jam together.  They eventually made connections with drummer Randall Marsh via an index card Mike found at Lipham Music.  They jammed at Hal and Mike’s ‘hippie house’ and a band they dubbed Dead or Alive was born.  When they overstayed their welcome at the hippie house (too loud), Marsh found a run down place at the edge of town where they could wail to their heart’s content.  It had no heat, hot water, or a working refrigerator, but it was cheap and perfect for them.  All was fine until a good friend of Hal’s decided to sail around the world and disappeared somewhere in the Caribbean never to be seen again.  Hal told Randall and Mike, “Life is too short, I have to go.” Before he sailed to Hawaii (where he would spend the rest of his life), he told them, “Keep playing.”

    After Hal left, Campbell went to one of the frequent free concerts at the University Plaza.  The band seemed to be in the middle of some drama involving the drummer, but they sounded good.  They were called Mudcrutch.  A few days later, Mike found another card at Lipham Music that said, “Mudcrutch seeking a . . .  drummer,” which he passed on to Randall.  His first audition with them wasn’t great.  Marsh wasn’t sure about their country leaning sound, but they came to the farm to give him a second go.  Campbell was actually hiding out in his room playing guitar (which he did all the time) when Randall came in and said, “Come on out and play.  Their rhythm guitarist quit and they said they sound better with two guitars.  I told them you were good.”

     When he was introduced to the guys in Mudcrutch, their body language said they were underwhelmed with the skinny guy in the cutoff shorts.  The bass player stepped forward and introduced himself:  “I’m Tom Petty,” followed by the other guitar player (Tom Leadon) who pointed to the singer, “That’s Jim (Lenahan).”  Campbell plugged into Leadon’s Fender amp.  After he showed Mike the chords, they ran through a song he had heard them do at the Plaza, a Petty original called Save Your Water Woman.  Leadon wasn’t that excited when Randall suggested they play something that Mike could play lead on.  They settled on Johnny B. Good

and Mike glanced at Randall – he had suggested it because he knew what was coming.

     Mike got himself ready and looked at Petty:  “Ready?  And in the moment before he could say ‘yes’, I let it rip.  Hard.  I looked down at the fret board as I played the big, fat double stop triplets, stinging the single string notes so they flew past as I slid down the G string, then jumped up to the fifth fret and dug into the classic Chuck Berry bends before rounding into the A power chord to hit the shuffle.  Randall was playing the shuffle and the other three were wide eyed before they joined in.  We played Honky Tonk Woman next followed by another rocker Petty had written.”  When they took a break, Petty spoke up:  “We want you both in the band.  What do you say>”  Randall didn’t give Mike time to think.  He just said, “We’re in!”

     After they finished this introductory jam, Petty asked Mike what he was doing in Gainesville.  Campbell said his draft lottery number was 86 and he had to stay in school to avoid the draft (even though he was at that point a student by name only and hardly attending classes anymore).  Tom told him, “Don’t worry about it.  Join the group.  Full time.  Don’t worry about that (the draft), we will take care of it.”  Mike wasn’t sure how Tom would ‘take care of that’ but the die was cast.  He was now a full time member of Mudcrutch.

     The band fell into a house band gig at a biker dive bar called Dub’s Steer Room owned by James Wayne Thomas (‘Dub’ for short after the ‘W’ in his middle name).  Jim the singer negotiated the deal:  six to eight weeks, six nights a week, five sets a night from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m.

for the princely sum of $100 per week.  Mike did the math in his head and figured out with five guys, it would be $80 per man per month –  more money than he had ever made.  It would be his ticket to pay the rent and get some real groceries;  not just eating oatmeal everyday to survive.  The band laughed when Jim explained it to him with a little more clarity:  $100 per week per man – $400 each a month, not $80.  All they had to do was learn enough songs.  Dub expected hits of the day and not originals.  They visited the bar with Mike’s tape recorder and made a copy of the most popular tunes on the jukebox and got to work.

     Dub was in the business of selling alcohol and one part of the job came as a big surprise to the band.  When they set up the first night, they met the dancers.  They assumed they were go-go dancers but they soon learned that a bar like Dub’s employed topless dancers, not go-go dancers.  After their first six week engagement, Dub wanted to try out a different band for a while.  Mudcrutch played anywhere and everywhere they could get a gig before returning for the next engagement there.  The steady gig at Dub’s eventually evolved into a traveling party.  When the paying gig ended at 2 a.m., a lot of the younger patrons trekked over to the farmhouse to keep partying with the band.  They would sleep it off and then do it all over again the next night.

     During one of their breaks from Dub’s, they traveled north to do a block of gigs at a place in Birmingham, Alabama.  It did not go well.  As they were loading in their equipment, the club owner confronted them about their appearance.  The bottom line was simple:  “You ain’t wearing tennis shoes when you play in my joint.”  They packed up and left without enough money to get home and no plans – until they met a couple of local girls who got them an audition at another place called The Brass Stables.  They made it halfway through the six week engagement before they got fired.  They didn’t care – they had enough money to get back to Gainesville.

     Upon their return to the farmhouse, they had another unpleasant surprise waiting for them.  Mike Campbell got his draft notice and was told to report to the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville for induction.  Even though playing in Mudcrutch was exactly the life Mike had dreamed of since leaving home, going to school had been his hedge against conscription.  Dropping out of school had removed any safeguards other than Tom’s promise to ‘take care of that’.  Obviously, Petty didn’t have the magic wand he would have needed to keep Uncle Sam from calling.  We will pick up the story of Mike Campbell’s musical journey in Part II of Heartbreaker.

Top PieceVideo:  TP and the Heartbreakers – a song inspired by Tom’s father on his less likeable days . . .;