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Island. Goose Island Beer Company, Chicago's beer, and sound opinions is. Mike Campbell's our guest today, and when you think of talented, hardworking, and humble guys in rock and roll, he's way up there. A rare thing indeed. Mike found the most success in his long-running music career with Tom Petty as a crucial member of the Heartbreakers. From 1976 to 2017, what a run.
He played lead guitar and co-wrote some of the biggest songs of the 20th century, including Refugee, Running Down a Dream, and Here Comes My Girl. He's also collaborated with Don Henley, Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, and many more. Mike recently released his autobiography, now a New York Times bestseller, and we got to talk to him all about it, Greg. Now, we have interviewed lots of musicians over the years, and we've talked about lots of musicians' autobiography.
But Mike seems to be one of the most steady. He's the same guy from northern Florida with a deep love and appreciation for music and the people he creates it with. We started out by asking him how he... fell in love with playing the guitar. My first guitar was a cheap pawn shop guitar that my mom got for 15 bucks because I kept begging her. And it was kind of unplayable.
which I didn't know at the time because the strings were way off the neck. But I just thought that's the way it was. So I just got in there and, you know, my fingers would bleed, you know, and I'd stop for a while until it... you know healed up and i'd start back at it again it was just like uh i was obsessed from the instant i got it it just i felt connected to it
It's hard to describe but it just sort of a light went on inside me like this is what I'm supposed to do You know and I loved it so much, you know, I was just like everything else in my life stopped in terms of the kinds of stuff that that really turned the light bulb on for you. I mean, from that era, there was a lot of, you know, people were always talking about, oh, I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, you know, those kind of moments where you...
said, okay, I've got to play this music. I mean, what was it for you? What was that moment? Well, I was one of those people. But before that, my dad... was into Johnny Cash and Elvis. And he had a few records around the house. And I heard before the Beatles came on Ed Sullivan, I was listening to those records with Scotty Moore. luther perkins on the johnny cash records and i was always enamored with the guitar from early on
But when I saw them on TV, you know, it's like we went from black and white to color, as most people say. It was like, wow. You know, I'd love to be able to do that. These guys are from Mars or someplace. I wanted to know as much about their world as I could musically, you know. There's an incredibly sweet moment later in the book when you find yourself backstage sitting next to Johnny Cash and getting to tell him how much one of his songs meant to you.
Yeah, that was a very sweet moment. And it illustrates what a great guy Johnny was. You know, he was sitting in the corner in a folding chair in the backstage with the highwayman. I think we were in Sweden or someplace. I shyly went over and introduced myself and, you know, I got down on one knee and said, you know, you mean so much to me and I love your music. My dad played your records and I told him my favorite song.
And I wasn't asking him to play it, and he said, oh, I'm sorry, that's not in the set list tonight. I said, that's okay, I just wanted to let you know. And sure enough, during the show, he stopped the show and he did that song. And I'm sure it was because I mentioned it to him. And we got to be fast friends from then on. He was just that type of guy, very sincere and sweet. Well, I think Johnny traveled a similar path to you guys, kind of forging his own sound.
maybe contrary to the popular trends of the time and doing his own thing very, very strongly throughout his career despite what trends were. I go back to you forming a band with Tom. in florida and and you know the acceptance of if you didn't sound like the allman brothers you weren't anybody down there um you know and i think there was a great part in the book where you were writing you got fired uh
from a gig in Birmingham for the crime of playing country rock because the dancers didn't like it. Early on, it seemed like you were forging your own path. Yeah. Whether I knew it or not, I was just following the music. And as I wrote the book and I thought about those memories, it occurred to me, and I hope people understand it and maybe they don't know.
The life of a musician starting a band and trying to succeed is not easy. You've got to be dedicated. You've got to love it. You've got to be willing to starve and sacrifice for several years.
And, of course, at the time, I didn't think about it was a sacrifice. But looking back on it, you know, there was a lot of hard work and patience it took to hang in there and not quit. And I think our band... succeeded at that you know and there are a lot of bands break up for lots of reasons but it was a tough road to hoe as tom used to say
Before we get away from influences, Mike, you are a devoted listener, a fan, I think, first and foremost, right? Your couple of pages about Mike Bloomfield and the influence he had to you. I was like, I was like. Oh, that's one of the best descriptions of Bloomfield I've ever read. Right, Greg? Oh, yeah. Chicago music journalist. A guy who really is underappreciated. Very underappreciated.
Yeah, he, you know, at the time when I discovered the Paul Butterfield band, there were no rock magazines. You know, it was a downbeat was the only music magazine. It was mostly jazz and stuff that was over my head. But I saw an article in there once, it might have been Ralph Gleason, about his review of the Paul Butterfield album. And so I went and got it. And the guitar, the whole band, but that guitar...
It just like spoke to me, you know, and it's like I wanted to do that and I wanted to understand how he did it. So I would slow the record down to have speed and listen to his fingers. And I figured out that that's how he was pushing the string and bending it. So I got deep into his phrasing and his tone and his passion. The way he played was so brave. You know, he's out there like going to run off the road at any moment, but he didn't.
And there was so much feeling in it. And I connected with it. And I really have tried, you know, always to, as a source of my inspiration, to emulate that as much as I can. Because it really was, I think, it's one of the best playing that was ever done. For guitar geeks, your book is just full of specifics. You don't shy away from this. You know, here's a pattern of notes. Here's how I phrase these things. Well, and the holy grail story of encountering a Fender broadcaster before the telecaster.
For the Stratocaster. And, you know, for $2,000, I was like, oh, my God, how am I ever going to afford this? It was $600. $600. $600? Yeah. These guitars that this guy named Leo made in his garage. Yeah. Yeah. But here's the beauty of that is I was such a greenhorn and so naive from Florida out in California. I didn't even... know what it was. I thought it was a telecaster. Oh, what's a broadcaster? I don't know. It looks like a telecaster. I had no idea. I was so innocent about it.
And then it turns out to be this incredible instrument. So once again, just something, it was a blessing. It came from heaven to me. I don't know why, but yeah, that is a good story. It's true. You know, that's what went down. That's the kind of guitar, Greg, that one could sell if you were that much of a heathen and pay your mortgage probably for a year now. Right. Yeah. Well, I like the part about I didn't have any money.
So I went, and once again, I was so naive. I didn't know what consignment meant. I thought it was like, well, something else. And so I went and got the band PA, which we weren't playing live. We were trying to make a record, and we had all invested in it, four or five of us. And so I put that on consignment to get the guitar.
I didn't realize. I just gave away the pants PA. And when I told Tom, yeah, you know, I knew instinctively it was the right thing to do, but it wasn't really, I should have asked them first, you know, but I was so excited. And then when Tom heard it, you sold a PA. How could you do that? How are we going to be? And then he saw the guitar and he heard it and he goes, I get it. Okay. I'll let you off on that one. You get a pass. I got a pass.
Tell us a little bit about Mudcrutch, your first big band, relatively speaking, with Tom. And it never really got off the ground. Finally, Mudcrutch was able to release albums. and it's you know many many many decades later it's almost like the times had caught up with the sound with the band being in the south being in florida You were expected to sound like the Allman Brothers already had to be a cover band. There was like no in-between there, and it seemed like you guys were the in-between.
What was that like? Like, was there any discussion within the band? Well, maybe we should be a little more Allman Brothers-like or whatever to sort of... maybe make the road a little smoother. We never followed any of those rules. We did what we wanted to do. We played the way we wanted to play, and if people liked it, fine. But the truth is, in Gainesville, we got pretty...
I mean, we were a big band in Gainesville for a while playing that type of music. And we were like the alternative to the Southern rock blues thing. But that wasn't really what... turned us on you know we were leaning more toward the birds and the beetles and stones and that was our influences and that's what we chased you know we weren't going to like conform to
you know, a white boy blues thing because everybody else was doing it. That's not the way we operate. The fact that you guys were not immediately embraced for it. The decision to go west, I guess, was a big one, right? I mean, it was like we need to go somewhere else to establish this, right? Exactly. We kind of conquered Gainesville, so to speak.
and made a little single it didn't do much and we realized uh we had a lot of talks about it you know we need to make a record you know and bernie ledden uh who was friends of ours who's brother was in our band was saying come out to la because he was out there forming the eagles he says there's lots of opportunities and you guys could probably do good out there
So we scraped up what we had and put it in a truck and drove out to L.A. completely greenhorned and struggled for a couple of years trying to figure out how it's done, you know. And that's how it happened. That period, though, when you went out to L.A., it's like you've got this vision of what it's going to be like. There's opportunity, as Bernie Ledin told you.
And then it sounded like, you know, you went in the studio, cut some stuff, and then we're sitting on your butts for months at a time. You had to be wondering, what's going on here? Why is this happening to us? Yeah, it was a confusing time, but that's where Denny Cordell comes into play. He heard something in us before we heard it. He heard some kind of value in what Tom and I and Ben were doing.
And he liked the songwriting. And so he stood by us, you know, and he supported us with the rant and a meager amount for food for quite a while as we went in the studio. And he was producing us, but we didn't know how to record. And it took a lot of patience on his part. And eventually we learned.
There was some sitting around and second-guessing, like, what do we do? Why is this not working? I used to keep a journal. That's the only time in my life I ever kept a journal, and I would write in it. I kept it for two or three months. And I quit doing it because every day I'd write, we went in the studio. We couldn't get a track. We're all bummed out. Next entry. We went in the studio again. Couldn't get a track. Every day it was the same thing. It just wasn't working.
And that's the rite of passage. That's what I'm talking about, the sacrifice and struggle. Maybe people don't realize, you know, you don't just walk in and start recording. It's great. It takes a while. It is for us to find our mojo.
Your role as a songwriter, Mike, I think is not widely understood, except by the hardest of hardcore... tom petty fans uh you know but refugee here comes my girl you got lucky running down a dream you know many of uh tom's greatest songs would start with you as i gather in the book you know you had a riff you'd give them to him and then he'd complete it it was it was not like you guys sat down uh you know next to each other guitars in your laps or or at the piano
But a lot of the musical ideas that would inspire him first started with a riff that sometimes you didn't even know was any good. Well, that was our partnership. It was a marriage in heaven, made in heaven. I was a very... shy insecure person so I was more comfortable being all by myself and Working on an idea without somebody there staring at me like come on do something, you know And so that worked good for me and I could I could hash out
ideas that i thought might be valuable and then i had my buddy tom here what do you think of this oh how about here comes my girl how about refugee i had the perfect partner for the way i was working And it worked for us, you know. We rarely sat down eyeball to eyeball, if ever, like Leonard McCartney type thing. We never did that. But our system worked for us, you know. And I was very fortunate to have that partner.
One of the things that strikes me on that was your wife got you that tape recorder. Yeah. It seemed like it opened up a whole new world for you. Well, it did. I remember one day Cordell said to the whole band, he said, you guys should get TX so you can learn what you're doing. And I was the only one that did it, really.
Couldn't afford it, but I think my wife got a settlement. One of her aunts died and gave her a little money, and we needed it for ranch. She said, no, you go get the tape recorder. She's always been that way with me. So I just took to it like a rabbit. to the field. You know, I was like into it and I loved recording and I loved the whole, I still do. That's all I do. I just love to record something and overdub with it and build it up. And so I got to four track and I started doing that.
And that's when the doors kind of opened for me and I started to get the vision. Oh, this is I'm getting ideas now. You know, I know what I know how to realize them with this machine. And it lit a fire in me. When we return, we ask Mike Campbell about the difficult and exhausting experience of recording the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album, Damn the Torpedoes. That's in a minute on Sound Opinions.
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This week, we're talking with Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on the occasion of his autobiography. Let's get back into the conversation. Your account of the recording of Damn the Torpedoes is one of the most painful things I have ever read. You know, Jimmy Iovine is at the helm. He's done Dancing Barefoot. had a hit with Patti Smith, an unlikely hit. And the hell he put you guys through. Poor Stan Lynch.
advocating firing that guy again and again and again. Greg and I have been music journalists. I've talked to many... you know, bands that went through a hellish experience like that, they always seem, the producers who think... they know better than the artists are always saying fire the drummer fire the drummer get a real drummer in here you know and and jim keltner comes in and he's not the right drummer other you know later on in the book there's a sweet moment when none other than duck
on, perhaps the greatest bassist ever to play in this realm. You know, says Stan Lynch is a great drummer. Shut up, all of you. Right? But it's like, although you make it seem like... Root Canal without anesthesia. Recording that album, it obviously isn't. brilliant album, and there's still a kindness that you have. I don't know if many other people would be as kind as you are to Jimmy Iovine. Well, you know, it's interesting that you notice that Jimmy...
And I had a connection. You know, Jimmy believed in me. And he saw that I was important to the vision that Tom was bringing in. And he inspired me.
We were really close, me and Jimmy. Like I said in the book, we'd get the basic tracks. He'd say, get the long chord with the guitar, Mike, and your bass and guitar. We're going to make this record. We're going to finish it now, you and me. He saw what I was bringing to the table, and I had... great admiration for him for believing in me you know same as with cordell and you know it's like i'm glad that that story is in the book because it is it is hard to read because there's so much
emotional, spiritual trauma in the experience. But I think it's good for people, music fans or whoever, even if you're not a music fan, to see that it's not that easy. It could be, you know, being a musician, play a chord, make a record, be a star. There's a lot of sweat and blood that goes into it. And sometimes it can really push you to the limits.
That thing about 70 takes of a song, yeah. Well, it was so funny because when I think back on it, we wouldn't do that now. When I say we were green, Jimmy wasn't green, but he should have known too that... okay, this take would have been great except the chorus sped up. But this take has a great chorus. We'll just cut the tape together and we'll make a Frankenstein monster of a perfect take. We didn't think about that.
It's like, no, if it's not great from start to finish, we've got to start all over again, do the whole track again. In a way, that's kind of beautiful, you know, but it. We could have made it a lot quicker if we had done some editing. And it would have required somebody to pinpoint the bits. Like, well, that was the chorus. So, you know, we were just in there trying to spare me, as Stan would say, like a monkey trying to f*** the football.
You know, I love that because that's old school. That's like the old soul singers. They would always tell me, like, we had to do it from beginning to end. It wasn't perfect. The fact that that is essentially a live album. Damn the Torpedo is essentially a live record. The band. a five-piece rock band recording an album that turns out to be a multi-million seller.
Mike, did you know that it was going to, it was the breakthrough record. I mean, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were known, but they didn't have that massive commercial success on that record. Did you know that was coming? No, we had no idea. We didn't know anything about hits. I still don't know. What makes a record a hit? First of all, it's got to be...
Greatly recorded, great songs. But I think it's also the timing. You have to kind of hit the market when it's wanting that type of thing. So there's a lot of magic that goes into the fact that it did so well. I mean, I knew it was good. I was proud of it. And, you know, like... I remember once we had just finished Refugee and I walked through the studio office and the girl that was working at the table, she goes, just watch that one run, watch that one run.
And I'm going, what do you mean? She said, that's a solid hit. And I go, really? Okay, we'll see. So there was something in there, but no, we don't know. You never know. Like the whole thing with... a full moon fever. They told us there was nothing on there the first time we took it in. Right. We thought we had a hit record. And they said, no, no, don't want to put this out.
And we came back, you know, later and, oh, yeah, we hear it now. Like, whatever. So as an artist, I mean, I don't we never thought about is this going to be a hit? Is it going to catch fire with the millions and millions of people? We never thought like that. We always thought like, do you like it? Do I like it? Does the secretary think it's good? Does it feel good to us? Then if we're proud of it, then put it out there and see what it does. That's our mentality.
Let me ask you a philosophical question, though, Mike, because when when you're working later on with Jeff Lynn, you and Tom, I mean, it's completely different. It's almost like a punk rock approach, you know. first take. It's got the feel. It's good. That way of making Damn the Torpedoes the Jimmy Iovine way of we're going to spend two weeks getting Stan's snare drum, to sound right, is gone. I mean, it's never going to happen again.
Is that a bad thing? Not with you, right. But is that a bad thing? Could everybody's health and well-being have been preserved better? You're touring in England. You become a huge class. And you, you know, initially the press is mystified. Are Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, are they part of this new wave punk thing or where do they fit, right? But the punks had it right. I mean, it was one take. Get the vibe.
Get the energy. And then later you wind up having those same experiences with Rick Rubin and with Jeff Lynn of old people. Jeff Lynn, you know. ELO is as complicated recordings as have ever been laid down, and yet with you guys, he was like, just let Tom be Tom, and Mike, you come in and play that guitar.
Well, as you were saying that, you know what occurred to me, comparing us to this in 77, when we went to England, and all the punk bands, you know, the Clash and Sex Pistols and all them, that was the thing. But the difference between us and them is they put the band together without ever learning to play, which was kind of cool for them. We'd already put like three or four or five years into struggling to be good players.
And we had that energy, but we could also play. You know, we'd done our work. And so that was the difference between us. But, you know, and you also, you know, Damn the Torpedoes, the Jimmy Ivey production. is that kind of record. Full Moon Fever is a whole different kind of record. You know, it doesn't require a five-way performance. It requires crafting to make it sound like we all played together.
And that's the beauty of GIF. It's two different ways of making records, you know, and they're both valid and they're very different, you know. One, you know, I like the best of both worlds. I like to hear the guy's chemistry when they're performing the track. But I also like to hear the layers that go on to glue it all together and make it great, you know. And the beauty of when we got with Jeff was after all that struggle of making records being so difficult, it was like a breath of fresh air.
You know, we started at noon by four o'clock in the afternoon. We're done with it. You know, the record's done. Free Fallen, the finished track for Free Fallen, literally four hours. Yeah, and then, okay, let's do, I won't back down. Okay, another three, four hours, that one's done. How about another one? And it was just like, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it was like, wow, I'm not even sick of it yet, you know?
How can we be finished? I think that gives that stuff some staying power, too, because it feels sort of, you can feel how organic it is, you know, how natural it is. Yeah, we were having fun. We were excited, and we were learning, and we never got stuck with... drum sounds we just went on with the song and the performance and the next song it was all like up here you know and in the creative level and i love that record i also you know i like when i hear torpedoes i like it but
I can hear the pain. And at my age, I don't want to do that anymore. I did it once. And Hard Promises was the same thing. And Long After Dark, you know, they were difficult, but that's where we were at the time. And now I know better. I know better than to waste time on the wrong things. But it's all about learning.
You know, it's funny when you talk to an artist who's on the other side of it, you know, you're just hearing the finished product and you go, wow, wasn't that amazing making that record? And all the artist that thinks about it is like, I just remember the pain that we went through to make it.
It was just like, it's a different perspective. They don't see the guitar players sitting on the floor, on the concrete floor next to his amp, looking at his shoes, like basically almost like crying, like, what's wrong? Why do I suck? They don't see any of it. Well, speaking of difficulty, so Damn the Torpedoes turns Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers into a juggernaut. And then you've got new management. Cordell is sort of fading away a little bit.
And Elliot Roberts comes in, who's a big-time manager. I mean, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, et cetera. And he lays down this, in remarkable detail, Mike, give you total credit for laying this out, that meeting. Where this whole, you know, is it a band or are they sidemen? Is it Tom Petty and a bunch of other guys or is it a real band? And Elliot Roberts basically says, well...
So many words and correct me if I'm wrong, but the impression I get was he's really not saying it's a band Yeah saying it is Tom Petty and he gets the most of the money and you guys you guys have to you know deal with the it's a 50 50 split with tom getting 50 and the band getting the other 50 in terms of the revenue
Writing about that moment is a really eye-opening moment for me, reading your book. You were very transparent about it. How did that not break up the band, is what I'm asking. Well, it didn't break up the band because of me, if I can take credit for that. The truth is that I'm glad that's in the book and also illustrates the undercurrents or back door stuff that goes on with the finances of a rock and roll band. There's a lot of bands break up over money.
This guy wants more. That guy wants more. And the story with the Heartbreakers and Tom is up until that point, we were all equally paid on everything. You know, it was five-way split, like, you know. you know, three Musketeers, the five Musketeers or whatever, you know. And at that point, it was illustrated to us by Elliot, which I kind of already knew, but I didn't bring it up. But Tom was doing a lot more work than I was.
A lot more work than Stan was. You know, we were playing and working hard in the studio. He was doing business deals. He was writing the lyrics. He was referring to band. He was talking to the audience. He was creating a persona. He was putting in a lot of hours with the manager, like going over tour detail, doing a lot of legwork that I was just sitting at home waiting for the tour.
And we get up on stage and, you know, and I'd be la-di-da-di-da. This is easy. He'd be up there trying to engage the audience, to pull it through, to build it up, to do all the theatrics and stuff that requires a frontman. And so...
When I looked at it, I thought, well, you know, that looks fair to me. You know, he's working more, he should get more money. And some of the other guys in the band, they thought, well, wait a minute, we always split everything equally. Well, you know, that's kind of idealistic. In defense of Tom, though...
I mean, they could have been really brutal. They could have put us on salary. And, you know, I don't know how I would have felt about that. But what they did is they restructured the partnership. So we're still getting... And it dawned on me, like, look, if this thing's going to fly big, if Tom gets really rich, we're going to be rich too. With our percentage, we're going to do great. So what's the big deal? So he gets more big deal. If I've got enough to meet my niece and live my life.
And play my music. And that's how I pitched it to the other guys. Like when they were getting out of shape, you know, it's like, you know, you're going to break up over this. You're going to look at what you're going to miss out on. You know, you want to go start another band or go do sessions. Like, come on guys, get real.
He's working harder. He should get more. It all made perfect logical sense to me. I mean, the first time Elliot said it was like, what? And I thought about it. Well, wait a minute. No, there's logic to that. And if I was Tom, I would want the same thing. I'm the, as in Spinal Tap, I was the lukewarm water in the middle. Trying to put out all the fires. Because, you know, I wasn't going to let the band break up.
Over anything. I just never did. And I never would. Because I loved it too much. So that was just a little bump in the road. And we got through it. And everybody got, you know, Maseratis. Eventually. Coming up, we'll keep chatting with Mike Campbell about working with some of his musical heroes, including Bob Dylan. That's in a minute on Sound Opinions.
And we are back. Let's get back to our chat with Mike Gamble of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Talking about the band as the stature was increasing throughout the 80s. You became a really big band. You tell the anecdote in the book, Bob Dylan is going through a rough patch in the 80s trying to figure out what he wanted to do. And I didn't know this.
But he called you and said, what should I do? Bob didn't need my advice to tell him what to do. He he called me and said that he was thinking about. having a band as opposed to a bunch of different players that didn't know each other so that he could communicate. He could talk to one guy. To five guys, it'd be like talking to one guy. He'd have to explain it to each guy differently. That's the way he was looking at it.
And he said, you know, maybe I'll get somebody like John Cougarsband who know each other. And why he called me, I don't know, unless he had some ulterior motive. But that's up to Bob. But I said, no, no, no, you should take us, you know. We know your stuff really well. And next thing I know, we were booking a tour. Yeah, and it worked out pretty well. I mean, you write very...
positively about the experience. Those shows, as you probably know, weren't necessarily well-reviewed all the way through, but it sounded like it was a good experience for the Heartbreakers. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, we got some bad reviews about... The sound was mixed poorly here and there over time. But Bob didn't seem to mind the bad reviews. We also got good reviews. And we enjoyed playing it.
Yeah, there were some bumps along the way, but when we were good, we were really good. Good songs, good singer, good band. And when we were connected, it was magic. And it was enlightening for me and the Heartbreakers. We went around the world with Bob. playing those songs and supporting him and doing a few of our own songs in the middle.
And I learned so much just being around him and the whole band, I think it revitalized us and kind of got us out of our own. So I look, look, you know, yeah, we could play, you know, we can back up Bob Dylan, we can back up ourselves. We don't have to be all pissy with each other all the time. So I think he kind of taught us that, just to relax and do what you want to do, and people will follow you. Did anything surprise you about Dylan that maybe people don't generally know about him?
Just that he's a sweet guy. I'm very sensitive about speaking about what does Bob think about this or that because I have too much respect for him. And I wouldn't presume to... to speak for him, but I wasn't surprised, but I was pleasantly engaged with his friendship and his honesty, and he's just fun to be around. He's funny. But I wasn't surprised by it. He was kind of like, yeah, that's kind of how I thought he was. He's even just cooler than I thought. Yeah.
You're so self-effacing about the people you've interacted with, whether it's that meeting with Johnny Cash or playing with Dylan. I love your interactions with George Harrison. You know, one of the greatest guitarists of all time. But I didn't realize this. You know, when you have the opportunity to play Taxman with him, you have to go to Sir Paul because Sir Paul played that solo.
I never knew. Did you ever read that, Greg? No, I knew that. I didn't know that. I didn't know the story about you having to go to Paul. If you listen to the solo, it is pretty freaking off the wall. And it's great. Well, what do I say? I mean, that's like meeting God, meeting those guys. George made a big impression on me. The taxman thing, I knew that I had read and I was up on Beatles lore that Paul had played that solo. And so when we were going to do it, I had to learn it.
you know and it's it's kind of raga in a way but there's a lot of different ways you could finger it and so i was trying different ways that i thought he might have done it so i wanted to ask him in person like did you do it this way or did you do it that way And he's so funny. I don't call him Sir Paul, but I guess he is Sir Paul.
That seems weird. So I asked him quickly. He said, oh, no, the first way you did it, that's the way it was. I said, oh, great. And I gave him a compliment. I said, this is really clever because the scale going up... is different than the scale going down, which is like a very Indian musical type thing to do. And I thought he would say, well, thank you. And he goes, yeah, that's brilliant, isn't it?
I couldn't tell if his tongue was in his cheek or not. That's great. As you get to a certain point, you're allowed to pat yourself on the back. guys is the high point in my life because they are such a huge impression on me and Bringo too he's such a sweetheart you know and George was such a kind gift-giving person and complimentary and funny
And sarcastic in his own way. But I don't know. I still can't get over the fact that he seemed to like me for some reason. I think it's because musicians have an affinity with each other or something. Well, I think it's more than that, Mike. I mean, George was very centered. as you portray him and and we had asked tom about george and it was very similar when we had tom on the show uh his his a centered down-to-earth guy who knew who he was um and that's how how you seem to
You and Marcy have been together. How many years married now? It'll be 50 next year. Wow. Yeah, I'm very proud of that. You know, and, you know, other members of the Heartbreakers got sucked into the sex, drugs, rock and roll, you know, whole thing and struggled and, you know, Benmont. battled with sobriety, comes out the other side for the better, but it was tough, right? You seem to have kept your head about you while everyone else was losing theirs for 40 years.
I did push the envelope. I went to the hospital, which I talk about one time. I didn't understand back in the day that, you know, addiction is a disease. I just thought it was a choice. I understand that now. And I have more sympathy for people that struggle with it, that they can't help it, you know. And I've just been lucky.
I can't drink too much because my stomach revolts on me. So that stopped me from being a drinker. I love to drink. I like to get high and have fun. But my body, you said at one point, you know what? If you do this, you're going to kill me. So it was easy for me to go, well, I don't want to die. So I think I'll just pull back, you know, but some people can't do that. And I have sympathy for that.
Ben Mott was able to do it. Tom was able to do it. Howie was not. And I've lost some friends. And I have a lot of friends, too, that have figured it out. Steve Ferroni's been sober for like 30 years now. He got it. straightened out a long time ago. He's consistently strong with it. I have respect for people that fight their disease. I'm glad I don't have it. But you've got to do what you've got to do.
So you mentioned Tom wasn't going to be told what to do, and that's kind of a recurring theme throughout the book. I won't back down, you know, seemed to be a life motto for Tom. He had a sense of... The way he wanted to do things, the way he wanted the band to do things, and sometimes he paid a price for that. You know, those struggles early on with MCA, you know, just infamous, right?
Where do you think that in the end fits in his legacy? What does it say to a young musician today? Well, Tom is... We were lucky to have a leader like that in the band. A band needs a leader. It needs someone with ambition and the ego and the drive and the fierceness and the fight to win against the man.
you know or whatever it might come up there's a lot of business that you have to stand up to and you have to be driven and without that leadership the band's just a band you know they could be pushed around or they can fall apart you know and that's just to tom's credit He loved the band, and he led the band. And he was very smart. You know, he could see bull. He did not suffer fools, and he didn't take any deals that weren't good. I mean, except at the very beginning, we didn't know any better.
But once he figured it out, he did most of our record deals and our negotiations. He was the final word in it. And he was good, you know, much better than I could have done. He just had that ability, and that's what helped us succeed. And I think if your question was what is his legacy, it was his legacy was he was a great leader. You know, there's one of the things you don't stint from is that to be a great leader, to be a leader. Let's take the adjective out of it, just to be a leader.
you have to uh there's an element of ruthlessness about it you know you got to be a little A little cold at times, right? Only with people that deserve it or that ask for it. I mean, you've got a lot of seedy people. Once you start getting successful, you have seedy people coming around trying to... tell you what you should or shouldn't do, or trying to get you, talk you into things that they're going to make money on if you do it, but maybe it's not best for you. So, ruthless toward them, yes.
But Ruthless toured your band and your fans, not at all. Tom was extremely driven too, obviously, and he played that entire tour, which I did not know, the 2017 40th anniversary tour. He played that tour with a broken hip. I knew his hip was ailing. I didn't know it was broken. And apparently it got worse as the tour went on, yeah. Right.
And he's a reticent guy. He didn't talk a lot about his private life. I've interviewed him a dozen times over the years, and he would never dwell on those kind of subjects. Was the band privy to... What he was going through, did he share that with anybody? It seemed like he was not going to complain about it. No, he shared the basic details, like I've got an issue, you know, and it hurts, but I'm going to do this tour anyway.
And once Tom made up his mind, you didn't talk him out of it. So we were aware, but he didn't share the gory details. Like, I don't know what it was like in his hotel room after the gigs, that he was medicating his pain or if he was really suffering psychologically. We're dudes. We don't share feelings like that too deeply. We were aware, but we weren't deep down in the psychological, emotional yearnings of the pain he was in.
As I look back on it, it was probably worse than I thought because he was just having so much fun and seemed to be wanting to be there. So if it was really bad, he would have stayed home. So as bad as it was, it wasn't bad enough that he couldn't do the tour. And the tour did not kill him. You know, we had plans to do more stuff, record another record, do another tour. All he had to do was go in and recuperate and get his hip fixed.
So the tour was his choice. He was given options. Like, you can pull out of this if you want to. If you don't think you can do it, and he just put his foot down. I'm doing this tour. If I have to sit on a chair, I'm going to do this tour. And once he puts his foot down... It stays there.
Mike, one last thing for me. I do have to ask you about American Girl because I think you centered that in the book where you talk about, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seemed to me like that was, that's the song. Yeah. The way you frame it in the book, it just seems like, and obviously it was the breakthrough song for you guys in a lot of ways, you know, breakdown perhaps, but American Girl is the song that...
It just goes on and on and on. People regard it as timeless. And it sounded like, man, popping out of your head there in the very earliest days of that band. What has that song meant to you over the years? Well, a lot. It was the last song we played together, too, at the Hollywood Bowl. That song, picture...
We're doing our first record. Once we now have the Heartbreakers together and things are starting to roll, energy is picking up. We have a band. Tom is writing better. We're trying to discover ourselves as the five guys from Gainesville. And Tom got inspired. And he came in one day with this song, American Girl. And we immediately loved it, you know. So we got a sound up and we started playing it. Stan came up with the beat and I came up with the guitar part.
everybody started playing it and somehow in the chords i started up playing the full chords like tom was and it just sounded like messy so i took the third note out of the chord just one And I played those chords up the neck against Tom's full chords on the bottom. And then this harmonic happened. And that's our sound. We found our sound that I can play around Tom. I don't have to double him, but I can play intervals above him that are harmonic.
that sound like us. Nobody else sounds like that. And it was very exciting. You know, when we found it, it's like, that's us. Now we know what we are. And it was on 4th of July. The next day, Tom and his wife and my wife and her kids went to Disneyland. We were celebrating. But that song just appeared. Tom... wrote it. The imagery is great. The words are great. The exuberance in the track. I think we can feel that...
You can feel us discovering each other like, wow, we got something here. You can feel that in the music in that track. We only played it a couple of times in the studio and we got the track and I put the guitar on it and this and that. I think it's a combination of the sound came together, the exuberance of the performance, and those lyrics, and the way Tom delivered it. It is timeless, thank God. We're lucky. We caught a wave there. You sure did.
Heartbreaker, a memoir. It's a narrow shelf of memoirs that are not self-serving that stand as something more, and this belongs on it. Well, it's been a pleasure. It has been. Good questions, and I enjoy it. That wraps up our conversation with Mike Campbell. And as always, we want to hear from you. Share your thoughts via a voicemail on our website, soundopinions.org.
or in our Patreon group. And Greg, it has to be said, his book reads just like the guy we just talked to. Absolutely. It is so frank and engaging. But what do we have on the show next week? Next week, Jim, a lot of fun. Common's one of our favorite hip-hop artists of all time. He made a great record called Like Water for Chocolate, and we're going to celebrate his 25th anniversary.
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