Tom Petty guitarist Mike Campbell: How ego, heroin and a hot temper nearly wrecked the Heartbreakers

At the start of 1979, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were a struggling band on the brink of something big. In quick succession, they landed a fresh record contract, started writing promising new material and bagged a powerful new manager in Elliot Roberts, who had helped shape the careers of stars as vaunted as Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. They had every reason to be excited, then, when Roberts summoned them to their first meeting.

How fast the mood would shift when, without wasting a moment, Roberts sternly announced to the guys, “There’s gonna be a few changes.” Chief among them, a change-up in the distribution of income. While previously all profits from live shows had been split evenly between the five members, from now on half the profits would go to Petty, with the rest to be slivered between the other four. Adding insult to injury, Petty was nowhere to be seen at the meeting. “After so many years of being ‘all-for-one-and-one-for-all’, we realised, ‘Oh, we’re at this stage now,” guitarist Mike Campbell, 75, says in a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. “We’re gonna cut the money down for the rest of the band. Why?”

Well, as Roberts explained, Petty wrote the grand majority of the songs, sang lead on all of them, and provided that ineffable frontman energy every band needs to become huge. However reasonable that argument may have been, it didn’t lighten the mood. “I was angry,” Campbell writes in his frank new memoir about his history with the band, titled Heartbreaker. In the book, he describes the group’s irreplaceable keyboardist, Benmont Tench, as being “furious”, while drummer Stan Lynch was positively apoplectic. “Petty doesn’t even have the balls to show up to the meeting,” Campbell quotes Lynch as saying in the book. “There is no way I’m taking this deal.”

Had that held true, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers would have ended then and there. Instead, Campbell managed to talk the others off the ledge. “There was a magic in our music that never would have happened without the five of us together,” he tells me. “Bands are delicate things. Most break up, but we managed to keep ours together.”

In fact, they did so for over 40 years, only ending with Petty’s death in 2017 from an accidental overdose of the pain medication he needed to manage a horribly damaged hip. By staying together, Petty and the Heartbreakers wound up selling tens of millions of albums, including a Greatest Hits package that moved over 12 million copies alone. At the same time, holding a band of disparate souls together for nearly half a century, under unending pressure, involved a litany of painful compromises and decisions, many of which are detailed in Campbell’s book. Clearly, he had the right temperament for the job, having played the role of peacekeeper between Petty and the rest of the players nearly from the start.

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Yet, to write about the experience fairly, Campbell had to navigate a minefield of emotions, balancing what actually happened against his love for Petty, as well as the respect accorded any beloved figure who’s no longer here. Part of the power of his book comes in offering a rare glimpse into the delicate dynamics that underpin any great band supporting a superstar. But speaking in our interview, Campbell is, at times, more guarded.

Regarding that pivotal meeting described above, the guitarist is quick to state that, had he been in Petty’s shoes, he likely would have done the same thing – and however imbalanced the deal was, it could have been worse. “Tom could have said, ‘Put these guys on salary,’” he says. “But he made us partners instead.”

Part of that decision was likely down to the fact that they had started out together as dirt-poor young guys from Florida, some of them, like Campbell, from broken homes. Nearly 200 pages of his book are devoted to their long years of struggle. “People don’t realise how much sleeping on ratty mattresses and driving in vans in the snow and playing dumpy little gigs goes on,” he says. “There’s a lot of build up.”

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Even so, he says that Petty never had the slightest doubt he would become a star. Neither did he have any doubt over who was in charge. In their early days, the band was known as Mudcrutch, not exactly a promising moniker. By the time they got a record contract, a new name was needed and Petty made it clear that whatever it was going to be, his name would have to be at the front. In fact, when a contract was first offered, the label only wanted Petty for the recording, to be backed by studio musicians – a deal Petty went along with.

It was only after going down that route that the label realised the Heartbreakers had a sound Petty alone couldn’t replicate. “There’s a chemistry when guys are in a group, as opposed to hired players who collect a paycheck at the end of the session,” Campbell says. “And Tom wanted a band.”

Happy as it made the guys, they were still unpleasantly surprised when they saw the cover of their first album, which showcased Petty alone. The rest were segregated to the back cover. On a positive note, that 1976 debut and its 1978 follow-up earned growing radio play for chiming classics like “American Girl” and “I Need to Know”. But the band made next to nothing in sales, which explains why the stakes were so high for their third album, the time to be cut for a new label and aided by their well-connected new manager. For that record, titled Damn the Torpedoes, they were assigned a highly touted young producer, Jimmy Iovine, who had just scored a major hit with Patti Smith’s Because the Night and who would go on to co-found Interscope Records.

So focused was Iovine on creating hits, he proudly announced to the band that he never once bothered to listen to side two of any album. “I thought that was the funniest thing he ever said,” Campbell says. “And, apparently, it was true.”

Iovine was blisteringly clear about the sound he needed from Petty and co in order to achieve that goal, focusing his most brutal attention on Lynch’s drums to get it. In the book, Campbell goes into wrenching detail about how hard Iovine and, by extension Petty, worked Lynch – to the point that he nearly quit the band. Campbell says he included those tensions to show readers just “how much emotional and spiritual trauma there can be to make magic happen. It’s not like you waltz in and here it is.”

Luckily for the band, Iovine’s tough approach resulted in a multi-platinum smash, driven by the hits “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl”, both co-written by Campbell, who often contributed compositional ideas. Despite the album’s success, the poor treatment of Lynch continued for years, and spanned a time so tense that Petty auditioned other drummers behind his back.

Campbell goes out of his way to praise Lynch in his book, a choice, he insists today, that was not made to compensate for his often lousy treatment in the band. By 1994, Lynch finally had enough and left the group, a transition eased by the success he achieved working with Don Henley on several of his hit solo albums. Campbell also had an important musical connection to Henley.

The two co-wrote the 1984 smash hit “The Boys of Summer”, which Campbell had first brought to Petty, who didn’t think the song was right for the Heartbreakers. Its success was a godsend, both for Henley, who was still trying to move beyond the messy implosion of The Eagles, and for Campbell. Though the Heartbreakers had sold over five million albums by that point, the pay scale in the band was so unfavourable to the guitarist, he was in danger of losing his home. Only funds from his hit with Henley saved it. “Most people think you put out one record and you buy a Ferrari,” Campbell says. “It’s not like that at all.”

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Though the band’s finances improved exponentially over time, there were still major ego issues to navigate. In the late 1980s, when Petty decided to work with ELO’s Jeff Lynne on new material – something he usually did with Campbell – he didn’t tell the guitarist until it was a fait accompli. Then again, communication between the two had always been more instinctual than direct. “We didn’t have touchy-feely talks,” Campbell says. “We’re dudes.”

Their roundabout way of communicating became an especially troubling issue when Petty began using heroin in the Nineties, something that was known only to his innermost circle at the time. Campbell never brought his concerns to Petty because, he says, he knew exactly how that conversation would have played out.

“It would have gone like this,” he says. “‘Tom, I’m worried about you. You’re hurting yourself. Maybe you ought to think about cleaning up.’ [Then] Tom would have said, ‘What the f*** does Mike have to say about me? It’s my business. Leave me alone.’ You couldn’t talk Tom into anything.” Their mutual attitude was that “when you’re not on-stage or in the studio, it’s your business”, Campbell says.

At the same time, their careers had become intertwined in a way that had huge potential consequences for all of them. In one of the book’s most tense scenes, Campbell recalls Petty calling him up one day in 1987 to declare that he hates what the band has become, and he wants to break it up. “When I hung up the phone, I was devastated,” Campbell says. “The band’s over? In my mind, it would never be over. I couldn’t even comprehend it.”

Luckily, Petty’s decision turned out to be fleeting. The next day he called to apologise. But the incident crystallises the reality of being in a band that’s ultimately beholden to one person. In his book, Campbell is honest about the aspects of Petty’s character that could make that relationship difficult, including his hot temper, firm resolve and need for control, issues that were serious enough that eventually his second wife nudged him into therapy. It may have helped. It certainly helped that Campbell had a taste for deference and a talent for diplomacy. “I don’t like conflict,” he says. “I feel an obligation to try to smooth the waters.” (He believes those qualities likely stem from his parents’ breakup when he was a child, which shattered his sense of stability: “I’m always searching to recreate that.”)

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His penchant for peacekeeping has been a boon both to the band and to his marriage, which has lasted 50 years. If Petty had a far more tempestuous spirit, he also had a profound sense of loyalty, something that, ironically, Campbell feels had a hand in his death. Despite the incredible hip pain he was in, Petty stayed on the road in some part to support the large team around him. “You’ve got all these roadies who depend on you for their livelihood,” Campbell said. “I once said to Tom, ‘That must be a hard burden to carry and he gave me a look that said, ‘Thank you. I’m glad you understand.’”

Towards the end of his book, Campbell had the unenviable task of recounting his great friend’s tragic death. One week after what would be the Heartbreakers’ final show, Tom had stopped breathing and was rushed to the hospital. Campbell received a phone call deep into the night to go to the hospital to see his friend, who was being kept on life support long enough for those closest to him to say goodbye. “A terrible sense of finality fell over me,” Campbell writes in his book. “I placed my hand on his shoulder. I finally told him: ‘I love you, brother.’” Recalling those moments was “very hard”, he says now. “I’m still grieving.”

At the same time, he has moved forward with his life by fronting a band of his own, The Dirty Knobs, who’ve released three well-received albums so far. Looking back on it all today, Campbell says he has no regrets, despite the highs and lows he had to surf. It’s too soon to say whether writing the book was cathartic, he says, but the process of putting it together was definitely powerful. “It’s a deep experience writing about your whole f***ing life!” he says. “You’re reliving some experiences from a long time ago. And when you write about it, it all comes back to you.”

‘Heartbreaker: A Memoir’ by Mike Campbell is published on 18 March in hardback, eBook and Audio (Constable, £25)