The moment Mike Campbell met Tom Petty for the first time
Throughout more than four decades in the music business, Tom Petty always had one constant in his life: Mike Campbell. The two were cut from the same cloth, Florida boys with a love for rock and roll guitar playing and songcraft. Through the earliest days of The Heartbreakers through Petty’s solo records, Campbell was always there to lend a helping hand, compose a riff, tweak a lyric, or provide insight.
The friendship that the pair shared lasted all the way up to Petty’s untimely death in 2017. The first time that the pair met was more than 40 years prior when Petty was looking to recruit new members into his band Mudcrutch.
“I was living in Gainesville, and at that time, the whole city was based around the college,” Campbell told Rolling Stone. “There’s a lot of musicians, and bands would play in the college out on the lawn or whatever. The first time I saw Tom Petty, he was playing in a band called Mudcrutch with Tom Leadon. They were in a park doing country-rock-type stuff. I think Tom was playing bass, and Tom Leadon was playing guitar.”
“They had a couple of other guys, and they were doing a Flying Burrito Brothers style of music, which at the time I thought was really cool because most of the time bands were doing really bluesy, jammy stuff and here was this band with harmonies with beginnings and endings,” Campbell recalled. “The first thing I remember about Tom was that he was writing songs and pretty good songs. Not many players I’ve been in bands with were that tuned in to the songwriting thing.”
When Campbell’s roommate Randall Marsh was recruited to be Mudcrutch’s drummer, Marsh suggested that Campbell be added to the lineup. The partnership that evolved would become the crux of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, with Petty and Campbell often co-writing songs with each other.
“First time we wrote a song together would be ‘Rockin’ Around With You’ on our first album,” Campbell said. “At that time, I wasn’t as developed as a songwriter as Tom was. I guess I’m still not, but my input at the time was guitar riffs and chords and things. And that was just something I played in the studio one day.”
“I had a little demo of it I think that I messed around with, and he took it home and said, ‘Maybe I can write some words to this.’ Then he came back the next day and took some of the extraneous chords out of it and simplified into a nice song, and that was the first song we ever wrote together,” Campbell remembered fondly. “It’s always a thrill to write with somebody.”
