![]() “So we’d go out and play songs they’d never heard before. I didn’t play Heartbreakers songs,” Campbell remembers. Some of them might have known who I was, some of them might not have, but we did not rely on the hits. We would go into a place with 200-300 people. “I loved the challenge of playing clubs when we first started. While the quartet initially convened in the studio-where the band derived their name from a literal dirty knob-their original focus was live gigs. Then Matt said, ‘Oh, I know this guy who plays bass.’ Those were the guys that showed up, and it just instantly worked. My roadie said, ‘I just saw this drummer at a session.’ So he brought Matt in. I did not have auditions to start a band, though. ‘This guy can’t be right.’ But we started playing together and I realized that he fit in really well with me and, eventually, his hair grew out. When I met him, I didn’t know what to think of him because he had this weird, blue Mohawk. ![]() “I was going to cut some demos and he knew this guy, Jason. “I went to a session with my engineer friend, Don Smith, who worked with the Heartbreakers for many years,” he says. I respected that he had the humility to admit it and to accept it.”Īs for The Dirty Knobs- which also features Jason Sinay on guitar and vocals, Lance Morrison on bass and Matt Laug on drums- Campbell explains that the quartet came together almost by happenstance. ![]() Then he said, ‘I wish I would have had the presence of mind not to let that one get away.’ I thought that was just so brotherly and sweet. He told me, ‘That was good for you,’ which he had never acknowledged before because we’re brothers, and we’re competitive. Flash forward several years later: I was in a car with Tom and it came on the radio. So it ended up being his and it turned out well, thank God, because, at the time, I was having some financial issues and that kind of saved my ass. Then I got the call through Jimmy Iovine that Don Henley was looking for songs. But it had a different chorus and he was too busy writing to some other stuff. The guitarist looks back with affection on Petty’s reaction to this success: “When I first played him the music, he passed on it. It was a nice thing to do.”Ĭampbell’s best-known songwriting collaboration outside of the Heartbreakers is “Boys of Summer,” which became a hit for Henley in 1984. But it connected with a lot of people and kept his love and memory alive on some level. It got to a point where I would not look back at the video because I might choke up a little bit. But then she said, ‘I think it’ll be a nice tribute and we’ll have a little video to let everybody remember Tom.’ Once she explained it to me, I thought it was a good idea, and it was emotional every night when we got to that part of the show. The guitarist recalls, “When she first suggested that to me, I said, ‘Please, no’ because I was tired of playing that song after the last 30 years. Campbell later joined Nicks for Fleetwood Mac’s 2018–19 world tour, where she sang Petty’s “Free Fallin’” during their encore. Over the years, Campbell occasionally found a home for some of the material that Petty didn’t select, thanks to artists such as Don Henley and Stevie Nicks. I never contemplated going recording with them but, after we’d been playing for a while, I thought, ‘Well, this is a good band. We liked what we were doing, so we went out and played a few gigs. “Then I met the guys in The Dirty Knobs, and we started just playing for fun in the studio. That’s when I started just writing to them myself for fun, just to see what they would sound like.” But I ended up piling up so many pieces of music that he couldn’t possibly ever write to all of them. If I was fortunate, he would write to the good ones. “I have a lot of songs, and I would always give them to Tom. “I never really had a solo record in mind,” Campbell explains. Although Campbell wrote and recorded with Tom Petty for over 40 years-through Petty’s death in 2017-in the mid-2000s, the Heartbreakers guitarist acknowledged the surfeit of unused material that he had originally presented to his musical partner. Mike Campbell launched The Dirty Knobs after coming to terms with his increasingly prolific creative output.
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