“You don’t know about me without having heard a band by the name of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but that’s okay,” Mike Campbell writes in the introduction to his new book Heartbreaker: A Memoir (out March 18). “We played rock and roll together for a long time. So much has been written about us. Some of it is even true. But this is the first time one of us has tried to tell our story.”
The book traces back through the epic saga of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but also dives deep into Campbell’s childhood, his early struggles in the music world when he lived off bologna and oatmeal, and his work outside the Heartbreakers with Bob Dylan, Don Henley, and many other greats. It also touches upon Petty’s sudden death in 2017, and the difficult years that followed. “A hydra of grief gripped me,” Campbell writes. “Numbness and sadness and resignation and disbelief – all jumbled, no rhyme, each feeling contradicting the next, some setting in for black days of emptiness and loneliness.”
Long before that awful time, Campbell and Petty were just two teenagers in Gainesville, Florida, desperate to find an outlet for their musical ambitions. Here’s a chapter from the book where Campbell describes their first encounter.
I didn’t sleep on that couch for very long. Dead or Alive kept jamming at Hal’s hippie house apartment, but we were too loud to do that for much longer. Hal kept saying we needed to find some place out in the woods, so we could play all day, all night without all the hassle. That’s what the Allmans did, he told us. It sounded good to me. I was sleeping on a couch in the middle of the living room of a small one-bedroom apartment with a married couple. A place in the woods sounded great.
Hal found it.
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It was a crumbling wood-frame farmhouse with a bowing tin roof and walls that leaned like four winos trying to hold one another up. It was set in the middle of ten thick wooded acres on NW Forty-Fifth Avenue, the last avenue in Gainesville. There was no heat. There was no hot water. The refrigerator didn’t work. The pipes sputtered rusty water. Rent was seventy-five bucks a month. It was perfect.
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Hal, Randall, and I split the rent three ways and each got a bedroom. Sometimes our buddy Red Slater stayed in the gutted, spidery laundry room, not much bigger than a utility closet. Randall kept his drums up in the living room and we played for hours, all day and all night, as loud as we wanted.
Pretty soon, all sorts of freaky weirdos were hanging out: Hal’s best friend, Whitney, and Randall’s pretty girlfriend, Jean, and Red, and all their friends, and all their friends, and on and on.
There was no way to get back and forth to school except to catch rides with Randall, if I kicked in a quarter for gas money. Sometimes I had it, sometimes I didn’t. I lived on oatmeal, which was all I could afford. One day a little black-and-white kitten with no tail showed up on the porch, and I took him in. I named him Frank. I spent most of my time with him.
Frank would sit on my bed and listen to me play the Guyatone for hours, even days. I would come up with a long, swirling melody and record it on the Wollensak, then I would overdub a counter melody like I had learned about, using pedal point and harmony. Then I would add additional movements and melodies and blend them all together. I would lose all track of time. School and Vietnam and Sherwood Forest were all out there, outside the music, far away from me, where I hoped they would stay.
Randall would poke his head in sometimes.
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“Mike buddy, you okay? You’ve been in here awhile. Like days. Maybe you should eat something.”
It was so cold at night. I would lie awake with my teeth chattering, sleeping under all my laundry to stay warm, and wait until the sun came up so I could stand outside. I could tell nobody quite knew what to make of me. I didn’t say a word, for days on end. I don’t know why. I was getting skinnier and skinnier. I was hungry all the time. I wrote a letter to my dad, who had moved back to the States. He was living in Georgia with his new wife, Mickey, a wonderful Japanese woman who was so sweet to me. They had married soon after we left Okinawa. I asked my dad for fifty bucks. I signed the letter, “Cadaverously yours, Mike.”
He sent the money and I bought bologna and bread and an electric blanket. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I didn’t know what to study. All I wanted to do was play music.
I had nowhere else to go. My mom married that guy and he immediately lost his job, then he got another one—in England. And then she was gone, with my little brother and sister too. I told myself, well, you’re alone in this world. Nobody is gonna save you. Nobody is gonna support you. You’ll have to find your way on your own.
Hal and Whitney would sit around the living room on the ripped couch and talk about sailing the world. Hal would spin long stories about how he was going to sail to Hawaii and spend his life surfing the beaches of all the islands. Whitney said he wanted to sail around the entire world. He had already gotten a small boat and was plotting the course of a practice run to the Bahamas. The night before he left, we stayed up drinking Boone’s Farm wine and jamming for his send-off party. He hippie danced all night right in front of me. He left in the morning, setting sail on a calm ocean, without a cloud in the sky. He was never seen again. He sailed into the Bermuda Triangle and vanished.
Whitney disappearing made Hal realize that life was fragile and fleeting. We could be gone at any moment. He told us he was leaving. He told Randall and me to keep playing, we sounded good together. A few weeks later, he sailed to Hawaii, and he spent the rest of his life as a surfer there.
One afternoon, a few weeks after Hal left, with no money and no band and no ride home, I wandered over to the Plaza of the Americas. I sat in the grass alone and watched as one band broke down their drums and carried their amps off the stage and another carried theirs on. How many bands were in this town? Well, one less anyway.
Hal had been such a big presence in the farmhouse, it wasn’t the same without him there. I felt like I was just drifting, avoiding the draft, waiting for the war to end, waiting for something to come along to help make my life make sense.
I thought, what are you going to do? Sit around and wait for a life to magically appear in front of you?
On the plaza stage, the band that had set up looked to be squabbling. The drummer was pointing his finger at a long-haired guitarist holding a red Gibson ES-335 with a Bigsby tailpiece. The bass player walked away from them, shaking his head. The drummer sat back behind the drums as the singer stepped up to the microphone. The drummer counted them in and they launched into a tight, driving take of the Byrds’ version of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.”
The lead guitarist caught my ear first, playing the stinging Lloyd Green pedal steel intro on the big Gibson through a cranked Fender Dual Showman, making it cry with country bends. He could really play. The bass player was cool too. Skinny, with long blond hair and a Hofner viola bass like Paul McCartney played. He thumbed a loose, grooving walking bass line that pushed and bounced through the song. They both stepped up to the singer’s mic and together they sang the Roger McGuinn, Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman three-part harmonies beautifully.
The song ended. A small round of applause rose up. The drummer counted off again and they rolled into a two-chord country shuffle. The singer stood back by the drums, shaking a tambourine. After a few bars, the bassist stepped up to the mic and sang in a nasal twang that kept getting away from him. But he looked sharp and he played bass just as good while he sang.
Back then, everybody was trying to sound like the Allman Brothers. Nobody was playing this kind of tight, Byrds country rock—short songs with sweet harmonies and big choruses. And long-haired hippie kids playing country music was still so far-fetched it was almost jarring. You never saw any bands like that in Gainesville. I thought, what a cool band. I wondered who they were.
The song ended and the blond bass player shrugged.
“Thanks. We’re Mudcrutch.”
A few days later, I was staring at guitars in Lipham’s. I wandered over to the bulletin board where local musicians posted flyers looking for gigs and band members. I was thinking maybe it was time for me and Randall to stop playing together. It had been a year of jamming, not really writing anything good. Hal was gone, and I didn’t want to replace him with some random bass player. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t even know why I was looking.
Then that name caught my eye. An index card in the middle of the board said Mudcrutch Needs . . . I got excited. I moved another card that was blocking it. Drummer. There was a phone number below it.
I thought, oh well. No luck for me. But it could be cool for Randall. Like me, Randall had loved the Byrds almost as much as the Beatles. But he said five seconds into Sweetheart of the Rodeo, they lost him. I thought at least he’d like the Beatles harmonies. I took the card off the board and stuck it in my pocket.
I hitchhiked back to the farm. When Randall came home, I gave him the card. I asked him if he remembered me telling him about that band I saw. He said no. I said, the band with the short songs and the harmonies, kinda Beatles-y?
Randall said, the country band you saw? He said, yeah, thanks but no thanks. Randall hated country music. He associated it with every bully that had ever messed with him in Bushnell. I said, they’re not like that. They’re freaky. They’re like us. Longhairs. He said, yeah, right. But he took the card. A few nights later, I was sitting on my bed playing guitar, watching Frank try to catch a stinkbug on the window. Randall knocked and stuck his head in. He said he had played with that band Mudcrutch, over in the singer’s garage. I asked him how it went. He said he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he could play that country stuff. And they couldn’t play too loud there. And they had to cut it short after a few songs. They might play again though. Out here. Just to give it another shot. Cool, I said. Randall stood in the doorway for a minute while I played. When I looked up, he had shut the door.
A few nights later, I was doing the same thing—sitting on my bed, playing my guitar unplugged, while Frank slept on the bed next to me—when I heard a car pull up. Randall answered the door and I heard voices, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I heard the heavy thump of bass notes. Randall hit his snare a few times. Loud power chords rang out. Someone said, “Check, check,” into a microphone.
They kicked into “Born to Be Wild.” They were loud. It sounded okay, but it didn’t sound as good as when I had heard them on campus. Frank hid under my bed.
They finished and I could hear they were talking. A few minutes later, there was a knock on my door. Randall and Red came in. Randall said, that band’s here. Mudcrutch.
I said, yeah, I heard you guys in there.
“Well, they were just now saying they usually have two guitar players but their rhythm guitar player quit. They said they’d sound better with two guitars. I told them you were good. Why don’t you come out and play?”
I shrugged and said I didn’t know about that. Red said, you might as well, man, you’re in here playing anyway. I said, yeah, I guess. I wasn’t sure I was good enough. I followed Red and Randall into the living room, carrying the Guyatone.
Two of the guys Randall was playing with were sitting on the couch—the singer and the guitarist with the cool cherry 335 in his lap. The skinny long-haired blond bass player stood with his back to me. He turned when I walked in. He sized me up quick and then glanced over at the guitarist with a look I couldn’t totally read. But I could tell it was not “impressed.”
My hair was still only Revolver long. I was wearing cut-off jean shorts and a baggy army shirt. I was barefoot. Compared to the 335, my guitar looked like somebody had cut a guitar-shaped hole out of a door.
The bass player turned and faced me. His blond hair fell down to his shoulders. He had a thin, sharp face, with blue eyes and high Cherokee cheekbones. He sized me up.
“Guys,” Randall said, “this is Mike.” I looked down and said hey.
The bass player was closest to me. He stepped forward. He had an air of confidence that pushed me back a little.
He nodded.
And then, for the very first time, I heard him say the words that I would hear him say countless times over the course of the next forty years. He said them to me, to bandmates, to audiences. He said them to lawyers, to label heads, to producers, to promoters. He said them to anybody he felt needed to hear them. Often he said them as an introduction, a warm welcome. But sometimes he said them to indicate that a particular line of discussion had now come to an end. To serve as the final words on a matter. To indicate, that’s the end of that. But not this time, of course. This first time I ever heard him say these words, they were not the end of anything. They were the very beginning.
“I’m Tom Petty.”
From the couch, the guitarist stood and said hi. He was tall, with a handsome, boyish Irish face and long brown hair. He said his name was Tom too. Tom Leadon. Leadon pointed to the big red-cheeked guy with a mustache who I recognized as the singer. “That’s Jim.” Jim Lenahan.
There was no way my little Heathkit amp would keep up with the amps they were playing, the Fender Dual Showman and the big solid-state acoustic bass amp, so Leadon let me plug into the first channel of the Showman.
Leadon quickly showed me the chords to the next song. They were simple. The verses were just G to C, and the chorus was the same chords with an A minor thrown in front of them and a simple turnaround with an E minor and a D thrown in. I picked it up easily and locked in with Randall to drive it. I watched Leadon’s hands as he played bluegrass fills and a country solo. It was so different from what I was used to hearing when I played with a band. It sounded so melodic and purposeful, so composed.
As Tom Petty sang, I realized it was the same song I’d heard him sing at the Plaza of the Americas. “Save Your Water, Woman, I Won’t Drink Out of Your Stream.”
Petty was a good bass player, and Randall played with him well. When we finished, Leadon said, wow, you picked that up fast. He sounded surprised, but it was an easy song. I told him it was a cool song. I asked who it was by. Leadon said, it’s by us. He said, Tom wrote it. I said, really?
We weren’t sure what to play next. Randall spoke up.
“Hey, maybe we can play something that Mike can play lead on.” “Oh, you play lead too?” Leadon asked.
He didn’t sound thrilled about it.
Back then, bands typically followed either the Beatles model or the Stones model. There was a rhythm guitar player, who played rhythm exclusively, and a lead guitarist, who played the leads and fills. In the Beatles model, the rhythm guitarist sang too. In the Stones model, there would be a lead singer who didn’t play guitar.
Petty and Leadon looked at each other and shrugged. Petty turned to Randall and said, like what?
Randall smirked. He knew what he was doing. One country rock song was plenty for him.
“How about ‘Johnny B. Goode’?”
They looked surprised. Petty looked over at me. “You can play ‘Johnny B. Goode’? Really play it?” I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
Leadon asked if I wanted to play the solo. “Sure, if you want.”
He asked if I wanted to play the intro. I said, sure, if you want me to.
I glanced over at Randall. He knew what was coming.
I leaned over and turned up the volume knob on the Dual Showman’s first channel so it would cut through louder and dirtier. I glanced over at Randall. He gave me a nod. I rolled up the volume knob on the Guyatone. The single coil bridge pickup buzzed with a sixty-cycle hum.
I looked over at Petty. “Ready?”
And in the moment before he could say yes, I let it rip. Hard. I looked down at the fretboard as I played the big, fast 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.
I looked up.
Randall hunched over his drums and played a fast Ringo shuffle. The other three were looking at me with wide eyes as they jumped into the song. Tom Petty sang this one, word for word, while Jim shook a tam- bourine. I played the fills and the solo fast and loud and note for note. They nailed the stops and starts right in time with me. All three sang the chorus together, and I answered with fast double stops. We kept it short, fast, and tight, and stopped together like we had been playing together for a year. We all looked at one another, stunned.
Next we played “Honky Tonk Women,” and Leadon and I swapped leads back and forth. I played a couple of grinding Keith Richards fills and Leadon played melodic, chromatic country and bluegrass runs. Randall, who hadn’t played with a real bass player in over a year, if ever, clicked in with Petty’s bass playing and gave everything a raucous, thundering swing they didn’t have when I saw them on campus. Petty sang another song he wrote, and Jim sang the covers with a big, bellowing soul shout and a clear, strong falsetto on the harmonies.
We took a break. Randall and I sat on the couch while the other three went out on the porch for about thirty seconds before they turned and came back in.
“We want both of you to join the band,” Petty said. “What do you say?”
I didn’t say anything. Randall said, “We’re in.”
They cheered. We went out on the porch and pulled cans of beer off the rings of a six-pack. Somebody lit a joint. Someone said, “To Mudcrutch.” And we laughed and said, all together, “To Mudcrutch.”
A little later, Randall and I were talking on the edge of the porch. Then he went inside to take a leak and Tom Petty walked up. He stood right in front of me.
He was skinny and several inches shorter than me, but he somehow seemed bigger than he was. Everything about him looked put together and purposeful. His clothes, the way he stood, how he talked. It all seemed carefully crafted. He had hypnotically blue eyes, so blue it was hard not to look at them.
He was smoking a joint. He hit it and passed it to me. “What are you doing?”
“Just talking to Randall.”
“No, I mean, what are you doing?” “Oh.” I shrugged. “I’m in school. Sorta.”
“School, huh?”
“Yeah. I don’t really know what I’m doing. My dad thinks I should enlist.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You play like you know what to do.”
He hit the joint again. He was looking right at me. “Join the group.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean for real. Full time.”
“No, I can’t do that. I gotta stay in school. My number’s eighty-six. As soon as I drop out, they’re gonna draft me.”
He waved it off like he was brushing away a mosquito. Like, that little thing? Is that all that’s stopping you? Getting sent to war?
“Don’t worry about that. We’ll take care of it.”
He was so certain of what he was saying it was hard not to believe him. He looked at me, serious, determined.
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“Join the group, Mike.”
Excerpted from HEARTBREAKER: A Memoir by Mike Campbell with Ari Surdoval. Copyright © 2025. Available from Da Capo, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
