While he was lead guitarist in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Mike Campbell helped create a considerable number of now-classic songs in the heartland rock canon.
Today, some of the electric guitars Campbell used on those songs are famous in their own right. There’s his Broadcaster — the guitar he says “I can’t live without” — that featured on “American Girl,” the band’s third single, as well as his famous Red Dog Telecaster, heard on their 1980 hit “Refugee” and recently the focus of two new Fender Tribute models.
There are others, and they all have great stories, but nothing like the pair of tales Campbell tells about his 1962 Gibson Les Paul “SG” Junior, the guitar famously heard on the outro guitar solo from “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” the second single from Tom Petty’s 1989 solo record, Full Moon Fever.
“Great story about this,” Campbell tells Gibson TV. “I was in Hartford, Connecticut on tour, and I went for a walk, and I passed a video store. No guitars anywhere. I just walked in.
“And somehow in the conversation, they said, ‘Oh yeah, we have a couple of guitars.’ And this is one of them.”
Campbell has no idea why a video store had a pair of guitars inside, but it didn’t matter. He liked what he saw and decided to strike a deal.
“They had two in the back, and I bought them both,” he says. “It was like, I don’t know, 120 bucks. I’m just lucky that way.”
As Campbell explains, while SGs feature minimal electronics, they are excellent-playing tone machines. “These are wonderful because they’ve just got the one pickup, one volume, one knob,” he says. “They play great. They’re nice and lightweight.”
Campbell had the guitar with him by chance while he, Petty and producer Jeff Lynne were doing overdubs on “Runnin’ Down a Dream.”
“Tom and Jeff and I were working on the record, and it was one of the few songs that Tom and I wrote where we’re gonna have an ending where the guitar is going to just go on for a while,” he explains.
“I pulled this guitar out, and I think I had an Ampeg amp or something. I was doing one of those licks on the solo,” he says, as he demonstrates it on the guitar. “And I remember Jeff was there, and he went like this.” Campbell lowers his sunglasses and makes a surprised face. “It’s hard to impress Jeff. So, yeah, that was a good sign.
“But that was it — that was this guitar. It just happened to be there that day. I didn’t go looking for it. I just picked it up.”
It turned out to be a happy accident.
But there’s a bad accident to go with that story.
In 1986, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers supported Bob Dylan on his True Confessions tour. The tour was on its third-to-last stop, at the L.A. Forum on August 3, 1986, when tragedy struck. As Campbell recalls, the band was in between songs and Dylan was talking to the audience.
“I had this guitar on, and I’m standing there, trying to be cool,” Campbell elaborates. “And I kind of went like this to scratch my ears or whatever. And Bob was talking to the audience going on with some important spiel about something.
“And the strap came loose and [the volume control] was wide open. And it went ka-blam! Loud! You know, this thing’s loud.”
“Bob turned around like, ‘What the fuck were you doing back there? I’m trying to talk up here!’”
Campbell looked down to see the headstock had split cleanly away from the neck.
“And my heart just broke, because I love that guitar, you know. I just thought they’re gonna repair it, but it’ll never be the same.
“But it kind of is,” he says. “They did a great job, and you can’t even tell. It tunes good and plays good, and I still use it, you know? And it gets the job done every time.”
As Campbell has told us before, that wasn’t his only noteworthy encounter with Bob Dylan. Two years earlier, the folk-rock icon sought him out for advice on buying a drum machine after he heard Campbell had used a LinnDrum to help him compose “The Boys of Summer,” his 1984 hit cowrite with Don Henley. But as Campbell explained, the technology mystified Dylan.
