Hello, friends! After a busy holiday season, I’m posting a review I’ve had sitting around, almost ready, for several weeks. It’s an entertainment-related review, as a relief from the endlessly distressing news cycle. Hope you enjoy it!
By the way, I’ve been thinking about my new year’s resolutions for The Memory Cache, and have decided to try to make it more readable and more engaging by aiming for more regular posts, but with fewer words. Somehow over the past few years, my posts have grown longer and longer, and even to me perhaps overly detailed. So look for shorter articles, more often, in the new year.
In my review of the documentary The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal a couple of months ago, I mentioned that I had read a couple of great rock biographies recently. I’m finally getting around to writing about one of them – Heartbreaker by Mike Campbell.
A few years ago, I read and reviewed Steve Van Zandt’s autobiography Unrequited Infatuations, which is probably the closest parallel story to Mike Campbell’s that you could imagine from the whole history of rock and roll. For both Van Zandt and Campbell, they were the primary sideman at the right hand of one of the great legends of American rock music. For Van Zandt, the legendary band leader, song writer, guitarist and singer was Bruce Springsteen; for Mike Campbell, it was Tom Petty.
Both of them were founding members of their respective bands, close friends with their superstar band leaders, and trusted advisers, co-producers, and song-writing collaborators. But their stories, their backgrounds, their personalities, and their own unique talents and contributions were also very different, which makes Mike Campbell’s book a new and rewarding addition to the slender shelf of “rock star sideman” autobiographies.
In fact, Heartbreaker is notable not just as Campbell’s account of his life and career, and his role as lead guitarist and chief sideman for Tom Petty, but because it is the first “insider” autobiographical account of the band’s entire history from one of the members.
Tom Petty and various band members participated through interviews in the excellent Warren Zanes biography Petty, and Petty and the band members also cooperated with Peter Bogdanovich in the film documentary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Between those two works, and other published stories and anecdotes, many of the major events, trials, tribulations and successes in Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s long and storied history have been well documented. Yet we’ve never before read a full, reflective personal account from one of the members of how the band began, how it all went down, and what came next after Tom Petty’s unexpected death in 2017.
I should say as fair warning that this book might not be for everyone. I’m a long-time enthusiastic fan of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and of Mike Campbell in his own right, so the level of detail he includes (for example) about the minutiae of equipment he owned, played and liked (or didn’t like) at different stages of his career, or how he learned to play different songs, might not be for everybody. But for me, as a fan and a lifetime guitar player too, I ate it all up.
In any case, that’s just a very small part of his story. He writes about his childhood, growing up an Air Force kid with a dad who was not always around, and his parents’ eventual separation and divorce. He talks about their poverty, a childhood spent moving around and living in different cities. He describes being a poor kid in school, but one who was smart and did well despite the obstacles he faced in life and his family situation.
And he talks about how he took up the guitar, started playing in bands after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan (like most rock musicians of the Boomer generation, including me), and ended up in college in Gainesville, Florida, where he met Tom Petty, and was invited to join Petty’s band after playing a flashy Chuck Berry lick on his cheap Japanese guitar.
From there, he moves on to a rich and satisfying history of the band. He talks about his fellow band members, how they met and got together, their talents, their ways of being, and how they got along. He brings the whole band rock and roll experience, and their personal relationships within the group very much alive.
I particularly liked reading about now he met his wife Marcy in the early days of the band in Los Angeles, and how they fell in love and built a life together. He does a wonderful job conveying the challenges and complexities of building a real, fully human life, a strong marriage and a close-knit family while immersed in the chaos of a life as an artist in a major rock and roll band, one that was frequently in the studio at all hours, or out on tour.
It seemed almost amazing to learn that there are some people in the rock community who apparently have long-term stable marriages and family lives – that’s not the typical public image of a rock star or famous entertainer. But it was a very heartwarming element of Campbell’s story.
There are so many other interesting aspects to this book. Campbell shares many of his thoughts about his own songwriting process, and his creative collaborations and deep friendship with Petty. He discusses nuances of his guitar playing style, and how he developed it, becoming one of the most iconic rock guitarists in the world in the process.
And then there were some powerful moments in the band’s history, like the time Tom Petty’s new agent talked to Campbell and the other members (without Petty), and presented them with a new "take it or leave it" financial arrangement that gave Petty a larger share of the proceeds. Campbell describes how he talked the other band members through this hard recognition that Petty was the main star, but that they were all going to end up doing well if they stuck with the band, even if Petty came out richer than they did. It was a pivotal moment, and one I'd never heard before.
Heartbreaker is an excellent rock autobiography, and an entertaining memoir from one of the great sidemen and lead guitarists in rock history. If you’re a fan of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, it’s a must read. For all others, it’s at least a very interesting life story of a talented and likeable person and artist, who chose the life of a famous musician, celebrity and entertainer. Recommended.
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