RUNNIN' DOWN A DREAM

With his autobiography just published, Mike Campbell talks frankly about his years as Tom Petty's right-hand man in the Heartbreakers, early-days self-doubt, playing with Bob Dylan and Fleetwood Mac, and two heart-warming love stories.

- Jaan Uhelszki

On March 18, 2025, the day Mike Campbell's memoir Heartbreaker came out, he posted the opening sentence of the book on his Instagram account: “You don’t know about me without having heard a band by the name of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers.”

And he’s right. But that’s about to change. Up until the publication of his book (written with novelist Ari ‘Double Nickels’ Surdoval), probably everything you knew about Campbell was contained in the sound of those 13 albums by the Heartbreakers — the band he helped found in 1976, as lead guitarist, co-writer (writing or co-writing 36 songs in the Heartbreakers’ mighty canon) and co-captain, as he often likes to describe himself. But perhaps a more accurate term is liege lord: the only Heartbreaker to appear on all three of Petty’s solo albums, he was the singer's righthand man, apologist and sometimes dragon-slayer. He stood to the left of Petty on stage for four decades, dark, quiet, watchful, cool and a little dangerous-looking, an inscrutable contrast to Petty’s rangy, tow-headed, insider deportment and brutal confidence.

While they were markedly different in temperament, demeanour and core competency, what bounded the two were a shared a British Invasion sensibility in the music they loved — not common among their Northern Florida brethren — and dreaming the same dream, a dream they could only achieve together. Although if cornered, both would have been loath to admit it.

“Tom never doubted that we would make it,” Campbell writes in the intro to Heartbreaker. “He always knew we were going to the top. Nothing was going to stop him. He was little and he was skinny, but he could be unbreakable. He could withstand pressure like nobody I have ever seen. Tom Petty was one of the toughest people I have ever met, but it could make him hard on people.”

Including Campbell.