Sound Chaser

Mike Campbell is a consummate support artist. He was Tom Petty's right-hand guitar man for 47 years, first with Florida swamp-rockers Mudcrutch, later as a founding member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, then ultimately extending his reach to support Petty's solo endeavors. Campbell didn't just cowrite many key Petty hits; he also laid down some seriously scorching lead runs, on indelible tracks like "Refugee," "Runnin' Down a Dream," "Love Is a Long Road," "You Wreck Me," and especially the seven-minute fever dream that is "First Flash of Freedom."

Following Petty's untimely passing in 2017, Campbell was unmoored. He regained his public footing as a touring member of Fleetwood Mac in 2018–19, then rekindled his creative jones a year later fronting his masterfully named band The Dirty Knobs, which he'd founded 20 years earlier as a side project, playing L.A. clubs between Heartbreakers tours.

"A dirty knob is very much an analog kind of thing. I don't think they even have dirty knobs in digital music because it's all just computer-mouse stuff," Campbell said during a recent Zoom interview. "The band name came from an incident with a Neve console. They can be quite temperamental if they're sitting around for a long time. If you don't use them, they oxidize inside, so you have to loosen them up. We went to turn something up on ours, and it went"—he made a crackling noise. "I said, 'What's that?' 'Oh, it's a dirty knob.' So I said, 'Okay. Well, that's us.'"

Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs keep things nice and greasy on their fourth studio effort, Mission of Mercy (Soundly Music/The Orchard), whether it's the down-home twang of "More Than Gold," the trippy Beach Boys homage of the title track, or the all-out assault of "Armageddon." Campbell credits his fellow Knobs—guitarist/keyboardist Chris Holt, bassist Lance Morrison, and drummer Steve Ferrone—especially the man behind the kit.

"I met Steve in England at Albert Hall on a George Harrison gig," Campbell said. Ferrone was the drummer in Hari and the Hijack Band, a one-night revival of Eric Clapton's touring band (sans Clapton) with Harrison out front and Campbell on guitar, when the former Beatle played Royal Albert Hall in London, England, in 1992. A couple of years later, Ferrone joined Petty and would remain a core Heartbreaker until the great musician's death. The other two Knobs are former Don Henley bandmates.

"Once we got ahold of him, we simplified his drumming quite a bit. We dumbed it down for rock'n'roll," the guitarist said with a laugh. "The thing about Steve is, he's got a great attitude, and he's got perfect time. He never speeds up or slows down. That's what I noticed first off, that his tempos were great. And that counts for a lot." Campbell cited the funky drum break near the end of "My Mama Told Me" as his favorite Ferrone moment on the new LP. (My own favorite Ferrone groove is the taut backbone he laid down for "You Don't Know How It Feels," the lead single from Wildflowers, Petty's 1994 solo opus.)

During his long tenure with Petty, Campbell spent the bulk of his performing time stage right. Since moving out front with the Knobs, Campbell has shown he's no slouch carrying the torch. "Mike has done such a great job of keeping the tribe together. I really respect him for that," Ryan Ulyate, Tom Petty's longtime engineer, told me over Zoom a week after my Campbell interview. "I've seen the band a few times now, and something we talked about was how Tom would really engage with the crowd. In the Heartbreakers, Tom was the frontman; he was the guy having that level of fan interaction. Mike really stepped it up. The last time I saw him was at The United Theater in downtown L.A., when he was doing a book tour. He was playing Heartbreakers songs on acoustic guitar—songs he had written with Tom—and he was telling stories. He was engaging with the audience back and forth, and it all felt like you were in a group of friends."

Campbell wants his recordings "to sound like a band—a stereo, live band," he told me. "Even if things start with a demo and we overdub the band, I like to spread it out as if you're at a gig. This guitar is over here. That one's over there. The solo is maybe in the middle. Bass is in the middle. Vocals move around. That's the way I like to doit." Campbell uses Pro Tools. "Tape is great, but it's also bulky and cumbersome," he observed. "It's great to be able to go in and put your session up and boom—it's just like you left it. I approach Pro Tools as a very minimalist user, and I look at it like it's a tape machine. I rewind, play, and record. In the old days, you'd put up the tape and roll it, cue it up, push play, and then you had to bring all the faders up and try to remember what it felt like yesterday. With digital, it's a lot faster."

Campbell told me he still has full album fever. "You take on an album like it's a program or a movie," he said. "You're gonna turn everything else off, focus on this album, and just let it soak over you as an experience. That's the way I make them to be listened to, from start to finish. My job is to inspire you, whether it's with The Heartbreakers, The Dirty Knobs, or any of the other stuff I've worked on. I hope it gives you a feeling of hope and redemption, and that life can be good."