(Credits: Far Out / Ирина Лепнёва)
Tue 23 December 2025 18:00, UK
When you listen to a lot of Tom Petty’s music, it’s hard to imagine what kind of musician he would have become were it not for his right-hand man, Mike Campbell.
“Mike really is the best in rock and roll,” said Petty, hurling some praise towards the guitar-playing extraordinaire, “I’d be lost without him. I’ve played with Michael since 1970, so I wouldn’t understand playing with anyone else. We write together, and we’ve developed a whole style of playing together.”
Both Campbell and Petty were incredibly capable musicians prior to working with one another; however, it seems that beginning to create together was the spark they needed to really light up their careers. Prior to this, though, the two were dabbling in various types of rock ‘n’ roll, allowing themselves to be inspired by different styles and sounds, and working out what kind of music they wanted to make.
For Campbell, he found a great deal of inspiration in the styles of a pre-Rolling Stones Mick Taylor and had been listening to John Mayall’s rendition of ‘Oh Pretty Woman’, which had Taylor on guitar. The two worked together on the album Crusade, released in 1967, and Campbell admitted that once he started listening, he couldn’t stop; hence, it was only a matter of time before he allowed the record to bleed into his guitar playing.
“I love that album [Crusade, 1967],” Campbell admitted, “I’d just put it on and practise guitar along with it. I love the way Mick Taylor plays, and maybe some of it’s rubbed off. I had a Gibson guitar that I wanted to try, and I wanted to come up with some chords that I liked that I could play some lead over.”
He started recording different ideas on a four-track tape recorder, and this is what he used to pitch ideas to Petty when they eventually started writing together, with the latter believing that getting the four-track was a turning point for them both, as it allowed the guitarist to really begin layering his music and start putting exciting songs together. One that they both instantly knew had potential was ‘Refugee’, which Petty took away and started writing lyrics for almost immediately.
“All I remember is giving him a cassette, telling him: ‘Here’s some demos’ […] I didn’t think much about it. Then the next rehearsal we had, he said, ‘I worked on your tape, and I got some words to this song.’ I said: ‘Oh, really?’ He played it to me, and I was just blown away,” recalled Campbell. However, despite knowing the song was great, actually recording it proved to be an issue, with the Gibson player admitting, “The band tried to learn it, and that was a whole other movie. Trying to capture that demo with the band live took a while.”
The issue was that while separate band members had been trying a great deal to nail their songwriting, they were pretty new to the studio environment. Writing ‘Refugee’ might have been simple enough, but actually committing it to a proper recording was where the difficulty lay, as it involved moving snare drums around, fiddling with knobs and dials, and trying their best to regain the original excitement they had when they wrote the song. In the end, it took 100 takes to finish the track, but the band knew that it was worth it.
“We all blamed each other,” said Campbell, recalling the studio sessions from hell, “but we never doubted the song. So we just kept at it until, finally, one day we played it and said ‘Oh, that’s it’.”
Related Topics