THE READING ROOM: Mike Campbell’s ‘Heartbreaker: A Memoir’

These days, most music memoirs tend to be bleary-eyed and bloated chronicles in which artists recount who-slept-with-whom and tote up the quantity of the most mind-expanding, or mind-numbing, drugs swallowed or injected on tour. There’s a requisite tale of childhood, sometimes amidst ragged poverty and uncaring parents and sometimes in spite of supportive parents against whom the artists rebel. Then there’s the litany of life on the road and its pains and pleasures. If readers are lucky, somewhere in such memoirs the author writes a little about music and perhaps songwriting, but those moments are few and far between.

And then there is guitarist Mike Campbell’s Heartbreaker: A Memoir (Da Capo, March 18, 2025), a candid and lively reflection about his life and times as one of the world’s preeminent guitarists, focusing on his long tenure as guitarist and songwriter with Tom Perry and the Heartbreakers. Written with novelist Ari Surdoval (Double Nickels), Heartbreaker runs against the grain of the run-of-the-mill music memoir. Although Campbell carries readers through his career chronologically, he doesn’t dwell on the earliest chapters of his life nor how poverty shaped him. In two sentences, Campbell sets the scene, and it’s all readers need to know before he moves onto the music: “Jacksonville is where my mom grew up, poor as ragweed and pretty as Ava Gardner. She was a waitress in a diner and one day my dad came in, tall and handsome in his uniform, and whisked her away.”

All Campbell really wanted, he writes, was a guitar: “All I had was two shirts and one pair of jeans and one pair of old sneakers. But all I wanted was a guitar. A guitar. A guitar. A guitar. It was all I thought about. I had no idea why I wanted one so badly.”

Looking back, he realized why he wanted a guitar so much: the Beatles. Like many other musicians of his generation, seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show opened a new world to him. In Campbell’s case, watching George Harrison ratcheted up his desire for getting a guitar and playing it. “I couldn’t take my eyes off them,” he writes. “Especially the one in the middle—the tall, skinny, dark-haired guitarist with the big hollow body Gretsch Country Gentleman. George. The quiet one. He smirked and played the perfect, ten-second solo to ‘All My Loving’— one minute in to a two-minute song—and that was it for me. That was it. I knew I needed a guitar. I needed one. I didn’t know why. I just knew.”

On February 1, 1965, Campbell got his wish when he received from his mother a beat-up little Harmony acoustic. Later, his father, stationed in Okinawa, sent his son an electric guitar, and Campbell progressed from playing the chords he saw in a Mel Bay instructional book to playing along with the Beach Boys’ version of “Johnny B. Goode.” “I dug into the rhythm. The lyrics echoed in my head and I thought, that’s me. I am the little country boy who can play the guitar just like ringing a bell. They told me to go, and I went. I played it like my life depended on it.” From then on, his guitar becomes an extension of him, and that deep desire shapes him throughout his career. It’s clear from his memoir that Campbell dedicated himself to his art, striving to get better and better, as a guitarist and eventually as a songwriter.

By 1968, Campbell headed off to Gainesville, Florida, where he enrolled in the University of Florida. He spent more time playing music and finding others with whom to play music than he did in class. He fell in with some other rock and rollers and formed a band called Dead or Alive, but he soon met up with a guy named Tom Petty, who liked what he heard from Campbell’s guitar and invited Campbell to join Petty’s band Mudcrutch. The rest of the story is pure rock and roll magic, of course, with a few fractious moments as the Heartbreakers begin their rise to the throne of rock royalty. Campbell reflects on Petty: “Tom had this whole vibe—how he walked, how he talked, how he looked, and how he looked at you—that he cultivated carefully. Jane [Petty’s wife] would pick out clothes for him at the department store where she worked. He would pick what he liked and she would return the rest and get the clothes he wanted tailored. Everything fit perfectly. He was almost a year younger than me, but he seemed so well put together, and his songs were part of that.”

Campbell also praises his bandmates. Keyboardist Benmont Tench could play anything. “And he didn’t just play beautifully. He could see around corners. He had a near second sense as to when to play. He floated with ease between me and [Tom] Leadon, elevating the guitars and answering them. His talent was immense and he wasn’t afraid to go for it—wringing every drop of sweat and grit and melody from a song.” Drummer Stan Lynch was “like a force multiplier. Every band got more powerful when he was behind the kit.”

As Campbell grew as a guitarist, he reflects more and more on his sound and the ways he’s contributing to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. “If you could play, if you could listen, if you could think, you could do anything. So I just started taking all these different ideas—the Beatles, the Who, the Stones, the Byrds, the Allmans, Mozart, Bach, Dylan, the blues—and putting them together. When Tom showed us a song, I would think, what would Mike Bloomfield play? What would George Harrison do with this? What chords would Carl Wilson use? It all melted together until it sounded like everything I loved at once, then I brought it all to Tom’s songs. I wanted to sound like me, but I wanted to sound like me for Tom’s songs, because I loved them.”

Campbell’s desire always to improve himself and his playing and songwriting underlies his entire career as well as the narrative arc of his memoir. Looking back, he expresses his gratitude to Denny Cordell, his first producer and Wings member, for telling him he could write: “Thousands of songs later, I am still looking for what Denny Cordell heard in me, all those decades ago, when I was hungry and nobody, with nothing and with nowhere to go. I will always be looking for it, with every song. How my path ever crossed his is too fantastic to even imagine, but I lived the life I have because it did. When I couldn’t even talk, Denny Cordell knew I could write. I never thought I could really do it until he told me I could. Until he told me I should. Until he told me I had to. What a gift to give someone. The belief that they can write. And then, everything they write after. I could never thank him enough.”

Heartbreaker does what the best music memoirs do: encourage readers to listen once again, or for the first time, to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and to Campbell’s solo works.