“You always have to have a dream. My other dream ran its course.” Mike Campbell on the lessons he learned from Tom Petty and the guitars he’ll never part with

“It’s a labor of love,” Mike Campbell says of his group, the Dirty Knobs. “It’s something I started doing between Heartbreakers tours to try out new songs and to keep in the groove. We would go and play clubs and do some recordings, and it just got better and better. I always had in the back of my mind it would be a great project to do if the Heartbreakers ever took a hiatus, or whatever.”

“Whatever” was, tragically, Tom Petty’s shocking death in 2017. That put the Heartbreakers — and, for a while, Campbell — in dry dock, numbed by his musical partner’s unexpected passing.

After a welcome jumpstart from Fleetwood Mac, however, Campbell began to go his own way in earnest, locking into the Dirty Knobs as his primary music-making vehicle. External Combustion followed in 2022, followed by their third album, Vagabonds, Virgins and Misfits, last June.

Through it all, Campbell has perfected his songcraft and frontman chops, but through the lens of a guitarman, filling each track with rich riffs and tasteful solos, as well as moments of occasional burning fury, such as “So Alive,” “Shake These Blues” and “Innocent Man” from the Knobs' most recent album.

For Campbell — whose autobiography Heartbreaker: A Memoir comes out this March — it’s another step forward in a career that’s been in motion since he was 16 and bought his first Harmony acoustic guitar from a pawn shop in Jacksonville, Florida.

But while he’s celebrated for his electric guitar work, Campbell says these days his focus is more on songwriting than woodshedding.

“When I started learning to play, I immediately began to craft my own chords and do a little bit of songwriting, and I’ve focused more on that as the years have gone on,” he says. “I think it’s interesting with the guitar players: They get to a level where they’re gonna be what they are, and they kinda stay there. They establish their craft and skills and they keep refining it.

“That’s anyone — Clapton, whoever — which is great. I’m the same. I’ve gotten to a level of competence where I know what I can do and I don’t really work at it or practice guitar. Usually, if I pick up the guitar now it’s because I’ve got an idea for a song. I’m more toward the song and less toward the guitar these days.”

Unlike Petty — who famously took guitar lessons from Don Felder when he was young and referred to rhythm playing as "a lost art" — Campbell is self taught.

“I got my lessons off the records," he says. "I would slow ’em down so I could hear what was going on and copy them, and then I’d speed them back up. I used to do that with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Mike Bloomfield to figure out what he was doing. I would slow it down to half speed and listen real close. That’s how I figured out he was bending the string. So that’s really how I learned, just by listening real close and copying off the records.”

Campbell has accrued scores of guitars over the years. He thinned the herd about a year ago. “I got rid of about 100 or more that I don’t use that often or only occasionally. I didn’t give away anything that would rip my heart out.”

As for the guitars he’ll never get rid of? “There’s a lot of them,” he offers. They include his Rickenbackers and the Fender Broadcaster he picked up in Hollywood for $600 in 1976, when the Heartbreakers were working on their first album.

“Of course my original goldtop ’59 Les Paul. Those I would never part with," he adds. "I’ve got a couple of old Martin and Gibson acoustics I would probably never get rid of. There’s, like, six or eight that I would never give away. The other ones I could probably live without, but I’ve got room for them now."

And while he knows the Dirty Knobs will never eclipse what he did with the Heartbreakers, Campbell feels the group is making headway and gaining acceptance three albums into its life.

“To a large extent I’m finding a new path for myself,” he says. “You always have to have a dream; my other dream ran its course, and I’m very proud of it and I’ve got to carry on. I always figured before the Heartbreakers came to an end, if they ever did — and I didn’t think it would end the way it did — that I would do my own band, just ’cause I gotta play and I love to play to people and to write songs.

"And I want to be good at it. I want to get better at it. And with Tom I had one of the best teachers in the world. So I’ve learned a lot about a lot of things: fronting a band, writing... I like the path we’re on. I have a lot of fun. I get to keep playing. And what more can a musician want?