Most guitarists — even rich, famous ones — have that one guitar they dream of acquiring.
Not so for Mike Campbell, who recently sold off over 100 guitars from his vast collection, and who estimates that he still has duplicates of models he parted with.
“I got rid of things I truly didn’t need or use,” he tells Guitar Player. “And after all that, I still don’t know how many guitars I own. I love guitars and I bought them as tools, but I reached a point where there was nothing I didn’t have, so I stopped buying. I can’t think of anything else to spend my money on, other than my children.”
If there is one dream guitar in Campbell’s collection — the one guitar he can't live without — it’s the instrument he purchased in 1976 during the recording of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ debut album. At the time, Campbell had but two guitars to his name, a Gibson Firebird that he bought at a pawnshop for $120, and a Fender Stratocaster that Petty was using. He knew that he needed a new guitar — or rather, a better guitar — to help bring the band’s songs to life.
As he recounts in his upcoming memoir, Heartbreaker (due from Hachette on March 18), Campbell found just the thing upon visiting Nadine’s Music in Hollywood: a 1950 Fender Broadcaster — the precursor to the Telecaster — with a price tag of $600. Though that may seem little today, it was an unbelievable sum for the guitarist, then struggling to get by on his $60-a-week band salary and what money his pregnant wife, Marcie, brought in from her grocery store job.
Coaxed by the store owner to plug the guitar into a blackface Deluxe Reverb, Campbell felt his soul shake.
“I was a goner,” he writes.
That’s when Campbell seized on a crafty, spontaneous and downright ludicrous idea: He would race back to the Shelter Records offices, fetch the band’s PA system, and trade it in for both the guitar and amp. Petty was furious when he found out what Campbell had done, but he softened somewhat when he heard the bright and brilliant sound of the Broadcaster through the Deluxe Reverb.
All was totally forgiven when the band recorded “American Girl.” “That was one of the first songs I played that guitar on,” Campbell tells Guitar Player. “It was like, ‘Hey, that's us. That’s our sound. Well done, Mike!’” In what can only be described as poetic irony, Petty would soon accidentally sit on Campbell’s Firebird, cracking the neck in two. (Petty would go on to play the Broadcaster when performing his rhythm guitar parts on "Last Dance With Mary Jane.")
Campbell retired the guitar from the road during the band’s Damn the Torpedoes tour in 1980.
“The first time we went to Japan, we had our gear sent over in a boat,” he recalls. “When I opened up the Broadcaster’s case, it was all damp from seawater or whatever. I thought, I don't want it to get damaged. It's too valuable. I don't know what it's worth nowadays — enough to buy a house probably.”
Not to suggest that the instrument has been put out to pasture.
“It’s right next to my chair when I record,” Campbell says. “I still use it all the time. This is the guitar that didn’t get away, and it never will. It’s got that sound, and that’s that.”
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