On March 18, 2025, the day Mike Campbell’s memoir Heartbreaker came out, he posted the opening sentence of the book on his Instagram account: “You don’t know about me without having heard a band by the name of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers.”
And he’s right. But that’s about to change. Up until the publication of his book (written with novelist Ari ‘Double Nickels’ Surdoval), probably everything you knew about Campbell was contained in the sound of those 13 albums by the Heartbreakers – the band he helped found in 1976, as lead guitarist, co-writer (writing or co-writing 36 songs in the Heartbreakers’ mighty canon) and co-captain, as he often likes to describe himself. But perhaps a more accurate term is liege lord: the only Heartbreaker to appear on all three of Petty’s solo albums, he was the singer’s right-hand man, apologist and sometimes dragon-slayer. He stood to the left of Petty on stage for four decades, dark, quiet, watchful, cool and a little dangerous-looking, an inscrutable contrast to Petty’s rangy, tow-headed, insider deportment and brutal confidence.
