Q&A: Mike Campbell brings The Dirty Knobs to Pittsburgh, reflects on time with Tom Petty

After spending more than 40 years riding shotgun alongside Tom Petty with the Heartbreakers, guitarist Mike Campbell is feeling more and more comfortable as the frontman of his own band. And his time leading Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs has him appreciating what he didn’t have to do in the past.

“There’s a big difference. In the Heartbreakers, I had it so easy. All I would do is la dee da dee da play the guitar, play your solo. It was pretty easy looking back on it,” Campbell said this week. “And now that I’m at the microphone, there’s a lot more responsibility. I have more respect for what Tom was going through, now that I’m having to do it myself. You have to remember the lyrics, you have to sing on pitch, you have to lead the band, you have to engage the audience, you have to play the guitar.

“You wear a lot of hats when you’re the leader. I’m finding it very fulfilling though. It’s fun.”

Campbell, who had been a member of the Heartbreakers from 1976 until Petty’s death in 2017, is bringing his band to Pittsburgh’s Stage AE on Aug. 1 for a co-headlining tour with Blackberry Smoke.

In his time with Petty, Campbell co-wrote some of the group’s biggest hits, like “Refugee,” “Runnin’ Down A Dream” and “Here Comes My Girls.”

Besides his work with Petty, he wrote the music for Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer,” toured with Fleetwood Mac and played on albums by Bob Dylan and Stevie Nicks (and many more). Campbell’s latest album, “Vagabond, Virgins & Misfits,” his third with the Dirty Knobs, features guest appearances from Graham Nash, Chris Stapleton and Lucinda Williams.

“All I want to do is have fun at this point in my life, and I am having fun, so that’s rule No. 1,” Campbell said. “If it’s not fun, I don’t do it.”

In a phone call earlier this week from Los Angeles, Campbell discussed more on becoming a lead “singer,” some lesser-known Heartbreakers gems, the Ramones, his memoir and more:

With the setlist, how have you been narrowing down which songs that you want to play from your time with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for this tour?

Well, this tour coming up, actually, all the tours since I’ve been doing the Dirty Knobs for several years, and we’ve got three albums out. And I approach the setlist with reverence. We do a lot of songs from our three albums. And I always throw in three or four Heartbreakers songs in the set or in the encore for good measure, because I love the songs and I wrote a lot of them with Tom. So it’s good to play them again with a great band and to keep them alive, and other people enjoy hearing them.

How’s the synergy in this band now that you guys have been together for a while?

It’s amazing. We’ve got telepathy. We’ve been together long enough that we know what we’re going to do before we do it. So it’s a very spontaneous band. The setlist can change, the arrangements can change on stage, we can throw in a different song here and there if I feel like it. So you never know what’s going to happen, but it’s always fun.

I imagine that’s more fun that way than just doing the same thing every night?

Well, yeah, there’s things to be said for both ways. With the Heartbreakers, especially when we started playing the bigger shows, there was a responsibility to play the hits a lot. And I love playing the hits. I love having hits. But there were times, especially me and Ben (Tench, keyboards), we’d go, God, I wish we would change the set up tonight, but we’ve got this set that worked. And so we stuck to it pretty much. With the Dirty Knobs, we don’t have to do that. We can do whatever we want, so there is more freedom in that.

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Do you feel like you’ve grown into your role as a lead singer now?

I do. I mean, singer is, I’ll put that in quotes. I consider myself maybe more of a stylist, but I can get the point across. Yeah, I sing. I’m definitely more confident. I’m not afraid of doing it. I know what I can do and what I can’t do. And I stick within my range. And I have a great harmony singer in the band, Christopher Holt, who can sing the high parts for me. I’m finding my own voice and it took me a while to not, by accident, a lot of times I would tend to sound like Tom because I spent so much time around him. I have the same accent, the same nuances. And so at first I had to try to filter out that and find my own personality. I finally got to where I feel like I’ve done that now. So I can’t get all the country out of my voice, the Florida out of my voice. But that’s OK. I want to keep some of it, but I don’t sound like a clone. I sound like myself now, which is really good.

How long did it take to get comfortable with your singing voice? I read that you received some tips from Stevie Nicks’ vocal coach.

Yeah, he helped me a lot, mostly with confidence. When I was around Tom, I never wanted to sing because he was kind of intimidating, and he was the leader, and I didn’t really want to compete with him. So I didn’t really do much with my voice until later on. And I’m finding now what my voice is. And yeah, Stevie Nicks, her trainer, the guy’s named Steve Real, was on tour with Fleetwood Mac, and he would come in and work with me. Mostly, it’s just a matter of getting used to your air and how to breathe and how to be confident, not be afraid that you might sound like shit. Just do it, and be confident that you can make it work. (laughs)

You co-wrote some massive songs like “Refugee” and “Runnin’ Down A Dream,” but were there songs that you thought would be a hit that didn’t quite pan out that way?

Well, I don’t really know what a hit is per se, unless it’s just a lucky thing that catches on and gets played a lot, but there are deep tracks that I wrote with Tom that I like to do with the Knobs from time to time. There’s a song called “All or Nothin’” that I really love playing live, and to my ears it’s as good as anything we did. It could have been a hit, I guess. There’s another song called “Can’t Stop the Sun,” it’s got some Beatles-y chords in it and stuff. The Heartbreakers rarely played it, but I like to do it with my band now. And a few other things, deeper tracks like “Between Two Worlds” and stuff like that that didn’t get played that often, and it’s fun to bring them alive again. There’s some of the songs that people are familiar with, like “Even the Losers” or “You Got Lucky,” “A Woman in Love,” I can throw those in from time to time. So I’ve got a plethora of choices.

That is one of the things with the album tracks: there’s obviously good stuff that just never went to radio, so it’s good that you’re shining some light on those.

Yeah, like “Fault Lines” is another one that I like to play that didn’t get a lot of radio play, but they’re really strong material. So I enjoy doing those, and the crowd likes to hear stuff that they recognize now and then.

For the Dirty Knobs, the new album features a bunch of guest appearances, so was that easy to pull those together? Was that calling in favors or just asking?

It was just organic. I met Graham Nash, he did a radio interview with me, and we had a nice rapport, so I got up the courage and said, hey, would you be interested in maybe singing a harmony on one of my songs? And he said, ‘Sure, I’ll make your song better.’ (laughs) And he did, so it was not a big, big plan, it just kind of happened. And then with Lucinda, I had also done a radio show with her, I asked her, would you want to sing on a song? And she said, yeah, so it just sort of happened that it happened. The new album coming out, too, has some guests on it. I won’t tell you who they are. But it’s all just like, wow, this song sounds like it’d be cool if so and so was on it. I wonder if they do it? And you call them up and they either say yes or no.

So you wrote songs with people in mind?

No, I only write songs with the song in mind. It’s after the fact when I’m sitting back listening going, oh, this would benefit from a girl’s voice, or this would benefit from another point of view here and there, or a certain tone on the harmony would be nice. So it’s some reflection after the song’s done, it’s when those kind of things come to me.

There’s a new single “Heart of the Heartland” that came out in June. Is that a standalone to promote the tour? Or is that the first hint of what you’re saying is a new album?

That won’t be on the new album. It was just a track we had that my manager said, well, we have some time, let’s put this out and let it breathe a little bit. We have a lot of songs. (laughs)

The one lyric that I was gonna ask about from that song was “Where’s the heart of the heartland?” Do you think that that’s a statement about the country, where it’s at right now, with what it needs?

Yeah, I think there’s an understated reference to where is the heartland? Where is America? What’s going on? Without being specific. I’m not really a political person, but the song didn’t start out to be about that. But if you look at where’s the heart of the heartland? I could have sang, “This is the heart of the heartland,” but I thought “where” was a little more intriguing. It’s wherever you find it.

It leaves it a little bit more open that way, open to interpretation.

Yeah. Do you know where it is? Can you tell me where it is? (laughs)

I don’t know if anybody can.

I’m still looking for it.

You’ve had a lot more experience traveling the country than I have, so I’ll trust your judgment there.

You know what? The heart of the heartland is still there, and I just went through it. When people are there, the heart of America is still there, and America will survive whatever problems come up. I believe in America. And like I said, I don’t want to get political or choose sides, but everybody knows what’s a lie and what’s not a lie. And the liars will be filtered out eventually because that’s the way our democracy works.

With the “Vagabonds…” album, what’s been your favorite song to play live?

I like “Hands Are Tied.” It’s an interesting song. It’s an old song that I dug up. It wasn’t written for the album. It was old. It’s like 20 years old, and I had an old demo of it which we actually just used it because it was really good. I just like the soul of the song, and it’s a great guitar song. It’s got some time changes in it and live we’re able to jam on it a little bit, and I just feel a lot of connection to that number.

I imagine a song like “So Alive” probably gets the crowd going pretty well too, right?

Yeah, that’s just a burst of adrenaline. With that song, I think I’d been listening to the Ramones all day or something. I wanted to write something with energy, and it really came out in like five minutes, right before the guys got to the session. We recorded it in one or two takes, and it’s just exuberant and it’s positive. It balances out some of the more thoughtful, darker songs.

I wouldn’t have pegged you as listening to the Ramones, so that’s interesting.

I listen to a lot of stuff. I listen to a lot of stuff from back then, the ‘60s and ‘70s. I don’t listen to much new stuff, but I always loved the Ramones. We did a few gigs with the Ramones with the Heartbreakers back in ‘78, I think. And I just loved their band. Their energy was incredible, and they’re catchy tunes. So, yeah, I like the Ramones.

You’ve had the chance to write or play with people like Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, and a lot more, so is there anybody on your bucket list of people to work with that you haven’t had a chance to?

Oh, that’s a good question. Well, I did have an opportunity, Ringo Starr did one of my songs on his last EP called “Miss Jean.” It was really fun, so that was a bucket list person. That also just came to me. Their office called and he was looking for something. So that just worked out. But who else? I’ve worked with most of the people that I’m really enamored with. I’ve never worked with Paul McCartney or I guess Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. That would be fun if I could fit into that. I don’t know. But I had the opportunity to work with a lot of them that were meaningful to me. No one else stands out in my brain at the moment, but definitely McCartney or the Rolling Stones.

Grand Central Publishing

You had your memoir, “Heartbreaker,” that came out earlier this year, so with the opportunity to explore your past, was it difficult at all to dive into that? Was it hard to look back at your past?

It wasn’t hard. Mostly I had a great ghost writer, Ari Surdoval, and we would just talk on the phone. He lives in Nashville, and we would talk for a couple of hours every couple of weeks until we had enough material. And I just went back to memory land. I was surprised at how much my brain had retained over the years, little memories and people that crossed my life back in the day, that were still in my brain that just popped up like, oh God, I forgot about that. I’m surprised it’s still there in my memory. So I had a lot of revelations of like, wow, that was something I thought I forgot about. The things would start spilling out of my memory and things that happened to me when I was growing up and starting up with Tom. So it was not hard because I just talked. The hard part for me, Ari did the organizing all my stories pretty well. He did a great job. But then I had to do the audio book. And that was a lot of work. That was sitting there at the microphone. ‘I’ll do that again. I messed up that word.’ I’m reading the whole thing. It’s a long book. That was hard, just because I’ve never done that before. That was more work than I expected. But it was good. I enjoyed it.

Do you feel like you’re creating some new chapters now?

Oh yeah, always creating, always writing, and it’s been eight years since the Heartbreakers folded and Tom passed on, so I’m in a new chapter in my life, which is very exciting, starting over and working my way up. I have a great band that I love, and it gives me a reason to live. (laughs)