Mike Campbell doesn’t cry when he talks about the early-morning phone call that told him Tom Petty, his bandleader and best friend of nearly 50 years, had just been rushed to the hospital.
The Heartbreakers guitarist doesn’t cry when he remembers playing to a sold-out Hollywood Bowl with Petty one week before that horrible October morning either, or even when he remembers seeing Petty’s body in a hospital bed just hours before his heart stopped beating. “They had his hair straight,” Campbell says. “He was medicated and very still, but he looked like an angel.”
It’s not until he thinks back to a brief encounter after that Hollywood Bowl show — the final time he spoke with Petty — that the eyes behind Campbell’s purple Lennon sunglasses well up with tears. “We said that we loved each other,” he says, wiping the moisture off his face. “Sorry I’m crying. It’s going to take me a while, but I’m at peace with the way we left things.”
In the months following after the tragedy. imagining a future for the Heartbreakers without Petty was impossible. “I thought it would be too sad,” Campbell says. “Where’s the other brother? I’m not ready to face that.”
He was sitting by the pool at his house, around his 68th birthday, when he got a phone call from Mick Fleetwood. Nobody knew it at the time, but Fleetwood Mac had just parted ways with Buckingham and were in the market for a new guitarist. “I’d met Mick once or twice, but never really got to know him,” says Campbell. “But he goes to me, ‘I’ve been listening to your music a lot. Would you be interested in joining the band?’ ”
Fleetwood’s offer to make Campbell a full member of the storied Southern California band — not a hired hand — was both exciting and daunting. “I thought I’d never play big gigs again,” Campbell says. “I thought I’d never be on the G4 [private jet] again, and I’d never again play the Forum. Then all of a sudden, I’m like, ‘What the fuck? How did this happen?’ ”
The rigorous schedule is a change from the Heartbreakers, who used to jam around for a week or two at most before a tour. Then again, there’s a lot of ground to cover: Campbell is learning 60 new songs more or less from scratch, as is Crowded House singer Neil Finn, who’s taking over most of Buckingham’s vocal parts. “Mick has this aptitude — he sniffs out these great people to come join us,” Christine McVie tells me. “I feel like I’ve known them for years, and I actually don’t know them very well.”
Campbell with his new Fleetwood Mac bandmates.
It’s only day four of the rehearsals, and Campbell is still adjusting to the idea of living out of a suitcase for the foreseeable future. In some ways, it’s a relief from the grieving process. But even as he prepares to walk onto the rehearsal stage with his new band, Tom Petty is deep in his thoughts. “It still seems unreal to me,” Campbell says. “I’m past the point where I’m living with grief every minute, but sometimes I’ll be driving and one of our songs come on and it’ll hit me.”
He mentions attending a recent ELO concert at the Forum, where songs from Full Moon Fever came over the preshow PA. “Hearing them in a big room like that just shut me down,” Campbell says, seemingly on the verge of tears again. “We wrote those songs together. We lived a dream together. You can’t just snap your fingers and get over something like that.”
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