“It’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t stood on that stage and felt that love from that many people rushing over you,” Mike Campbell says. “It’s like a wave knocking you off. It’s a magical thing that you can’t really get anywhere else in life. It’s a buzz, a high, a spiritual joy.

“And that’s why we kept doing it — because there’s nothing like it.”

For most of his career, Campbell has felt that rush while performing onstage with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, where he served as lead guitarist until Petty’s death on October 2, 2017. Given that group’s deep, multi-decade catalog, Campbell would experience the audience’s intense reaction to their music time and again over the course of a single night’s performance.

But there is one song that stands out from the rest for him — a favorite that was “a dream come true” for audiences to hear every night. And it was one of the group’s very first: “American Girl.”

“A lot of songs come to mind,” Campbell tells Under the Radar about the tunes that move him. “But I guess the most important one right now, in my mind, is ‘American Girl,’ which is one of our first songs.

“All through our career, every time we would play that song, I would feel that rush of adrenaline. As if it was the first time I heard it. It always had this power to it. It connected with people.”

As it did when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performed “American Girl” at what would be their final show, at the Hollywood Bowl, on September 25, 2017, the last stop on their 40th-anniversary tour. In his recently published memoir, Heartbreaker, Campbell recalls the audience emotionally singing along with every song at the show.

“And that night at the Hollywood Bowl, that was the last song we played, and I felt it then,” Campbell says.

“So did Tom.”

Composed by Petty and recorded on July 4, 1976 — America’s bicentennial anniversary — “American Girl” was the band’s third single off its self-titled debut album.

Campbell says the song moved him when he first heard it. Notably, it was among the initial tunes he recorded with the Heartbreakers using the rare 1950 Fender Broadcaster electric guitar he purchased — along with a blackface Fender Deluxe Reverb combo — for $600 shortly before the album’s sessions.

But he also recalls another song that took longer to become one of his favorites: “Refugee.” A Petty and Campbell co-write, “Refugee” proved difficult to record when the band tracked it for their third album, 1979’s Damn the Torpedoes.

“It was so easy to write,” says Campbell, who strapped on his iconic Red Dog Fender Telecaster — a unique mutt of a guitar — for the recording session. “But when we went in the studio, under the microscope with the producer and everything, trying to make it great, it took a lot of work. We just couldn’t get it to come together for so many takes. I found myself thinking, Maybe we’ll never get this.”

What kept them going was Campbell’s four-track demo of the tune: It was so good that the band knew the song was worth the effort.

“We must have recorded that 100 times,” Campbell told Songfacts. “I remember being so frustrated with it one day that — I think this is the only time I ever did this — I just left the studio and went out of town for two days. I just couldn't take the pressure anymore, but then I came back and when we regrouped we were actually able to get it down on tape.”

“Refugee” went on to reach number 15 on the charts — the highest placement for a Heartbreakers record at the time — when it was released as a single in 1980.

“After going through something like that, it’s a beautiful thing when a stranger comes up to you, and they tell you how your music has made their life happier,” Campbell tells Under the Radar. “For instance, I’ve had several people tell me they played ‘Here Comes My Girl,’ which is a song I wrote with Tom, at their wedding because it was that important to them.

“When someone shares that kind of joy with you, or when someone just tells me a certain song of ours lifted their spirits… I mean, what more could a person want?”

Campbell is currently on tour with his group, the Dirty Knobs, through July 24, with newly added fall dates stretching to October 10, 2026.

By the time he joined the Eagles in January 1974, Don Felder had a history with some of the era’s defining guitarists and songwriters. Growing up in Gainesville, Florida, he befriended Duane Allman (who taught him slide), Stephen Stills and Bernie Leadon, who would precede him in the Eagles.

Felder recently spoke with us about his adventures with all three guitarists. Here, he keeps the stories coming with anecdotes about another Gainesville pal named Tom Petty, as well as Joni Mitchell and his onetime Eagles’ co-guitarist Joe Walsh.

Tom Petty

“When I first met him I was teaching at Lipham Music, not getting paid but for every hour they would give me a $10 credit. So it would add up and I could use that money to upgrade my amp or my guitar or strings or stuff. Tom was like Stephen Stills — very enthusiastic. They both had charisma onstage; you really liked them, and they sold you on what they were doing.

“I remember the first time I went to see Tom perform, he had these two guitar players who were just plugged in and turned up way too loud. Tom was playing bass. He didn’t want to play bass. He was like, ‘A frontman shouldn’t be playing bass,’ and I wanted to go, ‘Well, Paul McCartney might disagree with you about that.’ But Tom also wanted to play guitar so he could write.

“So I went to see this show and he comes on and he’s got this blonde hair and he’s flipping his hair and shaking it. These two girls are standing next to me — why I chose to stand between two girls I’ll never know [laughs] — but they’re going, ‘Oh, he’s so great! He’s so this and that, and I love his voice!’ And he was kind of singing like Bob Dylan; that’s what was happening at the time, so he sounded more like a Bob Dylan knockoff than Tom Petty.

“But his two guitar players were horrible. I went to a rehearsal after that and said, ‘You stop playing when Tom’s singing. When Tom’s not singing, you can play. When he moves away from the mic, you can play and solo and do whatever you want. But these are songs. You have to support the vocals, not just play all over them.’

“So I kind of helped them a little bit. Then I moved to Boston and we lost touch. I didn’t really hear about him until his first album came out a few years later.”

Joni Mitchell

“Before I joined the Eagles I was working with a guy named David Blue. He was a New York kind of country-folk artist. He wrote ‘Outlaw Man’ for the Eagles’ Desperado album, and Graham Nash produced his album [1973’s Nice Baby and the Angel]. David Lindley played on the album, and I was hired to go work with David Blue on the road…and wound up playing with Crosby & Nash, who were headlining, after David Lindley got sick.

“David Blue really appreciated all the stuff I had done for him, and he was really good friends with Joni Mitchell. He said, ‘Joni’s making an album. She’d love to have you come in and play on it.’ I used to see her sitting outside this little deli, less than a quarter mile from my house.

“I’d go there a lot to eat breakfast, and she’d be sitting outside smoking a cigarette and having this little, teeny cup of the darkest espresso you can imagine. I’d always say hello to her, and Brian Wilson would be sitting in the same booth, having the same thing every day — exactly like he did over and over and over until he passed.

“So I went into the studio with her and gave her a hug. I don’t even remember the song or the title, what it was, and I don’t even know if they used it. [Editor’s note: They didn’t.] It was just really wonderful to have met her and have had the honor of playing with her, and being able to say hello to her at the deli. Just a lovely, lovely, really wonderful, talented person.

“And if you want to talk about originality, she was probably the most original female singing guitarist ever. Her tunings, her chord progressions, her vocal melodies over these complicated guitar changes were just spectacular. I don’t know any other female that’s been able to even come close to that level of quality and talent, to tell you the truth.”

Joe Walsh

“Well, Joe has a unique style of his own, and I love it. He and I really have diverse backgrounds, but out of complete respect for each other and admiration for each other, we were able to play together. Before he ever joined the Eagles, I did some shows with him; he had a band called Joe Walsh & Friends, and we opened for Elton John at Dodger Stadium. He had a TV show called Joe Walsh & Friends, too; I went down and jammed on a couple of songs with him for that.

“We would do this tango, this dance. Without having a conversation about it, we understood that when somebody goes up and starts playing high, you should be supporting underneath them — slower, lower, an octave down, a contrapuntal melody to what was happening up there.

“And then when he starts winding his way down, I’d start winding my way up. So we’d have this very subtle interplay between us, without saying a word, just by listening to what somebody was doing. And if they were off on a really hot run, you just support them.

“That’s really why I wrote the music bed which became ‘Hotel California.’ Joe had just joined the band and I wanted to do that thing we did together on an Eagles record. Glenn [Frey] and I had done something like that on a song right after I joined the band, but it was not of the same caliber or quality of what we did for ‘Hotel.’

“Joe comes up with great parts, so when we were tangoing back and forth he says, ‘We need to do something like diddly-diddly-diddly here.’ So I said, ‘What is diddly-diddly-diddly?’ and he goes [sings part], and if you listen to that progression, it’s a descending chromatic chord progression. It changed chords on every bar, going down, going down, going down, and then it comes back again.

“So we had to figure out what the diddly-diddly-diddly was on every bar so it went with the chord change on that bar. We literally recorded it bar by bar.”

Tom Petty may belong to a long line of American rockers that includes Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp. But as the guitarist told former Musician editor Bill Flanagan, he saw himself as an outlier among his fellow songwriters.

“I think that I’m a little more — dare I say — eccentric than those guys,” he said in 1986. “I know all those people quite well, and I think that they’re terrific,” he quickly added, but he said an effort had to be made to avoid falling into the music’s stylistic trap.

“The only danger I see in all this ‘American music’ thing is that four chords, guitars and drums is fine — but if that’s all it’s going to be, it’s weird. Are we going to inherit nostalgia, or are we going to give this music something?”

It was evident that Petty intended to do the latter, and perhaps no song better demonstrates that than “You Got Lucky,” from Long After Dark, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1982 album. From its drum loop–based rhythm track to its synth riff and spaghetti western–inspired electric guitar solo, the song pushed Petty’s brand of American rock into new territory, showing others that you can break with tradition and still stay true to your roots.

The song began life in the hands of guitarist Mike Campbell, who wrote it with a synthesizer while playing along to a drum loop. It was a technique he used to write a number of songs for the Heartbreakers at the time.

“I wrote ‘Refugee’ to a drum loop I got off of a record. ‘Here Comes My Girl’ I wrote to a drum loop,” he said of composing two of Petty’s biggest early hits. “I didn't have a drummer in my demo studio at home, so I would make drum loops before there were drum machines.”

Later, when he bought a LinnDrum sample-based drum machine, Campbell would use the device to write songs like his 1984 Don Henley hit collaboration “The Boys of Summer.” (That in turn would lead to Bob Dylan working with Campbell in the belief that the LinnDrum was the key to writing a hit song. Unfortunately, Dylan was disappointed to learn that he had to follow the machine’s rhythm and tempo.)

Once Campbell had the music for “You Got Lucky,” a new loop was created to replace it, with Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch doing the honors.

“Then we'd cut the tape and tape the loop together,” Campbell recalls, resulting in a loop that was many feet in length. “We ran it around the room over some mic stands and through the tape heads, and then printed that for three or four minutes, and then recorded the song over that drum loop.”

The main riff was played on a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer by Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench. Trained as a classical pianist, Tench never got bit by the synthesizer bug. "He begrudgingly played it," Petty said in the 2005 book Conversations With Tom Petty.

As for the heavily vibratoed guitar solo, Campbell says that was Petty’s idea.

“He suggested we do an Ennio Morricone guitar sound, kind of a vibrato arm Strat kind of solo,” Campbell told Songfacts. “Sort of a surf guitar with a tremolo arm, like a Clint Eastwood movie, a Good, The Bad And The Ugly kind of thing. It was Tom's idea to put that approach on there.” (Though it’s not known what guitar Campbell used on the song, it was possibly his “Red Dog“ Telecaster, although it may have been the red Gretsch Country Gentleman he mimes with in the song’s music video.)

When it came to the song’s lyrics, Petty wrote the song in character, an approach he would use to a great extent on Southern Voices, the band’s 1985 followup to Long After Dark. For “You Got Lucky,” he adopted the attitude of an insecure man convincing his partner that she couldn’t do any better than him.

But Petty said he had a hard time getting listeners to understand the true intent behind the song’s key line, “You got lucky, babe, when I found you.” It wasn’t a show of bravado, he insisted, but a display of weakness.

“‘You Got Lucky’ is the most misunderstood song I ever wrote,” he told Flanagan. “That’s a very insecure person saying that! But it’s a very real emotion. I found it amusing, really, to sing that.

“But some people said, ‘God! The audacity!’ Insecure people say things like that to protect themselves, to protect the real pain that they know is coming later.”

As much as the song’s changed up Petty’s brand of rock, the video for “You Got Lucky” demonstrated that music videos could tell stories, something that would prove vital as MTV became the primary vehicle for music in the early 1980s.

Unhappy with the idea of lip-syncing to the song, Petty and the group chose a narrative approach, in which the band discover an abandoned cassette player and a dust-covered arcade in a futuristic Mad Max–inspired desertscape. Unlike other videos, it opened with a minute-long prelude that established the narrative for what followed, creating a format that would be followed by other artists (including Michael Jackson, whose cinematically styled “Thriller” video came out in late 1983).

“It really changed everything,” Petty said. “No one had ever — even Michael Jackson — done a prelude to the video, a bit of business before the song started.

“But boy, did it explode. It really did change the way videos went. There were a lot of imitations after that."

Tom Petty almost gave away one of his biggest hits.

For years, “Don’t Do Me Like That” sat forgotten in his catalog, a song he considered too simple to bother with. By the time he began recording Damn the Torpedoes with producer Jimmy Iovine in 1978, the track was already five years old, and Petty was ready to hand it off to another band entirely.

It took a persistent producer and a blunt comment from a studio assistant to convince him otherwise.

As Petty later explained, the song’s origins were surprisingly humble.

“It’s based on something my dad used to say,” he said.

His father’s expression was a simple plea for respect. In Petty’s hands, though, it became something darker. In the song’s story, a jilted friend warns the narrator that the same fate could happen to him, planting a seed of suspicion about his girlfriend.

It made for a compelling narrative hook. Combined with the song’s straightforward chord structure and driving beat, “Don’t Do Me Like That” was clearly a strong tune for Mudcrutch, the band he and guitarist Mike Campbell performed with prior to the formation of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

But Petty didn’t hear anything in the song that hinted at its hit potential.

“I didn’t think it was that great,” he said in Paul Zollo’s Conversations With Tom Petty. “I thought it was just a little bit too simple.”

Mudcrutch had already recorded a demo, and by the time Petty and the Heartbreakers began work on Damn the Torpedoes with producer Jimmy Iovine, the song was five years old. At the outset of the sessions, Iovine wanted to hear everything Petty had written — even the throwaways. That’s how he came across “Don’t Do Me Like That.”

“Jimmy is a thorough type of guy,” Petty said. “He went through all my old songs and suggested we record this one.

“Initially we didn’t want to do it because we wanted no ties to the past. But we cut it in one night.” Their version put Benmont Tench’s organ out in front of Campbell, whose predominant electric guitar on the Damn the Torpedoes sessions was his 1950 Fender Broadcaster.

“We recorded a few takes, played it back a couple of times, then put it away,” Petty said.

Despite Iovine’s enthusiasm for the track, Petty still had doubts. To his ears, the song sounded too much like the J. Geils Band, another guitar-and-organ-driven rock group. It even bears a passing resemblance to their 1975 hit “Must of Got Lost,” with both songs punching out their titles in a similarly staccato style over the chorus.

“I thought maybe I should give it to the J. Geils Band,” Petty told Zollo. “I could hear Peter Wolf doing that.”

“And Jimmy said, ‘Are you crazy? This is a hit.’ He wouldn’t let me give it away.”

Wolf, however, recalls the story a little differently. According to him, the offer actually arrived.

“One day I got this call from Jimmy Iovine’s office confirming my address,” Wolf said. “Then I got this package with a cassette in it. It was in Tom’s handwriting: ‘Don’t Do Me Like That.’ And there was a note: ‘Hey, I think this would be a cool song for you. I think you and the band can really do something with it.’”

Meanwhile, Petty had finally been persuaded to include the track on Damn the Torpedoes.

“When the album was finished, our assistant engineer said, ‘I really hate to speak up, but you should get this tape out and listen again,’” Petty recalled. A fresh listen changed his mind. “We thought it sounded pretty good — and it turned out to be the first hit from the album.”

As for why the J. Geils Band never recorded it, Wolf says the timing simply wasn’t right.

“It was in the midst of stuff,” he explained. “Maybe we thought we had the songs for our album: ‘We’ll do it on the next one.’”

“I called Jimmy — and I think Tom — and said, ‘Love the song. I’m not sure we’re going to get to it, but I do like it.’” (In fact, the J. Geils Band performed the song in tribute to Petty in 2022.)

Years later, Wolf said the story came up again during one of his last conversations with Petty.

“I explained the whole thing — we were in the mixing process or something,” he said. “And Tom told me, ‘I’ve got to thank you for that. When you didn’t end up doing it, everybody talked me into putting it on the record. And it became one of my big, big hits.’”

Released on November 5, 1979 as the lead single from Damn the Torpedos, “Don’t Do Me Like That” went to number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s the group’s only song to reach the top 10 of that chart, and became even more popular in Canada, where it peaked at number three.

Petty was thrilled with the outcome — but perhaps no one was happier than his father.

“My father never asked for royalties, but he was pleased that I used his saying,” Petty said. “He’s given me a dozen since, but none of them are as good.”

Years after his impressive post-Beatles output, George Harrison found success one more time with the Traveling Wilburys. Featuring a cast that included Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne, the supergroup made a splash in 1988 with their debut single, “Handle With Care.”

But as Harrison has revealed, the band took flight spontaneously and out of necessity.

In 1987, the former Beatle was putting the touches on his eleventh studio album, Cloud Nine, his first record since 1982's Gone Troppo. Following that record, the guitarist had taken a step back from the music industry, swapping songs for comedy, as he invested in the comedy troupe Monty Python, a band of creatives who he felt shared parallels with the Beatles.

Given Harrison’s years out of the spotlight, Cloud Nine was a greatly anticipated record from a musician who seemed to thrive outside of the Beatles. But he had one more commitment to fulfill.

“In Europe, they make 12-inch singles, and they usually like them to have an extra song,” Harrison explained to Countdown in 1990. “So they asked me for an extra song, but I didn't have one already recorded.

“The easiest thing to do was go into the studio the next day, write a song quickly, record it, mix it and give it to them.”

His plan quickly became more interesting once he presented it to Lynne.

“That night, I had dinner with Jeff Lynne, who was having dinner with Roy Orbison,” Harrison explains in the video. “And I said, ‘Well, tomorrow I'm going to find a studio and go in someplace, make a tune, and make this record.’ So I said to Jeff, ‘Do you want to come and help?’”

Lynne, who made his name with Electric Light Orchestra’s rock-meets-classical fusion in the mid to late ’70s, was more than happy to get involved.

“So Roy Orbison said, ‘Oh, well, if you do something, call me. I'd like to come along and watch,’” Harrison continued.

All that remained was to find a vacant studio and an engineer.

“Then I thought, Well, Bob Dylan has a little studio in his garage,” Harrison recalled. ”So I called him and said, ‘Do you mind if we come along tomorrow?’”

Like Lynne, Dylan was more than happy to participate. To round things off, the group-to-be’s final member was recruited before the day was done.

“I had to go to Tom Petty’s house to pick up my guitar, which was around his house,” Harrison says. “He said, ‘Oh, good. I'll come. I was wondering what I was going to do tomorrow.”

“The next morning, I started to write a song, and I thought, ‘If Roy Orbison is going to come, it's silly to have him sitting there,. He's a better singer than everybody,’” Harrison adds. “So I wrote a part for Roy to sing, and Jeff thought that was a bit cheeky!”

The half-finished song was completed in the studio, with Lynne taking the lead to make it complete.

As for the title — “Handle With Care” — it came from the words written on a box in Dylan’s garage

It was only when the song was turned over to Harrison’s label, Dark Horse, that it was deemed too good to be a mere B-side. The label had an idea for the hastily assembled group to make an entire album, figuring with so many great songwriters on hand, they could churn something out quickly.

“If we did that one song in one day, all we need is nine days to make an album,” Harrison explains.

As the band grew into the Traveling Wilburys, it also expanded its personnel. Yet, when Petty’s right-hand guitarist Mike Campbell was drafted in to track an electric guitar solo for the song, he requested Harrison cut his own take instead.

Campbell’s solo has never seen the light of day, but thanks to Harrison’s slide guitar playing and the mastery of all involved, “Handle with Care” was an instant success — and the Wilburys went down in history as the luckiest supergroup of all time.

“In January 1975, I received a call from a kid who used to come to watch my band the Tropics play up in Gainesville in the ’60s. It was Tom Petty,” Charlie Souza tells Guitar Player.

“It was Tom Petty,” he reveals. “He wanted to know if I’d be interested in playing bass with him in his band, Mudcrutch.”

Compared to Petty and his bandmates, Souza was big time. The Tropics, a rock act from Tampa, had scored a minor hit with their 1967 song “Time (Take the Time),” and appeared on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Later, he joined the New Cactus Band, a spinoff of the original Cactus band featuring Tim Bogert, Carmine Appice, Jim McCarty and Rusty Day. At the time of Petty’s call, Souza was playing with White Witch, whose 1974 album, A Spiritual Greeting, went on to achieve cult status.

Along the way, he’d played in Gregg Allman’s solo band and performed an uncredited appearance on his 1973 solo debut, Laid Back. Allman’s flirtations with drugs and adultery scared off Souza, leading him to literally run from Allman. It was a regrettable choice, as was turning down a gig with an up-and-coming Bob Seger over a $50 difference in pay.

Petty’s offer sounded promising. Mudcrutch had left Jacksonville, Florida, for L.A. the previous year and seemed to have momentum. “They’d signed a contract with the up-and-coming Shelter Records and released ‘Depot Street,’” Souza says.

Petty had sent Souza a recording of “Depot Street,” an early Mudcrutch tune. Souza liked what he heard and decided to accept Petty’s offer. He’d be replacing outgoing bassist Danny Roberts and joining Petty alongside guitarist Mike Campbell (who joined the band after completing a daunting audition), keyboardist Benmont Tench and drummer Randall Marsh.

But almost immediately, Souza encountered problems.

“At age 27, I had not developed my communication skills to a point where I could make myself clear about my own feelings and expectations,” he explains.

“My new friend, Tom Petty, had the same problem. Tom obviously had great skills communicating in music with his songs, as we all found out in the years to come. But he had a hard time conveying to me what his plans were for our future together.”

His misgivings aside, Souza was impressed when the band checked into the home studio of famed pianist, guitarist and producer Leon Russell in Tulsa, Oklahoma,

“We were in Leon’s basement, where he’d built a 40-track studio,” Souza says. “Forty tracks was unheard of. Leon Russell had always been one of my favorites. Stuff like ‘A Song for You’ and other hits ran through my mind. And now I was in his basement recording songs with these kids from Gainesville.”

As it turned out, those songs were pretty strong.

“Some of the tunes Tom hammered out on the piano were catchy and had good hooks,” he says. “‘Don’t Do Me Like That’ was one of them. There were many other songs I remember recording with Tom and the boys, taking on a slightly off-key Bob Dylan vocal slang that twanged in my ears.

“We laid down a few tracks that sounded pretty good to me, some of which were eventually released in the 1995 Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Playback multi-CD box set.”

Those sessions briefly eased any concerns Souza had. But he still couldn’t figure out where they were headed. A month later, they were back in California, in Encino.

“We continued to record more songs,” Souza says. “But the sessions seemed to be getting further apart from each other, and the band members’ energy seemed drained, especially Tom, who was pretty down at that point. But he never said much, so I didn’t really know what was going on.”

To make matters worse, Souza and his wife were struggling in their new home in Hollywood. “I had unknowingly rented an attic apartment in one of the worst parts of Hollywood, a block away from Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street,” he says.

Still, he believed he had made the right decision. He had a constant reminder of that. “After seeing the Hollywood sign on the hill from the Shelter Records home office on Sunset, I really thought that was it,” he says. “I had made the big time, finally, at the ripe old age of 27.”

But, like many others in Hollywood, Souza saw his dreams go up in smoke.

“I walked into the house in Encino to record with the band one day in August, and the only guy who was there was Tom,” Souza says. “He told me he was done. The band had broken up.

“All I could think about was Mike Campbell telling me that we were going to make it big together, as long as I didn’t start doing heroin or something.”

Stranded in California with a wife, two cats and no more weekly checks from Shelter Records, Souza had to recalibrate.

“It was a whole new Hollywood for me.”

One year later, he was listening to the radio when a song came on.

“It was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ ‘Hometown Blues,’” he recalls. Souza had played bass on the track, but it had been erased and replaced with a new part performed by Donald “Duck” Dunn of Booker T. & the M.G.s, one of several guest artists on Petty & the Heartbreakers’ self-titled debut.

“I also overdubbed a three-part harmony alto sax riff, which I heard faintly in the mix coming out of my car speaker.”

Souza hadn’t been credited or paid for his work, which led him to file a claim with the Los Angeles Musicians Union.

“The Union accepted my claim, and I was granted double scale for my sax overdubs.”

Producer Denny Cordell showed up at the hearing. “When we passed in the hall, we said nothing to each other,” Souza says.

Souza and his wife moved to the back room of a friend’s house. He set up a tape recorder in the garage and tried to write some new songs.

One day, he recalls, “I walked outside, and there was Tom Petty. I walked up to him and asked if he’d come into the garage and record with me on my little tape recorder. He, of course, quickly declined and said he was on his way somewhere else.”

Petty might have been referring to geography, but Souza understood their careers were headed in very different directions.

“I knew that Tom was on his way to making it big in the music business,” he says. “In the end, I was happy to have spent the time with him that I did.”

Souza never got another opportunity like Mudcrutch again. His career stalled, although he continues to make music and is working on a new album titled 2012.

Although he took his break with Petty in stride, his feelings shifted when the guitarist fired up Mudcrutch again in 2007. That December he paid a visit to Randall Marsh, the band’s former drummer, to see if he was open to making music together. But he had an ulterior motive.

“I guess I wanted to understand what happened so long ago from someone else’s viewpoint,” he says.

Over lunch at Sonny’s BBQ in Bushnell, Florida, Souza got a confidence boost, but little new information about why he was left behind.

“Randall told me, ‘Charlie, we all looked up to you — Tom, Mike, Benmont, and me. You were our hero back then. You had played with Cactus, and you were our idol because you sang all those great Beatles harmonies in the Tropics. We all thought you were the best bass player we could have in the band.’

“That felt great. I was a lot happier about what had happened.”

Souza also learned Marsh had been invited back to Mudcrutch and been recording with Petty back in Los Angeles. “I asked if he would see if Tom would bring me in to play bass, but he immediately said Tom was the bass player for the new Mudcrutch,” he explains. “That was the end of that discussion.”

Souza may never know why he was cut from the band, but he has a theory. His predecessor, Danny Roberts, had offered up his own songs for the band to record. Petty wasn’t happy about it and let him go. Unable to express his feelings, he dealt with matters in silence. Mike Campbell had a phrase for it: “covert aggression.”

The circumstances sound familiar to Souza.

“I read in the trades as recently as last year that Tom quit the band because I wanted to record a song I had written about a spaceman called ‘Brother in the Sky,’” he says.

Petty died in 2017, so Souza will probably never learn what happened. But he did have one last contact with his former bandmate.

“In 2011, I finally contacted Tom through East End Management,” he says. “He graciously gave me his blessings on releasing my book, Live Your Dream.” Published that same year, the memoir recounts Souza’s career and time with Mudcrutch.

As for “Brother in the Sky”? Souza hasn’t given up on it.

“I intend to record that song on my next album,” he says.

Mike Campbell shot to fame as Tom Petty’s guitarist in the Heartbreakers. Over the years since the group formed in 1976, Campbell has acquired a nice collection of rare guitars, including his 1950 Fender Broadcaster, the guitar behind his “American Girl” sound and the ax he says “I can’t live without.”

But Campbell’s incredible success story started in Gainesville, Florida, and with a very different guitar: a little Japanese Guyatone electric solidbody. It wasn’t much of a guitar, but it was all he had when he went to audition for Mudcrutch, a local band that featured a blond-haired singer and guitarist by the name of Tom Petty.

Predictably, things started off badly once Campbell pulled his Guyatone from its case.

"My band's drummer, Randall Marsh, auditioned for Mudcrutch and became their drummer," Campbell recalled to Guitar Aficionado of that life-changing day in Gainesville, Florida, back in 1970. "Mudcrutch had just lost their guitar player, and Randall told them that he had a buddy who plays guitar. They called me up to audition, so I went over there with my little Guyatone.

“When they saw my guitar, they all laughed at me and went, 'Oh, great.' They asked me what I knew how to play, and I suggested Johnny B. Goode.'

“When I started playing, they all changed their tune really quickly. That was the first time I ever met Tom. We hit it off immediately, but one of the first things he said to me was, 'We've got to get you a good guitar."

Campbell survived his trial by fire and went on to have a career with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers that thrived up to Petty's death in 2017. Campbell and Petty recorded more than a dozen chart-topping albums together, while Campbell on his own has made records and player with legends that include Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins. He also co-wrote and recorded most of the backing tracks to Don Henley's massive solo hit "The Boys of Summer."

And over those years, Campbell acquired several hundred good — and in many cases great — guitars. They include not only his Fender Broadcaster but also his Red Dog Fender Telecaster, 1959 Les Paul Sunburst and other examples with which he and Petty forged their defining Heartbreakers sound.

Campbell says he developed his love for guitar music as a child, courtesy of his father.

"My dad was a big Elvis and Johnny Cash fan," he recalled. "That was probably the first time I noticed the guitar and what it was doing in music.

“Then the Beatles came along, and that changed every-body at my school. I wanted to learn to play guitar, but I couldn't afford one for a very long time."

He was 16 when he got his first guitar, in 1966. It was a pawnshop Harmony acoustic, purchased by his mother for $15.

"It was unplayable," he recalled, "but I didn't know any better. I tried to play the damn thing, but the strings wouldn't push down all the way.”

In that respect, the Guyatone was a step up. But would soon learn there was much room for improvement.

“My dad was in the Air Force, and when he was stationed in Okinawa, he sent me that Guyatone guitar. I learned to play on that.

“One day, I went over to a friend's house and he showed me his Gibson SG. I was astonished at how easy it was to play. I didn't realize that playing a guitar could be painless.

“It opened my eyes, and I realized that maybe I could do this after all. It was an amazing time to learn how to play guitar. I'm still inspired by a lot of music from that era."

With his upcoming memoir, Heartbreaker, due March 18 from Hachette Book Group, guitarist Mike Campbell delivers a spellbinding account of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the classic American band he was a part of since its inception till Petty’s tragic death in 2017.

With captivating candor and a compelling narrative flair, Campbell relives his musical and personal journey, from a hardscrabble upbringing in Florida to meeting Petty and joining his fledgling band Mudcrutch to the heights of fame with the hit-making Heartbreakers.

In addition, he chronicles multi-Platinum collaborations with Don Henley and Stevie Nicks, as well as his post-Heartbreakers activity leading his own band, the Dirty Knobs, touring with Fleetwood Mac. It’s achingly poignant, sharply funny and remarkably detailed, a fact made more astonishing as Campbell penned the book without notes.

“In the early days, I tried to keep a journal,” he says. “It went from Mudcrutch to ‘got to L.A.’ But it got so depressing, because every day I'd write, ‘Went in the studio, couldn't get a track, went in the studio, couldn't get a track.’ After 20 pages of that I said, ‘Forget this.’ So there was no journal. It's was all in my head – what's left of it.”

He pauses, then says, “But I'll tell you, I know it's a good book. That’s not just ego — I know it's good because when I read it for the audio version, there were times when I got choked up.”

Paired with Petty, Campbell wrote enduring songs such as “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl,” “You Got Lucky” and “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” among others, and his memorable riffs and solos helped to numbers like “American Girl” and “Breakdown” into beloved classics.

As it is with any great songwriting combination, Petty and Campbell brought to each other matched though disparate strengths.

“I think I brought a musicality that Tom wasn’t capable of,” says Campbell, who recently spoke with us about his Fender Broadcaster, the electric guitar at the heart of tracks like “American Girl.”

“I had guitar techniques and musical influences that I could express to him in his songs, or present to him as my music, that he couldn't have done on his own.”

He smiles, then recalls, “In fact, there was one instance when I gave him something that sounded like a Heartbreakers song, and he said, ‘That sounds too much like me. Go do something that I can't do.’”

Campbell pulls no punches in recounting the band’s interpersonal conflicts, and in the case of Petty he doesn’t indulge in hagiography (“Sometimes he made me so angry I couldn’t look at him,” he writes). But what ultimately comes through is the guitarist’s genuine gratitude for the life he’s led and the bonds he formed along the way.

“Lord knows what would've happened if Tom and I never met,” he says. “As I wrote the book, I realized how many miracles have happened to me through timing, luck, divine intervention. I started with nothing, and these songs came to me from somewhere. There were chance encounters with my heroes, and of course, there was my relationship with Tom.

"We had our brotherly friction here and there, but there was a deep love that kept us together through all the rough times.”

You mentioned how Tom once asked you to write something that didn’t sound like him, but when you played him your demo of “The Boys of Summer,” he rejected it as “too jazzy.”

Yeah, and in the version I showed him, when it went to the chorus, instead of going to that glorious major chord, I went to some kind of minor thing. I don't know what I was thinking. It wasn't really jazzy per se, but I knew what he meant. It didn't lift up like a chorus should. I took that advice, and after he left, I thought, “I’ll change that chord. I can make a better chorus there.” The version that Don Henley heard had the new chord. Later, when Tom heard it, he said, “Ohhh. You changed it.”

It’s amazing how your journey with Tom started with his band Mudcrutch. You two jammed and he said, “Join the group, Mike.” It’s like he wasn’t even asking.

Tom was like that. He was undeniably dynamic. He was driven, and he could convince you to go on the road with him. “I'm going down this path. Come with me.” He had that great leadership quality, and I was sitting duck for that kind of thing.

You come across in the book as very non-confrontational, a peacemaker almost. But there was one big moment, during the making of Damn the Torpedoes, when you stood up for yourself and asked for a bigger piece of the pie. Tom just looked at you and said, “But I’m Tom Petty.”

That's a perfect example of our relationship, me going, “Don't you think dah, dah, dah?” And he goes, “Yeah, but I'm Tom Petty.” I couldn't really argue with that. I could say, “Well, yeah, but I'm Mike Campbell,” and he would go, “Nobody knows who that is.” So it was checkmate, and even though it stung a little bit, I had to give him credit. Tom would always give it to you straight, and I couldn't argue with that.

It’s eye-opening to read how the group seemed to be on the verge of breaking up at various points. A lot of people didn't know that.

I think people will see the struggle within the band, how it wasn't all Gold records and sold-out shows. Bands are very delicate animals. There's egos and resentments that can develop. Wives sometimes can split bands up. Everybody's passionately involved in this thing, and it can get very intense. I don't think a lot of people realize how tough it is to keep a band together. Things come up and one guy gets mad and says, “I don't need this shit.”

The reason why the Heartbreakers didn't break up was because Tom and I had a brotherhood. It’s hard to define, but no matter what happened from day one with him, the music came first. Whatever we might have agreed or not agreed, we agreed that the music was more important than anything else. We couldn’t let that fall apart, no matter what.

I was a peacemaker. I mean, guys in bands have different role. Tom was a leader. I was a kind of a peacemaker. Benmont [Tench, keyboardist] was a genius. Stan was a ball of fire, and Ron was the quiet, solid bass player. I embraced my role, and if there was a conflict that might break the band up, I wasn’t going to let that happen. I'm going to get in there and negotiate to keep it going. And we did.

There’s too many songs to touch on, but I was struck by your account of “Don’t Do Me Like That.” Tom had that one kicking around before there was a Heartbreakers, but it didn't make the first two albums.

It almost didn't make the third record if it weren’t for the second engineer, who said, “Do you remember that track you guys cut the first day? Let’s hear that again.” The title was a line Tom got from his dad. It started out there and it became a good song.

Of course, there’s “American Girl.” You write that the song didn’t truly come together until you came up with its riff.

Well, that was what I did on a lot of songs: I’d try to find a part that could be powerful and help the song as much as the vocal. That’s what I always thought – “It’s what George Harrison might do.” These things, I don’t know… it’s just another miracle. I have an ability to hear that, and with Tom, I think that's what endeared him to me. I could take his Bo Diddley four chords and turn them into something that was maybe a little better than he would've done on his own. If you take a lot of those guitar parts out, like on “Breakdown” and stuff, it's not the same song.

You single out “American Girl” as perhaps the best song you guys ever did.

There's something about it, yeah.

There’s also something tragically poetic about it. You said that it was the sound of the band discovering its identity, and sadly it would be the last song you would play with Tom.

Yeah. Irony.

Given all that, does it now have even more significance to you?

Well, now that you mentioned it, yeah. But I don't ever think of “American Girl” as the last song we ever played together unless somebody brings it up. It's like one of the first songs we ever played together. I don't have a sad attachment to it – it’s too much of an optimistic burst of joy.

But I am glad we played that song together at the Hollywood Bowl, and we played it together for decades. Every time we played it, the hair on the back of my neck would stand up. There's something about it that's just inspired and poetic and exuberant. It's the Heartbreakers, that tonality we found that day between the keyboards and the guitar harmonics and the energy and the riffs.

That was the sound of our band. That's what we sounded like when we were at our best. And that's what we tried to do after that. That's the sound we worked for.

Going back to “The Boys of Summer,” that song was the result of you experimenting with a LinnDrum.

That's the way songs are. I wrote “Refugee” to a drum loop I got off of a record. “Here Comes My Girl” I wrote to a drum loop. I didn't have a drummer in my demo studio at home, so I would make drum loops before there were drum machines. That was just business as usual. Now I had this machine that will do the drum loop for me, but I could program it any way I wanted. I was just having fun with it.

One night I sat up – “I can play claps. I can play tom-toms. It’s all in a beat, now let me put some chords to it.” It was just an inspired moment. It could have been a drum loop, but it could have been anything. Songs come from everywhere.

You don’t shy away from the addiction problems that existed in the band. You write about your own trouble with cocaine and how you wound up in the hospital. That was your moment of clarity.

Yep. Your body will tell you when it's had enough. I was the same with drinking, too. I thought I was Keith Richards for a while there – “I can just have whiskey and play.” And then my stomach said, “Uh-uh. No, don't do that. I'm going to hurt you.” So I stopped. It wasn't hard to stop. It just didn’t work for me anymore.

Others weren’t so fortunate. You dealt with Howie Epstein and Tom’s drug problems quite differently. [Epstein was fired from the band in 2002 over his substance abuse.] With Howie, you confronted him directly and said he had to stop. However, with Tom, you took a more hands-off approach.

Howie and Tom were two different people, and they happened at two different parts in my life. When Howie was struggling, I did not understand addiction. I now do. I've been through Al-Anon. At the time that Howie was caught in his disease, I didn't get it. I was angry. I thought he was being stupid and disrespectful to the band. I didn't understand that he was sick, so I was angry with him and I dealt with it that way.

I told him I still loved him, but I just didn't have any patience for his behavior. By the time I had been through some stuff and learned more about addiction, I could see that it’s a disease and it's not a choice for some people. Then I had more compassion for Howie and what he had gone through.

Tom started struggling through his divorce and all, but I had a different relationship with him. I could go to Howie and say, “I don't like what you're doing,” and he might listen to me. With Tom, it was like “Your private life is yours, and mine is mine. I can see what you're doing, but out of respect for you, I'll trust you'll do the right thing. If you need me, call me.”

I could have gone to him and said, “Hey, you’ve got to cut this shit out,” which I kind of did once to the manager. But the thing with Tom was, you could say that and he would just look at you like, “But I'm Tom Petty. I'm going to do whatever I fucking want. Get out of my face.”

Those were the sides of his personality. He was intimidating, but there was love there. I think one reason we stayed together is because we kept our private lives separate. We didn't socialize that much off tour.

\When the tour was over or our studio time was over, I went to my world, and he went to his world. My kids, my family, his kids, his family. We would talk occasionally on the phone for an hour or two just to catch up, but we gave each other space. Tom made his own decisions about what he wanted even to the last tour.

That was his decision — he wanted to go on tour. Nobody was going to tell him no for any reason. We suggested to him that we could postpone the tour, but he said, “Nope, I’m doing this.” That was the end of it.

Tom had hip problems that progressed to a broken hip, and to alleviate the pain he self-medicated. A week after the 2017 tour ended with the Hollywood Bowl show, he passed away. A lot of people in your position would torture themselves – “I should have gotten in his face.”

Well, I have no problem with that for the reasons I just explained. I don't torture myself. My conscious is clear because Tom knew that I knew, and Tom knew that I wasn't forcing him and getting in his face about it.

We had this invisible understanding, and I didn't have to confront him for him to know how I felt about it. Like I said, there was no second thoughts or reservations about going out on tour. In fact, the last conversation I had with Tom about it, I said, “Are you sure you want to do this? Are you up to it?” He said, “I'm not staying home. I'm going out. I want to do it. If I have to be in a wheelchair, I'm going to do it.” I said, “Okay, then what?” He said, “Well, when the tour's over, I'm going to go get my surgery. We'll write some more songs, make another record.”

That was the plan. It was kind of business as usual. I know that Tony, our manager, spoke to him and gave him options like, “We can postpone this. You can get your surgery now.” Tom said, “I need to be out there. I want to play with the band, and we're going to do it. I'll be okay.” So I have no second thoughts about it. I don't beat myself up like that. I miss them – same with Howie – but I did all I could.

For all that's made of Stevie Nicks’ songwriting partnership with former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, her friendship with Tom Petty was arguably as big an influence on her career, certainly the solo half of it.

“In 1976, I’d been in Fleetwood Mac for about a year when I heard Tom Petty’s debut,” Nicks wrote about the guitarist in a 2004 tribute for Rolling Stone. “I became a fan right then.

“I loved the way Tom’s Florida swamp-dog voice sounded in cahoots with Mike Campbell's guitar and Benmont Tench's keyboards. Tom had the same influences we had — the Byrds, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash — but he dropped in lots of serious old blues. I became such a fan that if I hadn’t been in a band myself, I would have joined that one.”

Nicks didn’t hide her enthusiasm from Petty. The guitarist said that when he and Nicks met in 1978, he felt overwhelmed.

“She was this absolutely stoned-gone huge fan,” he told American Songwriter. “And it was her mission in life that I should write her a song.”

Nicks didn’t have to wait long for that to happen. In 1980, she prepared to record her debut solo album, Bella Donna. The producer chosen was Jimmy Iovine, the man behind Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers 1979 breakthrough, Damn the Torpedos. Iovine was at work on Hard Promises, the group’s 1981 followup, when he took on Nicks’ album.

The overlap between those productions meant Petty got a chance to hear Nicks’ album in progress. There was one thing both he and Iovine agreed on — they couldn’t hear a hit single on it. (Perhaps “Edge of Seventeen” hadn’t been recorded yet?)

“Both Tom and Jimmy said to me, in a brutally honest way, ‘You don’t have a single on this record,” Nicks recalled. “Tom is a great and loyal friend, but he’s also honest like that.”

Iovine asked Petty to write a song for Nicks. What he came up with was “Insider,” a song he wrote in a style he thought suited her.

"When I wrote that song, I wrote it very quickly — I mean maybe in 10, 15 minutes," he told Melody Maker in 1981. "I just wrote it all down on paper and then I just picked up the guitar and tried to sing each line out. It took me maybe an hour to do that."

Petty said Iovine was thrilled with the song.

“I remember bringing it to him, and he said, ‘God, when I asked for a song, I didn’t expect this!’” The praise stung Petty. He had begun to wonder if he was making a mistake giving the tune away. “I was really attached to it,” he recalled

By the time Nicks was recording it, Petty was glum about the whole endeavor. He recalled being in the studio as she was cutting her harmony vocals and how she could read the concern on his face.

“She walked back in and said, ‘How was it?’ I said, ‘It’s amazing,’” Petty told Musician in 1981. “She said, ‘I can tell by the look on your face, you don’t wanna give me this song. I’m giving it back to you right now.’ I really thought a lot of her for that.”

Feeling guilty, Petty offered Nicks a replacement he and Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell had just written: “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” As Campbell recalled, he began writing the tune off a chord progression inspired by the drum intro to the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”

“I just put different chords to that feel, and gave it to Tom and he wrote these great words,” the guitarist explained in a video, where he demonstrated the song using his Fender Broadcaster, the same electric guitar he played on the song’s original recording.

“And we were working with Jimmy Iovine at the time, and he thought the song would work better as a duet, and he was actually right. So Stevie Nicks ended up singing along with Tom on this song.”

Petty said Nicks was thrilled with the new track.

“She says, ‘Wow! That’s why I wanted you to write me a song — it’s rock ’n’ roll, that’s what you do,’” he told Musician. “‘Insider' sounds like what I do.'

“And I thought, How dumb of me to think that she'd want me to write like her."

Sung as a duet by Nicks and Petty, with backing support from the Heartbreakers, “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” became the debut single from Bella Donna. The song rose quickly in the chart to peak at number three on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming both Nicks’ and the Heartbreakers’ biggest hit on that ledger.

Not everyone thought Petty made the right decision by giving it away. “Insider” appeared on Hard Promises, with backing vocals from Nicks and her sister, Lori. But while Petty thought highly of the tune, it failed to grab listeners or critics, one of whom singled out drummer Stan Lynch’s “cymbal-pinged weirdness” on the recording. The drummer wasn’t thrilled.

“As a trade-out for 'Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,' I didn’t think it was a good bargain at all,” Lynch said. “I remember [the discussion], ‘Well, we got “Insider,"' and I’m going, ‘Bad trade!’”

Nicks’ and Petty’s friendship endured for the remainder of his life. And, like a good friend, he was able to give her tough love when she needed it. After a stint in rehab in the early 1990s, she was insecure about relaunching her career and asked for his help writing songs.

“I didn't really expect the reaction I got, which was, ‘No, I won't,’” she wrote in Rolling Stone. “He said, ‘You are one of the premier songwriters in this business. Just write some great songs — that's what you do.’”

When they finally toured together in 2006, Petty gave her a platinum sheriff's badge inlaid with 24-karat gold and diamonds that read, To Our Honorary Heartbreaker. “It's probably the most beautiful piece of jewelry a man has ever given me, ever,” Nicks said.

Petty's sudden death from an accidental drug overdose on October 2, 2017, devastated her. “The loss of Tom Petty has just about broken my heart,” she said when she accepted the 2018 MusiCares Person of the Year Award; Petty won it the year before. “He was a great father and he was a great friend, and he was one of my best friends. My heart will never get over this.”

“You know, Michael is not one to show off,” Tom Petty said of Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell in an interview in Guitar Player’s August 1986 issue. “He thinks as a writer a lot, which sometimes I have to kick his ass about. I want to tell him, ‘Go ahead and give it to me.’”

When Campbell gave it, he gave it good. In one early session for the group’s debut single, “Breakdown,” the guitarist devised what became the song’s signature hook. But as Petty told us, the lick — a bluesy line that descends seductively from A to E an octave below — was originally buried in the song’s outro guitar solo. It took some assistance for him to hear it for what it was.

Fortunately, he had a little help.

“There's a story behind that,” Petty told us. “I wrote ‘Breakdown’ in the studio about 11 years ago, and the first version was seven minutes long, with this long guitar solo in the end.

“Everyone had gone home, and I was sitting there listening, and in walks Dwight Twilley.” The singer/guitarist, who is best known for his top 20 hit singles “I’m on Fire” and “Girls,” caught the tune as it was fading out, but not before he heard Campbell’s snakey descending riff buried in the solo.

“Twilley turns to me and says, ‘That's the lick, man! How come he only plays it once at the end of the song? It's the whole hook.’

“I listened back, and he was right,” Petty said. “So I called the band up — 4:00 in the morning — and told them to come back down. We did it again around the lick, took a couple takes, and there it was.”

As Campbell told us in the same issue that contained Petty’s interview, he used his 1950 Fender Broadcaster — the same electric guitar heard on “American Girl” — for the solo in “Breakdown.” He purchased it for $600 in 1976, along with a blackface Fender Deluxe Reverb, during the recording of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ debut album. "I felt my soul shake," Campbell said of hearing the Broadcaster through the Deluxe. He calls it “the guitar I can’t live without.”

“It's a good all-around guitar,” he explained to us in 1986. “For rhythms, solos, whatever — it always works. Anytime I'm stuck and can't get a sound, I just plug that one in.

“On ‘Breakdown,’ I think I was on the bass pickup for the intro and then I went to my treble pickup for the middle.”

Campbell recalled that once he and Petty salvaged the lick from the outro solo, he tried playing it with a slide. “I use a pill bottle with a ridge on it — One A Day vitamins, I think,” he explained.

Eventually, though, “we decided that the bottleneck was too bluesy. So I just played the part without the bottleneck and it worked. It’s just one of those things you stumble onto.”

It wasn’t the last time one of Petty’s songs would receive a new life. He nearly abandoned “I Won’t Back Down” until producer Jeff Lynne encouraged him to record it. The track became his first solo hit.

“People are always telling me, ‘That song helped me through the worst time of my life,’" Petty recalled of the tune.

As for “Breakdown," Petty told Guitar Player it’s the hook that saved the song.

“What he says is essential,” Petty said of Campbell. “The lick in ‘Breakdown’ — I can't imagine that song without it.”

“You don't really know why you smash your hand into a wall and break all the bones,” Tom Petty explained in a video interview around 1985. “I can't really pinpoint the reason because there wasn't a particular incident where I turned around and smashed the wall trying to hurt myself or impress someone. I was just frustrated.”

It was October 1984 when Petty nearly ended his guitar-playing career. The sessions for what would become Southern Accents had stretched on for months, since at least the September 1983 conclusion of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ tour for Long After Dark, the 1982 album that featured their hit “You Got Lucky.” Southern Accents had started life as a solo record, but by late 1984 it had become a band record. All Petty knew was that he wanted it finished, no matter which name was on it.

“There was a point around last winter when I wanted to finish the album,” he explained in a 1985 video interview. “Really, for my own reasons, just to have it out of my hair by the end of the year was kind of a goal, I'd say.”

With recording completed, mixing was carried out at Petty’s home studio by two teams of engineers in an attempt to wrap things up quickly.

“They'd be in one room mixing and I was in another room listening to the mixes of the day before,” he said.

One mix in particular was bothering him. He had picked “Rebels” to be the new record’s lead track. But no matter how it was mixed, it didn’t sound as good to him as his original demo.

“I was in another room, and I put on the very first demo of the song, which was better than what I was doing at the moment, which just drove me crazy,” Petty said.

“And as I was walking from that room to the next, I slammed the wall with my hand.”

Although it’s often said Petty punched a wall, he hit the wall with the back of his left hand, as he indicated in video interviews.

“I took my hand like this, hit the back,” he explained. “I didn't think that I hit it that hard.”

But almost instantly, he knew he’d done serious damage to himself. An X-ray revealed the unbelievable extent to which he’d broken his hand.

“I really hurt it,” he said. “Pulverized it. Broke it to powder — five bones in the hand, to powder.”

The trauma was so extensive that doctors from around the hospital dropped by to view the X-rays. No one could believe it.

In the end, his hand had to be rebuilt using wire and metal studs. Even after surgery, the prognosis was grim, considering that he’d broken his left hand, which he used for fretting. Doctors told him he might never play guitar again.

Petty’s response was characteristic: "Fuck that!"

As Heartbreakers’ guitarist Mike Campbell would recall, it was the same determination Petty showed near the end of his life when a broken hip threatened to sideline the group’s tour. Petty resolved to see it through, “Even if I have to be in a wheelchair.”

Nine months later, Petty finally had the chance to see if he could play. He picked up a guitar and chose a song suited to the occasion: “The Waiting.”

The surgery was a success. And as part of his rehabilitation, he had to begin playing lead guitar to help rebuild his dexterity. That came in handy years later when he cut the electric guitar solo for “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” a standout track from the Heartbreakers’ 1993 Greatest Hits album.

By then, he’d had nearly 10 years to reflect on the damage he’d done to himself in a flash of anger. Speaking to Musician magazine, he said the experience was a wakeup call.

“When I was in the hospital with my hand bigger than my head, I said, ‘What am I doing?’” he said. It was part of a habit he'd developed subconsciously to give himself something to write about.

“If things started to get too placid or idyllic, I’d just do something to get everything stirred up. It took a lot to admit that to myself. I would just get everything in turmoil so the music would come.”

He said those nine months wearing a cast, not knowing if he’d ever play guitar again, gave him time to consider his options.

“And the list was real short,” he told Musician. “It was nine months before I could even strum a chord.

“That was the hardest thing for me,” he continued. “In the back of my mind I always thought I’d be okay — but, boy, it was weird to reach for the guitar and have this big thing on the end of my arm. The way I was living at the time was rowdy. I was about to rowdy myself off the end of a cliff.”

With the Byrds, Roger McGuinn gifted us chiming electric 12-string anthems like “Turn, Turn, Turn,” riff-laden cuts like “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘N’ Roll Star,” and proto-country-rock classics like Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Beyond that, there’s his appearance alongside Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue, wild LSD trips with John Lennon and George Harrison, and notable collaborations with Tom Petty, not to mention his profound influence over Petty and his partner in crime, Mike Campbell.

All of this is to say that McGuinn isn’t just an unassuming electric and acoustic guitar (and banjo) hero — he’s also lived one hell of an eventful life. It was with that in mind that McGuinn dialed in with Guitar Player to peel back the curtain on his relationships with his early mentor, the 1960s singer Bobby Darin, as well as David Crosby, Lennon and Harrison, Dylan, Petty and Campbell.

Bobby Darin 

“I first met him at the Crescendo Club, where he offered me a job. I took it because I was looking to, well, actually, Barry Maguire [“Eve of Destruction”] had invited me to be part of the New Christie Minstrels, and I got my picture taken with them on the cover of TV Guide with the band. But I told Bobby that, and he said, ‘Nah, that’s a bad idea. That’s too big a group. You’ll get buried in a group that size.’

“Bobby offered me twice as much, so I took the gig and stayed with him for about a year and a half. Then he quit performing for a while, moved to New York, and became a songwriter in the Brill Building.

“But he was a mentor to me. I followed him around, and I used to ask him questions about the music business, and I told him I’d like to get into the movies. He came up with a script from [American actor and director] Jackie Cooper at one point, and it turned out to be something I didn’t want to do. But I did move to New York, and I became a studio musician at that point.

“But the script from Jackie Cooper was about a banjo player. I said, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ And then, I read the whole script, and it was about a banjo player. Bobby had remembered that I wanted to get into a movie, so he wrote this movie for me to be the lead in, but it was about a heroin addict. [laughs]

“I said, ‘Oh, Bobby, I don’t think I can do this,’ so I turned him down. I never did a movie with or for anybody. I didn’t work in Hollywood, but I’m still a banjo player.

“Bobby was a boss. It wasn’t like a friendly, ‘we’re buddies’ relationship. But he was kind and mentored me. He really cared about my growth as a musician and artist. I was with him the night he discovered Wayne Newton [the famed Las Vegas singer, known for his signature hit “Danke Schoen”].

“We were in Vegas, had a show in the main showroom, and were walking around the casino. Around the corner was the lounge where the acts who don’t play in the main room perform. And it was the Newton Brothers [Wayne and Jerry]. Bobby saw Wayne, and said, ‘Him. I’m gonna sign him.’ And he did.”

David Crosby

“He taught me how to drive. [laughs] I didn’t drive when I lived in Chicago — and this is 1960 — while I was working with [the folk group] the Limeliters. But after I left Chicago, David had this old Chevy convertible with four-inch seat belts that he got out of a DC-3. You know, he was really into safety.

“So he taught me how to drive in that. And with a good sense of humor, he took me to the corner of La Cienega and Sunset with a stick shift, and I wasn’t familiar with clutching and putting the thing in first gear and getting around the corner, but I did it.

“But in the Byrds, I think for the vocals, he was definitely important. And guitar-wise, he was a good rhythm player, but he didn’t play any lead, and I didn’t like his songwriting all that much. It was different from what we wanted to do. So I’d say his vocals were the main asset.

“And he and I were friends. I met him in 1960, and then, when we were getting the Byrds together, we were still friendly and having a good time. But tensions rose when people were getting songs on the record and other people weren’t.

“It became difficult. I think the final blow to me was when he said, ‘You guys are not good enough musicians to be playing with me.’ I didn’t think it was right, so Chris [Hillman] said, ‘We’ve gotta get rid of David.’ I agreed, and we went up and asked him to leave, and that was that. But we did him a big favor because he got into a ‘better’ band after that with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash.”

John Lennon and George Harrison

“I first met them in London in late ’65 or ’66. They were all really friendly, and they just loved the Byrds. We were having a great time together, and so I maintained a friendly relationship with all of them. I don’t think there was a rivalry. We were all friends. I don’t remember being rivals with the Beatles, or anybody! And the Bible says to seek one’s own glory is not glory, so I don’t think like that.

“But they were inspirational. Everybody I ever ran into inspired me to do something. I did take acid with them in Laurel Canyon, but my first LSD experience was in San Francisco in 1960, when it was still legal. The acid came from the Sandos Labs. It was on a sugar cube wrapped in aluminum foil and cost $10. [laughs] I was living in a commune in Russian Hill. That was my first acid experience.

“But when we and the Beatles took it in Laurel Canyon, I don’t think it really helped anything musically. It just got you high. [laughs] For me, it was just recreational. But I quit doing it because I had a bad trip. It was iffy. You could have a really fun time or a really bad time.

“I remember, later on, when Paul McCartney was playing at the Forum in LA. It was sold out, and I called up the Forum, and somebody backstage picked up the phone. I said, ‘This is Roger McGuinn from the Byrds.’ He got Paul, and Paul said, ‘Oh, come on down. I’ll get you in!’ So we were friendly.

“And I remember back during John Lennon’s Lost Weekend in LA, with Harry Nilsson. I was at the Record Plant. They were in one of the studios, and I walked by, and they invited me in. I played with them. I said, ‘You know, I didn’t fill out a W-4 form…’ [laughs] I just did it for old times’ sake, just to be friendly. John said, ‘Well, you’re the only one…’ I think that was the last time I talked to John.

“And then George I saw quite often when he was hanging out with Tom [Petty] at his house. We talked about guitars and stuff, and George really got into the ukulele and gave one or two to Tom. They’d be playing it, and we all really had a good time. We were just all hanging out and being friends.”

Bob Dylan 

“Bob and I were neighbors in Malibu. He used to come over to my house, and he liked my house! I remember I was on the road, and I’d just bought this house in Malibu, and I got a call from my real estate agent, and she said, ‘I’ve got Bob Dylan here. He wants to talk to you.’

“Bob got on the line, and he said, ‘I want to buy your house.’

“I said, ‘Well, I just bought it, man. I wanna keep it. I love it.’ [laughs] He would come over to my house, and I don’t know if he wanted to see me or the house, you know? [laughs]

“But he’d come over, and we’d play pool. At one point he saw a basketball hoop out in the back, and he asked me if I had a basketball. I didn’t, but I got one the next day.

“So we we’re playing basketball in the back by the carport, and he said, ‘I want to do something different.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, man?’ He said, ‘I don’t know… like a circus.’

“And that’s what the Rolling Thunder Revue was. I got to New York, and I saw him again, and he invited me on the Rolling Thunder tour, and that was how that worked.

“If you’ve ever seen The Big Bang Theory, Bob is like Sheldon. [laughs] It’s like… he’s out there. He thinks in abstractions. And social graces are different. He doesn’t really have a conversation with you; he talks in abstractions a lot. I love the guy like a brother. But… he’s a little… challenging to have a friendship with.

“So he likes me at times. [laughs] He goes hot and cold. He liked me when we were hanging out together in Malibu. He liked me on the Rolling Thunder tour. He liked me when I did the 30th anniversary thing at Madison Square Garden with him. He was happy about my performance at that. I remember he told Tom Petty and George Harrison, ‘Wow, Roger really stole the show!’ He was very positive about that.

“So I know he’s liked me at times. I love the guy. And I loved performing with him. I loved singing ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ with him.”

Tom Petty and Mike Campbell 

“I met Tom in 1976, when I was getting ready to do an album for Columbia Records. I had most of the songs ready to go, but I needed a couple of extra songs to fill it out. And my manager was around the corner playing records and tapes, and I couldn’t see what he was putting on. And he put ‘American Girl.’

“I said, ‘When did I record that?’ [laughs] And he said, ‘It isn’t you!’ And I said, ‘I know. It’s a great song. Who is it?’

“And he said, ‘It’s this new guy, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.’ I said, ‘I want to meet him.’

“So the next day they arranged a meeting, and I got to meet Tom. We became friends, and I invited them to come to New York to play at the Bottom Line with me. We remained really good friends until his death.

“And I was honored because when I read Mike Campbell’s book [the 2024 memoir Heartbreaker]: There was one point where he was talking about playing like Roger McGuinn. I thought that was fun, you know? Mike’s a good friend, too, and I congratulated him on a really fun book to read. It brought back a lot of good memories.

“But Tom was great. He was very gracious, very kind, and a friendly person. Some of my favorite memories are hanging out with him and George Harrison at his house in L.A. and just jamming. It was great working with him on [McGuinn’s 1991 album] Back From Rio. And the way that came about was a direct result of being on the Temples and Flames tour in Europe with Tom and Bob.

“We had a day off in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I had a tune, but I didn’t have any words for it. I showed the tune to Tom, and he liked it, and we sat there in the hotel room and wrote down ‘King of the Hill.’ And Mike Campbell had a four-track cassette recorder — a little kind of mini studio in a briefcase — so he came into the hotel room and recorded the demo of ‘King of the Hill.’

“That somehow got to Clive Davis, and they gave us a record deal, so it came out of that. Tom was a great songwriter. He described it as being from outer space. He didn’t want to investigate it too hard because he thought it might go away. I’ve had that, too. Some songwriters say that it comes from maybe from God, where you’re just getting the Holy Spirit telling you to write stuff.”

Growing up Gainesville, Florida, Tom Petty lived among some of rock’s future guitar greats. Former Eagles guitarist Don Felder lived in the area and says he gave Petty guitar lessons (although Petty said Felder taught him piano). Another future (and founding) Eagle, Bernie Leadon, also hailed from the area, and his brother Tom played in Mudcrutch, Petty’s pre-Heartbreakers band.

But the one Gainesville artist Petty admired most was Stephen Stills. Five years older than Petty, Stills had been a founding member of Buffalo Springfield, the psychedelic folk-rock group Petty once called “the coolest band in America” for its influential blend of acoustic and electric guitar styles and tones.

Petty had certainly been aware of Stills as one of the older members of the Gainesville scene, and he held him in high esteem, not only for his songwriting and vocals talents but for his guitar wizardry. Those only grew after Stills moved to Los Angeles, befriended Duane Allman — then working with his brother Gregg in the group Hour Glass — and, eventually, began following and learning from electric guitar icon Jimi Hendrix, the musician he called “my guru.”

By the time Petty emerged on the U.S. charts in 1977 with “Breakdown,” Stills had risen to fame with one of the biggest acts of the early 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Their success was so great that, in 1974, they launched one of the biggest rock stadium tours of its kind, establishing a format to be followed by acts like Fleetwood Mac and Peter Frampton.

So it was a stunning turn for Petty when Crosby, Stills and Nash opened for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on a string of dates in the summer of 2010. By then Petty had established himself as a superstar with hit records and successful tours under his belt. Petty was the consummate professional onstage, always prepared and cool headed.

But his first night with CS&N was a completely different trip.

“This is heavy for me,” the guitarist said, according to Warren Zanes’ book, Petty: The Biography. “I walked out and watched a little from the side of the stage, and they were really good that night, really hitting it, and the place was going crazy. I got nervous, thinking to myself, ‘God, I can’t follow that. I can’t possibly follow that.’

“So I go to my dressing room and pull myself together. Then the door opens and it’s Stephen and he wants to rap. And that just makes me more nervous.”

Despite having worked with his idols George Harrison and Bob Dylan, in the Traveling Wilburys, and Roger McGuinn, on the latter’s 1991 solo album, Back From Rio, Petty was starstruck.

By the time Petty was onstage, he was a wreck, aware that Crosby, Stills and Nash were on the side of the stage, watching him.

"I felt like I couldn't sustain a note," he said. "My voice started to kind of quiver. It was driving me mad. I was thinking, 'I have to pull this together. I can't sing in vibrato through the whole show.’”

Afterward, Petty pulled it together and finished the two-week run with CS&N without incident.

Six years later, Petty got another thrill when Stills joined the newly revived Mudcrutch as a surprise guest on June 26 at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood. The guitarist was from all accounts cool, calm and collected that night. As Stills dialed in his guitar tone prior to their performance of “The Wrong Thing to Do,” from Mudcrutch’s 2008 debut, Petty joked: “Don’t worry. We practiced backstage.”

While he was lead guitarist in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Mike Campbell helped create a considerable number of now-classic songs in the heartland rock canon.

Today, some of the electric guitars Campbell used on those songs are famous in their own right. There’s his Broadcaster — the guitar he says “I can’t live without” — that featured on “American Girl,” the band’s third single, as well as his famous Red Dog Telecaster, heard on their 1980 hit “Refugee” and recently the focus of two new Fender Tribute models.

There are others, and they all have great stories, but nothing like the pair of tales Campbell tells about his 1962 Gibson Les Paul “SG” Junior, the guitar famously heard on the outro guitar solo from “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” the second single from Tom Petty’s 1989 solo record, Full Moon Fever.

“Great story about this,” Campbell tells Gibson TV. “I was in Hartford, Connecticut on tour, and I went for a walk, and I passed a video store. No guitars anywhere. I just walked in.

“And somehow in the conversation, they said, ‘Oh yeah, we have a couple of guitars.’ And this is one of them.”

Campbell has no idea why a video store had a pair of guitars inside, but it didn’t matter. He liked what he saw and decided to strike a deal.

“They had two in the back, and I bought them both,” he says. “It was like, I don't know, 120 bucks. I'm just lucky that way.”

As Campbell explains, while SGs feature minimal electronics, they are excellent-playing tone machines. “These are wonderful because they've just got the one pickup, one volume, one knob,” he says. “They play great. They're nice and lightweight.”

Campbell had the guitar with him by chance while he, Petty and producer Jeff Lynne were doing overdubs on “Runnin’ Down a Dream.”

“Tom and Jeff and I were working on the record, and it was one of the few songs that Tom and I wrote where we're gonna have an ending where the guitar is going to just go on for a while,” he explains.

“I pulled this guitar out, and I think I had an Ampeg amp or something. I was doing one of those licks on the solo,” he says, as he demonstrates it on the guitar. “And I remember Jeff was there, and he went like this.” Campbell lowers his sunglasses and makes a surprised face. “It's hard to impress Jeff. So, yeah, that was a good sign.

“But that was it — that was this guitar. It just happened to be there that day. I didn’t go looking for it. I just picked it up.”

It turned out to be a happy accident.

But there’s a bad accident to go with that story.

In 1986, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers supported Bob Dylan on his True Confessions tour. The tour was on its third-to-last stop, at the L.A. Forum on August 3, 1986, when tragedy struck. As Campbell recalls, the band was in between songs and Dylan was talking to the audience.

“I had this guitar on, and I’m standing there, trying to be cool,” Campbell elaborates. “And I kind of went like this to scratch my ears or whatever. And Bob was talking to the audience going on with some important spiel about something.

“And the strap came loose and [the volume control] was wide open. And it went ka-blam! Loud! You know, this thing's loud.”

“Bob turned around like, ‘What the fuck were you doing back there? I'm trying to talk up here!’”

Campbell looked down to see the headstock had split cleanly away from the neck.

“And my heart just broke, because I love that guitar, you know. I just thought they're gonna repair it, but it'll never be the same.

“But it kind of is,” he says. “They did a great job, and you can't even tell. It tunes good and plays good, and I still use it, you know? And it gets the job done every time.”

As Campbell has told us before, that wasn’t his only noteworthy encounter with Bob Dylan. Two years earlier, the folk-rock icon sought him out for advice on buying a drum machine after he heard Campbell had used a LinnDrum to help him compose “The Boys of Summer,” his 1984 hit cowrite with Don Henley. But as Campbell explained, the technology mystified Dylan.

Tom Petty’s 1993 Greatest Hits compilation may have been a fan-pleasing collection of prime cuts, but as far as Petty was concerned it was a contract breaker and nothing more. Eager to leave MCA Records for Warner Bros., the guitarist stuck a deal with the label to give them two new songs to include with the hits package in exchange for his freedom.

Little did he know one of those new tunes would become one of the biggest hits of his career, a new gem among 16 venerable jewels dating back to his 1976 debut album.

For that he had producer Rick Rubin to thank.

Petty was feeling burned out at the time he and MCA made their agreement, and turning out two new tunes was a bigger chore than he expected. At the time, he was at work on his solo album Wildflowers, and wasn’t keen to give up any of his new songs for MCA’s compilation. Rubin, who was on hand to produce Wildflowers, took on the assignment of producing whatever two new tracks Petty came up with.

Unable to muster the necessary creativity, Petty gave Rubin a cassette of demos containing songs he’d never released previously. .

“It wasn’t like, ‘These are great new songs,’” Rubin recalled to Rolling Stone in 2016. “It was more like, ‘Listen to these. See if you hear anything.’”

Rubin said he wasn’t moved by any of what he heard. However, in between two of the tapes songs was a riff played in passing, “like after someone tuned up, just the first chords they played,” he recalled. It stuck with him.

“So I called Tom and was like, ‘Hey, this whole phrase is really good. You may want to write this song.’”

Petty decided to try it, and succeeded. The song he created from that riff was “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” a standout track on Greatest Hits that became his first Billboard Top 20 single of the 1990s.

But as Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell recalls, the song almost went by a different name.

”It was called ‘Indiana Girl,’” he told SongFacts in a 2003 interview. “The first chorus was, ‘Hey, Indiana girl, go out and find the world.’”

The line stuck until it came time to commit the lyrics to tape.

“We cut the song and Tom was singing the chorus,” Campbell said, “and he decided he just couldn’t get behind singing about ‘Hey, Indiana Girl.’” A short time later Petty found the line he’d been missing. “About a week later he came in and said ‘I’ve got a better idea,’” Campbell recalled. “So he changed the chorus to ‘Last dance with Mary Jane.’

“In the verse there is still the thing about an Indiana girl on an Indiana night,” he continued, but noted that the ambiguity of the new line gave the lyrics “a deeper meaning.”

As for what that deeper meaning may be, Petty never said. However, he revealed in a January 2010 interview with Mojo that Mary Jane is the woman from his 1977 hit “American Girl” “with a few hard knocks.”

One typical assumption is that Mary Jane is a young woman who died from an overdose, an idea borne out in part by the song’s music video. In it, Petty plays a morgue assistant who brings home the corpse of a beautiful woman, played by Hollywood actress Kim Basinger. After dressing her up in a wedding gown and dancing with her, he takes the woman to a rocky shore and releases her to the ocean, where Mary Jane floats to the surface and opens her eyes anew.

The song is noteworthy for featuring an electric guitar solo performed by Petty, rather than by Campbell. The two men would typically work out their sounds together, with Petty playing rhythm and Campbell lead. But as the guitarist recalls, he encouraged Petty to dig deep into his gut and play the solo himself. Campbell previously told Guitar Player that Petty played his 1950 Fender Broadcaster on the track.

“I pushed him to do that,” Campbell explained. “I said, ‘You go ahead and play a fuzzy sort of guitar solo’ because we had this good sound up.”

Campbell added that a rough mix of the song was created at his home studio but they were never able to improve upon it. “We went to three or four different studios over the next couple of weeks and tried to do a proper mix, and we could never beat that rough mix,” he said. “So, that was the mix we put out.”

As for Rubin, helping Petty find the hidden gem for his song was all part of his job. But he says he never knew what Petty thought of it all.

“I don’t know how he felt about it. I couldn’t read him,” he said. “Sometimes, he would say things very clearly, and sometimes he would not and feel strongly about something, and I would never know.”

As fans will know, “Last Dance With Mary Jane” wasn't the first song to nearly elude Petty. During the sessions for 1979's Damn the Torpedos, he wasn't too keen about “Don't Do Me Like That” until producer Jimmy Iovine convinced him it could be a hit (it went to number 10 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart).

For that matter, Petty nearly put the brakes on "I Won't Back Down" because he thought it was too personal. It took a bit of arm twisting and some help from George Harrison before he got it down on tape and became one of his most popular tunes and a salve for people in times of trouble and hardship.

“Of all the songs I've written, I think I get the most feedback about that song,” Tom Petty said of “I Won’t Back Down” in the Peter Bogdanovich documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream. “And it is a personal song. When I did it, I sort of thought that I laid it out, you know, with no ambiguity at all — like, I just said it very plainly.

“And I kind of felt nervous about it, like maybe I should take it back and disguise it a little bit. But I'm glad I didn't — and it's very much like me.”

Released in April 1989 as the lead single from Petty’s first solo album, Full Moon Fever, “I Won’t Back Down” was indeed a personal song. It was inspired by a 1987 arson at Petty’s home in Encino, California.

As Petty, his then-wife Jane Benyon, and their daughter were eating breakfast one morning, they smelled smoke: Someone had broken into the house and set a wood staircase on fire with lighter fluid. Petty and his family escaped, but the house was destroyed, except for — miraculously — his basement recording studio.

“We were shaken for years by it,” Petty told Paul Zollo in the book Conversations With Tom Petty. “I wouldn’t even use the word ‘fire’ in a song or anything. It really frightened me. They didn’t just try to kill me, they tried to wipe out my whole family. And it was a hell of a day. It was my wife’s birthday.”

Petty and his wife rebuilt their house on the property. And he got a chart-topping anthem out of it: “I Won’t Back Down.” Its minimal lyrics are a statement of defiance in the face of hardship and about as straightforward a message as anyone has ever delivered in a song.

Beyond its obvious appeal as a infectious rock track, its stand-tough message has made it an appealing choice over the years for political campaigns, sporting events, labor union strikes and recovery efforts following natural disasters.

The song took on new significance for the country following the September 11 attacks, when it re-emerged as a popular radio tune. Petty and the Heartbreakers subsequently performed a version of it for America: A Tribute to Heroes, a telethon that raised funds for victims of the attack.

But as Petty told Guitar Player in his July 2006 cover story, he almost didn’t record it. Not only did it hit too close to home — literally, speaking — but its message felt too direct, especially for a songwriter who prefers a more elliptical style of writing.

“I thought ‘I Won't Back Down’ was too introspective,” Petty told GP. “I was hesitant with that one, because there's not much ambiguity or metaphor in it. It just says it.”

Petty was concerned enough that he consulted with his co-writer, Jeff Lynne, who also performed on and produced Full Moon Fever.

“I remember asking Jeff Lynne if he thought the song might be a little embarrassing. He said, ‘No. It feels great.’

“So I was surprised when it was received the way it was. People are always telling me, ‘That song helped me through the worst time of my life.’”

Petty typically preferred to be less literal in his songwriting, to give the listener room to project their own meaning onto a song. But he said “I Won’t Back Down” demonstrates that you have to let each creation be what it wants to be.

“The thing about songwriting is that there's an exception to every rule,” he told Guitar Player. It's hard to talk about it generally, because each song is so different. I think my best songs are the ones where you can find different levels of meaning in them. Those are the ones I find the most intriguing, but I don't always write that way.

“Sometimes, I'll write a linear kind of thing, such as ‘Into the Great Wide Open,’ which is just straight-on storytelling. But the ones I really like have a bit of ambiguity. I don't have a method that always works. The process is so random, and yet it keeps happening. I just look up every year or so, and I've got 10 more songs. It's not something I work at every day, but I kind of feel that I'm never done writing. I'm always looking for a song.”

And while “I Won’t Back Down” appeals to an iconic American image of going it alone against the system, Petty — who played acoustic rhythm guitar on the recording — got plenty of help when making the song. In addition to Mike Campbell on a Gretsch Clipper electric guitar, including the slide parts, the song features Petty's Traveling Wilburys bandmate George Harrison on acoustic guitar and backing vocals.

Harrison had another vital role in the song’s recording. He came to the rescue when Petty was too congested to sing.

“I had a terrible cold that day,” Petty told Mojo, “and George went to the store and bought a ginger root, boiled it and had me stick my head in the pot to get the ginger steam to open up my sinuses, and then I ran in and did the take.”

Released in April 1989, “I Won’t Back Down” reached the top spot on the Billboard U.S. Rock chart, an impressive achievement for his first solo single.

Roughly 25 years later, “I Won’t Back Down” returned to prominence once again when singer Sam Smith claimed to have inadvertently copied the song for his 2014 hit “Stay With Me.” The singer’s publisher agreed to credit Petty and Lynne as co-writers and pay them 12.5 percent of the song’s royalties.

Petty for his part said he believed Smith’s appropriation wasn’t intentional.

"All my years of songwriting have shown me these things can happen,” he said. “Most times you catch it before it gets out the studio door but in this case it got by. Sam's people were very understanding of our predicament and we easily came to an agreement.”

One of the remarkable synchronicities of 1970s rock music is how so many big acts of the day emerged from Northern Central Florida and its surrounding environs. The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Tom Petty all grew up or spent time in the area, as did several guitarists who would go on to shape the California sound in that decade: Stephen Stills and Eagles members Bernie Leadson and Don Felder.

Felder, now a former Eagle, was very much at the center of it all. Growing up in Gainesville, Florida, he developed his guitar skills early on and by his late teens was giving guitar lessons at a music store to help support his career.

He recalled the day a young bass guitarist came in looking for guitar lessons. It was Tom Petty.

“I started playing at 10. By the time I got to be 16, I got a job working in a music store,” Felder recalled to People Now. “They didn't pay me, but for every student that I taught, I got five dollars credit on the store, so I could get guitar strings, or I could get a cord, or if I saved up enough I could get an amplifier or trade in for a better guitar.”

Many of his students were newcomers to the instrument who were struggling with the basics.

“And so I used to teach all these kids who had gotten guitars for Christmas. Their fingers were hurting — ‘Oh, it hurts to play’ — and I'd make it fun.”

“So one day this kid came in — kind of a scrawny bucktooth, kind of brawly-looking kid — and it's Tom Petty. He wants to learn to play guitar.”

At the time, Petty was playing bass in a Gainesville band called the Epics. As Felder recalled more recently to WMMR-FM, Petty was unhappy playing bass and wanted to learn how to play guitar. For that matter, the Epics were in desperate need of help.

“They had two guitar players that both just flailed artlessly on the electric guitar,” Felder says. “And Tommy was playing bass and singing and fronting the band, and he really didn’t want to be the singing bass player; he wanted to play guitar.

“So I started teaching him guitar in this music store, and going out to see him and teaching him at his house.”

Felder also went to the Epics’ shows and gave their two guitarists some tips. “I said, ‘Wait a minute. You got to turn down a little bit. You play rhythm, and then, when Tom's not singing, you play a little lead guitar line, right?’ ”

“It was funny because, the Allman Brothers were in that area, too. Duane Allman taught me how to play slide guitar. Stephen Stills and I had a band together when we were 14, 15. When Stephen left to go back to California” — where he joined first Buffalo Springfield and then formed Crosby, Stills & Nash — “Bernie Leadon moved to Gainesville to replace Stephen in the band.

“Lynyrd Skynyrd was, like, about 60 minutes away in Jacksonville,” he adds. “So in one little area in North Central Florida, so many musicians went on to become Platinum-selling artists, Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, legendary southern rock musicians who just happened to be caught up in that same place.

“I can’t tell it was something that was in the water or something in what we were smoking.”

The connections Felder describes stretch even farther when you consider that the late Rick Derringer inspired Allman to take up slide guitar, or that Neil Young — who would join Crosby, Stills and Nash — was childhood friends with Randy Bachman, who recently related a tale of how Young introduced him to Stills, with hilarious results.

Felder’s career led him from Florida to New York City, Boston and, by the early 1970s, Los Angeles, where he replaced David Lindley in a band supporting folk singer David Blue when Lindley went on tour with David Crosby and Graham Nash. When Lindley fell ill, he replaced him in performances with Crosby and Nash.

By late 1973, Felder got a session gig with help from his old friend Bernie Leadon, who was now a guitarist in the Eagles. The group needed a slide guitarist to play on their song “Good Day in Hell,” on their 1974 album On the Border. Leadon suggested Felder. The Eagles were so pleased with his work that they asked him to join.

Felder’s time with the band lasted through the 1970s, during which he put his signature lines on many songs, including the solo to “One of These Nights,” and co-wrote their hit “Hotel California.” But a spat with Eagles founder Glenn Frey marked the end of the road for the group in 1980. They regrouped in 1994, but in 2001 Felder was fired by the group. He sued and in 2007 the case was settled out of court.

He’s continued to perform solo and has just released The Vault — Fifty Years of Music, a career-spanning set that features new songs from old ideas dating back as far as 1974.

The Vault will take Felder on the road this summer as part of the Brotherhood of Rock tour with Styx and Kevin Cronin, which kicked off May 28 and runs through August 24. (He’s certain to be drinking plenty of water, following his near mishap onstage this past February.) Meanwhile he’s sitting on a load of other ideas from that cardboard box. Which means it might not be long before he dips back into The Vault for another album.

“It’s an odd song to begin with, and it’s a very odd song to be on a Tom Petty album, especially one called Southern Accents.”

So says guitarist, songwriter writer and producer Dave Stewart about “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” the ethereal, neo-psychedelic rocker that became a smash hit for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 1985.

“The song came about in the most peculiar way, and almost immediately it went off in a couple of directions," Stewart explains. "And all of it started with some mad experiment I was cooking up in my hotel room one night.”

The story begins in 1984, at a party to celebrate the end of a tour by Eurythmics, the group Stewart formed with singer Annie Lennox in 1980. Stewart had been lured away from the festivities to the Los Angeles home of Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, who was then in the bloom of a wildly successful solo career. The next morning Stewart woke to find Nicks in his room trying on Victorian-style clothing, before he promptly nodded off again.

He awoke a short time later to hear his hostess speaking angrily on the phone. “She said, ‘Don’t come around here no more,’” Stewart recalls. He’s not sure who she was talking to but the general consensus is that it was Joe Walsh, Nicks' on-again-off-again boyfriend, who was then on a decade-long break from the Eagles. But, says Stewart, “she could have been arguing with the cleaner.”

Later that day, as Stewart flew to San Francisco to play the tour’s last show, Nicks’ words were still ringing in his ears and forming the beginnings of a melody. By the time he checked into his hotel room, he says, “The music was all there, even the chorus parts with me singing, ‘Don’t come around here no more.’”

He took out his Tascam Portastudio and got to work making a demo so as not to lose the idea. “I recorded a Coral sitar, a drum machine rhythm and a bass synth,” he recalls.

The next day, Stewart flew back to L.A. and played the demo for producer Jimmy Iovine, who had previously dated Nicks and produced her 1981 solo debut album, Bella Donna. Iovine loved the track and thought it would fit the new record he was working on for Nicks. The lyrics weren’t complete at the time, but Stewart and Iovine got to work in the studio adding more instruments to his demo recording.

That’s when Nicks walked in.

“We went to a studio and started it, but Stevie was in a bad mood with Jimmy,” Stewart recalls. “She started to recite Shakespeare-type things, and Jimmy got annoyed.

“She went into the bathroom for ages, and Jimmy finally said, ‘We should get Tom Petty to help finish the verses.’”

At Petty’s house, Iovine played Stewart’s demo.

“Tom liked it even though it was kind of ‘off’ music to him,” Stewart says. “He started spewing out verses, which Jimmy liked. That’s when Tom suggested going back to his garage studio to finish it up.”

As Stewart remembers, there was never any discussion about re-recording tracks from his demo, but he quickly seized on a new idea: Three-quarters of the way into the song, he suggested having the Heartbreakers enter and ride the song out as a frenzied rocker.

“They listened to the track, and I said, ‘We should go into double-time here,’” he says. “I could see their confusion over this very different song appearing from a crazy Englishman, but the more I talked about it, the more they came around.”

The well-oiled band nailed their parts in two takes. “They were the Heartbreakers,” Stewart says simply. “The energy they had was just incredible.”

With the basic tracks completed, Petty cut his vocals and guitarist Mike Campbell recorded a rousing, wah-drenched solo.

"I used a goldtop Les Paul through a Rat distortion pedal, with a Boss octaver and a wah-wah pedal through an Ampeg Rocket amp," Campbell said in response to a fan question on the band's official website. "Also used a slide bottle," he added, likely referring to a Dunlop glass bottle guitar slide.

Recalls Stewart, “He started out playing a sustained single note, kind of reminiscent of what Neil Young might do, and then it was just, ‘Mike, go nuts’ — and he went off. It was absolutely amazing.”

After that initial session, Stewart, Petty and Iovine brought in Daniel Rothmuller to record hypnotic cello parts, and they called on singers Stephanie Spruill, Marilyn Martin and Sharon Celino for background vocals.

“I had always thought Stevie would do some interesting things with female harmonies,” Stewart says. Which would make sense: Nicks and Petty had been friends since at least 1981, and he and the Heartbreakers had collaborated with her on "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," from Bella Donna.

Spruill did the honors instead. “On the finished track, Stephanie did the part that’s really like a scream," Stewart explains. "At first she had trouble going to such a high note, but in the end she did it.”

Buoyed by the experience, Stewart and Petty collaborated on two more songs that appeared on Southern Accents: the funkified “It Ain’t Nothin’ to Me” and the Memphis soul–flavored “Make It Better (Forget About Me).” Released as the first single from the album in February 1985, “Don’t Come Around Here No More” was an instant hit, peaking at number 13 on Billboard, while its Alice in Wonderland–themed video (in which Stewart appeared as a hookah-smoking, sitar player atop a mushroom) became a heavy-rotation favorite on MTV.

“The video multiplied the band’s audience,” Stewart says. “Instead of people just hearing the song as a stand-alone, they saw the video and were drawn in. New people who that didn’t know Tom Petty at the time, they were like, ‘Holy shit, I want to see this band.’

“It’s such a weirdly off-kilter song. I had no idea it was going to end up with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but it’s just an example of the left-field things that I like to do. A lot of good things came from it.”

Mike Campbell understands the importance of matching his electric guitar tone to whatever song he’s playing. It’s a well-honed sense that was in clear evidence when Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers recorded their 1980 hit “Refugee.” His guitar of choice? his iconic Red Dog Fender Telecaster.

“This song is rebellious, and the sound has to match the song,” Campbell says. “So this guitar was in the right place at the right time.”

Campbell’s revelation comes in a video Fender has shared as it rolls out two tributes to the Red Dog: the Stories Collection Mike Campbell "Red Dog" Telecaster ($3,499.99) and the Fender Custom Shop Limited Edition Masterbuilt Mike Campbell 1972 “Red Dog” Telecaster ($20,000).

The Red Dog found its way into Campbell's collection around the time the guitarist became the lead-guitar foil to Petty's rhythm guitar work in the group Mudcrutch. While living in Gainesville, Florida, Campbell gave guitar lessons for $15 an hour to pay his rent. One of his students brought him a Telecaster and asked if he was interested in buying it.

Two hundred dollars later, the guitar was Campbell’s. But it wasn’t just any Fender Tele. The Red Dog is unique in that it has two humbuckers in the neck and middle position and a single-coil Telecaster bridge pickup, as well as a Bigsby B5F tremolo.

But what really grabbed Campbell was its built-in boost circuit — or as he calls it, “the Destruct button.”

“The Destruct button is just out of this world,” he says. “Without that, it’s, like, nice and clear. But if you want to really knock them down, you destruct them with that thing.”

The Red Dog’s big moment came on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ second album, Damn the Torpedos, when Campbell chose it for “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl,” both of which were released as singles. Producer Jimmy Iovine was impressed by what he heard.

Campbell recalls, “When Jimmy Iovine heard ‘Refugee’ and ‘Here Comes My Girl,’ he said, ‘We're done, don't need any more songs. Go write whatever you want. I got the two that'll make it.’

“We didn't know what hit records were. We were lucky, you know?”

But Campbell’s persistence with finding the right tone was equally important.

“‘Refugee’ was a hard song to record,” he explains. “For some reason, we got in the studio, and we tried every guitar for weeks, just trying to get something that just rang with those chords. And nothing would fit in with the band.

“And then, one day, we pulled this out,” he says of the Red Dog. “And there it was. It just fit that track perfectly.”

Fender’s two “Red Dog” Telecasters honor Campbell's original in varying degrees of authenticity.

The Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog is the latest addition to Fender's Stories Collection series that pays tribute to iconic Fender guitars and basses that have been modified by the artists who played them. It has an Heirloom nitrocellulose lacquer Red Dog red finish, a one-piece maple neck with a 7.25-inch-radius fingerboard and 21 vintage-style frets, and the Destruct boost circuit.

It also boasts a pair of vintage-style humbuckers and a single-coil Telecaster bridge pickup, a Bigsby B5F tremolo and a custom Red Dog neck plate. Custom accessories include a vintage-style case, strap, picks and a certificate of authenticity.

The Fender Custom Shop Limited Edition Masterbuilt Mike Campbell 1972 “Red Dog” Telecaster takes things even further. Created by Fender Custom Shop Senior Masterbuilder Dennis Galuszka in partnership with Campbell, it features a two-piece select alder body and a custom-shaped, one-piece maple neck. In the most obvious departure from the Stories Collection model, the Custom Shop creation features every nick, ding and scratch found on the original instrument, meticulously replicated in the guitar’s faded Red Metallic lacquer finish, neck, headstock, hardware and pickguard.

Other premium features include a flat-sawn maple neck with custom Oval “C” back-shape, a 7.25-inch radius, 21 vintage upgrade (45085) frets, a five-way switch, vintage replica Arcane, Inc. pickups, a Destruct boost circuit wired by Analogman, a three-ply parchment pickguard, vintage-style Jazzmaster bridge with threaded steel saddles, vintage-style “F”-stamped tuning machines, a bone nut, two American Vintage ‘65+ string trees with nylon spacers, deluxe hardshell case, strap and a certificate of authenticity.

All in all, it's a fitting tribute to Campbell that comes as the guitarist releases his new memoir, Heartbreaker, a chronicle of his life and career in and out of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. In addition to detailing the many important guitars in his collection, Campbell — who these days performs with his group the Dirty Knobs — reveals intimate details about working with Petty on some of the group’s biggest hits, as well as his own hits, like his Don Henley co-write “The Boys of Summer.”

Speaking to Guitar Player about the book, Campbell told how he wrote many of the group's songs, including “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl,” using drum loops taken from other songs.

“I wrote ‘Refugee’ to a drum loop I got off of a record,” he said. “’Here Comes My Girl’ I wrote to a drum loop. I didn't have a drummer in my demo studio at home, so I would make drum loops before there were drum machines. That was just business as usual.”

Of course the "Red Dog" Tele is just one of Campbell’s many important guitars. Another is his Fender Broadcaster, the electric guitar that's at the heart of tracks like “American Girl” and the one guitar he says he can’t live without.

Visit Fender for more information about the Stories Collection Mike Campbell "Red Dog" Telecaster and the Limited Edition Masterbuilt Mike Campbell 1972 “Red Dog” Telecaster.

“A lot of the stuff between Tom and me was pure respect,” Mike Campbell tells Rolling Stone of the late Tom Petty. “We didn’t talk about feelings or we didn’t verbalize things like maybe some people do, but we respected each other deeply. We didn’t have to say it.”

Petty’s death on October 2, 2017, left Campbell reeling. He not only lost his close friend but his band.

But some months later, in early 2018, he received a phone call that gave him a new purpose when he needed it most. The caller was Mick Fleetwood, the drummer for Fleetwood Mac.

The group had been formed by Fleetwood, bass guitar player John McVie and former John Mayall guitarist Peter Green in 1967. They’d gone through a host of lineup changes in that time, with guitarists coming and going.

The latest vacancy came in early 2018 when Lindsey Buckingham was fired over a disagreement about the band's upcoming tour. Along with singer Stevie Nicks, the guitarist had led the foundering group to their greatest success when they joined in the mid 1970s. But Buckingham’s unpredictable nature and desire for solo guitar projects brought instability to their lineup in the group's later years.

When Buckingham departed for good on the eve of the band's 2018 tour, Fleetwood went looking for a new guitarist.

Which is when he called Mike Campbell.

“It was on my birthday. I was sitting in my backyard and I was deep in grief,” Campbell tells Rolling Stone.

“The phone rang and it was Mick and he offered me the tour.”

It took him just 24 hours to think it over and say yes. “My wife Marcie and I went,” he explains. “It was like a five-star, paid vacation.”

Campbell joined the tour alongside Crowded House guitarist Neil Finn. More than a vacation, the gig saved his soul.

“It really pulled me out of my grief, helped me to focus and process what I was going through,” the guitarist says. “I owe them a debt of gratitude for that.”

Campbell was certainly no stranger to Fleetwood Mac. He knew Nicks from her friendship with Petty and collaborations like their 1981 hit, “Stop Dragging My Heart Around,” from Nicks’ album Bella Donna.

“Tom had the same influences we had,” Nicks wrote in 2004. "The Byrds, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash. But he dropped in lots of serious old blues.

“I became such a fan that if I hadn’t been in a band myself, I would have joined that one.”

Nicks developed a friendship with Petty that lasted 40 years, during which time she became close to the Heartbreakers. Campbell calls her “an angel and spiritual sister.”

“She’s just a sweetheart,” he says. “She’s been so kind to me and I have nothing but great respect and love for her.”

As for Nicks’ claim that she would have joined the Heartbreakers in a heartbeat? Campbell says it’s true. But Petty had other ideas.

“Stevie thought she would be good in the band,” he says. “And of course, Tom said, ‘We don’t have girls in the Heartbreakers,’ but she was kind of like the fifth or sixth Heartbreaker in a way.”

Of course, Campbell is the one who worked most closely with Petty, writing songs with him and playing electric guitar alongside him on stages around the world. His new aptly titled memoir, Heartbreaker, is a deep exploration of their friendship, musical partnership and music.

As the guitarist recently told Guitar Player, “Lord knows what would've happened if Tom and I never met. As I wrote the book, I realized how many miracles have happened to me through timing, luck, divine intervention. I started with nothing, and these songs came to me from somewhere. There were chance encounters with my heroes, and of course, there was my relationship with Tom.”

Among those heroes was George Harrison, the former Beatle with whom Petty formed the Traveling Wilburys in the 1980s. Although not part of that group, Campbell helped out on their debut album, but tellingly pushed Harrison to perform the solo on their hit “Handle With Care” when Campbell felt his attempt came up short.

“I just handed him the guitar, I had handed him a slide," he said. "The amp was already set up, and he just did it. Took the pressure off me!”

Al Di Meola is best known for his peerless classical guitar exploits and, over on the electric guitar side, his tasteful, yet often maze-like jazz-fusion licks. Of course, guitarists will always be drawn to his virtuosity, but he sees that aspect of his playing as icing on the cake.

It's his sense of groove — the result of unified interlocking rhythms — that brings his songs to life.

In his recent discussion with YouTube host Rick Beato, Di Meola is asked, “Can you teach groove?”

The answer, it would seem, is yes, and Di Meola underscores how those rhythmic sensibilities have been finely tuned over his lifetime by both playing and listening.

“I did spend a lot of years by myself, getting into New York City and hanging out in salsa clubs,” he continues. “I just took it all in.”

More importantly, he says many of his key learnings happened away from the instrument.

“I spent a lot of years on desktops, just tapping rhythms,” he explains. “I could do it on my guitar, too, but I did a lot of it with my foot, always concentrating on the 4/4, with that never going out of time."

In short, Di Meola says, if you want to learn groove, "focus on the foot. It becomes very important.

“Whatever syncopations you're playing with the upper half of your body cannot influence that quarter note down there; it's two separate parts.”

He accepts, however, that the disconnect he is able to create between the upper and lower parts of his body is “not achievable” for everyone. In those cases, he points to the obvious solutions: play with a drummer, or use a metronome.

Di Meola has also had the opportunity to learn from some of the best, including the otherworldly flamenco talents of guitarist Paco de Lucía, pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, whose playing he describes as “off the charts,” and keyboardist Chick Corea, “the master of rhythm."

In the end, however, Di Meola returns to the foot.

“What's magical is when you have the ability to feel the quarter note, you can have these giant pauses in the music," he says, "and that's where the drama is."

Without that sensibility, he says bands can fall apart, but with it, pauses between chords and note flourishes bring a lot to the power of a piece.

His comments would have resonated with the late Tom Petty, who stated that “Rhythm playing is a lost art,” during a 1997 chat with Guitar Player.

“There aren't a lot of people who do it seriously anymore,” he bemoaned. “But it's really important to our band that I play the rhythm because the music sounds different if I don't.”

Indeed, rhythm playing is the cornerstone of session gigs. Steve Lukather says rhythm parts make up “90 percent” of his session work, while Heart's Nancy Wilson has discussed how her approach to rhythm creates a disparity between the hands.

“My hands are the true story of my personality,” she says. “One hand looks glamorous, and the other is a real worker with broken nails.”

For more tips, check out GP's guide to mastering the basics of rhythm guitar and, taking a leaf from Al Di Meola's book, dive into our list of the 50 Greatest Rhythm Guitar Players of All Time.

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.”

Few guitarists had Tom Petty’s knack for songwriting, rhythm playing and how to put together not only a hit track but also an ace band, as he did with the Heartbreakers. Petty’s untimely death on October 2, 2017, silenced his talent and cut short the musical output that might have come from one of rock’s true soul-touching guitar-playing singer-songwriters.

Some 20 years before then, Guitar Player’s technical editor Art Thompson was invited to the home of Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell for a pre-release listen to Echo, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ 1999 album. It was there that Thompson had a rare opportunity to speak with Petty on a range of topics, from songwriting and rhythm playing to the best uses of Telecasters and Rickenbackers, as represented in these excerpts.

Is spontaneity key to the Heartbreakers' sound?

It's the band's nature, I'm afraid. We tend to play best early on, when we're discovering the song. It's actually a little frustrating that once the band learns a song, it doesn't get any better, just more studied.

Your main Tele is a custom instrument, right?

Yeah, I got it in '81 at Norman's Rare Guitars. Norm said, "Take it home and tell me what you think." I haven't stopped playing it since. A master craftsman named Toru built it [Toru Nittono of L.A. Guitar Works in Reseda, California]. I don't know whether he used old components or what, because this guitar looks like an old Tele-same pickups, same tailpiece.

So you prefer it to a vintage Tele?

I've had people bring 20 vintage Telecasters to rehearsals, and I'd play them all trying to find one that matches this one. The closest I got was an old Esquire, which I bought for a spare. But if I ever lost my main Tele, I'd die — it's so good. Toru even tried to make me another one, but it didn't sound nearly as good. Now it adorns the wall of some Hard Rock Cafe!

How do you decide whether to play your Tele or Rickenbacker on a particular song?

The Telecaster is versatile — I can play lead on it or turn it down and play jangly rhythms. The Rickenbacker is rich and acoustic-sounding. It's great for rhythm, which is mostly what I do. Rhythm playing is a lost art these days-there aren't a lot of people who do it seriously anymore. But it's really important to our band that I play the rhythm, because the music sounds different if I don't.

What's the secret to playing good rhythm guitar?

I've put a lot of time into learning not to speed up or slow down, and being real nimble with the part. We often cut with both the vocal and guitar mics on, so if you screw up either part, you've lost them both. You've got to be confident that you're going to be able to go through a song, and sing in pitch and play in time. If you get good at rhythm, you can really make the band jump.

Which players influenced your rhythm style?

When I was coming up, I tried to emulate great rhythm guitarists like John Lennon, Mike Pender of the Searchers, and Keith Richards. The rhythm guitarists in '50s and '60s country music were amazing. And just listen to Elvis's stuff from the Sun Records period! His guitar was very loud in the mix, because it was bleeding into the vocal mic. Scotty Moore is great, but Elvis really carries those records.

Is songwriting easy for you?

Yeah, but it was hard to get good at it. It took the longest time to understand that just because I wrote a song, that didn't mean it was good. When I first came out to Hollywood in '74, I'd probably written 60 or 70 songs, but our producer [Shelter Records owner] Denny Cordell really brought home to me that only a small percentage of what I had was good enough to record.

Do you ever worry about running out of ideas for songs?

I always find more in the songs when I look back at them than I knew when I was writing them, so it doesn't pay to worry about it much. I have to come up with about 14 to 20 songs a year. It's what I do. Fortunately, there's always something in my head.

What's hardest about writing a song?

Getting what you feel across and then having other people grab that feeling. I've never been one to say, “I'm going to bear my soul on this one,” but I think you eventually do. My rule is to let the music dictate the lyric — don't try to hammer two things together that don't like each other. There have been times when I wrote a lyric in advance, and it took forever to find music that felt right.

Mike Campbell has fond recollections of his time with Petty, as he told Guitar Player in an interview with contributing writer Gary Graff that appeared in the September 2024 issue. Campbell — whose new group, the Dirty Knobs, recently released their third album, Vagabonds, Virgins and Misfits — talked with us about Petty’s influence on him as a songwriter and as a bandleader after years of playing support roles.

Said Campbell, “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?”

And as Campbell tells us, finding that new path wasn’t easy.

“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.”

Mike Campbell’s musical resume is long and accomplished.

He’s recorded and written with Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, Don Henley, Stevie Nicks, Aretha Franklin, Brian Setzer, Joe Cocker, Jackson Browne, Lone Justice, Warren Zevon, Chris Stapleton, Roy Orbison, Roger McGuinn, Paula Abdul, Dwight Twilley – and that’s naming just a few. He also toured with Fleetwood Mac during 2018–’19, and leads his own band, the Dirty Knobs, which Campbell formed some years ago.

Primarily, however, Campbell is known as the lead guitarist in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He, Petty and keyboardist Benmont Tench joined forces circa 1970 as part of the Gainesville, Florida, band Mudcrutch, which moved to California and released a single before breaking up in 1975.

A year after that, Campbell, Petty and Tench formed the Heartbreakers, which released 13 studio albums and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before Petty’s shocking death on October 2, 2017, at the age of 66.

In that band, Campbell served as first lieutenant, co-writing, co-producing and lighting up the shows with his ferocious solos. In fact, the Heartbreakers’ guitar-drenched 2010 album, Mojo, was inspired by a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Campbell purchased a couple of years prior, and he was also onboard for Petty’s three solo albums as well as a resurrection of Mudcrutch in 2007.

Given that background, it’s not surprising that Campbell has remained part of the Petty camp, helping to curate and produce the posthumous archival releases that have included the compilations An American Treasure (2018) and The Best of Everything (2019) as well as 2021’s Finding Wildflowers, an immersion into Petty’s acclaimed 1994 solo outing, Wildflowers.

Campbell was also the driving force behind the latest package. Live at the Fillmore 1997 (Warner Records) hails from the Heartbreakers’ ground-breaking 20-show residency at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco during January and February of that year.

It was a landmark stand for the band, stretching beyond the Heartbreakers’ own catalog to include a wealth of covers – the album even kicks off with Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” – ad hoc audibles on the stage, and guest appearances by the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and John Lee Hooker, who put the Heartbreakers through their improvisational paces during a nearly eight-minute “Boogie Chillen.”

The album is a lengthy look at a highly instinctual band that, while known for its tightly constructed and meticulously produced studio tracks, had the capacity to surprise an audience, and sometimes even its own members.

But the 63 songs on the highly recommended Super Deluxe edition are only part of the story. As Campbell acknowledges, putting Live at the Fillmore 1997 together was a labor of love – and a bittersweet experience without Petty around to be part of it. But the good memories were a balm as he dug into what Campbell says still ranks as one of the best experiences in his long career.

You’re an integral part of the Heartbreakers’ archive team. Was releasing the Fillmore shows your idea?

Well, it was the one thing I wanted. There are a lot of reissues of the albums with bonus tracks; the estate is taking care of that. Tom’s daughter Adria is in charge of cultivating that stuff. I’m involved in a peripheral overseer kind of role. If there’s something I don’t like, I will object to it, but typically we’re all on the same page as far as what the bonus tracks should be and when they should come out.

But the one thing that I really wanted to get my hands on was the Fillmore stuff, ’cause I remembered it being really special. So I always had that in my mind. I kept bringing it up, bringing it up. When it came time to do it, everybody was onboard.

What was it like diving into the tapes and making the album?

Well, it was a lot of material, and it was emotional, because Tom was not there at the re-listening. But we went through it all. Basically, I let Ryan Ulyate, the engineer, do a lot of the initial listening. The rule was, if the vocal is great then put it on the list; if the vocal for some reason is not in the magic zone, we would skip those songs.

Most of the time, the vocals were good, and when the vocals were good the band was almost always good. We went through it and earmarked the best things, and I sat down after Ryan had done the initial logging and signed off on the ones I thought were really good. Then I left the rest to him to mix it.

How did the Heartbreakers wind up doing a Fillmore residency in the first place?

It was during a lull in the routine of touring arenas and recording, and we just felt like we were kind of in a rut. So the idea from Tom came up: “Why don’t we go up to the Fillmore? We’ve got a new drummer [Steve Ferrone] and it’ll be a good way to get back in touch with why we started playing music in the first place – to a nice crowd in a smaller room; change the set every night.”

Mostly that was it – a chance to change the set and play a bunch of songs we don’t get to play in the arena shows.

And it worked. You guys sound like you’re having the time of your lives.

It was a great time, yeah. And the Fillmore has a very special spirituality to it, which we picked up on. You can feel the ghosts in that room of all the players that came before you. And the crowds were amazing, the sound was amazing. We had a lot of fun.

Did you prepare for it any differently than you would for a tour, knowing that it was likely to be an anything-goes type of situation?

We had some rehearsals and threw some ideas of covers and deep tracks we could try. And the energy of the rehearsals kind of spilled over at the Fillmore. It was almost like being at a Heartbreakers rehearsal, because anything does go. We might change a song or we might do a song we never played before. It was just very kinetic.

Because you could wind up playing anything, did you, like, take your entire guitar collection and every pedal you owned?

[laughs] I couldn’t even get all the guitars I own into the building. We just brought the usual arsenal of things we need: a 12-string for this and that, Gibsons, Fenders, Rickenbackers for certain things. It was approached pretty much like any tour, the same gear. I had an electric Dobro, a black thing with a pickup in it, that I played on one song.

That’s pretty vague, but it was a long time ago. I mostly remember the usual arsenal of guitars that we used, with the odd extra thing thrown in, but nothing too extravagant.

So what was a given night like among the 20?

Every day we would put together a set list before the show, and during the set, if it felt like a song didn’t seem right coming up next, we might change it in the moment, or a new song might appear. We might say, “Let’s play ‘Gloria’ here,” and everybody would go, ‘Okay – 1, 2, 3, 4, here we go...’” Anything could happen.

What were some of the more memorable audibles?

You would ask me that... [laughs] Some of the covers we did, like the Zombies song “I Want You Back Again” – that was thrown in a few times. I love playing that song. Not many people know it but we did a good version of it.

There was the odd surf song here and there. “Guitar Boogie Shuffle” might be thrown in at the last second. We had this song called “The Date I Had With That Ugly Old Homecoming Queen” that was actually some music I put together in the afternoon and took to the soundcheck and taught to the band. It was just a riff, a Zeppelin kind of riff thing, and Tom said, “I’ll make some words up for that. We’ll put it in the show tonight.”

So that’s how spontaneous it was. From the afternoon to the stage, anything could happen.

There’s a nice moment when you play “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” for your birthday on February 1.

Yeah, Tom picked that song ’cause over the years we would do a surf song now and then. But I always liked that one a lot. So when Tom suggested it, I was happy to dig in and learn the chords. It’s a bit complicated, but we got it.

As you re-immersed yourself in these tapes, what did you hear about the evolution of the Heartbreakers as players and a band?

It’s interesting, because we did kind of get back to how the band started, which was playing smaller places in Gainesville, like women’s clubs or university auditoriums. In those days we weren’t afraid to stretch things out and jam a little bit.

But after the Heartbreakers started doing arena shows, there wasn’t much room to get all those songs people wanted to hear and also allow the band to stretch out and take chances musically. So at the Fillmore it was looser. There were some songs that might not have an end, that might go on for a minute or might go on for four minutes, and me and Ben and Tom and the band could just kind of jam.

We were really good at playing our hits and making them sound like the records, but I don’t think that people knew we were that good of a jam band, ’cause a lot of jam bands tend to get in A minor and noodle, and play for 10 minutes and not go anywhere.

But I think when the Heartbreakers jammed there was more of an arc to it, more of a melodic interplay, and we really listened closely to each other. It was like a musical conversation, and I think that’s something that didn’t get shared in the arena shows as much. But at the Fillmore, we could show people how good we were at really doing that.

How did the Heartbreakers go about arranging the guitar attack, which was sometimes three of you with Scott Thurston?

Well, I told everybody what to do. [laughs] I’m kidding of course. It was organic. We would learn a song, typically Tom would play the chords and sing, and I would come up with a complementary part, which I always did with him. We had an empathy where he would play something and I could just find the right thing to help him along.

And we’d have Scott: We called him our Swiss Army knife. He could do anything over there, and if we needed an extra guitar part, we’d have him play it. And then on some of the stuff, like “Good to Be King” or “Gloria,” stuff where it’s going on for a while, I might take a pause on playing solos and Tom might hit a wah-wah and play his solos.

And he wasn’t too shabby, either.

Tom had a John Lennon approach to the guitar, where it was all feel. He wasn’t, like, an up-and-down-the-neck type of player, but he could get inside the notes and make it sound really good. So he had a chance to do some of that as well.

How were you different as players at the Fillmore compared to those early days in Gainesville?

Older. Hopefully a little wiser. Maybe the nuances were a little more tuned-in over time. You pick up nuances in your tone and your playing – just some maturity, to an extent. But I think we also tapped into the raw, teenage abandon, to borrow a phrase of the early days.

So it was growing and getting more mature and better at your instrument, but also retaining the urgency of the initial excitement of learning to play.

At the end of Fillmore, Tom tells the audience it was the high point of the group’s career up to that time. How does it stack up 25 years later?

It’s still a high point, and a lot of it is because it was the first time we had done something like that, and it was the Fillmore Auditorium, and that history and the audiences there are so tuned in that it was a real joy to play there. In the following years, we did more of that type of thing.

We did one at the Beacon in New York, at the Vic in Chicago and the Henry Fonda in L.A. – never for a whole month but for a week here and there, so we could go back and revisit that approach occasionally.

Recordings of those will probably come out at some point, ’cause there was some really good stuff there. But the Fillmore stands alone because it was the first one.

Any ideas yet about what the next archival release will be?

I don’t really know. Right now they’re pushing this one, and it’s kind of all-consuming for the machine. I think after this there’s a Long After Dark reissue [Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1982 album], maybe, and at some point for me I wouldn’t mind looking at the Vic in Chicago run. There was some really good stuff in there.

And also the Beacon. There were some moments there, so maybe we’ll dig into that during the next couple of years.

I imagine it’s a bittersweet experience for you?

Of course it is, ’cause Tom’s gone and that’s kind of a hard thing for me to deal with, to sit there and listen to stuff and hear his voice. It touches on some grief that I’m still processing. But I’m a big boy. I can deal with it.

There’s a lot of material and it’s important, I think, because some of the young people have maybe never heard the old catalog, so when they’re re-issued there’s a chance for that stuff to be re-experienced.

Is there anything like an entire lost album in the vaults that never came out for some reason?

No. There’s a few extra tracks here and there. A lot of them have already come out. But, no, there’s no mystical album that’s sitting on the floor. There’s the live stuff, like I mentioned before. Those are the main things that have never been heard.

You’ve delighted fans at the Dirty Knobs shows when you’ve played some of Tom’s or the Heartbreakers’ songs. Do you feel you have a mission to keep those songs alive and in front of audiences?

Yeah, I feel like it’s my responsibility, ’cause I am actively touring and playing shows. It’s always bittersweet and emotional, but I think I owe it to the audience to give them some of my past, and they really like hearing those songs the way they should be heard.

Not that I’m a great singer or anything. But I can get inside the songs and I understand how they’re supposed to feel, and I understand how the lyrics should be delivered because I was there and I co-wrote a lot of the songs. Some of them I do it just like the records, but I have the freedom to take some license, too.

“Refugee,” for instance, it starts off as kind of an Irish waltz, the lyrics right up front, and at the end we kick into the old guitar solo feel. I also do “Southern Accents” as a waltz, just one guitar and very little band, just to get Tom’s words across and get the heart of the meaning. I can see in people’s faces that they really feel his presence. I feel it, too, and I feel like it’s an honor and my responsibility to carry that on.

Are you happy with the progress the Dirty Knobs have made after two albums?

Definitely. We worked really hard last year. It was a wonderful year for us. We built our brand, played a lot.

And then we ended our tour opening for the Who. That was a phenomenon for me to open for them, especially at the Hollywood Bowl, which was our last show and also the last place I played with Tom [in 2017], so that was emotional, but I was proud to have the Dirty Knobs opening for the Who. Who could’ve dreamed that would happen?

What’s next?

We’re gonna do a third album in January. I’ve got quite a few songs left over that didn’t make the first two albums that I want to revisit, and then some new songs. They’re all in the Dirty Knobs vein – guitar rock, not a lot of production overkill. We’ve found our little niche and we’re gonna stick with it.

And then I want to play more, maybe take it over to Europe, just play as much as we can.

You were part of the last touring lineup of Fleetwood Mac during 2018–’19. What would you like to say about Christine McVie in the wake of her death?

Oh god, yeah, Christine… I really loved her. She was such a sweet soul. Of all the people on that tour, she was just the kindest. Everybody was kind, but she was just so sweet all the time, always cheerful and happy to see you and just happy to play together and so jovial all the time.

And she could really play. She came from a blues background, so she understood the essence of that music, which I really appreciated.

And she’s a great songwriter – her songs were the hits, y’know. I just tried to work on her songs and make them sound true to the way she recorded them and just respect where they were coming from.

I’m very sad she left us. It’s a great loss for a lot of people, but god bless her. She was really one of a kind.

Order Live at the Fillmore 1997 here.

With 1984’s Purple Rain, Prince gave his fans a hint of the shape of things to come. The influence of Jimi Hendrix was writ large everywhere you looked, but never more so than on the title track.

While there was never any doubt about His Purpleness’s killer chops, Purple Rain was the record that really secured his reputation as one of the greats.

One year later, Prince nailed his colors to the psychedelic mast with Around the World in a Day.

But while the music embraced the style, no one would ever mistake the record as the work of anyone other than Prince.

“Paisley Park” was the best example of his signature groove-based vibe married to a spacey retro feel, while “Raspberry Beret” captured the flavor of the Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park.”

Fans and critics were initially wrong-footed by his deep-dive into ’60s sensibilities, but Prince clearly relished employing a much more rock-focused approach that let him showcase some of his greatest soloing, particularly on “Temptation.”

Although he moved away from the more obviously retro approach, Sign o’ the Times had a couple of tracks that continued his dabblings, particularly “Starfish and Coffee” and “The Cross.”

"Prince was a great guitarist and he was a showman,” ex-New Power Generation guitarist Mike Scott told Guitar Player.

“He knew how to bring a crowd to their knees – so I would color outside the lines. I would take solos that had more theory behind them as opposed to just doing crazy pentatonic stuff like he’d been doing forever.”

Last year, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame released a remastered edit of Prince’s jaw-dropping "While My Guitar Gently Weeps” performance.

Alongside Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood and Dhani Harrison, Prince steals the show at the 2004 Induction Ceremony with his typically dazzling display of fretboard finesse.

Browse the Prince catalog here.

90 years ago, Rickenbacker launched the world’s first commercially available electric guitar following the introduction of the game-changing ‘horseshoe’ pickup in 1931. And though much has changed over the years in terms of technology and musical styles, the basic principle of the electric guitar remains the same to this day.

It was a watershed moment for the music industry and pop culture as a whole. Over the decades, Rickenbacker continued to evolve their designs, producing a huge range of instruments including acoustic guitars, jazz guitars, semi-hollowbodies, solidbodies, bass guitars, laps steels, pedal steels, amplifiers and more.

Now, for the first time ever, Rickenbacker’s conclusive history has been captured in fine photographic detail, from the earliest days of the 1930s up to the turn of the millennium.

Created by the Kelly brothers – author Martin Kelly and photographer Paul Kelly – Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo provides readers with a full and detailed account of Rickenbacker guitar evolution that is finally rendered accessible by an easy-to-follow chronological layout.

Much like their previous book, The Golden Age of Fender: 1946-1970 (Cassell Illustrated), The Kelly brothers’ quest to nail the ultimate history of Rickenbacker took them on a journey around the world photographing collections of rare instruments and conducting countless hours of interview.

The result is indeed “definitive,” according to Rickenbacker Chairman and CEO John Hall. A family-run business for many years, his father – F.C. Hall – acquired the firm from Adolph Rickenbacher in 1953 at the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll.

Celebrating the launch of Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo, a special exhibition is being held at Shapero Rare Books in London. Earlier this month, Guitar Player caught up with Hall at a Q&A event held at the prestigious Mayfair bookshop.

“It was a big undertaking for Martin and Paul Kelly,” Hall told us. “Naturally, I was careful about who I would permit access to. The project was initially arranged via Alan Rogan. (The late Alan Rogan was a respected guitar collector/expert who famously worked as Pete Townshend’s guitar tech.)

"He was the one who came to me and said, ‘John, I know these guys. Do you want to do a book? I think they’d be good.’ So I felt comfortable that Martin and Paul were the right people to do the job.

“There’s some amazing information in the book. It fleshed out a lot of details, including some of the stories I knew.”

One such story included in the new Rickenbacker book concerns a young John Lennon who, in 1960, stumbled across what would later be revealed as the first Capri model ever made. Needless to say, the young Beatle’s purchase was a turning point in guitar history.

This truly remarkable tale that bounces back and forth across the pond is told in authoritative detail along with many others in Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo.

Other influential electric guitar players and a bassists featured in the Kelly brothers’ new book include Pete Townshend, Roger McGuinn, Brian Jones, Tom Petty, John Fogerty, Dee Dee Ramone, Paul Weller, Peter Buck, Johnny Marr, Susanna Hoffs, Chris Squire, Lemmy, Geddy Lee and others.

You can order a copy of Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo directly from Phantom Books here.

On March 15, 2004, George Harrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an occasion that saw an ad-hoc, all-star band featuring Tom Petty and two other members of The Heartbreakers, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Dhani Harrison, and Marc Mann pay tribute to the Beatle with a performance of one of his best-known songs, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

Noteworthy as that is in and of itself, we probably wouldn't be talking about the performance today had a fellow R&RHOF 2004 inductee, Prince, not guested on it, and taken it to another level.

Ending the tribute with a ferocious, explosive, and powerful three-minute guitar solo, the initially unassuming guest spot became one of Prince's most legendary performances, especially in the wake of his untimely death in 2016.

Now, a new "director's cut" video of the performance – created by Joel Gallen, who directed and produced the original 2004 broadcast – has been released on YouTube. The video, which you can check out below, gives Prince significantly more close-ups, meaning – luckily for us – a closer look at his unbelievable fretwork.

“17 years after this stunning performance by Prince, I finally had the chance to go in and re-edit it slightly – since there were several shots that were bothering me,” Gallen wrote in the video's caption.

“I got rid of all the dissolves and made them all cuts, and added lots more close-ups of Prince during his solo. I think it's better now. Let me know what you think. Joel.”

Of course, one of the performance's greatest mysteries remains the fate of the Tele-style H.S. Anderson Mad Cat Prince used for the solo. Just as he finished, Prince tossed the guitar in the air... only it never came back down.

"I didn’t even see who caught it," Steve Ferrone – who served as the drummer for the fateful performance – told The New York Times in 2016. "I just saw it go up, and I was astonished that it didn’t come back down again.

Some mysteries, it seems, are never meant to be solved...

Gibson has unveiled its new Tom Petty signature SJ-200 Wildflower acoustic guitar.

First announced during the Believe in Music show in January, the SJ-200 Wildflower is based on Petty's own SJ-200 (though a different SJ-200 Wildflower was custom-made by Gibson as a one-off build for Petty in the early '90s, around the time of his classic solo album, Wildflowers.)

The acoustic features a AAA Sitka spruce top, figured quilted maple back and sides, and a flamed maple neck.

Sonically, it packs an LR Baggs VTC under-saddle pickup with soundhole-mounted volume and tone controls. It's also fitted with Grover Imperial tuners.

The unique visual appointments on the guitar include the 'Wildflower' logo in mother of pearl on the headstock, a “You belong among the wildflowers” lyric decal on the back of the headstock, and Petty’s signature engraved on the double pickguard.

“It is so incredible to see the SJ-200 design our Dad worked on so long ago, lovingly brought to fruition with his long-time guitar tech and friend Alan Weidel and the craftsmen and women at Gibson guitars," Adria Petty – the late singer/songwriter's daughter – said.

"There has been much effort made to make certain this guitar lives up to Tom’s musical standards and the specs he wanted for a best-in-class instrument. Alan Weidel has put this instrument through its paces as he has with all Tom Petty signature guitar models.

"Tom played the SJ-200 while writing and recording Wildflowers and to us it is an honor and a privilege to have Gibson launch this instrument to celebrate his musical masterpiece. That way others can make what my Dad called 'the big jangle' a reference to that gorgeous, big, SJ-200 acoustic sound he loved.

We hope fans and members of the music community alike enjoy this beautiful instrument as much as we do. It is a beautiful tribute to him.”

The Gibson Tom Petty SJ-200 Wildflower acoustic guitar is available now – in an Antique Natural finish – for $9,999. It will be limited to just 100 examples, each hand-built in the company's Acoustic Custom Shop in Bozeman, Montana.

For more info on the guitar, stop by gibson.com.

Having already elicited "ooo"s and "aaaa"s with its new 2021 signature and custom guitars, Gibson has further detailed its new-for-2021 offerings with the announcement of its new acoustic guitar lineup.

The assortment of acoustics is headlined by new signature models for Orianthi, Slash, Tom Petty, and Noel Gallagher, with notable new additions to the company's Modern and Historic ranges also being announced.

First off is the Orianthi SJ-200, which is the former Michael Jackson and Alice Cooper guitarist's spin on Gibson's classic Super Jumbo-bodied SJ-200.

Unfortunately, we remain without photos or specs for the Slash Collection J-45, Tom Petty SJ-200 Wildflower, and Noel Gallagher J-150 models, but we hope to bring you that info soon.

In addition to its new signatures, Gibson has also expanded its Acoustic Modern collection to include the Vintage Sunburst Hummingbird Standard, Cherry J-45 Standard, J-45 Standard 12-string, and Wine Red and Autumn Burst SJ-200.

Like its Modern collection brethren, these acoustics boast classic designs with modern features like SlimTaper necks with a flatter fingerboard radius and pickup systems.

Gibson also announced an expansion of its Acoustic Custom Shop Historic collection, with the 1939 J-55, 1952 J-185, 1934 Jumbo, 1936 Advanced Jumbo, 1942 Banner J-45, 1942 Banner Southern Jumbo, and 1960 Hummingbird all joining the fold.

As opposed to the Modern collection's blend of the traditional and, well, modern, the Historic collection focuses on historical accuracy and attention to detail.

As with the signatures, we're rather short on photos and specs for the new Modern and Historic acoustics, but we'll provide those for you as soon as we receive them.

For now, point your browser over to gibson.com.

In the winter of 2016, after watching the excellent 2007 documentary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream on Netflix, I decided it was finally time to see Tom Petty in concert; somehow, I'd managed to stupidly "avoid it" for decades.

So, as soon has the band's 2017 tour dates were announced, I "obtained" tickets to their July 1 show at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. It was billed as a 40th-anniversary, career-spanning tour, so the timing seemed perfect.

While I honestly didn't dig the whole jam-band vibe (the 13-minute performance of "It's Good to Be King" was about 6.75 minutes too long – and you can apply that same formula to all the night's extended jams – and there were many), it was a fine concert, full of fine playing on fine-looking guitar after fine-looking guitar.

Maybe they could've played more of the late-Seventies Damn the Torpedos-era stuff, but that's nitpicking. After all, Petty was never one to reminisce; he was always looking ahead, or at least caring about the now, which is probably why the band seemed most "into it" while performing “Forgotten Man,” a track from their most recent album, 2014’s Hypnotic Eye.

Anyway, that tour – which Petty announced was going to be his last major trek (so that he could spend time with family, especially his granddaughter) – finally wound down in September on the West Coast, not far from his home. In fact, their final performance took place Monday, September 25, 2017 at LA's legendary Hollywood Bowl, the same stage where Petty's Traveling Wilburys bandmate, the late George Harrison, made history in 1964 and 1965 with his "other" band.

Here, you can check out a few performances from that fateful night, including "Free Fallin'" (above) and the night's actual final songs, the mega-kickass "You Wreck Me" and "American Girl."

"American Girl" was a fitting, albeit unintentional, farewell; it was, after all, the song that represented the first taste of Petty and the Heartbreakers – at least for a large segment of the population. Enjoy the clips above and below.

Mike Campbell is what you might call a “band guy.” Currently, he’s a member of two outfits - Fleetwood Mac, which he joined in 2018, and his own act, the Dirty Knobs, a group he formed as a side project more than a dozen years ago and which is readying its debut album. 

If he had more time in his schedule, he’d probably join a third band. “It’s just the way I am,” the veteran guitarist says. “Some guys join a band and use it as a springboard to go solo. I never saw the point in that. I like the idea of being in a gang and having your buddies around.” He chuckles, then adds, “It’s less lonely that way.”

For more than 40 years, Campbell was the ace lead guitarist and sometime co-songwriter of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and if fate had turned out differently he’d still be making music with his lifelong friend. “I’m still going through grief and processing the fact that Tom is no longer here,” he says. “I treasure the memories of what we did together.”

The Florida-born Campbell first hooked up with Petty in the early ’70s in a Gainesville-based group called Mudcrutch. The band would ultimately relocate to Los Angeles, sign a record deal and morph into Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Before then, Campbell was playing around Gainesville in a band called Dead or Alive, which he remembers as being “pretty good.” 

“We got gigs, so that put us ahead of most local bands,” he says. “We played around the college for free and did some women’s clubs here and there. ‘Oh, the women’s club wants to give us 200 bucks? No problem!’ That was big money to us in those days.”

Beyond the occasional $200, Dead or Alive offered Campbell a chance to hone his craft onstage. He’d been playing guitar for only a few years, starting out on a Harmony acoustic before moving to a $60 Goya electric that his father bought in Okinawa while serving in the U.S. Air Force. 

By slowing down records on his phonograph and learning the licks of his two biggest inspirations, Mike Bloomfield and Jerry Garcia, Campbell took his guitar playing to a decent level of proficiency, but he asserts that he didn’t find his own voice as a player until he started gigging.

“Dead or Alive was my first band and my first real chance to play live,” he says. “We did a lot of 10-minute jams. This was an important time for me. I had learned the basics, but now I could get out there and put it together. I think with me, I got to a point where I was like, ‘I know what I’m doing. People are responding to it and I’m inspired by it.’ 

So that pushed me to get better, to explore the nuances of playing. Guitarists know what I’m talking about. Once you go from nothing to ‘pretty good,’ you need that opportunity to go to another level. That’s what happened with me. Playing live, I was able to establish what I was, and I stayed with it the rest of my life.”

As for that Goya guitar, Campbell continued playing it for his first few years with Petty, until the singer suggested quite pointedly, “You should get a better guitar.” Campbell bought a Gibson Firebird and, thanks to a gift from a friend, acquired a Fender Strat. 

He gave the Goya away and lost track of it, but after mentioning the guitar in an interview 15 years ago, he was stunned when somebody from a Tom Petty fan club who had read the piece found the instrument and mailed it to him for his birthday. “Talk about a sweet gesture,” Campbell marvels. “We’ve always had the greatest fans.”

So let’s talk about how you joined Mudcrutch in the early 1970s. Did you have to audition for Tom to get the gig?

I don’t know if you’d call it an audition. My bass player left for Hawaii to be a surfer, so it was me and Randall Marsh, my drummer, left over. We had seen this band called Mudcrutch playing in the park. They were doing a Burrito Brothers–type thing, and they had harmonies and three-minute songs. I was impressed. 

I saw a sign that said they were looking for a drummer, so I told Randall he should audition. He called them up and they came to this house that he and I were sharing.

I was in the back room, and as it turned out their guitar player had quit. So Randall said, “Hey, my friend in the back room is a guitar player.” So I came out - I had short hair and cut-off jeans - and they looked at me and said, “Oh, fuck. This guy’s a loser.” I had my little Goya guitar, and they said, “What do you know?” So I said, “How about ‘Johnny B. Goode’?” 

We played that, and when we got to the end, Tom said, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re in my band forever.” I told them I was in college because I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. Tom goes, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that. You’re going to grow your hair out, and you’re going to be great. You’re in the band.”

Tom saw something in you, but what did you see in him?

He was writing songs. He showed us some, and I said, “I write, too.” I showed him something I had, and I think maybe he saw me as a potential writing partner. We didn’t really discuss it that much. It was just one of those destiny things - a chance meeting that changed our lives. We became fast friends, and that’s what we were till the end.

Fast forward a few years to when Mudcrutch became Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. You guys didn’t have immediate success in the States. Britain took a shine to you first. They called you “new wave.”

Yeah, that was kind of exciting. We put our record out in the States. It got a little airplay in San Francisco and Boston, but nothing happened. Somehow, the label booked us a tour in England, which was just a dream come true, to go to England to be able to play music. They picked up on what we were doing, and that energy spread back over to the States, and then things started to happen for us.

When would you say Tom and you started to perfect that chiming, dual-guitar sound?

It started on the first record. I saw a ’64 Strat for $200 in a music store, but I couldn’t afford it. Then a friend of mine got an insurance settlement from an automobile accident, and she said, “What if I buy that guitar for you?” I said, “Okay.” So she bought it for me right when Tom switched to guitar. 

I let him play that, and by then I had gotten a ’50s Broadcaster and a Les Paul. We were doing the first record, and we loved George Harrison and Roger McGuinn. We said, “We should get a 12-string.” I got one for 120 bucks, and that’s the guitar on the Damn the Torpedoes cover. 

On the second album, on songs like “Listen to Her Heart,” we were using the 12-string. The sound was developing, and eventually it became a go-to sound for us.

Was there a moment when you both realized, “The 12-string changes our sound, but we’re going for it”?

That happened on “American Girl,” which is interesting because we didn’t have a 12-string at the time. We wanted that sound, however, so I figured out how to play octaves on my Broadcaster to get a 12-string sound. 

We cut that track, and it was like an epiphany. We found out what we were. We found a harmonic foundation for how we wanted to sound, and it worked for our personality and Tom’s voice. In my view, that’s when we became the Heartbreakers.

As a songwriter, you certainly made your mark with “Refugee.”

That was a good one. [laughs]

When you would present music to Tom, did you show him everything you had, or did you show him only what you thought was really good?

I didn’t know what was really good. I would just give him whatever I was working on and let him pick what he liked. Around the second album or so, I got a TEAC four-track, and I began working on that at home, putting music together, overdubbing and making my sound. I loved it. Tom would hear things and get inspired.

I remember our first producer, Denny Cordell, came over and heard some of my things. He said, “If you develop what you’re doing here, you’ll be a millionaire someday.” I went after it. By the time we hit “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl,” I was getting better at coming up with ideas and then putting one extra guitar on it. I’d add bass or whatever and make it sound like a record.

Jimmy Iovine came into the picture on the third album. Tom had written “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl” with me. When Jimmy heard those two songs, he said, “That’s all we need. I don’t care what the rest of the record is. Pick those two songs and we’ll be fine.”

Did you guys click with Jimmy Iovine right away?

The first record we did with Jimmy was kind of hard. We got him in because we liked the sound of the Patti Smith record “Because the Night.” We wanted a bigger sound.

Jimmy came with his engineer, Shelly Yakus, and we really worked hard to get the snare drum to sound right, the kick drum to sound right, get the guitars to sound there. On “Refugee,” we worked on the guitar sound for months. It wasn’t always fun, but it was still a labor of love.

You’re often cited for your exquisite, tasteful playing - the right note at the right time, lyrical solos… Did Tom ever show you things he wanted you to play?

Not at all. He always trusted me to come up with stuff. Tom would bring in a song, and it would be bare bones - sometimes on guitar or piano. He’d just play and let us join in. I remember with “Breakdown,” we cut the track one night, but it didn’t have an intro. I had an idea to sort it out later, so we cut the track and I noodled along with a slide. It was all off the top of my head.

I went home and went to bed, and about two hours later, the phone rings. It’s Tom going, “I’m down here at the studio with Dwight Twilley and we’re listening to that track.” He said, “There’s a lick you played at the end of the song that we want to put at the beginning.” 

So I got up, went back down to the studio, and I listened to it and learned it without the slide. We went back to the top of the song and I played that bit. It became kind of a signature of the song. That’s how we would work. He would just let me do what I wanted to do, and either he liked it or he didn’t like it. But he usually liked it.

Did you and Tom ever discuss guitar configurations? I’ve never seen you both play the same guitars at the same time.

That was Tom’s stage rule, too. That started when I gave him my Strat. He would be playing rhythm and singing, so I couldn’t go for something with a thin sound. I’d go for a Les Paul or a Rickenbacker - whatever the song called for. 

There wasn’t much discussion about it. Usually he would just say, “What do you think?” And I’d go, “Let’s try this.” A lot of it was instinct - or luck.

Years before you joined Fleetwood Mac, you worked with Stevie Nicks on “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” and on her Bella Donna album. She once said that she wanted to be in the Heartbreakers.

God bless her, she did. But there’s no girls in the Heartbreakers. [laughs]

Were those sessions with Stevie fun?

They were, and of course, she became a good friend. By that time, we were comfortable working with Jimmy Iovine. We had “Stop Dragging My Heart Around,” and Jimmy, in his wisdom, said, “This would be great as a duet,” so Stevie ended up singing over our track.

As I understand it, you originally played your demo for “The Boys of Summer” to Tom for the Heartbreakers to record.

Yeah. I had a LinnDrum, and I started messing around and put the track together. I had the music all laid out, but I had a different chorus at the time - it wasn’t as good as the one everybody knows. I played it for Tom and Jimmy Iovine, and it got to the chorus and Jimmy goes, “Oh, that sounds a little jazzy.” He was right. So Tom passed on it.

But a week later, Jimmy called and said, “Don Henley is looking for some music. How about that track you played us?” And I said, “Okay.” I went back and listened to it, and I thought, Before I give it to Don, I think I’ll change the chords in the chorus and make it a little easier to sing to. So I put the new chords in the chorus and sent Don the four-track demo. He loved it, and he wrote those words and melody over it.

All of those beautiful, cascading guitar licks - were they on the demo?

All those bits were there. Don would have used my demo, but the song was in the wrong key for him to sing. That demo was just me having fun and doing stuff off the top of my head. So I had to relearn those parts to re-create them for the final track. It was a struggle, but I got it.

After the song became a huge hit, did Tom kind of wish that he had done it?

We were in the studio once, and we went out to the car with a cassette to listen to the mix. As we were about to put the tape in, I turned the radio on and “Boys of Summer” came on. Tom said, “Oh, I wish I would have had the presence of mind not to let that one get away.”

In the Heartbreakers, you worked with different rhythm sections over the years. Did you adapt to their styles, or vice versa?

It was all about following Tom. It was like, “Here’s the song. Play a beat to this. Play something simple to not get in the way of these chords and this vocal.” And that’s pretty much what it was.

You’ve done a lot of outside sessions. When somebody asks you to play on their record, what are they looking for?

They’re usually looking for the Heartbreakers sound, typically. I’ve never really asked what they were looking for, but I guess if they call me, it was because they’ve heard what I’ve done. I have to like the artist, I have to like the song, and I have to have the time to do it.

When you joined Fleetwood Mac, was it supposed to be just you on guitar, or was it already decided that the guitarists would be you and Neil Finn?

They didn’t have Neil at first. Mick Fleetwood called me on my birthday and said, “We’d like you to join the band. Are you interested?” Lindsey had just left. I said, “Give me 24 hours to think about it.” I thought about it quite a bit - what it would mean to me, how it would feel filling in someone else’s shoes. 

I decided that it was a challenge I wanted to take. I love the band, I love Stevie, and I love that rhythm section. They have one of the best rhythm sections in rock history, and it’s probably the only one still together.

Mick told me I didn’t have to audition, that I was in the band, so we had a meeting and they said that they wanted to have a singer because a lot of the songs have a male voice. I don’t know who came up with Neil, but I was right onboard. We called him up, he came out, and it worked right away. He and I get along great. He plays mostly rhythm and sings, and I play the parts.

You guys did a major tour in 2018 and ’19. What’s the plan moving forward?

Yeah, that was the longest tour I’ve done in my life. We went around the world for about a year and a half. Everybody was really tired at the end, so we agreed that’s probably the last time we want to do something so extensive. 

I’ve got the Dirty Knobs now for a while, so I think we’ll get back to Fleetwood Mac in a year, year and a half. Stevie wants to do a movie and probably some solo touring. At that point, if there’s a handful of gigs that sound good to us, we’ll get back together and do them. That’s how it was left.

Although all of these classic songs may not have been originally recorded on acoustic guitar, they all are perfect for an acoustic jam.

These aren’t ranked in any order; they're just 10 great songs that are super easy to play.

Even if you can’t master the iconic riffs that are part of most of these tunes, they’re all great to add to your strumming repertoire.

In some cases, the chord progressions might be simplified, but they'll still sound great, I promise.

So grab your guitar and check 'em out. And then check out our other 10 easy acoustic guitar song lists, too.

"The Joker" – Steve Miller Band
Are you a picker and grinner? I know I am!

That’s why this laid back song is so relatable. And fun!

"The Joker" was released by the Steve Miller Band on their 1973 album, The Joker.

The song topped the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in early 1974. And then topped the U.K. charts much later in September 1990 when it was featured in a Levi’s commercial (gotta love those jeans!)

It’s really just three chords. Easy, easy!!

Chords in this song: G...C...D

"Have You Ever Seen The Rain" – Creedence Clearwater Revival
CCR have a lot of great easy to play songs. Here's one of them.

It was written by John Fogerty and released by CCR as a single in 1971 from the album Pendulum, which came out in 1970.

It peaked at number 8 on the Billboard charts in 1971.

Check out these chords and then play it to your own groove. It'll stand up, I promise!

Chords in this song: C....G....Em....Am....F

"Take it Easy" – The Eagles
Seven women? Really? No wonder he needs to take it easy!

"Take It Easy" was written by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey and most famously recorded by the Eagles, with Frey singing lead vocals.

It was the band's first single, released May 1, 1972. Can you believe it never made it to number 1? It peaked at number 12 on the July 22, 1972, Billboard Hot 100 chart.

The opening track on the band's debut album, Eagles, “Take It Easy” has become one of the Eagles’ signature songs, and a theme song of that decade.

I still dig it. And yes, I DO need to take it easy…!

Chords in this song: G....D...C...Em...Am

"I Won’t Back Down" – Tom Petty
Here’s another first of the first! “I Won’t Back Down” was the first single from Tom Petty’s debut solo album, Full Moon Fever.

Released in 1989, the song was written by Petty and Jeff Lynne, his writing partner for the album.

It reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the Album Rock Tracks chart for five weeks, starting the album's road to multi-Platinum status.

Gotta love the theme of this song. I’m gonna stand my ground. So go grab your guitar and try it!

Chords in this song: Em...D...G....C

"You Might Think" – The Cars
"You Might Think" is a single by the Cars from their fifth studio album, Heartbeat City, which came out in 1984.

The track was written by Ric Ocasek and produced by Mutt Lange and the Cars. Ocasek sang lead vocals.

It also hit number 1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in the U.S.

The song had a super-cool computer-generated video, and "You Might Think" won the first MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year and was nominated for five more awards (best special effects, best art direction, viewer's choice, best concept video, and most experimental video) at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards.

Check out the video below and give it a try for yourself.

Chords in this song: A...D...E...A...F#m...E

"House of the Rising Sun" - The Animals
This song is actually a traditional folk song.

It's best-known form is the 1964 recording by the English rock group the Animals, which was a Number One hit in the U.K., the U.S., Sweden, Finland and Canada.

However, it also was recorded by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Nina Simone and many more.

"House of the Rising Sun" was recorded in one take on May 18, 1964. One take!! That's how to do it.

Check out this easy repeating pattern.

Chords in this song: Am...C...D...F...E7

"Light My Fire" - The Doors
I admit it. I thought Jim Morrison was pretty darn hot back in the day. And this song sealed the deal.

The Doors recorded it in August 1966 and released it the first week of January 1967 on their debut album.

Released as an edited single June 1, 1967, it spent three weeks at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in late July and one week on the Cash Box Top 100, nearly a year after its recording.

"Light My Fire" was performed live by the Doors on The Ed Sullivan Show broadcast September 17, 1967. The Doors were asked by producer Bob Precht, Sullivan's son-in-law, to change the line "girl, we couldn't get much higher," as the sponsors were uncomfortable with the possible reference to drug-taking. The band agreed to do so and did a rehearsal using the amended lyrics, "girl, we couldn't get much better." However, during the live performance, the band's lead singer Jim Morrison sang the original lyric. That's stickin' it to the man in true Morrison style.

Super easy. Now go!

Chords in this song: Am9...F#mG...A...D...E

"Wish You Were Here" - Pink Floyd
True story. At one point in my life I was in a Pink Floyd tribute band. So this list couldn't be complete without a selection by this band.

”Wish You Were Here" is the title track on Pink Floyd's 1975 album Wish You Were Here.. Its lyrics encompass Roger Waters' feelings of alienation from other people.

Like most of the album, it refers to former Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett and his breakdown. David Gilmour and Waters collaborated to write the music.

On June 14, 2013, the song was released as an unofficial promotional single on Spotify and when the fans streamed it one million times, the rest of the band's catalog was released, which happened after only four days.

The chord pattern repeats throughout the entire song.

Chords in this song: C...D...Am...G...D

"Lonely People" - America
America is one of my favorite classic bands of all time. I couldn't stop singing their songs in my younger days.

"Lonely People" is a song written by the husband-and-wife team of Dan and Catherine Peek and performed by America. The track was the second release from America's 1974 album, Holiday.

"Lonely People" reached number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, Dan Peek's only credited song to reach that chart's top 10, and was America's second number one on the Easy Listening chart, where it stayed for one week in February 1975.

"Lonely People" was written as an optimistic response to the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby."

So don't give up! Give it a try...

Chords in this song: G...Em...Bm...D....Am

"Lola" – The Kinks
When I was a kid, one of the neighbors called me “Lola,” so this song has a special place in my heart.

"Lola" was written by Ray Davies and performed by the Kinks.

Released June 12, 1970, in the U.K. on the 28th in the U.S., the single was on the album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One. It reached number 2 on the U.K. charts and number 9 in the U.S.

Does pink champagne really taste like cherry cola? Who cares! Check out the easy chords for this classic:

Chords in this song: E...A...D
B7...F#7...A

In the week after Prince’s death on April 21, 2016, a video of him playing the guitar solo on an all-star version of the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and others was shared repeatedly on social media.

The video comes from the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, where the song’s writer, George Harrison, was inducted, along with Prince, ZZ Top, Bob Seger, Jackson Browne, Traffic and Fifties doo-wop group the Dells.

We first shared the video in August 2015 and revisited it again in December of that year. In fact, it proved so popular with our readers that we shared it once more in March 2016, as well as after Prince’s death. His solo generates pure excitement, but the crowning touch comes at the end of the song, when Prince takes off his guitar—a Tele-style H.S. Anderson Mad Cat—and throws it up in the air…and it appears never to come down. 

In the days after Prince died, the New York Times ran an article about the performance in which Petty and others who performed with Prince that night shared their memories. According to the paper, the show’s producer, Joel Gallen, asked Prince to play the song’s solos, since he was there to be inducted anyway. But during rehearsals, Marc Mann, who plays guitar with Lynne, took over, knocking out a note-perfect recreation of Eric Clapton’s original mid-song solo.

“And we get to the big end solo,” Gallen says, “and Prince again steps forward to go into the solo, and this guy starts playing that solo too!”

There wasn’t time to get it right, but Prince assured Gallen everything would be fine at the performance. He told the producer to let Mann take the first solo, and he would perform the extended outro solo. “They never rehearsed it, really,” Gallen says. “Never really showed us what he was going to do, and he left, basically telling me, the producer of the show, not to worry.

“And the rest is history. It became one of the most satisfying musical moments in my history of watching and producing live music.”

Though Prince is onstage the entire time, he stands off to the side until the end, when he takes center stage. From that point on, the show is entirely his. His slick stage move at 4:43 and his guitar face at 5:05 are as enjoyable as anything he plays...and he plays up a storm. The smile on the face of Dhani Harrison—George Harrison’s son, who plays acoustic guitar on the number—shows how much he was enjoying Prince’s star-turn on his father’s song.

“You see me nodding at him, to say, ‘Go on, go on,’” Petty said. “I remember I leaned out at him at one point and gave him a ‘This is going great!’ kind of look.

“He just burned it up. You could feel the electricity of ‘something really big’s going down here.’”

But what about that disappearing guitar? Once it leaves Prince’s hands, it never reappears, and the video shows no one catching it. Even Petty’s drummer, Steve Ferrone, remains confused about it—and he was onstage.

“I didn’t even see who caught it,” he says. “I just saw it go up, and I was astonished that it didn’t come back down again.

“Everybody wonders where that guitar went, and I gotta tell you, I was on the stage, and I wonder where it went, too.”