At Home With Mike Campbell,
A Conversation About One Record
Mike Campbell was a teenager in Jacksonville, Florida when he first heard the album by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a six-piece out of Chicago putting a rock and roll spin on classic blues.
Paul Butterfield Blues Band, self-titled album from Mike Campbell’s record collection.
The year was 1965, or maybe ‘68; Campbell was teaching himself to play guitar by listening to records, and he had read about their first album, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, in DownBeat magazine. He was particularly intrigued by Mike Bloomfield, who was doing things with his guitar that Campbell thought were unbelievable. “Their playing is just so brave, and there’s so much technique in it that I did not understand,” Campbell remembers, “so I would take my record and slow it down to half-speed to hear the guitar.” That’s how he learned that Bloomfield was bending strings with his finger to achieve vibrato. He began playing along with the record, over and over, mimicking Bloomfield’s technique. “I ended up screwing it up, but I think in the process, by following his muse, I was able to find my own thing.”
Mike Bloomfield is considered one of the best rock guitarists of all time, and with that early ad hoc instruction, Campbell was destined to become one, too. He moved from Florida out to Los Angeles in the early ‘70s and, by 1976, found himself playing lead guitar with his friends in a burgeoning band called Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, whose albums he also helped produce. For five decades, Campbell has helped shift the contours of what one can do with a riff and changed the landscape of American rock history, co-writing some of the most iconic songs of all time: “Refugee“, “A Woman in Love (It’s Not Me),” “You Got Lucky,” “I Don’t Wanna Fight,” and more. With his current band, Mike Campbell and the Dirty Knobs—“more of a blues-boogie band than the Heartbreakers”—he takes a free-wheeling, 12-bar groove approach to his own songwriting muse. Their 2024 record, Vagabonds, Virgins, & Misfits, further showcases his ability to write an exquisitely salt-of-the-earth rock number.
“It made my life brighter and better and hopeful, and made me feel inside a kind of a soul healing.”
Mike Campbell
Mike Campbell dropping the needle on the Paul Butterfield Blues Band Record.
Photography: Sheva Kafai
Campbell still credits those early years listening to Paul Butterfield Blues Band as leaving a lasting impression on his own style. “Mike Bloomfield just amazed me, at his commitment and excitement. He would play off of Paul Butterfield, who played the harmonica; they had a conversation going. One would play and the other would play to answer him, and they would push each other to heights. Or if Paul Butterfield was singing, Bloomfield would answer almost every lyric with a phrase of his own, so he was like a second lead voice in that band. I just thought that was really a great way to approach music,” Campbell marvels, his enthusiasm palpable. “I try to play that way too—if there’s a place where the singer’s not singing, to try to put in something with the same passion as the singer. Bloomfield did that perfectly. I think I just soaked it up, you know. I just listened to it last week for the first time in years, and it still got my adrenaline up—wow, that guy is really going for it, yeah, really putting every ounce of feeling into each note. I think all guitar players should strive for that.”
As it happens, Campbell is still learning things from The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. When he put it on his Wrensilva the other day, it really hit home that music sounds better on vinyl, particularly when it comes to guitar tones. Same with other records, too—he’s played the Beatles, Jimmy Reed, the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry—and found that, in contrast to listening to music digitally, the guitar “cuts through in a mid-range, just a really beautiful sound. I don’t know what it is, but I noticed that when I put that record on the console, the guitars are so clear and they stick out where you can hear them within the music. They don’t get messed up into the bass or whatever,” he says. “I think there’s something about the vinyl that pulls out those frequencies of an electric guitar and makes them really sing.” He also rediscovered a trick with the balance knob that he used to pull in his youth, when he was playing a record that was mixed in stereo, like The Beatles’ Yesterday and Today. “Stereo meant all the way to the left was the bass and the drums. All the way to the right was the guitar and the vocals. You could actually mix the band. I used to turn the balance all the way to the right, and I could hear the guitar with no other instruments in there. And on the vinyl, it’s like, Wow, what a tone. You know, the tone just rings through.”
Campbell doesn’t sound wistful when he says this—there’s not an ounce of nostalgia, and his tone is more that of a kid in a candy shop. He says that ultimately, he looks to records like The Paul Butterfield Blues Band to guide what he communicates with his own work. “I want my music to have the same effect on other people that the music that I loved when I was starting out had on me,” he says. “It changed my life. It gave my life a purpose. It made my life brighter and better and hopeful, and made me feel inside a kind of a soul healing.”
“That’s what I want to accomplish, is to have that effect. When you put the record on and it makes you feel good inside,” Campbell continues. “It might be a dark subject here and there, but if there’s redemption when you get to the end of the record, life is okay. Things are going to be all right. That’s the way our concerts are too. It’s like going to church in a way, like soul healing. We play the music, and when [the audience] responds, we respond to them. It’s a give and take, and it’s a very magical thing. That’s why I do it—because there’s nothing else in life that gives you that feeling.”
