Quotes from Mike Campbell

Ive always respected Lindsay Buckingham and I took it on as a challenge to do justice to the songs the best I could. Im not Lindsay and hes not me, but I learned the best I could to support the songs as they were on the record.

Almost every time, if the vocal is really good, the band is almost always good too.

I have about 10 or 12 guitars, some of which are in non-standard tunings. Mostly I play a clone of my 59 Les Paul. Gibson made that for me when I first got mine, and I take that on the road. Its really great.

My very first guitar was pretty much unplayable. I was 14 or something. My mom went to a pawn shop and got me a Harmony acoustic. I didn't know any better!

Electric Gypsy' was really raw. I was literally sketching out the lyrics as they walked in the door. I jumped up and had a sheet of paper and I showed them the chords, which are simple. We counted it off, I got the lyrics off the sheet into the song and played a solo at the end - done!

You never know if its gonna be a big hit, you hope for the best.

Listen to the melody and the feel of the singer, and try to get inside the character of the guy who's singing to find an answer to that or an accompaniment that is in that same pocket, that's not showing off or playing above the song, or trying to put too much into it. Try to serve the song.

I tell people to listen really closely to the song when they're working out their guitar parts.

Top Of The Pops' was the show to be on. Youd go in in the afternoon, re-record the track for them, and then youd mime to the track that you cut that afternoon.

But its almost like church - were going to show up and preach the gospel of rock and roll. And its a great place to come and get away and get in touch with whats really important in life - which is love and music and fun, you know?

I try to get into a headspace where I pretend like this is the first time Im ever hearing this song, and I get into that and I just try to discover it. I found that if I really put my head in that space then I can get into it. I can discover it all over again.

I never really composed guitar solos. Id usually ask to run the tapes and Id go off the top of my head to make something work.

My amp setup is the same that Ive had for years. Its a Fender Princeton side-by-side with a Fender Tweed Deluxe. Thats my main sound. And then behind that I have a Leslie that is set on slow. Its kind of on all the time, just for some depth.

Those are the things that are in me, even going farther back, to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. I dont consciously pull from them, but they tend to come out in different ways in everything I do.

A lot of times we would do covers - Chuck Berry or J.J. Cale or all kinds of cool songs - and whenever we did that I would always listen to the original record and really try to figure out what made it a great record and bring that to the floor.

But in the back of my mind I always thought, Someday, if the Heartbreakers wind down, Ill focus on the Dirty Knobs.

I just woke up the other day and realized that I have been collecting guitars and amps my whole life and I just don't have room for a lot of them anymore. I have decided to sell some of the nicer pieces.

I like songs that can be dark or threatening or dangerous, but its a better song if you can keep that and somehow stick a little bit of that things are going to be okay at the end, were going to work through this, and theres a brighter light on the other side of the road.

There are places in the Knobs where well just make stuff up at the end of a song. Maybe we wont end it. Maybe well go on another three minutes and see what the guitar does. You go into it with reckless abandon and hope that some kind of magic might happen. And usually it does.

Thats the great thing about the Dirty Knobs over the years. Wed play these relatively small places and we wouldnt have any hits. Wed try to win them over in the moment.

The Heartbreakers got kind of stuck with these hits and we had to play them like the records, which is a great balance too and we were really good at that.

The first time I saw Tom Petty, he was playing in a band called Mudcrutch with Tom Leadon. They were in a park doing country-rock type stuff.

I think I've improved in the finesse and the tone and compositional skills. But I think I basically still kind of play the way I did back then, too. You sort of get to a point and that's how you play.

But there was no specific discussion when we came to make 'Hypnotic Eye' that were going to draw from a specific part of the well, because each song just comes in from wherever it comes. If it fits into a certain bag or feel, I think generally thats an accident!