Mike Campbell 1: Blue Stingrays

Surf music received something of a revival in the ‘90s thanks to Quentin Tarantino movies, and while it didn’t enjoy the massive sales windfall of the swing revival, it also didn’t tank as quickly. Bands like Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet, Laika & The Cosmonauts, and Man Or Astro-man? were just a few outfits who rode the trend and created new music, while independent labels searched for little-known practitioners from back in the day to reissue.

One such outfit was Blue Stingrays, whose Surf-N-Burn collection came with a mysterious bio and catalog listings for long-lost albums, but just one listen to the CD made it clear that these were not thirty-year-old tapes. In reality, it was a new album by Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, heavy on the twang and whammy bar, with former Heartbreaker Ron Blair on bass and Mudcrutch drummer Randall Marsh. (Benmont Tench is mentioned as being involved as well, but we don’t hear any keyboards; it’s been suggested he ordered the pizza.)

A dropped needle on vinyl opens the album, and party noises are heard throughout “Monsoon”; thankfully they don’t persist, but both reappear on the closing “Super Hero”, which sounds a little like the Mighty Mouse theme. Speaking of which, the theme from Goldfinger had already featured in Petty live sets, and it was something of a surf song already anyway; “Russian Roulette” has a similar secret agent theme quality as well. Every now and then there’s a riff and chord sequence that’s just screaming for a Petty lyric, especially “Brave New World”, and we could swear we’ve heard “Blue Venus” somewhere else before. “Surfer’s Life” and “Zuma Sunset” have distinct Brian Wilson qualities, and help break up the tempo. Fifteen songs in 47 minutes make it longer than most actual surf albums. (Two outtakes from the sessions, the more rockabilly than surf “Grits And Eggs” and “Dawn Patrol”, were released as a 45rpm single in 2021 alongside the album’s reissue on three varieties of limited edition colored vinyl.)

Overall the album is pleasant, but occasionally emulates the period incidental music concocted for the previous year’s hit movie That Thing You Do!; if Mike was in Tom Hanks’ radar he likely wouldn’t have opted to score a movie soundtrack so close to She’s The One. Throughout his time in the Heartbreakers, and despite the occasional session gig, he never dared pursue a solo project, which is why this one was a badly kept secret for such a long time.

Blue Stingrays Surf-N-Burn (1997)—3