Mike Campbell 2: Wreckless Abandon

Having spent his entire adult life working as Tom Petty’s right hand man on stage and in the studio, Mike Campbell waited a good three years after his boss died before finally starting his solo career. (A stint touring with Fleetwood Mac alongside Neil Finn kept him busy as well.) He’d already formed the Dirty Knobs as a side project, so they were ready to back him up on Wreckless Abandon.

As was clear from the exactly two songs wherein he sang lead with the Heartbreakers and Mudcrutch, he was never exactly a singer. But years of writing for and with Tom certainly helped shape his voice into a vehicle for lyrics, and we’re here for the guitars and hooks anyway. The title track has lots of them, fitting nicely between classic Heartbreakers and the Stones’ “Happy”, framed by atmospheric effects. On “Pistol Packin’ Mama” his drawl gets easily lost against guest Chris Stapleton’s, and if it’s a little derivative, “Sugar” makes up for it in bite and attitude. “Southern Boy” stomps a little too long, but the pounding “I Still Love You” shows what was missing on the last couple Heartbreaker albums. Stapleton comes back to harmonize on “Irish Girl”, which rhymes “mutiny” with “scrutiny” and otherwise sounds like 21st-century Mudcrutch.

He tells it like it is on the Stapleton co-write “F-ck That Guy” (censorship ours), but isn’t the most arresting storyteller on the John Lee Hooker pastiche “Don’t Knock The Boogie”, which improves once the solos start. “Don’t Wait” stays in the swamp even longer, so the pretty and quiet “Anna Lee” is certainly a respite. Benmont Tench shows up to lend a little welcome piano to “Aw Honey”, and “Loaded Gun” brings back the classic Campbell sound from all those records. The last minute of the album is dedicated to an acoustic slide rendition of “Don’t Knock The Boogie”.

The band is clearly comfortable backing him, since they’d been together twenty years already, and Wreckless Abandon has a fresh live sound thanks to George Drakoulias. Most of it clearly came to life on stage, but that doesn’t mean some editing mightn’t have helped. We’re just glad he’s still writing and playing. (He blows a mean harmonica too. And he got Klaus Voormann to design the cover.)

The Dirty Knobs Wreckless Abandon (2020)—3

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