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Mike Campbell on 30 years with Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers
The Live Anthology due 23 November
Joe Bosso, Thu 12 Nov 2009, 5:05 pm UTC
"It was hard, especially with Howie. There were some things we were listening to where he was singing so good, and it made us sad for him. We wish he was still here. But we found some stuff with Stan Lynch on the drums that was incredible. He was always really great live. It was nice to hear that, you know, we didn't suck! [laughs] We were actually pretty good.
"It was kind of staggering. This band has been together for so long and we've just had our noses down doing the work along the way, and when you look back and go, 'Wow, we really did all that. That's a lot of work.' It was nice to see that a lot of the music held up well."
Let's go through some of the cuts for your reflections. There's Nightwatchman, which is from 1981 at The Forum in Los Angeles. I always thought that was an underrated track.
"We were really thrilled to find that take, because we only played it live three or four times. I don't remember it being part of the set for very long, because it was kind of an album track, it wasn't a single or anything. But you can hear on this version that the crowd really knows the song."
Plus, that song always had a really good swing to it. I attribute that to Stan Lynch.
"Yeah, yeah. It wasn't easy [laughs], but we did find a good groove on it."
Then we have a few cuts from 1980 at The Hammersmith Odeon in London - Even The Losers and Here Comes My Girl - when you were still being called a 'New Wave' band.
"That was back in that era when they were trying to put labels on things. Those particular tracks I really like because you hear the spiritual energy of the band at that stage. We were just about to break through on Damn The Torpedoes. You can tell that the band is just discovering, you know, 'This is gonna work. This is gonna take off, and we're gonna go with it.' I'm real happy we got those."
Next up are a couple of covers you guys do: I'm A Man by Bo Diddley, from 2006, and I Just Want To Make Love To You by Willie Dixon, from 1995. What goes into the band deciding which covers to do?
"That's usually in rehearsal. Somebody will come in and go, 'I heard this great song,' and we'll start playing it and we'll go, ' This is good, we should put it in the show.' That's what happened with both of those. I'm A Man we played pretty much during the 2006 tour.
"I Just Want To Make Love To You was not in the setlist. [While compiling the anthology] We saw it on there and we were like, 'Did we play that at a gig?' And we put it up and it was like, 'Wow, this is really good.' I think that was one of those nights where Tom just thought, 'I need to put something out into the mix to shake things up.' So that's a very spontaneous, unrehearsed version, but that's what I like about it."
There's a dynamite version of Refugee from '83. I remember reading when Damn The Torpedoes came out that you guys couldn't play that song a lot live because Tom would blow his voice out.
