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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
"Ryan took it home and kind of remixed it and tidied it up a little bit and played it for us again and Tom was like, 'Oh, that's great. I didn't realize how good that was.' So that kind of came in at the last week and we were able to get it back in there. Ryan pulled it out of his bag of tricks."
On another disc you have one of your best rockers, a very underrated song, Jammin' Me. Do you feel as though that song hasn't gotten its due?
"I don't know…I remember when it came out it was on the radio a lot. People like it when we do it. It was cool that Bob [Dylan] helped us with the lyrics. I guess it's gotten it's due. [laughs] I'm happy with it!"
On a couple of cool instrumentals you get to stretch out. There's Green Onions by Booker T & The MGs.
"Oh yeah. That was another thing that came up when we were doing The Fillmore. Benmont had that organ sound and the part down and he said, 'Hey, let's try Green Onions.' Everybody knew it, and we just threw it together and it sounded good."
You throw a real left curve from The Fillmore set with your cover of Goldfinger.
"We were real thrilled to find that one because we'd kind of forgotten that we ever played it; we only played it at The Fillmore and then we kind of left it behind.
"I love that music, and it occurred to me one day that it could be done with a surf kind of arrangement. I messed around with it and showed it to the band. Took us forever to learn all those chords. [laughs] It's a great piece of music. Good sound, too. Ryan did an incedible job on the mix."
Do you remember what guitar you played on it?
"It was a Fender Jaguar, with lots of reverb."
Next, we have one of the standards, American Girl, from the Cow Palace in 1983. I have to imagine you have a thousand versions of that song.
"Exactly. Much like Woman In Love, we didn't think we had a good version of it and we were going to leave it off. You can't put out a half-assed version or an OK version of American Girl - it's gotta be really good. All the ones we listened to were pretty good but we didn't feel we had 'the one,' so we finally crossed it off the list."
