(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Tom Petty)
Sun 20 April 2025 21:00, UK
Mike Campbell was always more than just a sideman. Fittingly for a man who first met Tom Petty when they were both just the respective lead guitarist and singer of hard rock also-rans Mudcrutch, Campbell never stopped being a bandmate to his more famous bandleader. He wasn’t just a phenomenal lead player, he was also a talented songwriter in his own right.
Campbell helped Petty pen a number of his biggest hits, like ‘Refugee’, ‘Here Comes My Girl’ and ‘You Got Lucky’. However, the biggest hit to come from Campbell’s pen was a song that Petty turned down. Around the time that Petty was making his 1984 album Southern Accents, Campbell began experimenting with a LinnDrum Drum machine and a Oberheim OB-X synthesiser.
He composed a snappy little synth-pop number without a title and, excited by what he’d come up with, he went to play it to Petty and the record’s producer Jimmy Iovine. Crushingly, they were unimpressed. In particular, with Campbell’s initial idea for the chorus. Campbell detailed the process in an interview with Brian Koppelman for his podcast The Moment.
In the interview, he describes this ill-fated first performance, saying: “When I got to the chorus, I went to a different chord, it was kind of like a minor chord. As the song ended up, on the chorus it goes to that big major chord. You know, it lifts up. And so, he heard a slightly inferior version. And I remember when it went by, we were kind of grooving to it, and it got to that chord and Jimmy Iovine goes, ‘Eh, it sounds like jazz.’”
After reworking the song a number of times, Iovine called up Campbell to say that his friend Don Henley was looking for music to go on his second studio album, Building The Perfect Beast. Campbell took his demo over to The Eagles legend and the rest is history. However, what if Campbell had made that slight alteration to the chorus before he’d played it to Petty and Iovine?
What if Tom Petty had taken ‘The Boys Of Summer’ from Mike Campbell?
What if he’d been impressed with what he heard from Mike Campbell and decided to take on the song himself? It’s a tantalising thought on the surface. After all, that kind of emotionally literate heartland rock is Petty’s stock-in-trade, right? Well, yes, but the lyrical themes that arguably make up the true power of ‘The Boys Of Summer’ probably wouldn’t have been there.
You see, Mike Campbell only wrote the music of ‘The Boys Of Summer’. Henley provided the lyric and its effortlessly catchy guitar riff. So in this alternative universe we might not know this song as ‘The Boys Of Summer’. Its whole lyric, movingly detailing what nostalgia for our youths becomes as we creep toward middle age would almost definitely not exist.
However, the music might have survived. If you listen to the singles that Tom Petty put out for Southern Accents, their kind of new wave-inflected heartland rock isn’t a million miles away from what Campbell and Henley put together on ‘The Boys Of Summer’. It would probably be a little more guitar and piano driven, likely predicting the whole career of The War On Drugs three decades early, but from a musical perspective, it likely would have survived as we know it today.
The big question is whether Tom Petty would have seen much worth in it. After all, he wasn’t hugely convinced by Campbell’s original demo and its unlikely that a chord change in the chorus would make him see the light. In total, had Petty kept the song for himself it would have most likely stayed a similar sounding song on the surface, but with a completely different lyric.
Crucially, it also would have probably stayed an album track on Southern Accents. So, its probably for the best for all of us, Tom Petty included, that it went to Henley. It was him, along with Mike Campbell, that turned it into one of the most beloved classic rock songs of the whole 1980s.
Related Topics
Subscribe To The Far Out Newsletter