“The strap came loose, the amp was up, the guitar was up, and the neck broke off. Bob turned around like, ‘What are you doing back there?’” Mike Campbell recalls breaking his guitar in front of a live audience – in the middle of a Bob Dylan show
Campbell talks about the unfortunate incident on the legendary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bob Dylan's True Confessions Tour that led him to break one of his most beloved guitars
Bob Dylan on stage with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Mike Campbell is in the background(Image credit: LGI Stock/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist, Mike Campbell, has recently recalled an incident involving his beloved 1962 Gibson Les Paul SG Junior, during which his guitar snapped in two in front of a live audience, right in the middle of an impassioned Bob Dylan speech.
“And I kind of went to scratch my ears or whatever. And Bob was talking to the audience, going on some important spiel about something, and the strap came loose, and it was wide open, and it went 'bam'.
“And the amp was up, the guitar was up, and the neck broke off right here [pointing to the nut area]. And Bob turned around like, ‘What the fuck are you doing back there? I'm trying to talk up here.’ And my heart just broke, because I love that guitar, you know, and I just thought they're gonna repair it, but it'll never be the same. But it kind of is. They did a great job.”
In the same interview, Campbell talks about how he bagged this guitar at a bargain price.
“I was in Hartford, Connecticut, on tour, and I went for a walk, and passed a video store.
“I just walked in, and somehow, in a conversation, they said, ‘Oh yeah, we have a couple of guitars, and this is one of them.’ They had this. Why would a video store have guitars? I don't know. They had two. In the back was this one, and I bought them both. It was like, I don't know, 120 bucks.”
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Earlier last year, Campbell joined Larkin Poe on stage for a surprise rendition of the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers classic, Runnin’ Down a Dream, a performance the band described as a “lifetime memory made”.
Janelle is a staff writer at GuitarWorld.com. After a long stint in classical music, Janelle discovered the joys of playing guitar in dingy venues at the age of 13 and has never looked back. Janelle has written extensively about the intersection of music and technology, and how this is shaping the future of the music industry. She also had the pleasure of interviewing Dream Wife, K.Flay, Yīn Yīn, and Black Honey, among others. When she's not writing, you'll find her creating layers of delicious audio lasagna with her art-rock/psych-punk band ĠENN.
