Every culture has its southerners.
—SUSAN SONTAG
Mike Campbell only seemed like he appeared out of nowhere. It was an effect of just how shy he was. He’d worked so hard on being invisible that he was actually making some headway. Campbell came down to Gainesville from Jacksonville, a military kid. He was there for school. His father was career air force, divorced from his mother when Mike was fifteen, the same week the Beatles played Jacksonville. Not that Mike could have afforded a ticket. But he certainly knew they were there. He was no different than the other Mudcrutch guys: the Ed Sullivan Show appearance was where he started his calendar.
There were early signs of a gift. It wasn’t Mozart territory, but Campbell’s parents got a call from the school after his class had done some flute-o-phone lessons. The teacher thought maybe this kid had something. That resulted in accordion instruction, admittedly not the instrument that was going to propel the British Invasion. But Campbell got a musical foundation, even if he soon found out that every kid’s parents received that same call after the flute-o-phone lessons.
Perhaps, if one is looking for an origin story that might explain who Mike Campbell was relative to what he became, one might turn to a childhood scene that stayed in Campbell’s mind: as a boy, he would watch his father come home from work, before his parents split and his father got stationed in Okinawa. He’d see him putting on albums with the Sun Records logo. “He’d go to the record player, put on either Johnny Cash or an Elvis record,” recalls Campbell, “and he would just lie on the couch, playing the whole thing. When it was done, he’d get up, turn it over, just lay there all quiet and listen through again.” Staring at his father from the living room doorway, Campbell wondered what the man was doing, what he was hearing, what he was listening for. It was Cash who seemed to do the deepest work on him. “When I finally asked him,” Campbell says, “why he liked Johnny Cash so much, he goes, ‘Because he sings about the truth.’ I’m not sure just what I took that to mean, not then. But I do know that that idea stuck with me, the idea that you could listen for that. And no doubt those guitars worked their way into my subconscious.” But it wasn’t until his father was out of the house that music became an obsession. “I didn’t focus on it a whole lot until the Beatles came along. I saw them and I wanted a guitar. The Beatles showed up when people were ready for some medicine, soul medicine. After that, I played guitar from the time I came home from school until I went to bed.”
Campbell got to Chuck Berry through the Beatles and the Beach Boys. But at the same time, he figured out Dylan’s “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” and the fingerpicking for “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Up in his room, slowing down the turntable, forcing the records to go at a pace that would allow him to catch up, Campbell got better than he realized. If he later caught Mudcrutch’s attention with “Johnny B. Goode,” it wasn’t the first time Chuck Berry helped him get a little respect. “A friend of mine, kind of a bohemian type,” Campbell remembers, “knew this jug band, guys in their twenties and thirties who lived in downtown Jacksonville in a kind of commune—hippies, sex and drugs, stuff I had no idea about. But they were professional musicians, if on a low scale, making their living playing music. My friend brought me there, and they had kazoos and jugs and guitars and stuff. I was just sitting there, and my friend says, ‘Mike, show them the Chuck Berry song you showed me.’ It might have been ‘Roll Over Beethoven,’ maybe ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ But I saw the older guys go like, ‘Wow!’ and then look at each other surprised. I thought, ‘These guys think I’m good. Maybe I am good.’” The guitar his father had sent him from Okinawa, unrecognizable as a guitar to those who limited their worldviews to Fenders and Gibsons, hadn’t come with a self-esteem switch.
Gainesville wasn’t in Campbell’s plans until a guidance counselor talked him out of attending junior college in the Jacksonville area. She sat him down, listened to Campbell explain that he needed to stick around to help his mother, who was working in a soda shop to make the rent. She let him tell her that he was the oldest sibling, and the family counted on him. She heard the story, but when he was done, she let him know that she didn’t buy it. Campbell had the grades for the University of Florida and the possibility of getting an air force loan through his father. “She looked at me and said, ‘Are you crazy? You’ve got an opportunity here. If you go to junior college, you’ll never make it out of here. You’d be giving up what might be the biggest opportunity of your life.’ She got through to me.”
On one of his first nights in Gainesville, Campbell walked into the Plaza of the Americas, there in the middle of campus, and saw a band set up, getting ready to play. For a moment, he thought this must be what San Francisco was like. The University of Florida music school had rejected him, on the basis of a lack of formal training, so he was in general education, thinking about architecture as a major. But he could see that out there on the plaza no formal training was required. Once he’d been in his dorm for a while, he found some like-minded students. “We’d do blues-based jamming. Free-form stuff,” Campbell says. “At that time, you could sometimes just show up and get a shot at playing in the middle of campus. Then I found a bass player, a guy named Hal, who turned me on to acid for the first time, and not long after, we saw an ad for a drummer looking to join a band. It was Randall Marsh. We called our three piece ‘Dead or Alive.’”
Campbell was crossing the campus one day when he saw another band playing and headed over. He didn’t know the band’s name, but they struck him as interesting. “Most of the groups on campus were doing blues, long jams—poorly,” he says. “This band was playing short songs, singing harmonies, kind of boppy and country rock. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s cool.’ Then I found out they were called Mudcrutch. And I don’t know how much after that it was, but next thing I knew, I saw an ad on a bulletin board that Mudcrutch was looking for a drummer. By that time, our trio was done, and I was living with Randall at the farm. So I told him about the posting, said they were really pretty interesting. And I thought it would be great to get him out of the house. I was kind of sick of him.”
When Marsh brought the three members of Mudcrutch out to the farm, Campbell was listening from his room. “I was just sitting back there reading a book, but I was thinking, ‘God, that sounds like fun.’ And Randall tells them that there’s a guy in back who plays guitar. He comes in and asks me if I want to play. ‘Yeah, sure,’ I tell him. I got my little Japanese guitar, went out there, the only one with short hair, cutoff jeans, and this stupid little guitar. You could just see their disappointment, like, ‘Oh, great. The drummer’s good, but does he have to bring this guy along?’ They ask what songs I know, and I say, ‘Johnny B. Goode.’”
* * *
The farm where Marsh and Campbell lived came to be called Mudcrutch Farm. Once the band was working, it was where the after-gig parties would take place. “If we met someone who seemed like a person we’d like to get to know better,” Petty says, “we’d give them the address. When we were finally playing Dubs [Steer Room], which was a mile from the farm, we were really turning into night people, at it until the sun came up.” At the farm, Tom Leadon and Mike Campbell would often drift off by themselves, forming a connection through their shared obsession with guitar.
“Leadon and I would get together at a party or whatever and pick up our guitars, and we wouldn’t stop for six or eight hours,” explains Campbell. “He had the bluegrass stuff that was all new to me. He knew a lot of songs, Doc Watson, Hank Williams, all kinds of things. The music I’d been playing was heavy blues, jammy stuff, psychedelic. Here was something that was kind of like happy, uplifting. We developed quite a guitar bond. I picked up on a whole world from him.” Campbell had been attracted to the economy of what Mudcrutch was doing, the short songs with a punch to them, but the band made a home in the valley between the two styles.
“He would work out these harmonies with Tommy Leadon, you know, they’d do these twin guitar things, all worked out, really elaborate,” Marty Jourard remembers. “Always super precise. It’s his personality. Very controlled. And, yeah, fucking amazing. It was there from the beginning.” You couldn’t escape the influence of the Allmans in that part of the world. Campbell admits to pushing the band to let the solos go longer. Using a small sound-on-sound recorder, he crafted an instrumental that he describes as both rock and roll and a “mini-symphony.” It was called “Turd,” and it clocked in at over ten minutes. Down there in Gainesville, on the edge of a new decade, they could get away with a Turd. The band soon put on its first Farm Festival, and the turnout surprised everyone. The hippies came from miles around. No one was dropping acid just to hear songs that were under three minutes—and they were eating acid like it was candy.
Lenahan, as lead singer, was suffering. “The band got into this whole jamming kind of thing,” he says. “Long instrumental sections. I loved singing harmonies, but I hated standing there shaking a fucking tambourine for twenty minutes while they did these dual-harmony guitar things. It was great, yes, but if you’re butting heads over how long the instrumental sections should go, and you’re the only guy who isn’t playing an instrument, you’ve kind of lost that argument before it even starts.”
A band meeting was called. “They were all out on the porch,” explains Lenahan, “sitting in rocking chairs, and I was like, ‘Uh-oh, this is not going to be good.’” Tom Leadon was the one who did the firing. Mudcrutch was now a four piece, with Tom Petty on lead vocals.
* * *
Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd liked fishing in Miami. Both men had watched their lives change as the success of Atlantic Records exceeded their most fanciful projections, and sport fishing was among the welcome effects of all that good fortune. Wexler was the son of a window washer from the Bronx. He liked fishing in Miami so much that he suggested to Dowd that they buy a house down there, which they did. The problem with that was the work was beginning to interfere with the fishing. They kept having to get back to New York or Memphis. Wexler suggested they find a studio down in Miami. Dowd found Criteria Studios. Within a few years, Criteria had become one of the legendary rooms of its time. People thought of it as Atlantic Records South. Eric Clapton cut the Layla album there. Other clients included Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Fleetwood Mac, Aretha Franklin, the Bee Gees. And Gainesville’s Mudcrutch.
“Randall’s friend Gerald Maddox came into a little money. His family owned a pepper farm,” explains Tom Leadon, “and they had a bumper crop that year. He said he’d help us get some studio time. We called Criteria and found that we couldn’t afford the sixteen track. But we’d heard that Sgt. Pepper was done on a four track. So we asked if we could do four-track recording. But Ron Albert, the same guy who worked on Layla, said he wouldn’t work with less than eight tracks.”
Tom Leadon’s brother Bernie had been in Los Angeles for some time, playing in the Flying Burrito Brothers and doing session work, and by then had started the conversations that would lead to the formation of his new group, the Eagles. He advised his brother on how to prepare for the studio, suggesting that the band get used to playing the songs without vocals so that they would be ready for tracking. He talked to his brother about microphone placement and using acoustic guitars in the studio. No one really put it together that Ron Albert, who would be engineering the Mudcrutch session, was the same guy who had done Aretha Franklin records, Clapton, the Allman Brothers, Delaney and Bonnie. Bernie Leadon’s tips were generous but unnecessary.
The band stayed in a motel the night before. There wasn’t money enough to get more than one room. Petty hardly slept. Over the next several years, they’d learn how to get less efficient in the studio. They’d learn how to second-guess themselves and lose confidence in their direction, particularly when they needed it the most. They’d learn how to spend a lot of money that didn’t belong to them. But that next day at Criteria they didn’t know better than to work quickly and put a couple songs on tape. “Up in Mississippi Tonight” and “Cause Is Understood” were both Petty originals. The day started with “Up in Mississippi Tonight,” and they did a second take only because they felt funny about stopping after one. It couldn’t be that easy, they thought. But Ron Albert said the first take was indeed the keeper. Leadon overdubbed some acoustic. They cut the second song. To Mudcrutch, the day was a dream. The only problem was that it went too fast. It almost seemed like minutes later that they were holding boxes of singles in their hands. They had a record.
Their excitement got almost as far as Ron Albert. But not quite. To him, they were just another regional band. Albert saw a lot of them come and go, filler between the big clients. The very idea that the A-side referred to Mississippi as something you went up to suggested that these boys had a local sense of the world.
In tribute to their benefactor, Gerald Maddox, Mudcrutch named their label Pepper Records. They wrote “BMI” next to the songs because that’s what they’d seen on other 45s and LPs. Boomer Hough, formerly the drummer for the Maundy Quintet, was a deejay at WGGG. Because Tom Leadon had been as close to being the Maundy Quintet’s mascot as anyone, he was eager to bring the single over to Boomer to get some local airplay. WGGG was the biggest station in town. Making a record was a thrill, but getting it on the radio was the one thing they all knew would feel even better. That was why you made records, to be in a car and hear your song on the radio. The whole band knew that much. Going in to see Boomer Hough, Leadon didn’t dial back his excitement. Why would he? He rushed past the secretary at the station and went straight to where he knew he’d find his friend. He was sure Hough would be happy for him. The Maundy Quintet had cut a single, so Boomer knew the feeling firsthand. And that Maundy single had gone to number one on WGGG, played alongside the biggest hits of the day.
But as it turned out, Hough listened, a little distant even before the needle dropped, and then passed on the opportunity to play the single. Leadon, in his late teens, had learned a few things along the way but not how to hide his feelings. The secretary was embarrassed for them both.
It was a time when Gainesville bands could rally their friends and find themselves at the top of the charts. Locally, at least. WGGG wasn’t the only station in town. The Mudcrutch members went after others. They hit the phones, forcing WGGG to respond. Tom Leadon guesses that Boomer Hough went out and bought WGGG a copy of the single, not ready to have to ask Leadon for one. Mudcrutch went to number one on WGGG. They’d pressed five hundred singles. Number one or not, they didn’t sell many. But it helped them for the moment, kept the gigs coming. Most of the singles ended up in Leadon’s closet, where they’d remain when he moved west, the next member of Mudcrutch to pull out of that dream. No one ever got the records from that closet. Likely the next tenant dumped them. No one gets to know ahead of time what that crap in the closet is going to be worth.
* * *
Two years younger may as well be ten when you’re in high school. But by the time Tom Leadon came up on twenty years old, he and Petty had become a little more like peers, though the shadow of that two-year difference would always linger. It’s something that could never be completely undone. But neither could the bond between the two young men. Since his early teens, Leadon had been what he describes as “part of the deal” in Petty’s life. When Petty went on a movie date, it was expected that Leadon would come along. And he often did. On the occasions when he couldn’t make it, Petty would re-create the movie for him the next day.
“He’d sit there and spend an hour, tell me the whole movie,” Leadon says. “The dialogue, the scenes in detail. He did it several times. I was amazed that he could remember all of it. I think it was real to him in a way. Like he was experiencing it. It’d be like, ‘They came over the hill. The credits were rolling…’ And he had a way of looking you right in the eye, like he wanted to make sure you were getting it. Even if he was driving. I learned that I just couldn’t sit in the backseat if he was describing a movie, or he’d never see the road. I’d get into the front seat with him and Jan [Mathews], or Jane [Benyo], whoever it was at the time. It was less dangerous that way. But it couldn’t have been easy on the girlfriends, with the three of us sitting in the front seat.”
From the days when the Epics were rehearsing in the storage space left empty by Petty’s Dry Goods, amplifier tubes heating up a room that was often in the high nineties to begin with, Petty and Leadon were of one mind. They didn’t just suffer the heat together. They sang together, figured out arrangements, wondered if the Ruckers were going to show. They both watched Bernie Leadon get out of town and find something more. And they both planned to do the same thing. But as Mudcrutch was beginning to crystallize, Tom Leadon was getting restless. He’d been Petty’s right hand for a long time, but he certainly wasn’t sentimental about it. That’s not what happens with kids who want to make records. Instead, he started making a little trouble for himself, and for Mudcrutch. More than forty years later, he still wonders how he might have done it differently.
The Eagles’ first record came out in 1972. With three top-forty singles, they were as close to omnipresent as a young band could get. When the group came to Atlanta, the whole Leadon family drove up to see the show. There was Bernie, a rock-and-roll star. It made his younger brother more eager than ever. What Tom Leadon saw was that the Eagles were polished, their harmonies locked in, the songs punchy and sweet. That night, he stayed in the hotel with the band. It was a different world, and the kind you wanted to stay in, because when you left it, all else appeared to have been drained of color. Driving back to Gainesville, Tom Leadon held on to a fragment he’d been given: his brother had invited him to move to Los Angeles, told him he could help him make some connections.
No one in Mudcrutch, with the exception of Leadon, had been west of the Mississippi. Mudcrutch had risen to the top of the local scene. They’d even created new scenes and risen to the top of those, with the Mudcrutch Farm Festivals becoming mini-Woodstocks until the cops shut them down for good. In Leadon’s view, the band wasn’t going to grow until they had more room to grow. They were pushing up against the walls of their pen. And though no one in Mudcrutch was opposed to making a move, they weren’t quite sure how to do it. Or when. They had a steady booking at Dub’s Steer Room, the best club in Gainesville, and walking away from that wouldn’t be easy.
Leadon had other frustrations. He was drifting away from Petty. He’d gotten himself a girlfriend he wanted to spend more and more time with. Petty had always been strict about rehearsing, so when Leadon said he wanted to go camping with her, it wasn’t well received. But that wasn’t the problem that would break them apart.
In 1969 Playboy named Gainesville the “most promiscuous” college town in America. There’s no question that Gainesville and its university had a steady party going on. In 1964, James “Dub” Thomas opened his club six miles from the heart of campus. There are those who say it was Florida’s best room for rock and roll, including a writer for the Orlando Sentinel, who later described the club: “A trend setter, Dub’s introduced the forerunner to the wet T-shirt contest when [Dub] started his mini-skirt contests on Thursday nights. Hundreds of unenlightened college students would hoot and howl, the volume of which determined the winners. Dub, of course, served as the master of ceremonies.”
It was Jim Lenahan who brought Dub out to Mudcrutch Farm and got the band an audience with the club owner. When Dub agreed to bring the band in, it was Lenahan who dealt with him. With Lenahan gone, however, Leadon was handling the booking. Leadon’s status as the kid in the band didn’t make that easy for him. He got frustrated when Dub wouldn’t return his calls. And the miniskirt contests, for which bands would provide the music, began to wear on Leadon. It felt cheap. “When you do this week after week,” Leadon says, “it’s horrible.” He didn’t say anything, however—that opinion was his business, not band business.
On Leadon’s second to last night in the band, Dub was on the stage playing emcee. The miniskirt contest was about to start. The room was full. Dub was talking to the crowd about renovations he planned to do. He was hyping his own club, and the crowd was cheering him on. The room, he told them, would get larger. In addition, he’d be getting bigger and better acts to play the club. Leadon, standing behind him, waiting for the contest to begin, felt the blood rush to his head. Somewhere the Eagles were playing a sold-out show, and here he was, feeling like he was being publicly insulted by the owner of a small-town strip club. Bigger and better acts? Was that a comment on Mudcrutch? “I couldn’t let it go. That’s how I was in those days. I had a really bad temper.”
When the band went on break, Leadon made his way to the room out back where the pool tables were. Petty found him and asked what was going on. No one wanted this tension onstage. Petty’s advice was unambiguous: let it go. They had one week left in their booking. Don’t burn this bridge. Small town. Leadon heard him out. But the next week, they were back, and Leadon hadn’t let it go. He approached Dub and asked that he please not say anything about “bigger and better bands,” that he not slight them in front of the university audience that kept them working. Dub replied by telling Leadon, “I’ll say whatever the hell I want to say.”
It would have been better if Leadon stopped there, but he didn’t. “I had no business saying anything to this guy about how he runs his club. He was king there. But I’d been stewing too long, and I said, ‘If you do say something like that, I’ll turn the P.A. off when you’re talking.’” Without Tom Leadon knowing it, his brother Bernie had come out that night, back home on a break from touring with the Eagles. When Bernie walked in, Dub saw him and, knowing him well from Maundy Quintet days, greeted him, saying, “Congratulations on your success with the Eagles. Tonight I really want to hit your brother.” Bernie was quick with a response: “Don’t do that. Why don’t you just fire them?”
When Dub got on the stage to emcee, there was no joviality, no show. The miniskirt contest, not usually an event that demanded a lot of careful production, fell flat. The owner was not in a happy mood. The other members of Mudcrutch didn’t know exactly what had happened, but they knew something had and who was behind it. When they finished their set, Dub went up to Tom Leadon and said, “Pack up your equipment. You’re done here.”
The band got out quickly. Leadon went home, deflated, quieter. It wasn’t the outcome he’d been looking for. Alone in his dark apartment, he considered leaving Mudcrutch. He’d obviously grown discontented. But it wouldn’t be easy. “They were my best friends. We shared so much,” he says, reflecting as though it just happened. “All those dreams.” But it would be made easy for him. The next day Mike Campbell and Keith McAllister, the band’s roadie and friend, came by to get the P.A. from Leadon’s house, where the band had been rehearsing. It was Campbell who delivered the message: Leadon was out of the band. No one even wanted to hear his side of things. Petty was too angry to go to Leadon himself. “It was very hard for me to talk, at least at that time,” Leadon says. “I couldn’t express myself. But it was the beginning of a very lonely time.”