MIKE CAMPBELL & THE RED DOG TELECASTER

It’s a sunny day in Los Angeles and I’m being stared down by a bloodhound named Gypsy in the backyard of Heartbreakers legend Mike Campbell. I’m here to chat about the new Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Telecaster®, our faithful recreation of the guitarist’s modified 1972 original. As I await Campbell’s arrival, this living, breathing red dog holds court across the pool. Her wise brown eyes suggest she’s got stories of her own.

Sometime later, Campbell appears – looking the part in dark sunglasses and a hat – and we make our way inside Knobville, the clubhouse/studio where he rehearses with his band The Dirty Knobs. Some 30 or 40 guitars hang from a steel frame above our heads. “Have you seen this?” he asks, then proudly demonstrates the mechanism, bringing the entire collection within arm’s reach at the push of a button. “Pretty sick, huh?” He grabs the Red Dog and starts from the beginning.

“Guitar lit a fire under me. I loved the guitar from listening to Johnny Cash and Elvis records, but when I saw The Beatles on TV in ‘64 I knew I had to have one.” As he recounts in his new memoir, Heartbreaker, Mike begged and begged his mom for a guitar. A couple years later, on his sixteenth birthday, he woke to find a well-worn acoustic waiting in the kitchen. “Everything changed from there. It was all about the guitar. Still is,” he smirks, gesturing to the colorful menagerie overhead.

Campbell clearly has no shortage of guitars, but he keeps coming back to the Telecaster. “Telecasters are like the heart and soul of rock and roll music,” he says. “[Leo] probably didn’t even know what he was creating when he did it. It’s genius.” While he’s probably best known for his 1950 Broadcaster – a rare precursor to the Tele which features on countless Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers records – it was the Red Dog which Campbell used to record one of their most iconic tracks.

ORIGINS OF THE RED DOG

The story of the Red Dog, like the story of the Heartbreakers, begins in Gainesville. “The Heartbreakers had done our first record [the self-titled Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers] and we were gonna go play some gigs. But we had never played live before, so we went to Florida and they set us up in an apartment complex called Sin City, right near the university. We got a warehouse where we could rehearse and learn how to be a band. Back in the old days, before I went to LA, I used to give guitar lessons in my friend’s garage for like $15 an hour to pay rent. And one day this guitar student of mine, Guffy Crampton, came to Sin City to say hi. And he had this guitar.”

Campbell had a hunch it was special. “I could feel it. You can tell a guitar as soon as you pick it up and it just felt right. It’s got the whammy bar, the Fender [single-coil Tele] pickup and it’s got two humbuckers, which most Telecasters don’t have. That gives it more power and a tougher tone.” But what really stood out was the onboard boost circuit – aka the “Destruct Button.” “It’s just out of this world,” he says. “Without that it’s nice and clear but if you want to really knock ‘em down you Destruct ‘em with that thing.”

Campbell offered his former student a couple hundred bucks and the guitar was his. But it wasn’t long before the Red Dog caught his bandmate’s eye. “Tom saw it and said ‘I’ll take that,’ because he didn’t have a guitar at the time. So I loaned it to him. There’s a video of us from the late 70s playing Rockpalast in Germany. We used to do this jammy song called ‘Dogs on the Run.’ Tom would play this and he had it in open tuning – like the Keith Richards tuning – with the Destruct Button on and that used to sound really good.”

The Red Dog may have gotten its first ‘fifteen minutes’ on that 1977 Heartbreakers tour, but the story was just beginning.

THE REFUGEE SOUND

It was 1978 and the Heartbreakers were back in the studio recording their third album, Damn the Torpedoes, with budding New York producer Jimmy Iovine. The stakes were high and the pressure was palpable. Nothing seemed to come easy in the studio, but Campbell recalls one song proved especially challenging to get on tape. “‘Refugee’ was a hard song to record for some reason. We got in the studio and we tried every guitar for weeks just trying to get something that rang with those chords, and nothing would fit in with the band.” Then he reached for the Red Dog. “One day we pulled this out and there it was, it just fit the track perfectly.”

It’s arguably the Heartbreakers’ most defiant track – a rollicking rock anthem that captures the band on the brink of superstardom. In Campbell’s hands, the Red Dog lent ”Refugee” the perfect rough and tumble tone to complement Petty’s stick-it-to-the-man swagger. “The song is rebellious and the sound has to match the song,” he says. “This guitar was in the right place at the right time – and when you hear the record, this is what you hear.”

The band knew the song was good – in fact, when Iovine heard demos of “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl,” he told them they could go off and write whatever they wanted – but they had no idea just how far it would take them. “I remember leaving the studio the day we finished ‘Refugee’ and the secretary was sitting at the desk. I walk by and she goes ‘Watch that one run. It’s going all the way.’ And I go ‘Really? You think so?’ We had no idea.”

Of course, she was right. “Refugee” was a hit single and Damn the Torpedoes a runaway success. It catapulted to No. 2 on Billboard’s top albums chart and was eventually certified triple platinum.

NUTS, BOLTS & DIRTY KNOBS

From left: The original Red Dog; The Limited Edition Masterbuilt Mike Campbell 1972 “Red Dog Telecaster; The Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Telecaster

“This guitar is exactly how it was when I got it,” Campbell says, turning it over in his hands. “I don’t typically get guitars and do variations on them or re-wire or change them. If I buy them I like them like that. Now, the original has some blood on it,” he laughs, “but we left that off.”

True to the original, the new modelfeatures a classic single-coil Telecaster pickup and a pair of vintage-style humbuckers. “I’d never seen this type of pickup on a Telecaster except a picture of Keith Richards,” he says. “This gives it more power and variety of tone.” One noticeable upgrade is the five-way position switch, which provides five different pickup configuration options over the original’s three. He does a few bends with the Bigsby B5F tremolo – or “wiggle stick,” as he likes to call it – and nods his head approvingly. “The important thing about the tremolo is that you get a nice feel to it but also that it stays in tune. This one is really good.”

But nothing seems to delight Campbell more than the Destruct Button. “It’s just out of this world,” he says. “If you take the Destruct off you can get more of an acoustic sound, but you put the Destruct on and you get more rock and roll. You can make a whole record with those two sounds. The ‘clean guy’ and the ‘dirty guy’. Very versatile.”

Finished in a stunning Heirloom™ nitrocellulose lacquer “Red Dog Red” finish reminiscent of Campbell’s well-loved original, the guitar looks like it’s been places – and that suits him just fine. “I like guitars that have blemishes. I don’t like ‘em when they’re all shiny and brand new. Just never have. I figure if they’ve got some scars then they’ve done something.”

FROM PRACTICE CHORDS TO TOP OF THE POPS

Campbell is playing two of the greatest rock riffs of all time – “Here Comes My Girl” and “Runnin’ Down a Dream” – when he announces he doesn’t have a pick. “That’s why it sounds funky,” he laughs. I shoot a glance over my shoulder to see if anyone on the team has a spare, and then I hear “Refugee.” He plays a few bars and looks up.

“You know, I wrote ‘Refugee’ so I’d have some chords to practice my leads over. I’d been listening to an old blues song called ‘Oh Pretty Woman,’ which was in the same key. I liked that key, so I got out my 4-track and I figured I’ll just put some chords together in that key. That was the inspiration for that song.” He handed off a cassette recording to Petty, who penned the lyrics, and a hit was born.

I remark on the song’s origins – how a simple lead guitar exercise would inspire one of the Heartbreakers’ greatest hits. Campbell shrugs, as if nothing really surprises him. “You never know, hits, where they come from, the strangest places. From that practice chord sequence to the top of the pops,” he grins. “Story of my life.”

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