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When Tom Petty passed away in 2017, he was on the road with his band The Heartbreakers. The legendary singer-songwriter died of an accidental overdose after using drugs to help ease the pain of a fractured hip. Petty's guitarist Mike Campbell was on that last tour with him and in a new interview with Guitar Player reflected on their final days together and if he thought he would've been able to prevent his bandmate's death.
“With Tom it was like, ‘Your private life is yours, and mine is mine. I can see what you’re doing, but out of respect for you, I’ll trust you’ll do the right thing. If you need me, call me,'" Campbell noted. “I could have said, ‘Hey, you’ve got to cut this s**t out,’ … [Y]ou could say that and he would just look at you like, ‘But I’m Tom Petty. I’m going to do whatever I f**king want. Get out of my face.’"
“Tom made his own decisions about what he wanted, even to the last tour," the guitarist added. "That was his decision – he wanted to go on tour. Nobody was going to tell him ‘no’ for any reason. We suggested to him that we could postpone the tour, but he said, ‘Nope, I’m doing this.’”
When asked how he felt about that last outing likely contributing to Petty's death, Campbell was honest. “I don't torture myself," he said. "My conscience is clear because Tom knew that I knew, and Tom knew that I wasn’t forcing him and getting in his face about it."
“[T]he last conversation I had with Tom about it, I said, ‘Are you sure you want to do this? Are you up to it?’" he continued. "He said, ‘I’m not staying home. I’m going out. I want to do it. If I have to be in a wheelchair, I’m going to do it.’ I said, ‘Okay, then what?’ He said, ‘Well, when the tour’s over, I’m going to go get my surgery. We’ll write some more songs, make another record.’"
Those words stuck with Campbell, and he knows there's nothing he could've done to convince Petty otherwise. “So I have no second thoughts about it," he said. "I don’t beat myself up like that.…I did all I could.”
Campbell's publishing a memoir about his time playing with Petty. Heartbreaker is slated to hit bookshelves on March 18.