FEVER PITCH
Heartbreaker Mike Campbell on recording Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever with Jeff Lynne
“TOM said, ‘I just bumped into Jeff on the road and we want to record a song. Can we do it at your studio?’ That was the beginning of what became Full Moon Fever. I didn’t have much of a studio then. Just something set up in a back room. But I did have a 24-track machine. Jeff came in and, God bless him, he looked around and said, ‘We can make a record here.’ I was like, ‘Really? Well, show me.’ And boy, did he! “It was like going to college watching him work. With Jeff, everything moves along at a fast clip and you rarely get bogged down in anything. He knows exactly how to move things along and somehow has a vision of how it’s going to sound at the end.
“He raised the bar for us. In terms of guitar parts, I’d rarely practise at home and figure out a part. I would just get to the studio and say, ‘OK, roll a tape,’ and then I would come up with a couple of different ideas and pick the best one. Jeff would take the rough thing home and he’d work out a part overnight. More often than not it was a really good idea, so it made me be more on top of it, be more prepared
“Jeff has this thing, he’s dead on with pitch. He can tell if something is a little sharp or flat. Tom and I used to laugh because if it was a little off he’d peer over the top of his glasses with this glare. We finally said, ‘Look, Jeff, whatever you do, don’t give us the eye. Put the glasses back up and we’ll do it right.’
“When Tom passed, Jeff called me and said, ‘Come over to my studio.’ Just to hang out. He knew that I needed that. We sat there and he played me some songs, went out of his way to give me three hours out of his busy day to be there for me. That’s the kind of real guy he is. He’s very warm inside. You may not see that but he really is.”