Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs, Strand Theater, Pontiac, MI, July 12 2026
Running down a dream.
I will freely admit that my primary objective in attending this concert wasn’t because I wanted to hear a particular song but because I just wanted to watch Mike Campbell play guitar. I mean, it’s Mike Campbell. I knew he did some Heartbreakers stuff with the Dirty Knobs but I wasn’t chasing songs or setlists, I just wanted to watch one of our great American rock and roll guitarists play livee while I still had the chance to.
The show was at a newly-restored 1920's theater in downtown Pontiac, capacity around 900. I missed the last two visits by the Dirty Knobs because they were at St. Andrew's and while that is a great concert room, selfishly I was glad this show was in a theater. Folks sat down for most of the night, stood up for the encore and this did not impede the overall energy of the evening. The crowd was engaged and attentive; the show was sold out. My third row non-VIP ticket was under $100 and there was no surcharge for buying a ticket at the end of the row.
The Dirty Knobs records are fun and enjoyable. This is a man who knows how to write songs and work in a studio and with other musicians in a band, this is not debatable, but I’m also not going to pretend that I am a diehard. But Mike Campbell on a 12-string Rickenbacker? Sign me up. Most of the night he played his ancient Firebird, there was also a 6-string Rickenbacker, an SG, what looked like a Telecaster (but could’ve been something else in that neighborhood) and this gorgeous grey hollow-body that kind of looked like a Gretsch and had all the dudes buzzing "what kind of guitar was THAT" when he was done. But I was also not keeping inventory (so don't email me to tell me what instrument I missed).
Watching someone at his level interact with his instrument is art. He is one of those guys where the guitar becomes part of them, where it is second nature. You see no effort expended, he just moves his hands and his fingers and there are those sounds. The effort feels clean and earnest. He’s not trying to make it look easy, it just is easy for him.
But I did not know that Marcie Campbell would walk onstage halfway through the evening and reprise her intro to “Even The Losers:” “it’s just the normal noises in here!” If you have read Mike Campbell’s excellent memoir, you will understand the backstory. She walked out and I thought “Is this a famous Detroit artist I do not recognize?” And then she stepped to the mic and spoke the line and I raised my arms in triumph and delight.
If you have not read Campbell’s Heartbreaker and you are reading this I can guarantee you will enjoy it. That book remains a favorite because it is detailed and full of personality. You don’t have to be a Tom Petty superfan to get a lot out of it — let’s remember who was Dylan’s backing band in 1986, and who else besides Tom Petty Campbell wrote songs with — and it is stuffed full of interesting stories. Like the one we’re talking about. I know she’s done it live before but I am not lurking on the Tom Petty message boards. I just bought a ticket to a show.
The gorgeous, gorgeous shimmer that comes off that guitar in that song, it was tangible, you could feel it, you could see its dust glimmering in the lights. “Even The Losers” was on the radio all the time, just all the time. People still weren’t sure about Tom Petty, thought he might be too close to punk rock because he wore a leather jacket on the cover of the first album. The song was about heartbreak but it was resolute: even the losers get lucky sometimes. It was a doorway, it was hope. It was one of several records offering those options to 15-year-old me that year.
I’ve never seen Mike Campbell solo. I saw TP & the Heartbreakers a few times across the decades, I even saw Mudcrutch at Webster Hall (still entirely unsure how I was that lucky that day). I didn’t see the last TP swing through the Tri-State area because my choices were Forest Hills or Newark, I dislike them both, the inventory for Newark wasn’t great, and I thought I’d get another chance. (Yes, this is the exact narrative that runs through my brain in a loop every time I listen to or watch something that makes me wish I had seen that band more than I did.)
But I wasn’t here for nostalgia; I have a negative desire to return to those years or that time or that age. I think it’s more like visiting an old friend; it is stopping by to say “hey.” It is letting myself reconnect with sounds and moods and songs. It is mostly emphatically claiming and reclaiming the things I love, giving them a full body hug, freeze-framing them in my mind and heart so I never ever forget them.
Mike has a protest song called “Fuck That Guy” and it’s be easy to write it off as lightweight until you’re in a theater yelling FUCK THAT GUY along with 900 other people. It’s sly, it’s disguised as a joke, but it very much is not. There is also a song on the new album called “Bongo Mania” where Steve Ferrone outdoes himself on the bongos, but that the diehards use as a bathroom song (based on the exoduses around me. Not judging! We’re old and this is a long show.)
“Can’t Stop The Sun” was unexpected — it is new on the tour, but the tour is also, like, three shows in — and was gorgeous, this beautiful song that I realized I had not listened to in years. I know everyone thinks “Don’t Fade on Me” is about Dylan — “You wake up and you don’t notice/which way the wind is blowing” — but man there are so many people it could apply to. They’re the kind of deeper cuts — someone coming to see Mike Campbell because they hope he plays “Refugee” probably isn’t hoping for songs from “The Last DJ” (even though it is a severely underrated album) — that I didn’t have front of mind but are now making me take the box set out and go back to the greater Petty catalog. Both of these were impeccable, finely crafted and executed, but “Can’t Stop The Sun” was an unexpectedly powerful and transcendent moment. It shook you into deeper attention.
The last song of the set proper was “Runnin’ Down A Dream,” one of Campbell’s best co-writes with Tom Petty, and I did not expect it to make me so emotional. You don’t realize how well you know songs until you don’t hear them for a while and then you run into them again, and they’re in the middle of the room unpacking their bag and making themselves comfortable, and you remember why you loved it and when you heard it first and how it made you feel, what your life was like, what was good, what was bad, and all of it will make you choke up, a combination of memory and mortality.
The details in the song, the invocation of Del Shannon, the way Petty sings “Little Runaway” while still being in the melody of the song, in a way where you could never mistake it for another song. The off-beat syncopation Steve Ferrone hits coming off the chorus and the gift is that he is still hitting the beat because he is in the band. (There's a delightful interlude later in the show where Ferrone basically comes out from behind the drums and talks to the audience for about the length of a song so everyone gets a break.)
And then you are just waiting for that final solo to hit. Campbell hands off a fair amount to guitarist Christopher Holt, who’s the kind of journeyman guitarist/instrumentalist who has played with everyone because he is fluent and versatile as heck. And Campbell has this kind of zen presence that lets turn his energy down and go over to the bass player or back to Ferrone and let the other guy have the focus for a little bit, before stepping back into the driver’s seat. Mike Campbell always sounds like Mike Campbell, that distillation of blues and country and rock and roll that he made his own, deliberately working to fashion it.
This is what’s fun about not memorizing a setlist: that burbling computer noise and then the synth riff that opens “You Got Lucky,” and then in your mind’s eye, there are the space age outlaws, riding through the desert. You marvel at the way songs can put you in a time machine and take you back for good and bad, you don’t know what songs will trigger it or how it will happen and what it will feel like.
Sara Lee Guthrie played a brief opening set and after spending a week immersed in protest songs for another assignment I was thrilled to be in the same room with an actual Guthrie, and to get to hear a Guthrie sing “I Ain’t Got No Home” and get to sing “City of New Orleans” with her, out loud, in a room full of other music fans who also know it, know why it’s important, know why we’re singing it.
Things I have written since we last spoke!
Caryn Rose
Caryn Rose
Caryn Rose
Caryn Rose
Caryn Rose
