Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs Capture ‘Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits’ – Part Two

Don’t miss out on Part 1!

Campbell likes to record as live as possible, no click, though that wasn’t always the case early on with Tom Petty.

“When the Heartbreakers started out, we were really young,” says Campbell, an original member. “We didn’t know much about overdubbing and editing, so we endeavored to play the songs live even right up to [Damn the] Torpedoes. The reason Torpedoes took so long is because we weren’t savvy enough to know, ‘We can cut this chorus into that verse… there’s a problem, we’ve got to do the whole song again, start to finish.’

“As we progressed, we worked with people like Jeff Lynne, who was a complete opposite of that and recorded one instrument at a time, which is equally as valid,” he continues. “I love that too, but I prefer when all the guys are in the room and they kinda know the song, but they don’t know it really well so little accidents and surprises can happen. That keeps it kinetic, which you can’t quite create when you build a track one instrument at a time.” The Heartbreakers would return to the “more live” method of recording later in working with producer Rick Rubin and others. One of the cool surprises on this record, Campbell says, was the song “So Alive,” which wasn’t entirely written when they got into the studio and magically came together in a few takes.

STUDIO SPONTANEITY

The most satisfying moment of the production for Drakoulias was the fulfillment of “Angel of Mercy.” The band had attempted to cut the song for each previous album, to no avail. They decided to give it one more try after Laug took a break for his dream job with AC/DC. Drummer Steve Ferrone was brought in, which wasn’t too unusual as he had played the tune many times as an original club member of the Knobs (he is still a member); perhaps it was locked in as a sense memory.

“It’s a tricky feel,” Drakoulias says. “It has a great riff. It’s got the 12-string, a vintage Heartbreakers vibe to it; it’s a barnburner, but we’ve tried cutting it at different times with different leans, and we finally found a good place for the vocal and the rhythm section. That was the hard thing—matching up the vocal with the rhythm section.”

The happy accidents for Campbell involved the guest artists, like Chris Stapleton on “Don’t Wait Up” and Graham Nash, who recorded remotely on “Dare to Dream,” a track Pradler uncovered while doing archival tape transfers to Pro Tools of Campbell’s past several decades of work. They kept the guitar part, but recorded over drums and bass. To Campbell, “That was really cool because it was like, ‘Present, meet the past.’”

Lucinda Williams stopped by Hocus Pocus to record “Hell or High Water,” and Pradler notes how different her process was from Campbell’s. “She’s very methodical. It’s very different from Mike, who is like, ‘Now, now, now,’ and with her it was, ‘Let me take my time because when I do it, it will be right.’ It was one take.”

Pradler and Drakoulias agree that Campbell is now coming into his own and growing into the role of frontman of The Dirty Knobs. Drakoulias says one of his roles as producer in the studio is to nudge him just a bit to maybe do another vocal take, or to “help identify little opportunities” within the tracks. “What’s going to make this the best listening experience for someone at home?” he asks himself. “What is going to get us the most excited?”

Nearly 30 songs were recorded for BMG’s July release of Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits, and Drakoulias helped distill it down to an album, setting up a kind of rubric: What does the song accomplish? Where does it fit on the album? Do we have three songs that say the same thing? Which is the best of those three songs? But as a producer, Drakoulias says, he also knows when to order food. And how to keep it fun.

“The most important thing is that we should be enjoying ourselves,” he smiles. “If we’re not enjoying ourselves, we’re doing it wrong.”