-
As vile as awards shows are, I did enjoy the 2012 tribute to Campbell. One of his public farewells after getting sick..
Can't find a good copy on youtube, so here's a dailymotion link. Skip forward ~4mins
-
I've got bloody happy memories of busting out some 'Wichita Lineman' at karaoke back in 04. The passion I brought far outweighed any lack of talent and I brought the house down....
Shit , look at that, I've done a Polly Gillespie and made someone's death tribute all about myself!
-
-
Saw him in Cardiff on his farewell tour.
Magnificent.
Some of his best work was right at the end.
-
@MiketheSnow apparently he had a TelePrompTer to help him with the words to the songs . He worked with a lot of the greats in his career.
-
Pretty interesting guy Glen. Obituary from the Times UK.
OBITUARY
Glen CampbellGod-fearing country star who mixed the Bible with sex and cocaine and whose many musical hits included Rhinestone Cowboy
In an image that captured the dichotomy of his life, Glen Campbell revealed in his autobiography that at the height of his fame he spent his nights hoovering up lines of cocaine while reading the Bible.
He titled the book Rhinestone Cowboy after one of his biggest hits, in which he sang: “There’s been a load of compromisin’ on the road to my horizon.” Although he had not written the lyric, it was, as a metaphor, as autobiographical as anything in his memoir. A God-fearing, scripture-quoting evangelical who said grace before meals, Campbell made his name singing middle-of-the-road country-pop ballads, but his penchant for drugs, drink and wild women rivalled the feral appetites of the most hedonistic rock’n’roller.
A man of many parts, he carved out a career as a brilliant session guitarist in which he backed Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys and the Monkees before he ever became a star. Looking like a true all-American cowboy — “as blonde as the sun and solid as a bale of hay” as one critic said of his beefcake physique — he also appeared in several films, most notably True Grit with John Wayne.
Yet he was best known for his faultlessly smooth tenor voice on a memorable string of hit records that included Wichita Lineman, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Galveston and Gentle On My Mind, in a career in which he sold more than 45 million records. His appeal lay in the way he effortlessly bridged the worlds of country music and pop — although he insisted that he was “not a country singer, but a country boy who sings”.
Many of his biggest hits were written by Jimmy Webb, to whose poetic lyrics Campbell brought an aching sense of melancholy. In Wichita Lineman he poignantly sang of hearing the ghost of an absent lover “singin’ in the wire”, while By The Time I Get To Phoenix was the story of a broken affair in which he imagined the daily routine of the woman he had left behind.
Such songs played subtly on themes of loss, longing and memory, and it was a sad irony that after a farewell tour in 2011 Campbell was no longer able to sing them because Alzheimer’s disease robbed him of his ability to remember the words.
By then his wild days were long behind him, a reformation that he attributed to God, but more practically to his fourth wife, Kim Woollen, a Radio City Music Hall dancer, who issued him with an ultimatum after they married in 1982. “He would fall down drunk five nights a week, just pass out,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘I can’t take it any more.’ We had tiny children, and I thought, ‘I’m not going to expose my children to some drunkard coming home and being mean.’ ”
She forced him to kick first the cocaine and then the booze, but there were relapses and in 2003 he spent ten days in jail for driving under the influence. He told the officer who arrested him that he wasn’t drunk, but had been “over-served” and then kicked him in the thigh. He served his time in Phoenix, Arizona, in a jail where the inmates were shamed by being made to wear pink underwear. On his release his wife asked the sheriff to autograph a pair of pink prison-issue boxer shorts and kept them as a warning. “Glen straightened up after that,” she said.
When they met on a blind date at the Waldorf in New York, Campbell was in a high-profile and mutually destructive relationship with Tanya Tucker, another country singer and fellow cocaine addict. Tucker was 21; he was in his early forties. They recorded hits together and brawled, broke up and got back together as the gossip columns had a field day chronicling their drug-fuelled antics, including a suicide attempt by Tucker and a near-fatal overdose by Campbell while the couple were freebasing cocaine.
She told reporters that he was “the horniest man I ever met” and claimed that in a violent outburst he had knocked her teeth out. He denied this allegation, but admitted: “In our sick slavery to things of the flesh, we were either having sex or fighting. We even fought during sex once or twice.”
His first marriage at the age of 17 to his pregnant 15-year-old girlfriend, Diane Kirk, lasted five years. She gave birth to his daughter Debby. When they divorced in 1959 he married Billie Jean Nunley, a beautician with whom he had three children: Kelli, Travis and Kane. By the time they divorced in 1976 he was having an affair with Sarah Barg, the wife of his friend Mac Davis, who wrote In The Ghetto for Elvis Presley and several songs for Campbell. They married in 1976, but divorced three weeks after the birth of their only child, Dillon Campbell. With his fourth wife he had three further children, Cal, Shannon and Ashley, who all played or sang in his band.
Life was sometimes complex. When he was moved to a care facility in 2014 his daughter Debby and son Travis went to court seeking to wrest control of his care from his wife, whom they alleged was refusing to allow them to see him.
He was born Glen Travis Campbell in a small farming community near Delight, Arkansas, the seventh son among 12 children. His father, Wesley, a sharecropper of Scottish ancestry, and his mother, Carrie, were devout members of the Church of Christ. Campbell was an active member of the congregation until his fourth wife introduced him to a Messianic synagogue that follows the Old Testament, but believes that Jesus is the Messiah.
He got his first guitar at the age of four, which was a $5 instrument from a mail-order catalogue. When he needed a capo to clamp to the frets to change key, his father fashioned one out of a corn on the cob and a rubber band: “All I ever wanted to do was play the guitar; singing was a sideline,” Campbell said. “And once I had that capo in place, I didn’t look back.”
The family home had no electricity; he learnt to copy songs by listening to a country station on an old battery radio. By his mid-teens he had moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to play in his uncle’s western swing combo, the Dick Bills Band. In 1960 he moved again to Los Angeles, where his burgeoning reputation as one of the hottest guitar pickers in town soon earned him a place in the Wrecking Crew, an informal grouping of A-list session players. The work was plentiful and lucrative. In 1963 he calculated that he played on 586 sessions. His ringing guitar tone became a cornerstone of Phil Spector’s epic “wall of sound”, heard on hits such as the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling. He also played on Sinatra’s Strangers In The Night.
“We were all in the studio together, Frank and the band, and we did the whole song in two takes. They spliced together the best bits of both versions for the final record,” Campbell recalled. Yet he was so star-struck that he couldn’t stop staring at the singer throughout the session. A disconcerted Sinatra eventually turned to the producer and asked: “Who’s the fag guitarist over there?”
Despite the awkwardness of their introduction, they went on to become friends. On one occasion when Campbell was playing golf in the Bob Hope Classic in Palm Springs, where Sinatra had a home, he invited him to stay in his house. “I asked him, ‘Which one?’ He had three of ’em,” Campbell said. He also played on sessions for the Beach Boys. When Brian Wilson retired from performing live to concentrate on songwriting, Campbell replaced him. He stayed with the group for 18 months and played on their 1966 masterpiece, Pet Sounds.
His songs played subtly on themes of loss, longing and memory
His performances with the Beach Boys persuaded Capitol Records, who had signed him as a solo act in 1962, to start putting promotional muscle behind him. His breakthrough came in 1967 with Gentle On My Mind, which won four Grammy awards, shared between Campbell and the song’s writer, John Hartford. From that moment top composers wanted to write for him. He had hits with Dreams of the Everyday Housewife and the title song of True Grit, in which John Wayne picked him to play his sidekick, “La Boeuf”.He shared Wayne’s conservative politics and at the height of the Vietnam War protests Campbell intemperately suggested that draft-card burners “should be hanged”. He later performed at the White House for President Nixon and for Ronald Reagan at the Republican National Convention in 1980. Shortly after, he was involved in an altercation with an Indonesian government official over the seating arrangements on a flight and told him that he was going to “call my friend Ronald and ask him to bomb Jakarta”.
By then he was in what he called the doldrums of his career and was consuming quantities of cocaine and whiskey that would have killed anyone with a less robust constitution. He admitted that even when he sang The Stars and Stripes for the president he was “higher than the notes we were singing”.
He blamed his addictions on the pressures of his solo career; when he was a session player he claimed he had been so busy that there was no time for drugs. “I was hanging out with the wrong crowd, and they were handing me things they said would ‘knock my head off’. It was silly but I didn’t have any stability,” he explained. “After a couple of failed marriages, it became a habit. So I got down on my knees and prayed. And, eventually, I got rid of those demons.” His other recreation was somewhat healthier: he was a fanatical golfer and celebrity host of the Los Angeles Open from 1971 to 1983.
When he announced in People magazine in 2011 that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease he was praised for his courage in going public. Yet the signs were becoming apparent and critics were asking awkward questions about the state of his health: one had written of a recent concert performance that he appeared “unprepared at best and disorientated at worst”. In the interview in which he made the announcement he struggled to recall details of his life and could not remember his age.
This year his wife said he could no longer play the guitar, but continued to sing, although the words were gibberish. “It’s not a melody that we recognise,” she said. “But you can tell that it’s a happy song and he has a song in his heart.”
Glen Campbell, guitarist and singer, was born on April 22, 1936. He died of Alzheimer’s disease on August 8, 2017, aged 81
Glen Campbell
In an image that captured the dichotomy of his life, Glen Campbell revealed in his autobiography that at the height of his fame he spent his nights hoovering up
-
@MiketheSnow apparently he had a TelePrompTer to help him with the words to the songs . He worked with a lot of the greats in his career.
Yes. And when he got lost his daughter and son just jumped right in until he got back on track.
Never forgot a solo or guitar link though.
-
@MiketheSnow apparently he had a TelePrompTer to help him with the words to the songs .
That's more common than you think for artists much younger, and without some terrible disease. Ozzy has been using one for years, for example.
-
@MiketheSnow apparently he had a TelePrompTer to help him with the words to the songs .
That's more common than you think for artists much younger, and without some terrible disease.
It's hard to remember lyrics someone else wrote...
Ozzy has been using one for years, for example.
Ozzy also ran into a tree on his quadbike.
-
@antipodean Don't tell Sharon that!
Not just for Sabbath though, I've read plenty about how Daisley and Kerslake were screwed over.
-
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11907076
I used to love the generation game when I was really young. Good game Bruce, good game
-
-
-
RIP 2017
Glen Campbell - Tribute Grammy Awards 2012
