Glen Campbell
Legendary country singer who was a session musician for a host of stars before reaching Phoenix all by himself
GLEN Campbell, who died last Tuesday aged 81, was a country singer with enormous crossover appeal who recorded the chart-topping hits Rhinestone Cowboy (1975) and Southern Nights (1977), as well as a clutch of easy-listening favourites including Gentle On My Mind and By The Time I Get To Phoenix (both 1967).
For years, Campbell enjoyed a wholesome, if bland, all-American farm-boy image, but managed to overlay his air of rustic simplicity with a metropolitan gloss, which gave his work a much wider resonance. Moreover, his open, relaxed personality, wheat-coloured thatch of hair and clean-cut, rangy, blueeyed looks commended him across the generation gap.
But this carefully wrought construct took several knocks later in Campbell’s career, as he earned a reputation as a drug-taking, hard-drinking womaniser, and in 1985 he was sued by the raunchy country singer Tanya Tucker, who claimed he had beaten her regularly during their twoyear relationship.
Campbell had established himself as an accomplished and versatile musician, who could range effortlessly from pop to rock to jazz. For all his early “cheesiness”, his most memorable chart hits were masterful and ageless meditations on specific melancholy life moments, such as the casting-off of a lover (By The Time I Get To Phoenix) and the lonely desolation of a telephone rigger pining for his absent girlfriend (Wichita Lineman).
After his recording career had stalled in the early 1970s, he broke through again with Rhinestone Cowboy, a spectacular comeback triumph which shot to the top of the American charts, reaching No 4 in Britain. But with renewed success came further excesses in his private life: he was living in Los Angeles, freebasing cocaine and cheating on his second wife, his rock’n’roll life seemingly hurtling towards destruction.
In the early 1980s, he remarried and moved out to Phoenix, Arizona.
At a concert with Johnny Cash in the Albert Hall in 1988, he symbolically raised a glass of water to the audience, claiming he had drunk nothing stronger for nine months, but raised eyebrows by playing a frenetic version of the William Tell Overture with his guitar balanced on top of his head before launching into what one reviewer called an “excruciating” bagpipe solo in the middle of Amazing Grace. He later admitted that he regularly went on stage half-cut and half-stoned.
By 1989, he finally appeared to have reformed, giving up his after-show sixpack of beer, kicking his crippling cocaine habit, shedding weight and announcing his renaissance as a born-again Christian.
Before breaking through as a star in his own right, Campbell enjoyed a successful career as a session mu- sician, and with others like Hal Blaine and Leon Russell recorded tracks for The Monkees television series in the mid-1960s. He contributed to Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound, playing backing tracks for the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers, and on Good Vibrations and the Pet Sounds album for the Beach Boys. With the country star Bobbie Gentry, Campbell duetted on a revival of the Everly Brothers’ hit All I Have To Do Is Dream which reached No 3 in the British charts in 1969.
Among the other big stars he worked with were Nat “King” Cole (with whom he jammed on jazz sessions), Dean Martin, Elvis Presley and the Mamas and the Papas. In 1966 he played lead guitar on Frank Sinatra’s cover version of Strangers In The Night ,a number Sinatra hated (he suspected it was really “about two fags in a bar”), and which Campbell not only did not know but had been booked to play on at the last minute.
Sinatra famously aimed to record a song in a single pass, and was furious when Campbell busked the guitar part while listening to the melody, necessitating a second take. “Is that guy with us,” barked Sinatra “or is he sleeping?”
As a solo artist, Campbell had 27 Top 10 hits, recorded more than 70 albums and sold more than 45 million records.
The (traditionally lucky) seventh son of a seventh son, Glen Travis Campbell was born on April 22 1936 at Delight, a small town (population 290) in rural Arkansas, one of 12 children in a dirtpoor farming family. When the day’s cotton picking was over, his father (of Scottish descent) played guitar, harmonica and piano, his mother the fiddle, and his sisters and brothers a mixture of all four.
When Glen was four, an uncle bought him a $5 mail order guitar which the boy mastered by copying the twangling country songs he heard at fairs and picnics. By the age of six, he was singing on local radio stations and at 14 (his parents having moved to Texas) was appearing at nightclubs in Houston and Galveston.
In 1956, he joined a country band run by another uncle, Dick Bills, called the Sandia Mountain Boys, which played regularly around Albuquerque, New Mexico, and broadcast on local radio and television.
He left to strike out on his own after two years, forming Glen Campbell and the Western Wranglers, but in 1960, already married to his second wife, he set out for Hollywood in search of wider fame. In 1961, having formed another group, the Gee Cees, he recorded a single, Turn Around — Look At Me, on an obscure label; the record impressed so much that Capitol signed him to an exclusive long-term contract.
His follow-up singles did modestly well and Campbell appeared regularly on the weekly Shindig music show on television and found steady work with record companies as a session musician.
In 1963 he played on no fewer than 586 recording dates, and the following year was making $100,000 a year and driving around in his first (gold-painted) Cadillac.
In 1965, the Beach Boys invited him to replace the ailing Brian Wilson on tour. Campbell immediately accepted: having played as a session man on many of their recordings, he knew their repertoire and could manage the falsetto vocal lines with ease. He did tour briefly with the group, singing and playing bass guitar, but soon wearied of the constant screaming of the fans that drowned him out.
His 1967 New Year’s resolution “to work on Glen Campbell” soon led to his recording an appealing country ballad by John Hartford, Gentle On My Mind, which became a major hit on both sides of the Atlantic, as did By The Time I Get To Phoenix, written by Jimmy Webb. These successes also propelled him on to national television in his own shows, drawing critical acclaim for his personable and easy-going approach.
He continued to record with increasing commercial success. His singles Dreams Of An Everyday Housewife (1968), and two more Jimmy Webb numbers, Witchita Lineman (also 1968) and Galveston (1969) all made the charts in the US and Britain, and their associated albums were awarded gold discs.
Meanwhile Paramount signed him to make six films in Hollywood, starting with True Grit (1969) in which he played a Texas ranger opposite John Wayne’s drunken, one-eyed Rooster Cogburn. The pair were reunited on British television five years later in an ITV spectacular, Glen Campbell — The Musical West.
After Rhinestone Cowboy, his biggest single hit, Campbell had several more records in the charts, among them Country Boy (You Got Your Feet In LA) which reached No 11 in 1975, and another No 1, Southern Nights (1977).
He was a familiar figure on the US pro-am golf circuit, and for many years hosted the professional Los Angeles open tournament.
Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2011, Campbell, who won five Grammys during his recording career, as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, then embarked on a “Goodbye Tour”, after which he recorded his final album, Adios, which included his last recorded song, I’m Not Gonna Miss You. The song featured in the documentary Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me (2014), a poignant portrayal of Campbell’s final tour and the effect of his illness. Adios was released earlier this year.
Glen Campbell married, in 1956, Diane Kirk, then 15 and pregnant with their baby daughter. When that marriage was dissolved, he married, in 1959, Billie Jean Nunley, a former beautician, with whom he had another daughter and two sons. The couple divorced in 1976, and he married, thirdly, Sarah Barg, the former wife of Campbell’s best friend, the singer Mac Davis.
They had a son but this marriage, too, ended in divorce and after a well-publicised tumultuous relationship with the singer Tanya Tucker, in 1982, he married his fourth wife, Kim Woollen, a dancer 23 years his junior, whom he met on a blind date and with whom he had two further sons and a daughter.
She survives him, with his five sons and three daughters.