Alzheimer’s battle added heroic coda to Campbell’s life

I-witnessed up close the ravaging effect that Alzheimer’s disease was having on Glen Campbell in the later years of his life. This was in 2011, when I interviewed him at his Malibu home shortly after he’d gone public with his diagnosis.

At that point, although his short-term memory was failing rapidly, he was in fairly good spirits, and his sense of humor was fully intact.

But even little points he wanted to make turned into a struggle. His brain was no longer responding with the kind of dexterity that his fingers and voice had done in making him a bona fide pop-country star in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.

When I asked how he perceived the effect of this pernicious disease, his response shifted from astutely analytical to frustratingly forgetful.

“I’m fine,” he said at first, as we sat at the counter in his kitchen, his wife, Kim, seated near him. “It’s just sometimes days are better than other ones.”

In other situations he liked to quip, “I don’t have Alzheimer’s. I have part-timer’s.”

In fact, Campbell had been experiencing the onset of dementia or Alzheimer’s for years before he and Kim chose to let the world in on the news.

At that time, they said they wanted fans to know what he was up against, because he wished to continue performing as long as he could, but didn’t want people thinking he’d relapsed on his sobriety if he forgot lyrics or repeated a joke he’d told a few minutes earlier.

That revelation made me rethink another interview I’d done with him a few years earlier. This one I cited for years as one of the most disappointing of my career.

Then, Campbell had released 2008’s Meet Glen Campbell, an excellent album in which he applied his endearing boy-next-door tenor and phenomenal guitar technique to a batch of recent-vintage songs by artists such as Tom Petty, Green Day, Velvet Underground, U2, The Replacements and other left-field (for him) sources.

I’d gotten little other than “yes,” “no” and “I don’t remember/I’m not sure” responses from him. I left the interview wondering why he’d even bothered, since he seemed more focused on getting to the round of golf he said was awaiting him.

In retrospect, I could understand that he was already impaired to an extent. But no one knew that yet – not even him.

In the 2014 documentary Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, directed by actor-filmmaker James Keach, there’s a scene where Campbell and his wife travel to Washington, DC, to lobby on behalf of greater federal support for increased Alzheimer’s research funding. The disease figures to affect millions more as the baby boomers move into what are supposed to be “the golden years.”

In an interview with former president Bill Clinton – one of Campbell’s fellow Arkansans – he suggested that despite the millions of records Campbell had sold and all the fans he’d entertained over half a century, his greatest legacy might turn out to be his advocacy for those with Alzheimer’s. Clinton praised the singer and guitarist for using his own difficult experience to put a public face on the cruelly degenerative disease.

The poignancy of his slide into Alzheimer’s certainly figured into several industry nominations and awards he received for his 2011 album Ghost on the Canvas and for Keach’s documentary, which generated an Academy Award nomination for the song “I’m Not Gonna Miss You.”

In that number, he sang, “I’m never gonna hold you like I did/Or say ‘I love you’ to the kids/You’re never gonna see it in my eyes/It’s not gonna hurt me when you cry.” Elton John called it “not only the best song nominated; it’s one of the most beautiful songs of all time.” – Los Angeles Times/TNS