The man behind ‘Galveston’
Jimmy Webb performs in Houston
A country boy and sharecropper’s son from Delight, Ark., Glen Campbell said he “got tired looking at the south end of a north-bound mule,” so he packed up his guitar and corn cob capo and headed west in 1954.
Campbell was a curious Californian — bright-eyed with a thick Southern accent — but he thrived there working his fingers along a guitar’s fretboard playing on scores of recordings by the Beach Boys, the Ronettes, Jan & Dean and others. Despite a session man’s chops, Campbell’s honeyed voice made him a recording artist, and his good looks made him a natural for TV. He was a ubiquitous cultural presence in the late ’60s and early ’70.
Among Campbell’s five or six best-known songs, one referenced Phoenix, and another Wichita. But perhaps the best of the lot, “Galveston” referenced an island and city 400 miles from his hometown and 1,600 miles from his place of business.
His version of the song — written by the great Jimmy Webb, who performs at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston Friday — also endeared him to Galveston, which welcomed him in 2012 with a key to the city. At that point Campbell’s farewell tour — prompted by his struggle with Alzheimer’s disease — was nearing its end. But an enduring piece of music that didn’t even run three minutes will forever connect the performer to the city.
Campbell’s “Galveston” almost didn’t happen. He wasn’t the first artist to record Webb’s song. Don Ho, the beloved Hawaiian entertainer, met Campbell backstage at a TV show in the late 1960s, having put “Galveston” on the B-side of another single.
“He told me the song hadn’t done anything for him,” Campbell told the Chronicle in 2008. “He sang it in this low voice. And it was so slow, I couldn’t believe it. But I loved the lyric. So I sped it up a lot.”
“Galveston” topped the country singles and adult contemporary charts in 1969, and reached No. 4 on the pop charts. It was a hit. Before “Galveston” was written, Campbell had success working with lyrics by Webb, an Oklahoman 10 years his junior.
Like Campbell, Webb grew up in a classic conservative home, his father a minister and Marine. Webb recalled his father taking him to Galveston a few times when the songwriter was a boy. “I think of it as a kind of mystical place,” he said.
Upon arriving in California, Webb steered away from his raising and toward the counterculture.
His songs also started to get recorded. The Supremes covered one in 1965, and Johnny Rivers recorded “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” a year later.
In 1967, Campbell turned “Phoenix” into a pop hit. The song was Campbell’s first to chart, after years of playing a pe- ripheral part in other big songs by the Champs, the Monkees, Ricky Nelson, Frank Sinatra and others.
“We’d never met,” Webb said. “I was watching him on TV like everybody else. He called me one time on the phone and asked me to write another song for him. He asked for another town song. I told him, ‘I don’t want to write another town song.’ He said, ‘I can do something with geography.’ ”
Webb that day started writing “Wichita Lineman,” a No. 3 pop hit for Campbell in 1968.
“That’s one of the few instances in my career where I really wrote a song for somebody,” Webb said.
The two men eventually met.
“Everybody knew what Glen looked like at that moment in time,” Webb said. “I introduced myself, and he looked me up and down and said, ‘When are you gonna get a haircut?’ That’s how it started out. Our politics were always crossed up a little. I was definitely a hippie type. I smoked a lot of grass. I voted for McGovern. And he was much crisper.”
Don Ho recorded “Galveston” as written by Webb, who designed it not as a celebration of the seaport town, but rather a general longing for home in what could be read as an allegorical take on the Vietnam War.
“Galveston, oh Galveston,” Ho sang. “Wonder if she could forget me? I’d go home if they would let me. Put down this gun, and go to Galveston.”
Campbell subtly softened sentiment that could’ve been seen as antiwar.
“Galveston, oh Galveston,” he sang. “I still hear your sea winds crashing, while I watch the cannon flashing. And I clean my gun, and I dream of Galveston.”
He cut “Galveston” with a top-shelf collection of Los Angeles-based studio players and producer Al De Lory, who, like Campbell, was a member of Phil Spector’s storied Wrecking Crew of session musicians. They took Ho’s understated version and boosted the tempo.
“I’ve always thought it’s amazing how some people cut records in different ways,” Campbell said in 2008. “I think I had an advantage as far putting a song together with what the tempo should be and all that, just from doing studio work. You’ve got to hit a really good feeling and valley in there that the song can lay in. It just really really really feels good.”
“If you weren’t really listening carefully you’d think it was a song about how cool it was to be fighting a war,” Webb said, laughing. “The lyric passed by quickly.”
Webb said the song prompts different reactions when he plays it.
“It’s interesting to me as a performer to watch people in essence hear the song for the first time,” he said. “I see sometimes a little tear fall here and there, and I realize they’re getting it. It bothers me when people say, ‘I never realized it’s an anti-war song.’ I say, ‘It’s not an anti-war song.’ It’s just a song about a guy caught up in a war who’d rather be someplace else. It’s not political. It’s kind of the eternal predicament of man, isn’t it?”