‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ Campbell dies at 81
GLEN CAMPBELL: 1936 - 2017
Glen Campbell was a grinning, highpitched entertainer whose dozens of hit singles included “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Galveston” and whose appeal spanned country, pop, television and movies.
A country boy and sharecropper’s son from Delight, Ark., Glen Campbell said he “got tired looking at the south end of a northbound 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 ’70s, thanks to an arsenal of songs that included smooth country classics such as “Wichita Lineman,” “Gentle On My Mind” and, of course, “Galveston.”
Campbell, whose public and honest battle against Alzheimer’s disease the past several years became another reason for his cultural relevance, died Tuesday. He was 81.
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 — also endeared Campbell 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 — was nearing its end. But an enduring piece of music that didn’t even run three minutes will forever connect the performer to the Texas Gulf Coast city.
‘Go to Galveston’
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.
“(Webb) 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. In 1967, two years before he charted with “Galveston,” Campbell turned another Webb song, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” into a pop hit. The song was Campbell’s first to chart, after years of playing a peripheral 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.”
Much like the way they cast “Galveston.”
Webb 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,” Webb wrote. “Wonder if she could forget me? I’d go home if they would let me. Put down this gun, and go to Galveston.”
Campbell softened the sentiment that could’ve been seen as anti-war.
“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.”
“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.”
In some ways, so did Campbell’s career.
Though it touched into six decades and had a dip in relevance during the end of the 21st century, Campbell’s public disclosure of his fight with Alzheimer’s revived interest in both the artist, his music and his place in popular culture.
Through his career, Campbell won five Grammys, sold more than 45 million records and had 12 gold albums and 75 chart hits, including No. 1 songs with “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Southern Nights.”
‘Be nice to people’
His performance of the title song from “True Grit,” a 1969 release in which he played a Texas Ranger alongside Oscar winner John Wayne, received an Academy Award nomination. He also was in the film “Norwood” with “True Grit” co-star Kim Darby and Joe Namath.
He twice won album of the year awards from the Academy of Country Music and was voted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Seven years later, he received a Grammy for lifetime achievement.
He was among a wave of country crossover stars that included Johnny Cash, Roy Clark and Kenny Rogers, and like many of his contemporaries, he enjoyed success on television. Campbell had a weekly audience of some 50 million people for the “Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour,” on CBS from 1969 to 1972. He gained new fans decades later when the show was rerun on cable channel CMT.
“I did what my Dad told me to do — ‘Be nice, son, and don’t cuss. And be nice to people.’ And that’s the way I handled myself, and people were very, very nice to me,” Campbell told The Telegraph in 2011.
Campbell remained a performer of great vitality until his retirement. Even when he leaned on a teleprompter for lyrics that eluded him, his fingers worked magic on the neck of his guitar. Like Johnny Cash, he went out with a series of strong albums that reminded listeners that creative licenses don’t expire at a certain age.
His 2008 album “Meet Glen Campbell” found him taking songs from far afield by acts including Jackson Browne, Foo Fighters, Travis, Tom Petty and Green Day.
Campbell was married four times and the father of five sons and three daughters.