THE RHINESTONE COWBOY
Singer and guitarist whose career spanned six decades revealed he had Alzheimer’s disease in 2011,
Glen Campbell, a guitar prodigy and ballad singer who dominated the polished, string-swelling countrypolitan sound of the late 1960s and 1970s, and cultivated a clean-cut image at odds with his once-stormy personal life, died Tuesday in Nashville, Tenn. He was 81.
His publicist confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Campbell announced he had Alzheimer’s disease in 2011 and performed the Glen Campbell Goodbye Tour shortly thereafter. In 2015, he won his sixth and final Grammy Award, honoured for best country song “I’m Not Gonna Miss You,” which he co-wrote for I’ll Be Me, a documentary about his life and deteriorating health.
In a career that spanned six decades, Campbell made dozens of albums, sold more than 40 million records and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
At a time when the grittier “outlaw” movement of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson was on the rise, Campbell vaulted to fame as an unabashed sentimentalist whose songs were aimed squarely at the American heartland. His best-known recordings included John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind” (which became his theme song) and Larry Weiss’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.” His most frequent collaborator was songwriter Jimmy Webb, who provided expressive, wistful hits such as “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman.”
“My approach is simplicity,” Campbell told Time magazine in 1969. “If I can just make a 40-year-old housewife put down her dish towel and say ‘Oh!’ — why then, man, I’ve got it made.” Campbell was 4 when an uncle bought him a $5 mail-order guitar from a Sears Roebuck catalogue. He taught himself to play as an escape from sharecropping, explaining, “Picking a guitar was a lot easier than picking cotton.”
Without any formal training, Campbell became, by the early 1960s, part of the so-called Wrecking Crew of Los Angeles, studio musicians who were known for their versatility and skill. He played rhythm guitar on more than 500 jazz, pop, rock and country records, backing entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard and the Beach Boys. When Beach Boy Brian Wilson had a breakdown in 1965, the band asked Campbell to fill in on tour. There he got his first taste of crowd frenzy.
“Right after one concert,” he told the New York Times, “the Beach Boys ran for the cars like mad, but I didn’t care. I took my time, figuring nobody would pay any attention to me, since I wasn’t really a Beach Boy. Well, I want to tell you, they jumped on me with all four feet — started yankin’ my hair, stole my watch, tore off my shirt. From then on, I was the first one in the car.”
Campbell broke through as a solo act in 1967 with a flurry of Grammy Awards for “Gentle on My Mind.” Strapping, clean-cut, farm-boy handsome and with an easygoing charisma, he was soon in demand as a television guest star. Through a friendship with comedian Tommy Smothers, Campbell co-hosted The Summer Brothers Smothers Show on CBS in 1968. He acquitted himself so smoothly that the network hired Campbell to host a variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, which aired from 1969 to 1972.
He was also cast as a supporting actor in True Grit (1969), whose theme song he sang.
On his upbringing in rural Arkansas: “If we grew it, we ate it. If daddy shot it, mamma cooked it.” On his vault to movie, TV and record fame: “Woooowheee! Ah been busier than a three-headed woodpecker!” On his movie role: “True Grit was fun to do, but I wasn’t cut out to be an actor. I made John Wayne look so good, he won his only Oscar.”
Campbell remained a top country act for many more years. “Rhinestone Cowboy” brought him a No. 1 country and pop hit in 1975, and he duplicated that success in 1977 with the rollicking and infectious “Southern Nights,” written by Allen Toussaint. Campbell said the demands of celebrity and a series of troubled marriages led to his prodigious drinking and cocaine use. “I didn’t hold back in those days,” he later told the London Independent. There was a time, he said, that he boarded a plane, got into a seating dispute with an Indonesian government official and drunkenly told the man he would “call my friend Ronald Reagan and ask him to bomb Jakarta.”
In 2005, Campbell was named to the Country Music Hall of Fame. He joked with a reporter that he couldn’t imagine he was in any hall of fame. “They could never put me in a slot,” he said. “They couldn’t say Glen was ‘country,’ ‘pop’ or ‘rock.’ I’m crock, OK? A cross between country and rock. Call me crock.”
The singer drew fresh critical attention for Meet Glen Campbell (2008), a recording session that included covers of songs by such disparate rock bands as Green Day, U2 and the Velvet Underground. He followed with the well-received Ghost on the Canvas in 2011, featuring admirers, such as the Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Billy Corgan and Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen. The next year, he received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement, and continued to record new music.
“I don’t know if I got it,” he told the Chicago Tribune, referring to Alzheimer’s. “That’s what the doctor said, but I don’t know what it is. I said, ‘I’m going to go on and live my life. And to heck with that.’ ”