30-day Challenge, Day 13
Glen Campbell: Rhinestone Cowboy
It's tempting to overlook or dismiss Glen Campbell. Country music, after all, is uncool to everybody except those in the South and Southwest, and hipsters who listen mostly ironically. That's too bad, because country music is like every other genre: Most of the stuff on the radio is commercialized and inauthentic, warmed over by a cynical music industry scraping to sell every download it can. It's as if a person listened only to Kesha and declared hip-hop stupid. (Oh, wait, people do that all the time. I digress.)
Glen Campbell shot to mainstream fame during a brief national fascination with country music in 1974–75. (Bet you young whippersnappers don't remember that handsome chapter in our nation’s cultural history.) I remember listening to "Rhinestone Cowboy" in the car with my dad, who was definitely wearing cowboy boots and maybe even a bandanna — after he bought a horse with a friend. Seriously.
This tune remains a guilty pleasure of mine to this day, because it’s way cheesier than most of Campbell's work. However, have a listen to a tune like "Galveston," which he co-wrote with the amazing Jimmy Webb, for an example of what Glen Campbell could do. He was a fascinating guy and an incredible musician; if you doubt it check out his guitar work, on his signature "Gentle on My Mind" (with the obviously reverent Roy Clark and Willie Nelson!), or some jaw-dropping electric work on "Galveston," or on the William Tell Overture, which he remembers as the theme song from “The Lone Ranger,” or on the theme from "True Grit," which he says is the only country tune ever nominated for an Oscar. Sure, the audiences are a pretty white-bread, but it's country from the 70s. The point is: The guy could play.
Today Campbell is suffering the final stages of Alzheimer's Disease; he has little time left. But he was the star a couple of years ago of I'll Be Me, a documentary of his final tour despite his cruel condition. The movie left me limp for days, partly because Alzheimer's Disease is a close relative of Lewy Body Dementia — the kind Robin Williams had, and the condition that's midway through ravaging my own mother. Besides the trailer for the movie, I really urge you to check out Campbell's final tune, "I'm Not Gonna Miss You." It's a heartbreaker if ever I've heard one.