Why Everybody Loves Glen Campbell

In 1960, a country boy named Glen Campbell showed up in Los Angeles with a guitar, a pompadour hairdo, and a lean, hungry look. He was blessed by fate, and soon started playing on hit records. He was always on the radio.

But there was a catch—they weren’t his records. Campbell was just a member of the band, and the public didn’t know his name. Even so, what amazing company this young man kept: He now played guitar for Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis Jr., the Everly Brothers, Doris Day, and dozens of other superstars.

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This all happened because he had earned the respect of some lesser-known peers, the first-call musicians who worked in the trenches during these sessions. Nowadays they are known collectively as the Wrecking Crew, and are acknowledged as the leading studio players of the era. Glen Campbell would be remembered today, even if he had never released a single record under his own name, just for his membership in this elite cohort.

He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I'd heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.

Campbell was that good.

“In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.”

There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.

He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.

But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked.

• In 1962, he focused on bluegrass, and released his first album on Capitol. It came and went with little fanfare.
• In 1963, Campbell reinvented himself as a traditional country singer. He released his second album on Capitol, but it also fizzled out.
• In 1964, he set himself up as a guitar virtuoso, and released The Astounding 12-String Guitar of Glen Campbell, again on Capitol. Judging by the sales, few were astounded.
• In 1965, Campbell adopted the guise of a rock musician. He put out The Big Bad Rock Guitar of Glen Campbell. It’s amazing that Capitol was still in his corner. Audiences, however, gave it a pass. That was the year everybody wanted British rock stars from Liverpool, not former studio musicians from Billstown, Arkansas.

Was there anything left to try? Yes, there was.

Around this same time, Glen Campbell rebranded himself as a surf musician, and got a choice gig with the Beach Boys. That’s quite a feat for a kid from a landlocked state. For a time, he actually replaced Brian Wilson as lead singer with the band. You might think this would turn him into a superstar, but fans wanted Brian back, and had no interest in celebrating his successor.

At this point, I would have given up and gone back to Arkansas. Campbell had made enough cash from those Beach Boys gigs to lease a Gold Cadillac, and could have returned home in grand style. But he was determined to try his luck one more time, and Capitol Records—then flush with cash, due to all those Beatles hits—still had money to burn.

That’s when they finally struck gold, or a gold record, to be more precise. Gentle on My Mind, released in August 1967, not only got Campbell on the charts but earned him two Grammy awards. He was now on a rapid trajectory to stardom, and would never look back.

During the next 34 months, Campbell released twelve more albums. This staggering output not only happened while he was concertizing and touring, but Campbell was now also acting in Hollywood movies. Adding to the craziness, he launched his CBS television show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour in 1969.

For the next three years, this good-looking young man, with his polite manners and affable demeanor, would entertain audiences from the small screen in their homes. He also showed a knack for comedy (it helped that Steve Martin and Rob Reiner were his writers). Best of all, Campbell always seemed to have some new hit song to share.

This was his golden era, and a surprising time for a down-home performer to enjoy pop music acclaim. In an age when teenage tastes controlled the charts, and three-minute anthems of rebellion took over the radio, Campbell found success in the most unlikely way of all, with lonely songs about lonely guys far away from home.

The protagonist in a Glen Campbell song isn’t heading to San Francisco with flowers in his hair. He’s not a street-fighting man or a working-class hero or even just a fortunate son. He’s sad and alone and wants to get back to Wichita or Galveston or some other place he used to be.

Listeners could relate to his, and maybe especially in a time when almost everyone was going on strange trips—at least in their head, if not to actual locales like Haight-Ashbury or Vietnam. There was something comforting in Campbell’s repeated reminder that places like home still existed, and someone special might be waiting there.

“The protagonist in a Glen Campbell song isn’t heading to San Francisco with flowers in his hair. He’s not a street-fighting man or a working-class hero or even just a fortunate son….”

Of course, I can’t give Glen Campbell total credit for these songs, because he didn’t write them. He got his best songs from a Hollywood hippie named Jimmy Webb. The first time they met, it didn’t look like they had much in common. They both showed up at the same studio one day, where they had been hired to make music for a Chevrolet commercial. That’s when country boy Campbell strolled up to long-haired Webb, and simply said: “Get a haircut.”

As it turned out, they had more in common than they realized. Jimmy Webb may have been a Hollywood hippie, but he was also a country boy from Laverne, Oklahoma—population of one thousand souls, and almost as many oil rigs. Webb may have left the heartland, but it stayed in his songs.

Campbell rode Webb’s tune “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” into the Billboard top forty and up to number two on the country chart. He wanted more of the same, and asked the hirsute balladeer to compose another song about a city. So one day, Webb let Campbell hear an early version of “Wichita Lineman.”

There would never be a later version—although Webb thought the song needed more work—because Campbell recorded it immediately. “When I heard it I cried,” Campbell later admitted. It made him feel homesick—almost the defining sensation of his best work from the 1960s. Others must have felt the same, because this time Campbell reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100.

Webb was worried that “Wichita Lineman” had two many flaws. It lasts for just two verses, without a chorus or bridge, and the verse modulates by a third in the middle—so the song doesn’t resolve in the tonic. There wasn’t even an intro (although bassist Carol Kaye invented a short one at the session). And the rhymes didn’t always rhyme.

The closing word of the song is line, but it’s supposed to rhyme with time. Webb wanted to come up with something better but, ironically, he didn’t have time to fix his line. It was already on the radio.

That didn’t stop “Wichita Lineman” from thrilling audiences, or earning extravagant praise from famous admirers. Bob Dylan once called it “the greatest song ever written.” Billy Joel cited “Wichita Lineman,” in his recent interview with Rick Beato, when asked to pick a perfect song. I’ve been playing it for decades (even at jazz gigs), and wouldn’t change a note of this supposedly flawed tune.

Glen Campbell now saw his name in lights—as they say in show business. That was quite a change for someone who had grown up without any lights, or even electricity, in the family home. That was back in Billstown, a city so small that it didn’t show up on road maps.

His father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”

In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:

Dad couldn’t bear the pressure of not being able to provide the bare necessities for his large family any longer. So he took a shotgun and headed into the woods. He loaded the weapon and was about to put the barrel in his mouth when he was distracted by a squirrel running down a tree branch. He shot and killed it. Almost instantly another came down, and another. My dad was crying and shooting his gun, and the family had eight squirrels for supper….Dad lived an additional forty years.

The father was a survivor, but his son was destined for greater things and, like Johnny B. Goode, that little country boy could play the guitar. He got his first instrument at age four—a three-quarter size Sears Roebuck model that cost five dollars—and was gigging and going on the road while still a child. He joined his uncle’s band and they made the move to Albuquerque when Campbell was seventeen. Six years later he came to Los Angeles. And six years after that, Glen Campbell was a superstar.

He enjoyed every bit of it. Campbell built the first million-dollar house in Laurel Canyon—a 16,500 square-foot home on seven acres. He later bragged that he had “stayed in smaller three-story hotels.” But he could afford it—he was now making $50,000 or more in a single night.

But the enjoyment soon turned sour. “There were times when I was too drunk to recall what I did or with whom I did it,” he later admitted. He sometimes got bad write-ups in the press for the times he faltered on-stage.

In his autobiography, Campbell admits his failings, but can’t resist pointing out that the same journalists who criticized him were also drinking and using drugs, although nobody called them out. But the reality was that Campbell was under the bright lights, front and center, night after night—undergoing a kind of scrutiny no music critic ever faces.

The pressure was intense. “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t have a career,” he later mused. “My career had me.” Sometime he was so confused on the road, that he would hunt for a local telephone book just to remind himself what city he was in. And now, in addition to the booze, he was also using cocaine.

“You have the illusion of new energy and refreshment,” he later explained, “You think you’re alert and become optimistic and happy, but this feeling only lasts ten to fifteen minutes.” Your choice is to snort more, or return to reality. And after too much cocaine, reality is more depressing than ever.

This was when the slow-motion collapse began. His marriage fell apart. He lost the fancy house in Laurel Canyon, and moved into an apartment. In the aftermath, he had little contact with his children. Campbell’s TV show got cancelled, and his record sales started to dip.

How did he respond? In the worst possible way: “I was drinking and drugging now to ease the pain.”

Not all the blame accrues to Campbell for his declining record sales. The public’s taste in songs changed too. In the late 1960s, a new style of wistful pop music, infused with country and folk elements, had taken off, and he was a beneficiary. Capitol Records was the leader in this new sound, and released a series of hit records featuring Glen Campbell, Bobbie Gentry, and Linda Ronstadt. He rode that wave as long as it lasted—but it didn’t last long.

Many thought that this was the beginning of a new era in pop, but it was really the end. Gentry soon disappeared from view (never seen in public after 1982). Ronstadt gradually adopted a more mainstream pop sound, and eventually tried her hand at almost every other genre (Latin, jazz standards, R&B, punk, even Gilbert & Sullivan operetta). And Campbell had to reinvent himself again, or at least that’s what he believed at the time.

So he kept trying new things—much like he had done at the outset of his career—but not always with good judgment or taste. I cringe when I hear him on record imitating Jerry Lee Lewis and Big Bopper, or playing “Yakety-Sax” in concert or acting like a hillbilly in an embarrassing movie with Joe Namath. One week he is releasing a gospel album, and then next thing you know he is covering Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” or singing an overwrought version of the theme from Love Story with a gazillion strings and a bombastic choir.

He pulled a lot of these things off through sheer talent. He always had plenty of that. But many were now asking: Who is the real Glen Campbell? I’m not sure even the artist himself could answer this question at the time.

And certainly not his family. After his third divorce, Campbell told the press: “Perhaps I’ve found the secret for an unhappy private life. Every three years I go and marry a girl who doesn’t love me, and then she proceeds to take all my money.” For his faithful fans, this cynicism was as much a shock as the artist’s personal travails. Campbell had always been known as one of the nicest people in show business, but even that reputation was lost from all the drinking—which made him rude and angry.

“When he wasn’t drinking, he was the best guy in the world,” his last wife Kimberly Woollen told an interviewer after Campbell’s death. “But I feared every time he took a drink.”

Campbell eventually found his way back to the charts, releasing two more mega-hits: “Rhinestone Cowboy” from 1975 and “Southern Nights” in 1977. But there would be no more gold records after that—not until his final studio album Adiós, forty years later. These triumphs from the mid-1970s have powerful hooks, but I’m not the only person who missed those lonesome, intimate songs from the 1960s. I’m still puzzled why Campbell didn’t try to build more on that sound and his relationship with Jimmy Webb.

On the few occasions when those two reunited, the results were memorable. My favorite Campbell album after the 1960s is Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb: In Session from 1988—but that collaboration only happened because of a Canadian TV show, and the music wasn’t released on record until many years later. It’s worth hearing if only for the slower version of “Galveston,” which captures delicate emotions not found on the original hit single.

Around that same time, Campbell released Light Years, which featured eight Webb songs. That record deserves to be better known, but this duo would never get back to the Top Forty. Campbell, for his part, quickly shifted to other moods and genres—performing church hymns or (a staple of his live shows) the “William Tell Overture” or whatever else captured his fancy in any given month.

In time, Campbell gravitated more and more to religious music, a choice that reflected his own deeply held faith. That may have been when he was most true to his own sense of his vocation—sometimes people asked him if he was going to start a ministry, and he always responded: “I’m already in it.” But a turn to Christian music didn’t help his record sales.

Yet even without new hits, Glen Campbell never lost his audience. Everybody fell under his charm, even crusty jazzcats like me. Campbell was just plain likeable with that aw shucks demeanor and beaming smile. Even when his personal troubles got into the news, fans found a way to forgive him. There was something about him that invited forgiveness.

We wanted him to succeed. And when he had victories in his battle with alcohol and drugs, we cheered him on, despite the relapses. Fans did the same when the singer finally settled into a more peaceful life with his fourth wife Kimberly Woollen. And they offered him support, one final time, after he went public with his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2011.

They came out in droves for his farewell tour, and their support lifted his album Ghost on the Canvas to his highest Billboard chart placement in decades. His last studio album Adiós, released a few weeks before his death in 2017 also sold well, and earned him his sixteenth appearance in Billboard’s ranking of the top forty albums.

At the time of his death, all the stars sang his praises—Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Dolly Parton, and other luminaries. They liked him too. How could they not? “Find me somebody that doesn’t like Glen Campbell,” commented Alice Cooper, in an unlikely tribute. “Find me anybody.”

“When you think about great singers, you’ll think of Glen Campbell,” Parton reminisced. Then she went on: “When you think about good looks, you’ll think of Glen Campbell. When you think about an all-around entertainer and wonderful human being, you will think of Glen Campbell.”

Brian Wilson said pretty much the same thing about his former understudy. Campbell, he declared, was an"incredible musician and an even better person.”

That’s his legacy, and always will be. Those two aspects of Glen Campbell—the musical and the personal—somehow merged, almost effortlessly. In his definitive moments, he felt real in a way that few celebrities do, and that same realness came across in his songs.

Maybe Campbell didn’t write his hits, but he brought something to them that was distinctly his. Even Sinatra and Presley couldn’t capture that particular kind of feeling. When Campbell sang about Wichita and Galveston and Phoenix, you felt he really was that man on a lonesome journey. That’s why you listened. And it’s why we still do, long after his journey has ended.