obituary: Glen campbell

Just as we were going to press with the last issue of Guitarist we heard the sad news that country giant, TV star and brilliant guitar player Glen Campbell had died. We look back on his life and career…

Where most people might associate Glen Campbell with hit country songs such as Rhinestone Cowboy, Wichita Lineman and By The Time I Get To Phoenix, many will know that he was also a stellar guitarist. He was, at one time, a member of The Wrecking Crew, a group of first-call session players based in LA during the 1960s, however, back at the beginning, things were very different indeed…

Glen Travis Campbell was born on 22 April, 1936 in Billstown, Arkansas. He was the twelfth child of a sharecropper John Wesley and Carrie Dell Campbell, entering the world in the depths of the Great Depression. His parents’ farm grew a few basic crops including cotton, corn and potatoes. The going was tough and, later on, the young Glen would help supplement the family income by picking cotton on neighbouring farms.

Meanwhile, his musical talents had begun to make themselves known while he was just little more than a toddler, resulting in his father buying him a five-dollar guitar from the Sears & Roebuck mail-order catalogue when Glen was just four years old. Initially taking lessons from an uncle and learning songs he heard on the radio, he began to flourish and by the time he reached his teenage years, he was earning money playing gigs and appearing on local radio stations. A move to Albuquerque, New Mexico at the age of 17 saw him find regular work by joining his uncle’s band, Dick Bills And The Mountain Boys, later forming his own band, the Western Wranglers. But the big break appeared on the horizon when musicians passing through the town persuaded him to move to Los Angeles in 1960.

Wrecking Crew

It was in Los Angeles that Campbell joined the infamous Wrecking Crew, working with artists such as Elvis, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, The Beach Boys and Frank Sinatra. The Wrecking Crew’s bass player, Carol Kaye, is on record as saying that while Glen couldn’t read music, having had no formal training, he possessed a phenomenal ear. In sessions where reading was required, he would ask her to quickly play his part and it would generally only take one pass for him to pick it up and play it back to the producer’s satisfaction – and when you consider that one such producer was the renowned perfectionist Phil Spector, it gives Carol’s comments some perspective! Songwriter Jimmy Webb recalls Glen was “a secret weapon in the armoury of 60s record producers”, having the rare ability to play in many different styles and genres.

It wasn’t long before the studios couldn’t hold him and, having already released a string of singles and albums with little or no success, TV beckoned and he began regular appearances on shows such as Star Route. A multi-instrumentalist who was equally at home playing banjo, bass and mandolin as well as guitar, Glen joined the touring band for The Beach Boys in 1964. He played bass and provided harmony vocals in place of the recently retired-from-touring Brian Wilson, before going on to play guitar on the band’s seminal Pet Sounds album.

Solo Career

By the mid 1960s, Campbell had been trying to break through as a solo performer without

much success, to the extent that Capitol was considering dropping him altogether. However, a collaboration with producer Al De Lory brought about the country hit Burning Bridges in 1967, which was followed by Gentle On My Mind and the Grammy Award-winning By The Time I Get To Phoenix – breakthrough singles that would propel him well and truly into the public’s gaze. Around the time of Wichita Lineman, written by Jimmy Webb – who insists to this day that the song was never finished – TV picked him up and The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour saw him invite a list of illustrious guests onto the show including The Beatles, The Monkees, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. He even invited Cream to appear, and the band performed Sunshine Of Your Love on the show in 1968.

Campbell was often to be seen playing 6- and 12-string Ovation acoustics but could also be seen in the company of Gibsons, Martins and Mosrites. His most longstanding instrument, however, is said to be an Epiphone Zephyr Deluxe Regent archtop which he owned for 62 years.

His tenure as multi-award-winning musician saw him release in excess of 70 albums, selling 50 million copies and winning six Grammys, a Lifetime Achievement award from the Academy in 2012.

Final Bow

In June 2011, at the age of 75, Campbell was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, shortly after the release of his album Ghost On The Canvas. Initially undeterred, he undertook a final outing on the road, titled The Glen Campbell Goodbye Tour, playing 151 sold-out shows with a band that included some of his children. The tour was filmed for a documentary entitled Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me and won him one last Grammy for Best Country Song, I’m Not Gonna Miss You, and an appearance at the 2012 awards ceremony.

From then on, the progression of the disease meant that his faculties slowly declined and he was admitted to a long-term care and treatment facility in 2014. Recent reports related that he had lost the power of speech, after which the decline was a more rapid one, resulting in his death in Nashville on August 8th.

With accolades pouring in from people as diverse as Brian Wilson, comedian Steve Martin and shock-rocker Alice Cooper, we’ll leave the final comment to his friend and collaborator Jimmy Webb, who said of Glen Campbell’s talent as a guitarist that he could “play with any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton”.

“As a musician, he released in excess of 70 albums, selling 50 million copies and winning six Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement award from the Academy”