Music Month Continues: A Star-Spangled Rodeo

Like most Tuesdays in the U.S., today offers a handful of newly released albums for your perusal and potential enjoyment. Sample some new output from the likes of Juliana Hatfield, Robert Earl Keen, or Lenny Kravitz, or perhaps the latest live album from Counting Crows (for Rob). Then tell me how they are, as I haven’t heard any of them. I actually can recommend a few items among today’s releases:

• Mike Doughty, Yes and Also Yes (especially “Na Na Nothing”)
• John Doe, Keeper
• Beirut, “Santa Fe”
• Red Hot Chili Peppers, I’m With You (Frusciante is gone, the sound isn’t. This album isn’t up there with Mother’s Milk, BSSM, or Californication, but it’s as decent as their last couple. Try the mellow “Brendan’s Death Song” or the messy “Monarchy of Roses.”)

The record I aim to highlight, however, isn’t any of these, and I’m as surprised as anyone at my selection. In the last week or so, we brought up our first favorite songs in the G:TB comments, and Rob remembered “Rhinestone Cowboy.” As I mentioned briefly at the time, Glen Campbell recently divulged that he has Alzheimer’s Disease, and he’s coupling the release of this album today, Ghost on the Canvas, with one more time back on the road to his horizon, something he’s plainly calling The Goodbye Tour.

The backdrop to such a record changes the way one listens to it, similarly to how Warren Zevon fans heard The Wind; even though Zevon had been singing about death for decades, “Keep Me In Your Heart” still gives the knowledgeable listener a little pause. Critics are going to go easier on Campbell in their reviews, and there’s almost more incentive to hearing and liking the music. I’ll be as guilty of sentimental kid gloves, undoubtedly.

The thing is, Glen Campbell, while a mainstay of country and lite rock several decades ago, never was a true heavyweight. I always liked him well enough, probably because my stepdad looked just liked him, even dressing up as him for Halloween. But Glen Campbell was just a handsome guy with a good voice who had some big hits in overly sentimentalized, over-produced, string-laced Southern pop. (And he probably got laid a ton, at least until he got Bible-fied in the 80's after too much partying.)

Those pop songs worked at the time, and they still find their way onto the airwaves emanating from your parents’/grandparents’ radio stations: “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” (never, ever to be confused with “By the Time I Get to Arizona”) for the laid-back country folk in the 60’s; the cover of Allen Toussaint’s “Southern Nights” and the aforementioned “Rhinestone Cowboy” for yacht-rockin' AM listeners in the 70’s. But they don’t necessarily hold up as well as a lot of the music from the same era.



Meanwhile, for the most part, Glen Campbell has always relied on the likes of Jimmy Webb or other songwriters to craft his tunes for him; that’s not the hugest knock, for as Barenaked Ladies sang about the New Kids on the Block, “So we may not write the songs we sing / But Look at Elvis, he sold his soul and you crowned him King.” (Wow, that there’s a musical mélange.) Campbell did play with the Beach Boys in the 1960’s, but he was more Bruce Johnston than Brian Wilson. (He was no Mike Love, to be sure.)

As such, even given the backstory that might skew judgment, it’s no blasphemy to compare this record favorably to his heyday hits. I won’t use the silly subjective word “better” to describe this new album; I’ll say it’s certainly more “accessible” to the modern listener than the old stuff is, and better than I would have figured. He does have the benefit of modern production and new content imbued with an empassioned focus like I haven’t heard since The Rising. Glen Campbell also still has his voice. And songwriters like Paul Westerberg and Jakob Dylan in his arsenal now, though he actually inked a bit of this album.

And the truth is that it's a good story. The tandem of Pat Summitt and Glen Campbell gives hope to a whole lot of people going through one of the most trying twilight chapters I can conjure. Hell, for as long as he can, I hope the Rhinestone Cowboy continues to keep making music rather than going the Richard Farnsworth route. We're on the eve of a period when, more than ever, hard-partying rock stars are dying of old age, for lack of a better way to put it. From Robert Johnson and Hank Sr. to Keith Moon and Kurt Cobain, we know how to reflect when music icons put themselves in a early grave and waste talent. Well, here's to the seniors, launched most successfully by the Man in Black, busking heartily for one last quarter on death's doorstep.

Bottom line: the album’s pretty good. Worth a listen, especially for those who’ve lost or are losing someone great.