The Wichita Lineman

by Dylan Jones

  Campbell had arrived in Los Angeles in 1960, box fresh from Albuquerque and keen to make his way in the music industry. In the same way that, over a century and a half earlier, manifest destiny drove American pioneers westward – as hordes of speculators, migrants and would-be moguls staked claim to anything and everything before them as they pressed onward to the Pacific Ocean – so, during the late sixties and early seventies, Los Angeles became the geographic holy grail of American rock music. Hemmed in by the sea, the mountains and the desert, California is almost an island, with its own climate, its own flora and fauna and its own culture. Those who make the long journey to the coast always have high hopes of it, and the state has a preternatural ability to meet those expectations. So it was back then. It didn’t matter if you were an aspiring singer-songwriter like Joni Mitchell or Neil Young or Glen Campbell, an eager bunch of double-denim guitar players like the Eagles or an old British blues band like Fleetwood Mac looking for rejuvenation, in the culture-rich sixties and seventies, LA, with its welcoming Santa Ana winds, was where you came. It was time for a new generation to yield to Hollywood’s shrewd, ebullient pleasures.

  ‘If you tip the world on its side,’ said Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘everything loose will end up in California.’ This, everyone now seems to agree, is how the Golden State turned out the way it did, how it became North America’s repository for the eccentric, the esoteric and the extravagant … the ambitious and the larger than life. To live in California means to live life in italics. Which is why the likes of Glen Campbell (and later Jimmy Webb) were attracted to the state in the first place. For both songwriters and musicians in the mid-sixties, New York was still the traditional port of entry, and yet Los Angeles had the gravitational pull of the dustbowl narrative.

  The coast was a celebration of fantasy, a Pacific kingdom of sunshine, sand and surf – a life of abundance, where anything was possible and nothing was real. Even then, hyper-consumerism seemed the métier of Los Angeles, and perhaps Campbell assumed that eventually everything in the city becomes entertainment.

  He wanted in.

  Even though Campbell had a voice with an unusually wide range – a great story-in-a-song type of voice – initially it was his fingers he was hired for, and once in LA he started making his way as a session man, as a guitarist – an especially versatile one, as it turned out – appearing with the rest of the Wrecking Crew on records by everyone from Phil Spector and Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash and Dean Martin. That’s his riff on the Monkees’ ‘I’m a Believer’, his fills on Elvis Presley’s ‘Viva Las Vegas’, his chord work on the Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’.

  ‘The Wrecking Crew could play anything,’ said Campbell. ‘They could cut with Jan and Dean and then Nat King Cole with the same players. “Mary Mary” by the Monkees and “Dance, Dance, Dance” by the Beach Boys. Barney Kessel and I are on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and Brian [Wilson] put our guitars directly into the soundboard.’ In 1963 alone, Campbell played on 586 sessions. Fellow Wrecking Crew member Leon Russell called Campbell ‘the best guitar player I’d heard before or since. Occasionally we’d play with fifty- or sixty-piece orchestras. His deal was he didn’t read [music], so they would play it one time for him, and then he had it.’ When he was working, Campbell’s concentration was like a flame-thrower (in his dependency period, years later, he was apparently just as focused). There’s an extraordinary clip you can still find on YouTube of Campbell leading the backing band behind George Morgan on the old Star Route TV show in 1963. ‘My Window Faces the South’, an upbeat song with rockabilly leanings, opens with Campbell chugging through some elementary boogie bars before returning for a solo that owes as much to Chuck Berry as it does to Chet Atkins. In this clip he plays like Jimmy Page or Jeff Beck, shredding, whirling up and down the fretboard as though his hands and fingers are somehow independent and making all these noises without him.

  The drummer Hal Blaine, a key member of the Wrecking Crew, said of Campbell: ‘He was one of those great guitarists who could hear a part once and he had it down pat. He didn’t need to be told twice, he just did it. Arrangers just loved that he could play off-the-wall solos, just the wildest sounds you ever heard.’

  In 1964, Campbell featured on what would become Dean Martin’s signature hit, ‘Everybody Loves Somebody’. The same year, along with the Wrecking Crew’s piano player Leon Russell and bassist Larry Knechtel, he would join the house band of the ABC television music series Shindig!, which also included James Burton and Delaney Bramlett on guitars and keyboard player Billy Preston. Campbell was such an accomplished player that when he was recording a session, the producer simply wrote ‘Glen solo’ whenever they wanted him to lend some of his magic. As Kyle Young, the CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, once said, ‘Had Glen Campbell “only” played guitar and never voiced a note, he would have spent a lifetime as one of America’s most consequential recording musicians.’

  Campbell occasionally went out on the road, supporting anyone and everyone, but after a series of early gigs supporting the Doors, where he was heckled mercilessly, he decided he’d rather stick with session work. He didn’t like the repetition or the crowds, and wouldn’t actually start touring again until the launch of his TV show in the late sixties. Touring with the Beach Boys had been enough for him. After spending much of his adolescence having bottles thrown at him or being hounded off stage for being too young or too pretty, he preferred the relative calm of the recording studio. There was a lot more money in it, too.

  ‘I must have played arenas like the Cow Palace [San Francisco] three or four times. The bill was “Chubby Checker, Sonny and Cher, the Byrds, and Many Others”. I was Many Others.’

  Invisibility was one of the Wrecking Crew’s fortes (no one was meant to know who they were, especially the groups whose records they played on), although Campbell was often recognised by the ‘talent’ because he had started to get a reputation. He tended not to be starstruck, either. Usually, that is. One of Campbell’s more famous gigs was playing guitar on Frank Sinatra’s ‘Strangers in the Night’. Playing along with the melody, he started to notice how Sinatra emphasised certain words, and how he held back on others. In fact, Campbell was so intrigued by Frank’s vocal technique that he couldn’t take his eyes off him. ‘I tried but failed to contain my awe. I wasn’t intimidated, just overwhelmed,’ said Campbell. At the end of the session, Sinatra sidled up to the producer of the session, Jimmy Bowen, and said, in his inimitable way, ‘Who’s the faggot on guitar?’

  ‘Being indirectly summoned by Sinatra was like a soldier being summoned by General George Patton,’ said Campbell.

  *

  Born in 1936, at a time of high poverty and low optimism, even from a young age Glen Travis Campbell had a sunny, upbeat disposition. The seventh son in a family of eight boys and four girls, he grew up on an electricity-free 120-acre sharecropper farm near Delight, Arkansas, ninety miles south-west of Little Rock. His family didn’t just endure poverty, they wore it. ‘It was the land of opportunity,’ said Campbell, ‘if you had a car. We were just one step above the animals.’ While the world would eventually see his name glowing in electric letters taller than some of the houses he was raised in, life in Arkansas in the forties was tough. The Campbell family slept four to a bed, and Glen used to say that he never knew what it was like to sleep alone until he was married. Being a tenant farmer, his father worked every hour of daylight, in his bib overalls, felt hat and long-sleeved shirt buttoned firmly at the neck. After a while, the Depression started to swallow him. ‘Dad couldn’t bear the pressure of not being able to provide the bare necessities for his large family any longer,’ Campbell would write in his autobiography. ‘So he took a shotgun and headed into the woods. He loaded his 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, then another. My dad was crying and shooting his gun, and the fa
mily had eight squirrels for supper. His children had been fed for another day, and Dad lived an additional forty years.’ As if to emphasise just how humble his family had been, Campbell used to tell a story about how, when he first brought his father to a fancy hotel, Campbell senior swallowed half a small bar of complimentary soap, thinking it was chocolate.

  For the young Glen Campbell, country music was a blessed release, listening to it first on a battery-operated console and then a proper electric radio, on which he would devour Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb and the other stars beaming out from the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. He didn’t much like getting his hands dirty, or his clothes, come to that, and listening to music was much more fun than being out in the fields all day long. He ‘got tired of looking a mule in the butt’, as Campbell put it in an interview with the New York Times in 1968. While the music played, anything seemed possible. While the music played, he could dream of being somewhere else entirely.

  ‘All I ever did since I can remember was eat, live and breathe singing and playing guitar. I worked at a service station for a week, almost took my hand off, changing a flat tyre. Well, I quit that, because I wanted to play my guitar, and I couldn’t do that with smashed fingers.’

  On the farm, his father would sit one of his brood on the cultivator, ‘Then before you knew it Daddy wasn’t sitting up there with us no more. He was over there driving a damn goat or whatever it was! And Mom was like, “You’re gonna kill one of ’em kids, they’ll fall off of there!”’

  When he was four, a $5 three-quarter-size Sears, Roebuck and Co. guitar arrived for Campbell via mail order, sent from his uncle Boo, and his hands immediately took to the strings. He was also blessed with a sweet tenor voice, which he used to sing gospel hymns at church every Sunday; this in itself was remarkable, seeing that he had almost drowned at the age of two (technically speaking, he died for thirty seconds or so, when he became submerged in a local stream after he got his leg trapped in a willow tree), and so had a reduced lung capacity. But it was his dexterity with a guitar that was really impressive. By the age of six, Campbell was performing on local radio, and by his teens he was playing in dive bars in town, showing off his guitar skills, as well as the small tough-guy cartoon dagger on his upper left arm (proudly scratched with a needle and filled with ink at the age of nine). In 1954, aged seventeen, he suddenly quit school (‘No point’) and moved to Albuquerque, where he started playing guitar in his uncle’s band, Dick Bills and the Sandia Mountain Boys, regularly being kicked off the stage of cowpoke bars like the Hitching Post and the Ace of Clubs by the local police, who could see that he was underage.

  ‘They should have had “Fightin’ And Dancin’ Nightly” advertised outside some of those clubs,’ he said. ‘I was playing at a place called the Hitching Post, and some of the guys I worked with in the daytime, they would come out and dance. Some cowboy would smart off to them, and they would jump right in. I would take my guitar and hide it. Protect it. If a flying bottle hit it, man, you couldn’t replace it. I never thought of shielding myself, the first thing I thought of was, get the guitar out of the way.’

  He also appeared on his uncle’s radio show and on K Circle B Time, the local children’s programme on KOB TV. Finally, in 1958, desperate to branch out on his own, he formed his own band, the Western Wranglers, sometimes playing fourteen sets a week.

  ‘There are some good licks in rock and roll stuff, but it’s basically one- or two-dimensional, something like that,’ said Campbell in 2011. ‘When I started playing, I listened to Django Reinhardt. I got a tape – it was him and Stéphane Grappelli. Django Reinhardt was the best guitar player that ever lived on this earth. He would play stuff that was just alien, man. I sat there and just laughed as I listened to his record. And they did all those songs from way back, like “Sheik of Araby”. He’d do the lick and then he’d play his own lick over it. I wish he had lived long enough to have recorded some more of those songs, because they would have been wall burners, you know what I mean?

  ‘I listened to it strictly for the music. I wanted to listen to what I wanted to play and sing. I was given the freedom to do that with my uncle and the band. I was a very young kid and they said, “Just play what comes in your head – make up a song if you can.” That didn’t hold up for very long. I said, “Oh, I love you darlin’” or some dumb thing. It was probably as abstract as that. When I went out to California, that was the whole ball game right there. I got to see some of the best players in the world then. Wow, it was something.’

  It was the move to LA that would really prove to be fortuitous, though. ‘I’d have to pick cotton for a year to make what I’d make in a week in LA,’ he said. He charmed his way into recording sessions, auditioned for record-company executives outside their offices and gradually hustled his way into a living. He played on demos and records, and even started making them himself, singing, playing guitar – anything that they wanted him to. On and on he did this, day in and day out, week in, month out. Happy to play with other people, his ambition had always been to make it on his own as a professional singer.

  ‘I probably had it in the back of my head to be an artist, but I was making so much money doing studio work, I didn’t want to go through that routine of going out doing gigs for $100 a night. You could make more than that doing a session. I was hanging around the greatest musicians in the world and that’s how you learn how to play. I got to work with so many great people – Nat King Cole, for me that was a thrill, and I’d much rather be doing that than going out and playing some joint.’

  Crest Records eventually signed him as a solo artist, and tried to promote him as an instrumentalist, scoring a minor hit in 1961 with an old-fashioned ballad called ‘Turn Around, Look at Me’ that Campbell had actually written himself. He did a lot of jingle work, too, musically espousing the benefits of various household products, including hairsprays and room deodorisers, while earning enough to buy a nicely appointed four-bedroom home on Satsuma Street in North Hollywood and lease a brand-new gold Cadillac. The covers of his early records featured Campbell in various engaging poses, all of which were semaphoring the duality of his down-home appeal and his ‘Look out, world, here I come’ ambitions.

  Campbell would start to call his talent a trade, a skill he had learned through hard work, practice and an aptitude that he never took for granted. One of the reasons he became so popular at recording sessions was as much to do with his open personality as it was his virtuosity. ‘I think I practiced my trade enough, which is singing and playing, being a musician and a singer, to have people recognise that and call me,’ he told the journalist Gary James once. ‘You know, it’s like if they call you to build a house and you don’t know how to build a house, you’re not going to get the job. I was ready when I was called to do something; I could do it musically. I didn’t limit my talent by pursuing one particular kind of music. I didn’t limit it by pursuing jazz or pursuing country or pursuing pop. Music was my world before they started putting a label on it. If somebody heard music that was different from another section of the country, they’d label it. That Detroit Sound, you record it in LA, it sounds the same way to me. So people label music. That came from working in my uncle’s band in Albuquerque. We had a five day a week radio show, six, seven years. You use up a lot of material doing that. We did everything from country to pop, when rock came along.’

  The small success of ‘Turn Around, Look at Me’ helped Campbell get a record deal with Capitol Records in 1962. His first release for Capitol, a cover of Al Dexter’s 1944 number-one country hit ‘Too Late to Worry, Too Blue to Cry’, provided Campbell with another minor pop entry, but when subsequent singles failed to chart, Capitol strongly considered dropping him from the label. Already into his second marriage – a life on the road was already proving to be somewhat tempting, especially for a good-looking young man – he threw himself into the Hollywood music scene, making home life even more challenging.

  In a last-ditch effort, Campbell w
as teamed with the producer Al De Lory in 1966. They collaborated initially on a song called ‘Burning Bridges’, which became Campbell’s first Top 20 country hit in early 1967. Then came his crossover version of John Hartford’s jaunty country song ‘Gentle on My Mind’.

  And it made him a star.

  ‘I bounced around four or five producers before I said, “But you don’t understand that’s not what I want to do,”’ said Campbell. ‘When you go with a company like Capitol, you tend to go along with what they say. No one ever seemed to ask me what I wanted to do. Finally, I worked out an arrangement with Al De Lory where I could do a couple of songs of my own on each session … And if he wanted me to cut “Come to Jesus” in A-flat, I’d do it as long as I could get my lick in.’

  He had heard Hartford’s original one day in the studio, and immediately decided he wanted to try it himself. It’s hardly surprising, given that Hartford’s version was almost comically country – twangy, in essence – and not the kind of thing that would have troubled the pop charts. The song would go on to win Grammys, but Hartford’s version was only a modest success. As soon as he heard it, Campbell scrambled into action, arranging the song in a completely different way, before asking various Wrecking Crew members to play on a demo and leaving it in the studio for De Lory to find. ‘Because I didn’t record the song in what I thought would be my final voice, I might, unintentionally, have incorporated a casualness that matched the song’s unusual arrangement,’ said Campbell, who at the time possessed a faultless five-octave range. Without telling him, De Lory simply tidied up the demo, while Capitol liked the record so much they released it immediately. It was a tactic Campbell would be mindful of.