It’s not unusual for a recording artist to achieve a
supernova of commercial success, even over a sustained period. Think of Elton
John for the first half of the Seventies, or Michael Jackson from 1979 (Off the Wall) to 1991 (Dangerous). But it’s another thing
entirely to achieve that level of broad acceptance not only on the radio but on
film and TV. For that, we’re talking about Sinatra, Presley, the Beatles—and,
in 1969, Glen Campbell.
In March of that year, Capitol Records released the
13th album by the country singer, Galveston. To a burgeoning career as a recording
star, he was now adding to his repertoire TV variety-show host (The Glen Campbell Good Time Hour) and
even actor (True Grit), playing
second male lead to the grizzled veteran John Wayne. Campbell had become, as
his friend, the songwriter Jimmy Webb,
would put it nearly a half-century later, “a small industry.”
Webb himself had become something of a “small industry,”
if not with Campbell’s visibility. He did not have the singer’s number of media
outlets, but he had an even wider array of people who clamored for his work. In
1967, he had come away with Record of the Year for the Fifth Dimension’s
recording of his “Up, Up and Away.” The following year, he had simply set the
music industry on its ear by composing an epic “pop cantata” that became a
smash for Richard Harris, “MacArthur Park.”
But the recording star with the greatest affinity
for Webb’s work was Campbell, who won a Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance
for “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” then followed with Grammy and Country Music
Award nominations for “Wichita Lineman.”
Webb had initially begged off Campbell’s request for
an appropriate follow-up to “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”—i.e., “something
about a town”—with the weary observation that he “just about exhausted the Rand
McNally phase of my career,” the songwriter recalled in his 2017 memoir, The Cake and the Rain. But then he yielded, turning out another
geography-based smash, “Wichita Lineman.” “Galveston”—originally performed by,
of all people, Don Ho—furnished
Campbell with another hit in this vein that would serve as the title cut of
another best-selling LP.
Both men enjoyed great appeal among the music
spectrum through their association. The 22-year-old Webb, who had seen his
tunes place among the rhythm and blues charts as well as pop, now found that
the plaintive, storytelling qualities of his songs hit the sweet spot with
country audiences.
And Campbell, who had spent the previous decade cutting his
musical teeth as a guitarist for the likes of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Nat
King Cole, The Beach Boys, and Phil Spector, could translate a distinctly
regional sound into broader national appeal through both his musical gifts (wide
vocal range and vast skill with multiple stringed instruments) and personal
factors (boyish good looks and down-to-earth, humorous manner). Before Kenny
Rogers, Taylor Swift, LeeAnn Rimes, or Lionel Richie, Campbell had shown the
way as probably the first true country-pop crossover recording star.
As a sign of that appeal, “Galveston” would be
nominated for Country Music Awards for Album and Single of the Year and rise to
#1 on the country charts, but it also made it to #4 on the U.S. pop charts. In
a 2011 interview, Webb—who contributed another hit, “Where's The Playground
Susie,” to Campbell’s 1969 LP—marveled at how Campbell managed to convert his
songs into gold:
"Glen was very, very good at commercializing my songs. He
could come up with great intros and great solos, great breaks, and he wrote
perfect strings, because he wrote very little. It was a minimalist approach and
it just left Glen out there with the song and the guitar. I tended to write a
little bit more as an arranger, and probably too much. So I could have done
better to have stayed out of Glen's way, I think."
In another sense, though, Campbell’s single,
dominated by producer Al de Lory’s thick layer of arrangements, was performed
at an upbeat tempo totally at odds with its underlying message. A song about
solitude, anticipated mortality, and loss, its lyrics need to be silently
absorbed before they can even begin to be remotely understood.
I wasn’t moved by “Galveston”—I couldn’t concentrate on it, even—until I heard
Webb himself perform it on his 1996 CD, Ten Easy Pieces. Campbell far
surpassed Webb in the pristine quality of his voices, but stripped to the bone,
with just the songwriter accompanying himself on the piano, “Galveston” throbs with
all its intended melancholy.
Like another pop classic of the late Sixties, the
Bacharach-David tune “I Say A Little Prayer," “Galveston” is a study in
ambiguity, composed at the height of the Vietnam War, in the voice of someone
separated from a lover because of wartime service. But Hal David’s lyrics are
so general that they have been applied in contexts completely unrelated to the
conflict (such as the 2010 revival of the team’s musical Promises, Promises, when it was inserted to boost Kristin Chenoweth’s
role). It has been interpreted most often simply as a statement of undying
commitment and love. I would be very surprised if more than one radio listener
in a thousand has understood it in any other way.
“Galveston” has never had a problem being seen against
a backdrop of war—indeed, it’s well-nigh impossible, with that lyric “while I
watch the cannons flashin',” to regard this in any other fashion. But opinions
remain divided about which war was
meant. Some listeners thought Webb meant the Spanish-American War—not
unnaturally, as the seaport served as the jumping-off point for servicemen on
the way to Cuba. Less defensibly, others looked all the way back to the Civil War.
But Webb was deeply opposed to the Vietnam War. If
he didn’t engage in fist-pumping protest songs, he forced listeners to work
harder: to understand the pain of a military man far away from the 21-year-old
woman he still remembers “standing by the water,/Standing there looking out to
sea.” (A second verse, included on Don Ho’s version but not Campbell’s, makes
the narrator’s pain even more explicit: “Wonder if she could forget me, I’d go
home if they would let me/ Put down this gun and go to Galveston.”)
After a five-year hiatus, Campbell and Webb would
collaborate on four more albums over the next four decades—including, most
poignantly, Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb: In Session (2012), released after
Campbell announced that he had Alzheimer’s.
The enduring commercial appeal of the two was
recognized two years ago by Capitol Nashville/Ume, when the label reissued on
vinyl the three Campbell albums that constituted his transformation from ace
session player to solo superstar in his own right: Gentle on My Mind, Witchita Lineman, and Galveston.
Webb may have groaned about songs with place names
in the titles, but the quartet of hits that Campbell covered—“By the Time I Get
to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” and “MacArthur Park”—became pop classics that evoke the aching places in the heart. Whether Webb
knew it or not then or not, love and loss have habitations and names, and
millions of listeners have responded overwhelmingly to his evocation of them in
the last half-century.
(The photo accompanying this post shows Glen
Campbell in 1969 on his Glen Campbell
Good Time Hour TV show.)
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