Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

March 8, 2012

Glen Campbell Showed Me A Thing Or Two

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 7:16 pm

(I wrote but forgot to post this earlier!)

Jeff and I occasionally head up to Couer d’Alene or down to Lewiston to try our luck at the casinos, where twenty bucks can fuel a fun hour or so and only occasionally result in something big. “Big” for us means leaving with anything over, well, twenty dollars, and if we do really well — say, one of us makes $15 on Dragon’s Claw — we might even have lunch.

I’m aware that most of my readers find that surprising, and some might find it offensive as well. That’s fine. I don’t feel convicted, and it’s OK if you don’t come along. But had we not been down to the Clearwater River Casino in Lewiston a couple of weeks ago, we wouldn’t have know that Glen Campbell would be playing on one of the legs of the “goodbye tour” necessitated by his struggle with Alzheimers.

I was lukewarm about going; my tastes, even in country music, run a bit different, and the musical heroes of my youth were Dionne Warwick and Three Dog Night and the Four Tops, not Glen Campbell. But Jeff’s house was full of Glenn on the stereo, Glenn on the radio, and, briefly, Glen on the TV with his “Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour,” and so we got tickets, won four dollars, and crowded into the tent-like arena at one of the more spartan casinos we’ve experienced.

He opened with “Gentle On My Mind,” which I heard before but never really HEARD before, and I loved it. I sort of knew “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” and “Wichita Lineman” and the first four notes of “Galveston,” which appear as a sampler on every country music CD collection blaring from late-night TV, but only those were familiar. I had seen Glen in the original “True Grit,” playing a character impossible to really like, and I had heard of his past excesses and debaucheries and figured it only made his brand of pop-country cooler and more streetwise. And one of the misfortunes of growing up in a house whose primary religion was Liberal Politics was that we identified with ease who was “in” and who was “out” based on their politics. One too many pictures of Glen with Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, or appearing on a TV preacher’s show, made it unlikely that his music would ever get a hearing in my house growing up.

In short, I wasn’t a fan. Not before the show, at least.

But I sure left as one.

His patter with the audience sometimes revealed his struggles with memory and cognition, and a couple of times he needed a reminder of what song came next. He was surrounded by his three children from his current marriage — all talented musicians in their own right, and all very gentle and non-patronizing of their Daddy. When he bantered with the audience, he faltered a bit, and there was a cringeworthy moment when he announced that he had to go to the bathroom and walked off the stage.

But when he sang, he sang with clarity, passion, and strength — and when he played, he played with gusto, tremendous skill, and energy that belied his age and his health. He never missed a word of the dozen or so songs he sang during his hour-long show, and he took on some guitar solos that blew me away. The guy’s in his seventies and has Alzheimer’s and yet played with more poise and more skill than I’ve heard in a lifetime of rock concerts and decades of 45s, cassettes, and CDs. He was clearly delighted to be on stage, and I was absolutely delighted to be in the audience watching him.

Glen Campbell’s music bears further exploration, clearly — but his character and courage were crystal-clear and rock-solid. The guy can sing, the guy can play, and the guy wrestling with the ravages of time and mind clearly, with a guitar in his hand, hasn’t lost a beat. “Gentle On My Mind” now joins the embarrassingly long list of songs that make me cry. It was a joy to be there, however late it is that I got to the party.

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