#Ultras with shiny tears/blood/water is so aesthetic

[chipsncookies]

😢

[pardontheglueman]

Glen Campbell - Rhinestone Cowboy

It was the great F. Scott Fitzgerald who, probably after one gin rickey too many at his favourite watering hole, The Willard, famously declared that ‘there are no second acts in American lives’. Fitzgerald, as it turns out, wasn’t much of a fortune teller and his half-baked theory has since been disproved many times over, but for Glen Travis Campbell, pummeling yet another bottle of rum into submission in the backseat of his tour-bus as it snaked through the Australian moonlight, those ominous words must have seemed like his own personal prophesy. Campbell was down on his luck, he hadn’t had a top forty hit since “Dream Baby” in ‘71, his syndicated T.V show with CBS had been pulled from the airwaves in ‘72 and his latest marriage was suddenly on the rocks. He was starting to look like a three-time loser. After all, this was only 1974 and his improbable re-incarnation as the “Rhinestone Cowboy” was still more than a year away.

The first act in Campbell’s remarkable life story, began when he made a name for himself as an ace guitarist with the now legendary Los Angeles musical collective, The Wrecking Crew; a bunch of peerless session musicians who played on scores of landmark recordings throughout the early sixties. Amongst the many milestones were the Righteous Brothers maudlin masterpiece, “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”, the Monkees teen-trauma “I’m a Believer” and Sinatra’s semi- swansong, “Strangers in the Night”. Campbell also cemented together more than a few bricks in Phil Spector’s palatial ‘Wall of Sound’ before the rise of the Beatles brought it tumbling down. Undeterred, he clambered onto the Beach Boys pop bandwagon, as the touring stand-in for a world-weary Brian Wilson. In the Kingdom of Pop, that’s tantamount to understudying the Son of God. Campbell remained in the fold when the Messiah returned and stuck around long enough to play bass on the historic Pet Sounds.

Although he’d charted in 1965, with an unlikely cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s pacifist melodrama “Universal Soldier” (Campbell supported the war in Vietnam), it wasn’t until he recorded John Hartford’s Grammy Award-winning “Gentle on my Mind” in 1967 that he truly crashed Pop’s party. He soon forged an improbable relationship with self-avowed hippie Jimmy Webb, who was in the process of penning a succession of magnificent country-pop ballads that would ultimately launch Campbell on the road to international Stardom. “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, “Galveston” and, of course, “Wichita Lineman” remain pure examples of pop’s incommensurable faculty for loosening the tear ducts.

For a while Campbell was on easy street – a succession of Grammy’s and gold records, T.V shows and Oscar-winning films, followed in his footsteps, but as the Seventies slipped by, the troubadour began to lose his Midas touch. Even Jimmy Webb’s personal goldmine of heart-breaking ballads had panned out – their 1974 collaboration, “Reunion: The Songs of Jimmy Webb”, came up empty in the desperate search for a hit single.

Campbell needed a break and he got one. Jimmy Webb had often remarked on Campbell’s uncanny knack for identifying a sure-fire hit on first hearing and on that three-week tour of Australia he’d kept playing a song over and over again. “Rhinestone Cowboy” had been written and recorded by Larry Weiss, a songwriter trying to pitch his way out of the minor leagues and was brought to Campbell’s attention by producer Dennis Lambert after both Elvis and Neil Diamond had turned it down. The song reached No1 on the Billboard chart in September of 1975 and also topped the Country chart the same week, becoming the first single to achieve the ultimate crossover since 1961, when Jimmy Dean did the double with “Big Bad John”. The album went to the top of the Country chart too, another first for Campbell.

“Rhinestone Cowboy” opens, as the first unwritten law of song sequencing demands, with its second best track. Written especially to reflect Campbell’s parlous state of mind, by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, “Country Boy (You Got Your Feet in LA)” may be an over-familiar tale of a farm boy seduced by the big city, but Campbell infuses it with a real sense of self and his ‘on the money’ vocal confirms an unshakeable faith in the songs deeply personal lyric. “Comeback”, another tailor-made ballad by Lambert and Potter allows Campbell to be more philosophical as he stands at the crossroads of life, “I wrote the book on self- preservation / I’m a firm believer in my peace of mind” he sings with a newfound determination to conquer his demons and resurrect his career.

“Count On Me” finds Lambert and Potter and, by extension, Campbell himself in a forgiving frame of mind, as he pledges undying love to the girl who’s broken his heart. Encouraged by Sid Sharp’s gentle strings, and a catchy, full-throated chorus, Campbell somehow summons up an air of genuine nobility in defeat.

Lambert and Potter’s fourth and final contribution, “I Miss You Tonight” is a rather solemn ballad that doesn’t quite get off the runway. The nostalgia feels a little forced here, and even Campbell’s steadfast delivery can’t dispel the air of sluggish melancholia that pervades the song.

Nevertheless, if the album had continued in this soul-searching vein Campbell might have delivered one of pop’s great concept albums, a countrified Astral Weeks, or a star-spangled Blood on The Tracks. The reflective mood, however, is undermined fatally by the inclusion of Smokey Robinson and Ronald White’s soul-standard, ‘My Girl’. Campbell, as one would expect, handles the number in an entirely professional way, but after hearing the irrepressible Otis Redding knock this song clean out of the ballpark I wouldn’t have volunteered to be next up to bat! Despite the accomplished vocal, the end result is no more than a pale imitation of Redding’s classic version. It sounds like someone put a little too much water in the whiskey!

Suit courtesy of Manuel Cuevas AKA the Rhinestone Rembrandt

“Rhinestone Cowboy” is, without doubt, the emotional lodestone of the album. Whilst it might fall short of the unimpeachable ‘Wichita Lineman’, there’s no denying that, under the right circumstances, it can bring a self-pitying tear to the eye and a lump to the throat as you sing along with Campbell on that super-sized chorus –

“Like a rhinestone cowboy / riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo / like a rhinestone cowboy/getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know"..

On paper “Rhinestone Cowboy” seems a hackneyed tale - the travails of a country boy drawn to the bright lights and the big city - however, Campbell has plenty to work within the shape of an insightful, evocative lyric –

“I’ve been walking these streets so long / Singing the same old song / I know every crack in these dirty sidewalks of Broadway / Where hustles the name of the game / And nice guys get washed away like the snow and the rain”.

Campbell plays it dead straight and he delivers the ‘western’ lyric with all the poise and purpose of a Shakespearean actor.

Time can be unkind to a certain kind of song, just this kind of song, as a matter of fact. The kind of song sung by a man sporting an ultra-white rhinestone suit, the kind of suit that not even Jay Gatsby in his Cotton Club pomp would ever have dreamed of wearing. “Rhinestone Cowboy”, though, transcends time and place, transcends our sickly obsession with image, transcends its source material, transcends even the supposed wisdom of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a starry-eyed song and my guess is that it will continue to orbit rock ‘n’ roll heaven forever.

No sooner have we reached the album’s highpoint than we’re brought back down to earth with a bump, courtesy of a pair of mundane ballads. “I’d Build a Bridge” is a clichéd love song that left me more than a little queasy before its sorry end, while “Pencils For Sale” is laboured from the word go and not even an outbreak of whistling at the songs close (usually a sign of desperation) can salvage this schmaltzy, underwhelming ballad.

Thankfully, Randy Newman rides like the cavalry to Glen’s rescue. Campbell’s interpretation of “Marie” not only reminds us of what a truly wonderful composer Newman is, but it also serves to remind us just how good a singer Campbell could be when he put his heart and soul into it. Recalling the making of the album for the Guardian in 2013, Dennis Lambert summed it up this way “If we could bring something special to the table, he had the artistry and a name to make it really great”. “Marie” is a testament to that, as is the album’s closer, a cover of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s “We’re Over” a scathingly realistic break–up song. Tom Sellers’ arrangement is just the right side of grand and this allows Campbell to give a measured, understated interpretation of a very fine lyric.

As this is the 40th Anniversary Edition, the folks at Capitol have thrown in five bonus tracks for good measure. These include remixes of “Country Boy” and “Rhinestone Cowboy” and more interestingly the quirky “Record Collectors Dream” and, best of all, “Coming Home” a rather likable track that I hadn’t come across before. Released as a single in Japan back in 1975, it has a naively infectious, “Shiny Happy People” feel to it that Campbell wrings every last drop out of –

“Coming home to meet my brother / we’re coming home to one another / we gotta get to know each other now”.

Forty years on, it’s difficult not to see “Rhinestone Cowboy” as something of a missed opportunity. The album’s producers, Lambert and Potter, had a keen sense of the aesthetic environment that would inspire Campbell, that would strike a chord with him and force him to buckle down. However, their quartet of custom-built songs served only to set a standard that the rest of the album failed to live up to. Although the record finishes strongly, with a pair of perfectly realised covers, it’s in the middle section, despite the gigantic presence of “Rhinestone Cowboy” itself, that the album loses its way. With a Mickey Newbury cover here or there, say the heart-rending “ San Francisco Mabel Joy“ or the wistful “Frisco Depot”, “Rhinestone Cowboy” could have been an imaginatively thought through Urban Cowboy concept album (and there aren’t too many of those in anyone’s record collection!) Ultimately, though, Lambert and Potter didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions.