It was the great F. Scott Fitzgerald who, probably after one too many gin rickey at his favorite bar, The Willard, declared that “there are no second acts in American life.” It turned out that Fitzgerald wasn’t much of a fortune teller and the half-hears theory of him has been disproved many times since, but Glen Travis Campbell, knocking 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 prophecy. Campbell was out of luck, she hadn’t had a top 40 hit since “Dream Baby” in ’71, her syndicated TV show with CBS had been pulled from the air in ’72, and her latest marriage was suddenly on the rocks. He was starting to look like a three-time loser. This was only 1974, after all, and he was still over a year away from his unlikely reincarnation as the “Rhinestone Cowboy.”
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 music collective, The Wrecking Crew; a group of incomparable session musicians who played on dozens of landmark recordings in the early 1960s. Among the many milestones are the Righteous Brothers’ maudlin masterpiece “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” the Monkees’ teen trauma “I’m a Believer” and Sinatra’s swan song “Strangers in the Night.” . Campbell also cemented more than a few bricks of Phil Spector’s palatial ‘Wall of Sound’ before the rise of the Beatles brought it down. Undeterred, he jumped on the Beach Boys’ pop bandwagon, as the touring stand-in for a world-weary Brian Wilson. In the Kingdom of Pop, that amounts to studying the Son of God. Campbell stayed in the fold when the Messiah returned and stayed long enough to play bass on the historic Pet Sounds.
Although he had signed on in 1965, with an unlikely version of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s anti-war melodrama “Universal Soldier” (Campbell supported the war in Vietnam), it was not until he recorded John Hartford’s award-winning “Gentle on my Mind” Grammy. in 1967 that really crashed the Pop party. He soon forged an unlikely relationship with self-proclaimed hippie Jimmy Webb, who was in the process of penning a succession of superb 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 immeasurable power to loosen tear ducts.
For a while, Campbell was on easy street: a succession of Grammy Awards and Gold Records, Oscar-winning TV shows and movies followed in his footsteps, but as the ’70s wore on, the troubadour began to lose his touch. of Midas. Even Jimmy Webb’s personal gold mine of heartbreaking ballads had paid off: Their 1974 collaboration, “Reunion: The Songs of Jimmy Webb,” was left empty in the desperate search for a hit single.
Campbell needed a break and he got it. Jimmy Webb had often commented on Campbell’s uncanny ability to identify a surefire hit on the first audition, and on that three-week tour of Australia he had kept playing one song over and over again. “Rhinestone Cowboy” had been written and recorded by Larry Weiss, a songwriter trying to break out of the minor leagues, and producer Dennis Lambert caught Campbell’s eye after both Elvis and Neil Diamond turned it down. The song reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart in September 1975 and also topped the Country chart that 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 also reached the top of the Country chart, another first for Campbell.
“Rhinestone Cowboy” opens, as required by the first unwritten law of song sequencing, with its second-best track. Written especially to reflect Campbell’s sorry state of mind, by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, “Country Boy (You Got Your Feet in LA)” may be an all-too-familiar tale of a farmer seduced by the big city, but Campbell infuses it with with a real sense of self and his ‘on the money’ voice confirms an unshakable faith in his deeply personal lyrics. “Comeback,” another ballad tailored for 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 new determination to conquer his demons and resurrect his career.
“Count On Me” finds Lambert and Potter and, by extension, Campbell himself in a self-indulgent mood, as he promises undying love to the girl who has broken his heart. Buoyed by smooth Sid Sharp strings and a full-throated catchy chorus, Campbell somehow musters 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 make it off the runway. The nostalgia feels a bit forced here, and even Campbell’s steady delivery can’t dispel the air of slow melancholy that permeates the song.
Had the album continued in this vein of soul-searching, however, Campbell might have delivered one of pop’s great concept albums, a country Astral Weeks or a star-studded Blood on The Tracks. The reflective mood, however, is fatally undermined by the inclusion of Smokey Robinson and Ronald White’s soul standard, ‘My Girl’. Campbell, unsurprisingly, handles the number in a thoroughly professional manner, but after hearing the irrepressible Otis Redding knock this song out of the park, he wouldn’t have volunteered me to bat next! Despite the accomplished voice, the end result is nothing more than a pale imitation of Redding’s classic version. Looks like someone put too much water in the whiskey!
“Rhinestone Cowboy” is, without a doubt, the album’s emotional magnet. While it may not be the flawless ‘Wichita Lineman’, there’s no denying that, under the right circumstances, it can elicit a self-pitying tear and a lump in your throat as you sing along with Campbell on that super-sized chorus –
“Like a rhinestone cowboy / Riding a horse in a star-studded rodeo / Like a rhinestone cowboy / Getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know / And offers on the phone.”
On paper, “Rhinestone Cowboy” seems like a hackneyed tale: the works of a country boy drawn to bright lights and the big city; however, Campbell has a lot to work with in the form of insightful and evocative lyrics:
“I’ve been walking these streets so long / Singing the same old song / I know every crack in these dirty Broadway sidewalks / Where the name of the game rushes / And the good boys get washed away like snow and rain.”
Campbell plays it straight, delivering the ‘western’ lyrics with all the poise and purpose of a Shakespearean actor.
Time can be ruthless with a certain type of song, only with this type of song, in fact. The kind of song sung by a man in an ultra-white beaded suit, the kind of suit that not even Jay Gatsby in his Cotton Club pomp would have ever dreamed of wearing. Yet “Rhinestone Cowboy” transcends time and place, transcends our sick obsession with image, transcends its source material, transcends even the supposed wisdom of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a star-studded song and I guess it will orbit the rock ‘n’ roll sky forever.
As soon as we hit the album’s climax, we’re brought back down to earth with a bang, courtesy of a couple of mundane ballads. “I’d Build a Bridge” is a clichéd love song that left me a little queasy before its sad ending, while “Pencils For Sale” is a plow from the start and not even a burst of whistling at the end of the song. song (usually a sign of despair) can save this maudlin and disappointing ballad.
Fortunately, Randy Newman rides as cavalry to Glen’s rescue. Campbell’s performance of “Marie” not only reminds us how truly wonderful Newman is as a songwriter, it also serves to remind us how good a singer Campbell can be when he puts his heart and soul into it. Recalling making 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 art and the name to make it really cool.” “Marie” is testament to that, as is the album’s close, a cover of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s “We’re Over,” a searingly realistic breakup song. Tom Sellers’ arrangement is just the right side of grand and this allows Campbell to give a measured and understated interpretation of very fine lyrics.
Since this is the 40th Anniversary Edition, the folks at Capitol have added five bonus tracks for good measure. These include remixes of “Country Boy” and “Rhinestone Cowboy” and, most interestingly, the quirky “Record Collectors Dream” and, best of all, “Coming Home”, a rather nice track that I haven’t seen before. Released as a single in Japan in 1975, it has a naively infectious “Shiny Happy People” feel from which Campbell extracts every last drop:
“I’m coming home to meet my brother/we’re coming home to each other/we need to meet now.”
Forty years later, it’s hard not to see “Rhinestone Cowboy” as a missed opportunity. The album’s producers, Lambert and Potter, had a keen sense of the aesthetic environment that would inspire Campbell, which would strike a chord with him and compel him to buckle down. However, his quartet of custom songs only served to set a standard that the rest of the album failed to meet. Although the album ends strongly, with a couple of perfectly executed covers, it is in the central part, despite the gigantic presence of “Rhinestone Cowboy” himself, where the album loses its way. With a Mickey Newbury cover here or there, say the harrowing “San Francisco Mabel Joy” or the wistful “Frisco Depot,” “Rhinestone Cowboy” could have been an imaginatively thought-out concept album, Urban Cowboy (and there aren’t too many of those in anyone’s record collection!) Ultimately, however, Lambert and Potter did not have the courage of their convictions.