By
Peter Webb
This is a story
of a love affair. The lover is me.
My obsession is for Glen Campbell’s music—not his seventies
pop-country crossover hit “Rhinestone Cowboy,” but his
classic orchestra-tinged albums of the 1960s. I am un-cool but I
don’t care.
It began when I was a boy growing up in a tiny Quebec farming village.
My parents mostly favoured the rock ‘n roll and jazz albums
they had brought over with them from England in the mid-1960s. Among
them were things still widely considered hip today: The Beatles’s
Rubber Soul and Abbey Road, Dave Brubeck’s jazz masterpiece
Time Out, and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (containing the only
available version of his greatest hate song, “Positively Fourth
Street). These albums were the soundtrack of my youth.
Between all this hard-rocking, hard-swinging, hard-whinging stuff
was an album that these days would scarcely nudge the needle on
the hipness meter, but which I adored equally: Glen Campbell’s
By the Time I Get to Phoenix. I loved watching the rainbow ring
of the Capitol Records label spin on the turntable as—excuse
my gushing adjectives—thick skirls of orchestral strings wrapped
Glen Campbell’s wholesome tenor in a pastoral blanket of sound.
There was something simple yet magical about Glen’s interpretation
of heart-rending classics like Paul Simon’s “Homeward
Bound,” Ernest Tubb’s “Tomorrow Never Comes,”
and Jimmy Webb’s (no relation) impeccable title track about
lost love and a lonesome train.
But for all the—pardon the gushing noun—majesty of that
album, there was stiff competition another recording by Glen Campbell,
which came into the house at some later date in the form of a 45-inch
single.
That song, when I first heard it, crushed the velvet tones of the
entire By the Time I Get to Phoenix album into rawhide. The song
was “Wichita Lineman.”
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