Glen Campbell - "(Back Home Again in) Indiana"

Hello Friends,

Last Glen Campbell post for this week, friends!

Once again, we're repeatedly amazed at what a great guitarist this guy was!

Play it, Glen!

Glen Campbell - "Gentle on My Mind"

Still mourning the loss of Mr. Glen Campbell this week friends.

In addition to that buttery baritone, people often overlook the fact that Campbell could absolutely shred on the guitar.

Check out the solo on this live performance of "Gentle on My Mind"... wowsa!

RIP Glen Campbell!

Aww man!  Even though we pretty much saw this one coming, it doesn't make us feel any better about it!

Lost one of the greats today!

Here's a great tribute courtesy of RollingStone.com.  

Glen Campbell, the indelible voice behind 21 Top 40 hits including "Rhinestone Cowboy," "Wichita Lineman" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," died Tuesday. He was 81. A rep for Universal Music Group, Campbell's record label, confirmed the singer's death to Rolling Stone. During a career that spanned six decades, Campbell sold over 45 million records. In 1968, one of his biggest years, he outsold the Beatles.

"It is with the heaviest of hearts that we announce the passing of our beloved husband, father, grandfather, and legendary singer and guitarist, Glen Travis Campbell, at the age of 81, following his long and courageous battle with Alzheimer's disease," the singer's family said in a statement.

Campbell was a rare breed in the music business, with various careers as a top-level studio guitarist, chart-topping singer and hit television host. His late-career battle with Alzheimer's - he allowed a documentary crew to film on his final tour for the 2014 award-winning I'll Be Me - made him a public face for the disease, a role President Bill Clinton suggested would one day be remembered even more than his music.

"He had that beautiful tenor with a crystal-clear guitar sound, playing lines that were so inventive," Tom Petty told Rolling Stone during a 2011 profile of Campbell. "It moved me."

Campbell was born in 1936 in Billstown, Arkansas, the seventh son in a sharecropping family of 12 kids. "We used to watch TV by candlelight," Campbell told Rolling Stone in 2011.

In his youth, Campbell started playing guitar and became obsessed with jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. He dropped out of school when he was 14 and moved to Wyoming with an uncle who was a musician, playing gigs together at rural bars. He soon moved to Los Angeles and by 1962 had solidified a spot in the Wrecking Crew, a group of session pros. In 1963 alone, he appeared on 586 cuts and countless more throughout the decade, including the Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man," Elvis Presley's "Viva Las Vegas,” Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried" and the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling." 

"I’d have to pick cotton for a year to make what I'd make in a week in L.A.," he said. "I learned it was crucial to play right on the edge of the beat ... It makes you drive the song more. You're ahead of the beat, but you're not." Fellow Wrecking Crew member Leon Russell called Campbell "the best guitar player I'd heard before or since. Occasionally we'd play with 50- or 60-piece orchestras. His deal was he didn't read [music], so they would play it one time for him, and he had it."

In late 1964, Brian Wilson had a nervous breakdown on tour with the Beach Boys, and the band called on Campbell to replace him on bass and high harmonies. "I took Brian's place and that was just ... I was in heaven then – hog heaven!" Campbell remarked.

"He fit right in," said Wilson. "His main forte is he's a great guitar player, but he's even a better singer than all the rest. He could sing higher than I could!" Wilson even wrote an early song, "I Guess I'm Dumb," for Campbell. His first hit was a cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie's antiwar song "Universal Soldier." But Campbell's own political views tended to be conservative. "The people who are advocating burning draft cards should be hung," he said in 1965.

Campbell had his first major hit in 1967, with "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," written by Jimmy Webb, an L.A. kid with a knack for intricate ballads. "Glen's vocal power and technique was the perfect vehicle for these, in a way, very sentimental and romantic songs. And I think that you know we made some records that were very nearly perfect. 'Wichita Lineman' is a very near perfect pop record," Webb said. "I think in the process that Glen was a prime mover in the whole creation of the country crossover phenomenon that made the careers of Kenny Rogers and some other... many other artists possible."

The tune kicked off a working relationship that included the haunting Vietnam War ballad "Galveston," the tender "Gentle on My Mind" and "Wichita Lineman," Campbell's first Top 10 hit. With swelling orchestral arrangements and slick production, the songs weren't exactly considered hip in the Sixties. "They felt packaged for a middle-of-the-road, older crowd," said Tom Petty. "At first, you go, 'Oh, I don't know about that.' But it was such pure, good stuff that you had to put off your prejudices and learn to love it. It taught me not to have those prejudices." In 1968, Campbell won Grammys in both the country and pop categories, including Best Country & Western Solo Vocal Performance, Male, Best Country & Western Song and Best Vocal Performance, Male.

In the summer of 1968, Campbell guest hosted the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The successful appearance led to his own variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, which he hosted from 1969 until 1972. Artists like Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and Linda Ronstadt performed on the show, which also gave a national platform to rising country stars like Willie Nelson. "He exposed us to a big part of the world that would have never had the chance to see us," said Nelson. "He's always been a big help to me."

A young Steve Martin was a writer on the show. “He just went along with it," Martin said in I'll Be Me. "He was completely game, and completely fun, and had kind of a down-home sense of humor. It was just an incredible treat for us young writers to be introduced to talent at that level at such a young age.”

Campbell's boyish charisma led John Wayne to cast him in a co-starring role in 1969's True Grit. He later said that his acting was so amateurish that he "gave John Wayne that push to win the Academy Award." But the good times didn't last: His show was canceled; his first feature film, 1970's Norwood, flopped; and the hits dried up for a few years. Then, Campbell scored a smash with 1975's "Rhinestone Cowboy." It began a comeback that included hits "Country Boy (You Got Your Feet in L.A.") and "Southern Nights." The hits slowed down again in the Eighties; in the Nineties he opened up the Glen Campbell Goodtime Theatre in Branson, Missouri.

Campbell was married four times, and has five sons and three daughters. In the early 1980s, while battling alcoholism and cocaine addiction, Campbell made tabloid headlines with a 15-month, high-profile relationship with country singer Tanya Tucker, who was 22 years his junior. In 1981, he became a born-again Christian and in 1982 he married Kimberly Woollen, a Radio City Music Hall Rockette, who helped Campbell clean up his life.

In 2003, he was arrested for a hit-and-run, an incident that ended with him allegedly kneeing a police officer in the thigh right before he was released. Campbell pleaded guilty to extreme drunken driving and leaving the scene of an accident, and spent 10 days in jail.

In 2011, Campbell, then 75, revealed that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In June of that year, he announced he was retiring from music due to the disease. He released his final album of original music Ghost on the Canvas(with guests Billy Corgan, Paul Westerberg and Jakob Dylan) and embarked on a farewell tour with three of his children backing him.

He played 151 shows on his final tour. "The audience being there somehow triggers his ability to access that other part of his brain," U2's The Edge said. "It's incredible."

"This tour of his just says, 'Here I am, here’s what’s happening to me,'" Clinton said. "'I'm going out with a smile on my face and a song in my heart so you will know,' - and that may be more of his enduring legacy than all the music he made."

He spent his final years in an assisted living facility. His friends and children would often spend days with him playing him his old songs. "Music utilizes all of the brain, not just one little section of it," Woollen noted. "Everything's firing all at once. It's really stimulating and probably helped him plateau and not progress as quickly as he might have. I could tell from his spirits that it was good for him. It made him really happy. It was good for the whole family to continue touring and to just keep living our lives. And we hope it encourages other people to do the same."

Earlier this year, Campbell released Adiós, his final studio album, a collection of mainly cover songs by Bob Dylan, Harry Nilsson and others, recorded after his Goodbye Tour. "Almost every time he sat down with a guitar, these were his go-to songs," daughter Ashley Campbell told Rolling Stone Country. "They were very much engrained in his memory – like, so far back that they were one of the last things he started losing."

"He had a beautiful singing voice," Bruce Springsteen said in 2014. "Pure tone. And it was never fancy. Wasn't singing all over the place. It was simple on the surface but there was a world of emotion underneath." 

Genesis - "Fly on a Windshield / The Carpet Crawlers" Live (1976)

Hello Friends,

Here's a live clip of a Gabriel-less Genesis performing a couple of songs from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

By 1976, Phil Collins took over lead vocal duties for the band while still playing drums.

On this tour, they recruited none other than Bill Bruford as a second drummer to back up Collins when he stepped out from behind the set.

They're definitely NOT the same band without Gabriel, but (a) they were still REALLY good, (b) there's not a lot of good quality footage of the band with Gabriel on TLLDOB tour and (c) Peter Gabriel really never did that many Genesis songs on any of his solo tours!

Enjoy!

Prog Rock Saturday: The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway

Genesis - "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" (1974) - Atco

Hello Friends,

We've got a true prog-rock classic on the turntable tonight.

Genesis's 1974 double LP of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway arguably captures one of the great bands of the seventies at their absolute apex.

The process of writing, recording and touring for the record would nearly break the band and, in fact, would cause frontman Peter Gabriel to depart once the "Lamb" tour commenced.  Out, Angel, Out.

This is a crazed, bombastic, overly-ambitious affair that on paper probably shouldn't work at all.  However, it was an important album of the era and holds up today as a classic. Actually, we think this album even gets better listening to it over the years.  Revisiting it from time-to-time is like checking in on an old friend: familiar, yet distant.

Every time we listen to this record, we hear something we've never realized was there before!

There's a storyline going through the album, which to be honest, we don't really understand or care too much about.  Something about a Puerto Rican hoodlum, Rael, who while spray painting graffiti on some building in downtown New York stops and witnesses a literal lamb lying down in the middle of Broadway.  Some sort of portal opens up and Rael ends up in some underground/alternate world trying to save his brother, John.   Most of the songs vaguely describe the events, creatures and characters witnesses during Rael's "descent" and all winds up good(?) when Rael finally saves his brother from drowning and realizes that, the whole time, he and his brother were the same person.  Upon this sudden realization, Rael/John's spirit/consciousness melts away and he becomes part of his surroundings.

Definitely weird.  Whitman-esque.  Lynchian to boot. And there's more than a few hints that it might be Gabriel trying to work out some of his one schizophrenic tendencies.

We try not to get too bogged down in the specifics of the concept.  The star of the record is without a doubt Gabriel's vocals.

As with most of Gabriel-era Genesis, he can simultaneously emote whimsy, confidence, intelligence, slyness, cleverness, while all the time sounding somehow extremely vulnerable, human and unsure.  Like Ziggy Stardust (or a Replicant), he's like an alien to this world that appears to be more human than human.  Its like he's in on some mastermind "in joke" that we're all struggling to understand, but the twist is that he's as clueless and ignorant as the rest of us!

He's a Messiah & Everyman.  A prophet & popstar.  A headbanger and a folk singer.  

The music is nothing to sneer at either.  Mike Rutherford, Phil Collins, Tony Banks and Steve Hackett provide Gabriel with an equally as weird, bombastic and ambitious canvas to work with musically.  (Even Brian Eno makes an appearance with some vocal treatments!)  Throughout the 22 songs, the band achieves a near perfect balance between the soft & sublime and the over-the-top, hard-edged cacophony.  

For all its overt weirdness and avant-garde concepts, there's actually a good number of songs that you can really pound your fists to.  The opening title track, "Cuckoo Cocoon", "The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging" & "Carpet Crawlers" could all have been songs on Cheap Trick, Wire or Guided by Voices records.  "Counting Out Time" is one of the power poppiest songs of the mid-70's.

The album's momentous closing track, "It", teeters very closely to a dance-disco track but actually wouldn't sound entirely out of place on a later period Flaming Lips record.  

Like any great, important piece of music (or work of art) those who create it do so and leave it up to us, the audience, the fans, to make heads or tails of things.  They provide an outline, a road map, but the themes and lessons are up for personal interpretation. Is this a parable of a man trying to navigate his way through the music industry?  Is it about a struggle with drug-addiction?  A religious experience? An ode to America, more specifically, New York City in the 1970's? Is it ultimately a tale about sexual frustration? Schizophrenia? Madness?  Is it a lot of stream-of-consciousness nonsense?  A combination of all of these things?  

(Personally, I always sort of pictured this punk kid doing some graffiti art when he's literally distracted by a small lamb crossing busy Broadway.  Mesmerized, and thinking he's imagining it, he goes to approach the lying lamb street and BOOM he's run over by a passing taxi!  The rest of the album is the character's spiritual journey through Hades, Heaven or wherever.)

Whatever the consensus, at the end of the day, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is a rock & roll record.  Sure, it appears to be something that's much bigger than the sum of its parts, but its the dozens of amazing hooks throughout the record that keep us coming back for more and more!

'Cos its only knock & knowall, but I like it...

RATING: 5 carpet crawlers heed their callers out of 5

Three Dog Night - "Liar" (1970)

Still holds up.

Pretty amazing song featuring Danny Hutton on lead vocals.

Enjoy!

Naturally...

Three Dog Night - "Naturally" (1970) - Dunhill

Hello Friends,

Naturally is Three Dog Night's fifth record.  Not a great record, but certainly not terrible.

For the most part definitely sounds dated and, at its worst, sounds like a bunch of white guys trying to sound soulful.

Except for the side one instrumental, "Fire Eater" the album is comprised completely of cover songs.  (Actually, we believe all of this band's hits were either cover songs or written by non-band members.  The band became a sort of proving grounds for lots of burgeoning songwriters of the era-- including Bernie Taupin, Leo Sayer, Harry Nilsson, Paul Williams, Laura Nyro, etc.)

The Hoyt Axton-penned, "Joy to the World" was obviously the big hit from this record, but our album winner is without a doubt their take on the Russ Ballard song, "Liar"-- a rollicking, bad ass, sort of sleazy early 70's anthem.

This song is amazing and heads-and-shoulders beyond anything else on the LP.  (With covers of Spooky Tooth's "I've Got Enough Heartache" and Free's creepy "I'll Be Creeping" a distant second and third.)

And yes, friends, that's the same Russ Ballard who wrote the songs "New York Groove" & "God Gave Rock & Roll To You"!

Fun Fact: Hey kids, a three-dog night is an expression that originated in the Australian outback referring the to the temperature at night.  A one dog night is cool.  A two dog night is cold.  A three dog night is fucking freezing and you will therefore need three dogs to sleep in the tent with you.  Crikey!

RATING: 3.5 fishes in the deep blue see out of 5

Roger Waters - "Wait for Her" (2017)

Hello Friends,

Sure ol' Rog still seems like a huge prick, but his newest record, "Is This The Life We Really Want" seems to be pretty darned good!

Spoiler Alert: He doesn't seem to be a fan of Donald Trump. Yeesh!

Enjoy!

Roger Miller - "Oo-De-Lally" (1973)

Feeling nostalgic on this Summer afternoon.

Listen to this song enough times, friends, and its bound to drive you nuts.

Kind of like Mairzy Doats.