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It is either fashionable to praise Glen Campbell’s recently released and ironically titled Meet Glen Campbell, or in fact I am completely off base here and it is truly an admirable work. I have yet to read even a slightly negative review of this “re-introduction” of the 72-year old Glen Campbell to a new and obviously younger (I suppose) audience—and perhaps reconnect with those who loved hits such as “Wichita Lineman” or “Gentle on My Mind” in the late 1960’s and early 1970s. The Hatch-Show-Print looking cover of Meet Glen Campbell possesses a slightly hip, yet still old-fashioned look: the perfect graphic illustration, one presumes, of what this release is all about. It’s about a long-dormant legend being acknowledged for his past and at the same time praised for his being artistically relevant, still.
On one level, it may accomplish all of that, certainly the former (giving props to a brilliant past). But it is, sadly, not very compelling, which is to say it’s not so great an effort. In fact, I don’t think much of it is even worthy of release.
Now, it’s sometimes too easy to criticize and even to veer into condescension—especially when the target is relevance itself, as in such and such a legend wants to re-prove himself or herself to the listening world, as if that’s important. It may be, for certain artists. I don’t think it’s necessarily the case for Glen Campbell, even though it’s clearly his right to record and release anything he chooses. It’s not necessary in my mind because Campbell has nothing more to prove, and the possible rewards outweigh the considerable risks—chiefly, that your efforts will merely come up short and remind all of us of what made you so good in the first place, which is sadly absent now: or put it this way, the artistic and cultural milieu that you thrived in simply does not exist and you are not a strong enough artist now to set free that long-ago bottled up genie.
Certain artists are able to pull “hear-me-now” rabbits out of the hat, but they are few and mostly they are defined by the legendary status they created in their earlier years—and that usually has to do with an authenticity that is nearly impossible (at least for me) to articulate—or by never truly having vanished at all in the first place.
Johnny Cash, whose career essentially died in the 1980s, did indeed reinvent and significantly enlarge his stature when he connected with Rick Rubin and released, over time, five albums that were revelatory—is this the Cash who sang “A Boy Named Sue,” the song many people, amazingly, only knew him for?—because those discs were aggressively out of type for the Man in Black, and because Cash proved to be a brilliant interpreter of songs by Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails, and who would have ever guessed that? Plus, they all reminded us that this was the man who recorded “Walk the Line” and “Ring of Fire.”
No one needs to be reminded of Carlos Santana’s neat trick. His hiatus from the music scene was shorter (10 years, give or take) than Cash’s, but no one much cared anymore for 1969’s “Evil Ways,” even though it still shows up on FM radio with amazing regularity. In 1999 Santana, cannily, pulled together a current generation of musicians and released Supernatural, easily the biggest selling work of his career—an eight-Grammy producing work that, for Santana himself, was a personal, if not musical triumph. (“Smooth,” the most popular song off the disc, is actually the worst, but what can you do?)
One last example: Charlie Louvins, who last year released a self-titled work in the Santana vein, enlisting support from such artists as George Jones, Jeff Tweedy, and the luminous Tift Merritt. It worked, and praise be to Louvins for knowing precisely how to pick his friends.
Glen Campbell, on the other hand, doesn’t choose the route of getting other artists to help him out, and that, to some extent, is to his credit. He does opt for the cover song approach, and here his selection of titles is questionable.
On Meet Glen Campbell, the man who sang “Rhinestone Cowboy” covers, among others, John Lennon (“Grow Old with Me”); Jackson Browne (“These Days”); U2 (“All I Want is You”); Foo Fighters (“Times Like These”) and Paul Westerberg (“Sadly Beautiful). If Campbell were a distinctly country singer, which he is not, perhaps he’d bring the same alarming reinterpretation to “Sadly Beautiful” that Cash did to Trent Reznor’s “Hurt.” Combine a legitimately country, white-man-blues sensibility with Reznor’s gleaming nihilism and you have the only version of “Hurt” that really matters anymore, in all deference to Reznor.
Campbell, though, was not a country artist, even though that’s where you will find him in record stores (if you can find one of those). He was always associated with country music and he’d likely (or maybe not) place himself in that category. But it’s simply not true.
Every hit Campbell ever had had a pop underpinning, around which he would inject just this or that much of a country hint. He was Garth Brooks (although Brooks is more “true” country) before Brooks was even a record exec’s dream: just enough country to satisfy listeners who may have become too “sophisticated” for George Jones, still want a nominal roots component in their music, and yet who also require the buoyancy of a good pop song. Campbell could sing “Wichita Lineman” all day long—a song with pure country content—but it still showed up on the Top 40 because it had a larger audience than Haggard could ever muster. That’s not a criticism of Campbell at all; it’s just that his “I-can-be-hip attempt” lacks the artistic leap that Cash’s did.
So: to cover the likes of Green Day—“Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)"—is, first, to cover a song that does not need another interpretation, and it’s not a great stretch for Campbell. He does not add anything to the original. On none of the songs on Meet Glen Campbell does Campbell really bring anything new to the original. If it sounds like I’m saying he should have done a Hank Williams tribute that’s not entirely true, but neither is it altogether inaccurate. You would expect Campbell to stretch himself here, and he simply does not.
Add to this the over production of Meet Glen Campbell: Orchestration abounds, and it becomes tiresome after about song number three (which by the way is Tom Petty’s “Angel Dream”). This is all put together with the best of intentions, and Campbell is an important artist, but Meet Glen Campbell does not work. It ends up sounding generic and hollow. (For what it’s worth, Campbell would do better, in my opinion, to release an album that shows off his very excellent guitar-playing skills.)
Meet Glen Campbell doesn’t do what its creators hoped—burnish the elderly Campbell’s reputation—and that’s unfortunate. With different intentions and goals, a new “good” Glen Campbell record, of which there are many, would be welcome indeed. And there’s no doubt he could still make one.
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