Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me
by ballybeg
…you’re movin’ on the back roads, By the rivers of my memory, Ever smilin’, ever gentle on my mind.
In the 1960s, Glen Campbell was the most sought after session guitarist in the industry. He played for the recordings of every singer and group you could name: Sinatra, Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Stevie Wonder, The Monkees, and dozens of others. For two years he was a Beach Boy. With the wildly-popular, 1967 Grammy-winning hit, Gentle On My Mind, he came out front, and charmed his way into people’s living rooms for four years with his weekly television variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, full of popular music and hokey skits. He had a short-lived acting career, mostly because he was a mediocre actor, but as a musician and host he was brilliant. His fusion of country/pop/bluegrass/soft rock produced many more hits, and he has sold more than 50 million records over the course of his career. Boyishly good-looking and affable, with a down-home Arkansas persona which always seemed a bit out of place in LA, his smooth, lonesome, tenor voice, and his lightning-quick fingers on the neck of his guitar, he won all the major music awards, including, in 2012, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. I didn’t follow him after the early 1970s, but I grew up watching the tv show with my country music-loving grandparents, collected his albums as a young teen, and still thrill to the sound of that banjo at the beginning of Gentle On My Mind, and his astonishing displays of prowess on the guitar.
Imagine my dismay to watch this documentary, Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, and discover that in 2011 Campbell was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He and his family decided to make and film a farewell tour, as a way to celebrate his long career, but essentially documenting the course of his demise. The goal was to raise awareness about the dreaded disease and the urgency to understand it, fight it and fund it, and, to that end, we watch Campbell in a most vulnerable, delicate state, often forgetting the words to songs he sang thousands of times, not recognizing his children (three of whom played in his band), becoming disoriented more and more frequently as the year-and-a-half tour rolls on. It is hard to watch, but his family felt strongly it was what he wanted, and that it was a necessary sacrifice to shine light on the Alzheimer’s experience. Four years later, Campbell is currently in the seventh, and final, stage of the disease, where he cannot understand any language or communicate. His very brave choice to film his experience, has given voice to millions who suffer with the indignities of Alzheimer’s.
I knew I had to write this blog, when my 27-year-old daughter asked me, as she happened upon me crying over this film, “Who’s Glen Campbell?” You don’t have to be a country music fan to appreciate the talent of this man, or be grateful for his contribution to an understanding of the disease which has slowly stolen the “river of his memories” and eaten away his brain.
Blog Post