Country star Glen Campbell dies at 81

Washington

GLEN Campbell, a guitar prodigy and ballad singer who dominated the polished, countrypolitan sound of the late 1960s and 1970s and cultivated a clean-cut image at odds with his once- stormy personal life, died on Aug 8 in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 81.

Campbell announced he had Alzheimer's disease in 2011 and performed what he called the Glen Campbell Goodbye Tour shortly thereafter. In 2015, he won his sixth and final Grammy Award, honoured for best country song I'm Not Gonna Miss You, which he co-wrote for a documentary about his life and deteriorating health.

In a career that spanned six decades, Campbell made dozens of albums, sold more than 40 million records and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

At a time when the grittier "outlaw" movement of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson was on the rise, Campbell vaulted to fame as an unabashed sentimentalist whose songs were aimed squarely at the American heartland. His best-known recordings included John Hartford's Gentle on My Mind (which became his theme song) and Larry Weiss's Rhinestone Cowboy. His most frequent collaborator was songwriter Jimmy Webb, who provided expressive, wistful hits such as By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Galveston and Wichita Lineman.

"My approach is simplicity," Campbell told Time magazine in 1969. "If I can just make a 40-year-old housewife put down her dish towel and say 'Oh!' - why then, man, I've got it made."

Campbell was four when an uncle bought him a US$5 mail order guitar. He taught himself to play as an escape from sharecropping, explaining, "Picking a guitar was a lot easier than picking cotton." He grew to admire the Belgian-born jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, whom he called "the most awesome player I ever heard". Without any formal training, Campbell became by the early 1960s part of the so-called Wrecking Crew of Los Angeles, studio musicians who were known for their versatility and skill.

He played rhythm guitar on more than 500 jazz, pop, rock and country records, backing entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys. Campbell broke through as a solo act in 1967 with a flurry of Grammy awards for Gentle on My Mind. A strapping, clean-cut farm boy with an easygoing charisma, he was soon in demand as a television guest star.

Campbell said the demands of celebrity and a series of troubled marriages led to his prodigious drinking and cocaine use. "I didn't hold back in those days," he later told London's Independent newspaper, recalling how he trashed hotel suites and got into other messes. There was a time, he said, that he boarded a plane, got into a seating dispute with an Indonesian government official and drunkenly told the man he would "call my friend Ronald Reagan and ask him to bomb Jakarta".

His most-chronicled escapade was his tumultuous relationship with country and pop singer Tanya Tucker, who projected a wildcat, man-eating persona and, at 22, was half Campbell's age.

In 1982, Campbell wed his fourth wife. He announced he was a born-again Christian and that he had given up drugs and drinking.

He had a relapse in 2003, when he was arrested for a hit-and-run incident in Phoenix after ploughing his BMW into another car. He later pleaded guilty to drunken driving and was sentenced to 10 days in prison. His police mug shot - looking zoned out and unkempt - became a public sensation on the Internet. He vowed never to touch alcohol again.

His musical reputation had survived more than intact and, in 2005, he was named to the Country Music Hall of Fame. WP