overlap

This was a funny gig, in several ways. The keyboard player is a longstanding musical partner, and conducts the band like an orchestra, and from the thick end of twenty metres above the band I can see every bald spot and everything that goes on below. Gentle On My Mind, Galveston, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, that's some opening to a set. We get a mix of the familiar biggest hits, and a selection of other stuff which lurches from madness to genius, sometimes within the same song. Daughter Debby Campbell does her bit, and that bit's a bit of a con - if she had some interesting material of her own to do or something interesting to add it would help, but standards like Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue, Stand By Your Man and You Don't Have To Say You Love Me make this more nepotism karaoke than the cutting edge of a radical new world. Hearing a father and daughter duet on Jackson is an acquired taste, there's something mildly iffy about the two of them singing the 'we got married in a fever' line, for example. Nevertheless, she gives the old man the chance to go offstage and change his shirt, and come back for more good stuff. I mentioned the madness/genius interface. While he clearly struggles to play continuously at length, he's still hits the guitar solos fine. As if to prove it, we get a version of the William Tell Overture which he leads on electric twelve string, soloing away for the last two minutes of the song with the guitar behind his head. Whether that's because he can't get it down again, I couldn't say! So we go from the sublime - Roy Orbison's In Dreams, hitting every vocal note spot on, to the ridiculous of demonstrating his prowess on the bagpipes accompanying an entirely straight cover of Mull Of Kintyre. A very tight band obviously helps, and the well-worn ad-libs come over as if scripted at times, but after that long in the game you can understand where the familiarity comes from. And now I've seen both Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell do Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, Galveston, The Highwayman and a few others besides. Now where I come from, a bloke of 70 playing electric guitar solos behind his head is infinitely more rock n roll than a two album tinytalent that's spent more days in jail than he's played gigs in his career, and Gordon Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind is a great finish. Cracking gig, Glen!