It Just Is

Toothless, old and yellow. That's how I remember Glen Campbell when I caught him on TV performing at Farm Aid in the mid-'80s. The former golden boy of country-pop was on his uppers for sure, after revelations of substance and spousal abuse had put the breaks on a long and storied career.

I recall strong mental images from the time of the elder Campbell in a fugue of religious dementia, hauling on a 40 ouncer of Wild Turkey while lecturing former wife Tanya Tucker from the old family Bible -- and then belting her with it, periodically. This could also be my imagination at work, since Tucker is tied to a chair in the version of the story I remember, and Campbell isn't wearing any pants, but whatever actually happened, the point is he'd suffered a devastating public embarrassment (and rightly so), which was written deeply on his face and in his performance -- a performance that might stand as one of the bravest in anybody's career, let alone his.

And truth be told, he was letting it all hang out, delivering a version of "Witchita Lineman" on a beaten acoustic that, coupled with the whole queasy frisson that came from seeing Campbell in such a near-derelict state, finally opened my ears to that particular song's majesty. This begat my love affair with songwriter Jimmy Webb, who gave Glen Campbell his three most indelible hits with "Witchita Lineman," "Galveston" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix."

The first two in particular burst with something ineffable -- a quality that defies explanation and can only really be understood internally, but let's take a whack at it anyway and submit that there's a mighty synergy between concept and execution that lifts those melancholic yet shimmering Campbell versions of the songs into an extremely special place.

I think you can hear "Galveston" being quoted in the five-note lick that gets tossed like a casual remark into the opening bars of "The Rose Society" by Mark Olson and Gary Louris -- a songwriting team that had its own brush with the ineffable back when both were in the Jayhawks, and had this inexpressibly wonderful hit in 1995.

I think "Blue" might have become an albatross for them. Olson and Louris went their separate ways afterwards, until reconciling in 2007 for a handful of tracks on Olson's last solo record, and again for this year's full-on two-hander, Ready for the Flood. Make sure you stick around for "Bicycle," which follows "The Rose Society" on the MySpace playlist. Not to diminish the quality of the other three songs there, but a softly ponderous drumbeat and intriguing lyrics stretched across a magnetic verse hook makes "Bicycle" irresistible, and an immediate reminder of the Olson-Louris mojo in full flower.

By and large, however, Ready for the Flood is an album of gentlemanly, almost tentative songs, which seem focused on arguably the greatest of this duo's many assets -- their voices. It's a preternaturally ideal vocal partnership, like the Everlys, or Gram and Emmylou. Put simply, they belong together. You can't explain it. It just is.

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