'I’ll Be Me'

Glen Campbell and his daughter, Ashley Campbell, in Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me
Glen Campbell and his daughter, Ashley Campbell, in Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me

From the outside, it’s not always easy to distinguish love from unwholesome exploitation. The world is full of aging performers who trade on nostalgia, who go onstage a hundred or more times a year and affably play old hits in a way that’s recognizable to their audience. Maybe they genuinely still love the stage and the spotlights, the feedback loop they close with the faithful. Maybe they’re just doing it for the money. And who can blame them? No man but a blockhead ever sang “Satisfaction” but for money.

Things get a little more complicated when there’s a family standing behind the great yet fading artist. Maybe grandpa still likes leading the family band; maybe he just knows that without his name on the marquee no one shows up. Maybe there’s a thin line between living the dream and elder abuse.

Glen Campbell is an important if complicated cultural figure, a supremely gifted musician who thanks to his surfer-boy good looks and the patronage of the Smothers Brothers became the world’s biggest pop star, reaching Elvisian heights in the late ’60s and early ’70s with a string of impeccably melodramatic and unsettling pop hits (penned by the weirdo genius Jimmy Webb), a hit TV variety show and a starring role opposite John Wayne in the original screen version of True Grit.

After that, his star collapsed into a show biz trope, a rhinestone cowboy familiar to the talk-show couches and finally a bit of a tabloid bad boy. Twenty years ago, he was fodder for those “Where Are They Now?” features; in 2008 producers Julian Raymond and Howard Willing constructed a comeback album — cheekily titled Meet Glen Campbell — around Campbell’s warm tenor. An obvious attempt to spark a late career revival similar to the one Rick Rubin managed for Johnny Cash with the American Recordings albums, Raymond and Willing unironically married Campbell’s still immense gifts to material from rock songwriters as idiosyncratic as Lou Reed, Paul Westerberg and Jackson Browne. It mightn’t have been a huge commercial hit — it spent one week at No. 155 on the Billboard 200 chart — but it was a solid, interesting record that renewed Campbell’s relevance. He followed it up in 2011 with the elegiac Ghost on the Canvas, an even better record that explored themes of mortality.

It was during the recording of this album that Campbell was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. And when he prepared to tour in support of the album, his family, in part to prepare audiences who might wonder why Campbell fumbled a lyric or seemed confused onstage, made public his condition. They also engaged actor/filmmaker James Keach to document the progression of his dementia as he embarked on what was now marketed as a “goodbye tour.” Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, which opened the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival earlier this month, is the heartbreaking, surprisingly entertaining result of that decision — a film that will likely contribute to the ongoing conversation about the nature of the disease and the way we relate to its victims.

No doubt some of the people who bought tickets to the final tour expected (and maybe hoped for) some kind of cringe-worthy onstage breakdown, but Campbell remained — for the most part — an excellent performer who only occasionally flubbed lyrics or needed to be reminded where to capo his guitar. Even as his other faculties slide to the point where he can’t remember the names of the musicians onstage with him, Campbell’s musicality seems startlingly intact as he rips off long, incredibly precise guitar solos and sings with perfect pitch (even as he needs a teleprompter to remember the words).

While the film bears some similarities to Life Itself, Steve James’ biography of Roger Ebert, in the way it unflinchingly tracks the progress of its subject’s health, Keach makes no attempt to synopsize Campbell’s long career, instead relying on exchanges between Campbell and his fourth wife, Kim, to elucidate the singer’s history and his fragile relationship with his own past. In an early scene, Kim sits with Glen as he watches home movies, explaining to him that the people flickering on the wall are his past wives, his children and even his younger self.

At first, Kim might seem a less than sympathetic figure, as we might assume she’s a late-arriving trophy. But the truth is she has been married to Campbell for more than 30 years and is the mother of his three youngest children — Ashley, Cal and Shannon — who nightly perform with him. Over the course of the film, she emerges as a brave and compelling figure, a patient and conflicted caregiver who is constantly weighing the benefits of allowing the tour to proceed. While Glen is, for the most part, at his best onstage where he is obviously energized by performing and basks in the love of the audience, he’s increasingly difficult offstage, becoming petulant, paranoid and generally making life difficult for everyone.

As the tour extends for more than two years and 150 shows, he eventually becomes “unrehearseable” (though he handles a Tonight Show musical guest spot with something like cracked grace) and the end looms up hard and irrevocable. There is a trip to Capitol Hill, where Ashley appeals to a congressional committee for more funding to fight the disease. Finally, the music stops.

There are quibbles to be had with this movie. It might be too long; there’s nothing special about its visuals; it would have been nice if some footage from the dates Campbell played in his home state of Arkansas had made the cut. And it might have ended in a more effective way than with the music video for Campbell’s final recording. It’s a ballad he wrote for Kim called “Not Gonna Miss You” that he recorded with the Wrecking Crew — the crack group of studio musicians Campbell belonged to before he became a pop star in his own right — and which reveals some self-awareness that’s not really present in the film (as well as the sense of humor that is). But it’s really not such a great song.

And no doubt there are some who will question the Campbell family’s decision to trot out the old singer, who was 75 when the tour began, for one last profit-taking go-round.

But I side with the singer’s son Cal, who observes when his father “connects to something that gave him joy, it’s like he’s himself again.” I don’t think the decision to let him be Glen Campbell for as long as he could was a bad one.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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