Bruce Springsteen closes Western Skies, the concert film he co-directed and released earlier this year, with a version of "Rhinestone Cowboy," which was something like a comeback hit for Glenn Campbell in 1975, the same year that Springsteen released his Born to Run album and appeared simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek.
It's a fitting coda to the event, which featured Springsteen and wife Patti Scialfa strumming and singing in front of a 30-piece orchestra in a 100-year-old barn on his New Jersey property. For Western Skies, kind of like Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time ... In Hollywood, is a valentine to a bygone California, to a Laurel Canyon cinematic sound that evokes Jimmy Webb songs that Campbell recorded at the tag end of the '60s that made him, arguably and briefly, the world's biggest recording star.
But by 1975, Campbell's network variety show had been canceled, and he was on a downward trajectory not unlike that of Rick Dalton, the erstwhile TV cowboy star played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Tarantino's movie. His acting work had all but dried up; his career had leveled off to a series of musical guest spots on other people's shows and an aborted stint as the host of The Glen Campbell Music Show, a BBC production which lasted only six episodes (and shouldn't be confused with the 1981-82 U.S.-based syndicated series of the same name).
Campbell hadn't had a big pop hit since his remake of Conway Twitty's "It's Only Make-Believe" in 1970; it's said that when he first heard songwriter Larry Weiss' version on the radio while on tour in Australia he deeply identified with the lyrics about a down-and-out but persistent performer determined to find (or in Campbell's case) regain the spotlight.
Weiss, like Springsteen a New Jersey native, had written the song not for Campbell, but for himself. While he had some success as a songwriter, having co-written Eric Burdon's 1966 hit "Help Me, Girl" and "Bend Me, Shape Me," a 1968 hit for The American Breed (a group that later morphed into the funk band Rufus), Weiss started out with aspirations of becoming a star performer, following in the footsteps of his friends and fellow Brill Building songwriters Neil Diamond and Tony Orlando.
In 1971, he moved to Los Angeles, and in 1974 released his first album called Black and Blue Suite. His version of "Rhinestone Cowboy" — often mistakenly attributed to Diamond, who Weiss vocally resembles — was the first single from that album.
Campbell's version made No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100, Country, and Adult Contemporary charts in the summer of 1975, becoming the first song since Jimmy Dean's 1961 hit "Big Bad John" to reach the apex of all three charts. It was the Country Music Association's Song of the Year for 1976. It led to Weiss being named Nashville Songwriters' Association International's Songwriter of the Year in 1977, and to the Dolly Parton-Sylvester Stallone fiasco Rhinestone in 1984. Weiss may still be trying to develop a musical around it.
It's an interesting lyric. What you might lose in the triumphal versions by Springsteen and Campbell (Weiss' take is slightly more downbeat) is that the singer is not exactly an integrity artist determined to, as Marty Stuart put it during his recent concert at Pulaski Technical College's Center for Humanities and Arts, stand "on his belief." He's a showbiz kid; "there's been a load of compromises on the road to [his] horizon." He's seeking the spotlight, not laying out his soul. He's a hack — a rhinestone cowboy.
Rhinestones are fake — glass or plastic simulating diamonds. They dazzle when the light strikes them right, but they're not real.
Or maybe they are. Real rhinestones anyway — nobody really thinks they're diamonds. They don't fool anyone, they just look real pretty. The money that Glen Campbell and Larry Weiss and Bruce Springsteen make is real, and that money buys freedom and power, the ability to say no to other people and yes to yourself.
Springsteen probably didn't think that much of Glen Campbell back in 1975; he probably regarded him the same way a lot of us did, as more aligned with a certain Rat Pack-like entertainer aesthetic than someone for whom music was a kind of lifeline. Even if his career had leveled down, there didn't seem much desperation in Campbell. Even though he'd scrambled out of Billstown and spent his 20s making his bones as a first-call session guitarist, you could put him down as a slick professional, not one of those hungry, angry amateurs laying out their guts on their records.
It took time to appreciate what was sublime about Campbell, to discern the genius in his guitar playing and the immaculate sonic precision of his recordings. You look back, and those songs from 50 years ago — "Galveston," "Wichita Lineman," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" — sound like miracles. But at the time they were just pop records; the Wrecking Crew's answer to Countrypolitan. They were just in the air, we took them for granted.
When Shannon Boshears, the vice chancellor of advancement and executive director of University of Arkansas — Pulaski Technical College, came out on stage to introduce Buck Trent, who was opening for Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives at CHARTS the other night, she warned us about the rhinestones. There would be an eye-stabbing lot of them in the show, she said.
She was dressed in one of Trent's old stage suits, a number Manuel Cuevas had made up for him during the '60s, maybe while he was one of Porter Wagoner's Wagonmasters or, probably more likely given its relative low-key vibe, for a Hee Haw appearance. She'd had it altered some, and it fit great.
Trent, who's 81, is a virtuoso instrumentalist on banjo, mandolin, steel guitar and guitar who has played on dozens of big country hits and hundreds of songs you've likely heard. He invented the electric banjo and played lead guitar on Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You," which was her kindly-worded kiss-off to Wagoner when she finally left his show.
Trent started a theater in Branson and yucks it up on stage, continuing a tradition that began before the barn dances and threaded through the syndicated half-hour country music variety shows that were picked up by secondary markets all over the U.S. and Canada during the '60s and '70s. Like Jim Stafford (who was in a high school band with Gram Parsons and Kent LaVoie, who became famous as singer-songwriter Lobo) Trent is a virtuoso who presents as a comedian.
Trent was backed by a pickup band that included Brad Williams of Arkansas-based roots-rock-hillbilly The Salty Dogs and, for one song, Boshears, who plugged in her Stratocaster and attempted a duet with Trent on the old Johnny Cash-June Carter song "Jackson." But Trent, while he provided some pyrotechnic lead banjo, seemed to have trouble remembering the words, leaving Boshears to sing both Johnny and June's parts with Trent leaning in to provide a little help on the chorus.
Somehow that made it better, more tender and affirming of the pretty thought that we are here to rely upon one another.
Later, after he and his rhinestoned, turquoise-suited band took the stage and displayed the kind of fluid dexterity to which genuine musicians have access, Stuart (in black-fringed Custer leather) reminisced a bit about watching those syndicated half-hour shows — Wagoner, who gave Dolly her start, and the Wilburn Brothers from Hardy, Ark., who gave Loretta Lynn her big break, and Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs (the grandfather of Superlatives' bassist Chris Scruggs) — at home in Philadelphia, Miss., with his brick-mason father on Saturday afternoons.
There was a time when those shows and network shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Real McCoys and The Andy Griffith Show seemed to dominate television, offering an alternate, rural version of America that ran as counterpoint to the narrative of the '60s as a time of cultural and political revolution.
There was a twang in the air and on the airwaves, even before Michael Nesmith started smuggling what would soon become known as country rock onto those Monkee records and into the sitcom, before Clarence White — whose B-bender Telecaster (that would probably fetch at least $1 million were it ever to be auctioned) Stuart wielded on this night — joined The Byrds.
I don't know if Bruce Springsteen ever watched those shows, but I did, and Marty Stuart did, and a lot of us heard Jim Reeves and Johnny Horton before we ever heard the Beatles.
That's a part of the story that doesn't get much attention. And maybe when, in 1971, CBS canceled Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, Mayberry R.F.D., Hee Haw, The Jim Nabors Hour and other folksy shows ("It was the year CBS killed everything with a tree in it," Pat Buttram, who played Mr. Haney on Green Acres, said) they steered us toward a new urbanity. (The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour lasted until 1972).
Fred Silverman, a 33-year-old executive, replaced those shows with, among others, All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, MAS*H and Sanford and Son, radically different programming that reflected a wised-up, ironic rock 'n' roll perspective as opposed to the open-hearted, small-town country flavor of the shows they replaced. (Hee Haw lived on as a syndicated corny answer to Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In until 1997.)
In the 1970s, we watched shows about people who lived in apartments and row houses, not on farms. They suppressed the twang but didn't kill it, as evidenced by the recurring revivals and incessant corporatization of the Nashville brand. Country music became an industry too big to fail, a fashion that goes in and out of style.
Like rhinestones.
It's funny how musicians don't care all that much about genre labels. You can dress 'em up any way you like, they'll still find their way to the gist of it, to the spooky intervals and the lifeblood rhythms.
Take a hoary dirge-like Tommy Cash's "Six White Horses," capo down the neck of the Martin D 28 and turn it into something revelatory. Break out the Telecasters, and it's surf's up. Maybe you think the last thing you want to hear is "Orange Blossom Special" performed by a solo mandolinist. Doesn't matter what you call it, it's all a kind of jazz.
And it can all be real, even when it's showy and gaudy as hell.
During the opening set, Trent engaged Williams in a Dueling Banjos schtick, where he'd play a passage on his electric banjo, sometimes using his tuning keys to extract microtonal shivers, and expect Williams to answer back on guitar. Williams kept up for the most part, but Trent was the star after all, and after one particularly stinging run Williams surrendered by way of a Jimi Hendrix chord, and in the process got one of the night's loudest laughs. Good fun.
Williams is a serious player, singer and songwriter, and his Salty Dogs make as good a music as anyone working the Americana country vein these days as their latest record — the cheekily titled Gold — demonstrates. Williams and guitarist Nick Devlin (full disclosure: Nick helped me out on an album I released a couple of years ago), bassist Brent LaBeau, and drummer Bart Angel have been around 17 years now; this anthology offers three new tracks (one of which features the ever-electric Trent on wired-up banjo).
Taken together, Gold sounds like the lost history of a rhinestone-studded outfit that started out in the mid-1950s and carried on until the mid-'70s or so, modulating from Nashville to Bakersfield while flirting with some outlaw rock 'n' roll tendencies. It's a secret history of something that never really really existed.
Entirely authentic. Like Buck Trent and Marty Stuart. Like a rhinestone cowboy.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style on 12/15/2019