He Made It To Phoenix
Glen Campbell passed on August 8th. I was never a fan but I heard his music played over the radio for many of my young adult years. When we lived in Durham Campbell was a patient at the Ear Nose and Throat hospital where my wife worked as a medical assistant. She rode in the elevator with him. He was there for treatment of a severe sore throat. That could not have been “a good” day for him.
I grieve at the passing of any musician who has contributed to my life. You might say that I have come to know life in part, through the music of Glen Campbell. Music is a contemplation of life, philosophy if you will. Aristotle famously said that philosophy begins in wonder. Certainly music is a mode of wondering about life and it’s ineffable mystery. Music treats the fundamentals of human existence.
To celebrate a life lived, I offer a tune written by Jimmy Webb, the first of Glen Campbell’s many hits: By The Time I Get to Phoenix.
This was Campbell’s first Top 40 hit after filling in on tour for Brian Wilson with The Beach Boys. When Webb heard Campbell’s version of this, he wrote him a followup song, “Wichita Lineman,” which reached #3 in early 1969. Webb said in his Songfacts interview: “I think that Glen’s voice is perfectly suited to early JW – ‘Wichita Lineman’ and ‘By the Time I Get To Phoenix’ – there was some kind of a surreal fit between his voice and those songs. It’s very hard for me to look back and say, ‘Oh, a-ha, now I see why we were successful.’ Because at the time it certainly wasn’t anything that I was in control of.”
Jimmy Webb was 21 when he wrote this song, which became his second songwriting hit after Up-Up and Away.
This was Campbell’s first hit as a solo artist. Through his session work, he was well known in the industry, and Brian Wilson tried to make him a star by writing and producing a song called “Guess I’m Dumb,” which Campbell recorded in 1965 but failed to dent the charts. Once Campbell recorded “Phoenix,” his career as not just a singer but as an all-around entertainer took off: In 1969, he got his own TV show that ran for 3 years. (source songfacts.com)
