I’ve got to be honest: I find Glen Campbell’s life story much more interesting than his music, which I always found bland and middle-of-the-road.
“Crock” was what he called it, but it’s not that bad. He meant a fusion of country and rock, though “Crop” might have been more accurate for his laid-back country-pop ballads – especially as he was a sharecropper’s son.

Campbell was already a successful session guitarist when he went solo and made his name with a trio of songs by Jimmy Webb – Wichita Lineman, Galveston and By The Time I Get To Phoenix.

This was his last big hit in 1975, a song he heard while touring in Australia and decided to record because of the parallels between his own life story and Larry Weiss’s lyric about a veteran performer who survives in a world where “hustle’s the name of the game.”

There were no rhinestones when Glen was growing up in Arkansas, the seventh of 12 children on a farm with no electricity, where his penniless parents grew cotton, watermelon and potatoes, picking cotton for other farmers to supplement their meagre income.

Having learned guitar from the age of four, he left school at 16 and was soon playing in country bands around the South. In 1960 he relocated to Los Angeles and became one of the legendary studio band The Wrecking Crew.

He played on recordings by just about everybody you can name in the early Sixties – Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby and The Beach Boys, Phil Spector and The Monkees – and had had a stint in The Beach Boys (he plays on I Get Around and Help Me Rhonda) when Brian Wilson took a break.

This was Campbell’s biggest hit, after a five-year gap since his previous one, It’s Only Make Believe. His whole career could pretty much be summed up by one couplet: “There’s been a load of compromising / On the road to my horizon.”