Current mood:	pleased
Current music:	"Meet Glen Campbell"

Getting reacquainted with the Wichita Lineman
It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to a new Glen Campbell album. Actually, it’s been a long time since anyone listened to a new Glen Campbell album that wasn’t a live album or special theme collection focusing on the holidays or his greatest hits.

But I figured the release last week of the coyly titled “Meet Glen Campbell,” his return to his hitmaking home of Capitol Records with a new studio album on which the 72-year-old musician and producer Julian Raymond tackle up-to-date material by the likes of the Foo Fighters, Tom Petty and Green Day, was a good excuse for getting reacquainted with the pride of Delight, Ark.

I always liked Campbell back in his heyday when he was turning out slightly countrified pop hits hits like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind,” “Where’s the Playground Susie?”, the quietly anti-war “Galveston” and the magnificent “Wichita Lineman,” written by Campbell fave Jimmy Webb. Hey, even some of Campbell’s cheesier stuff, like “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Southern Nights,” was so catchy that it was hard to dismiss. I always enjoyed his late ’60s-early ’70s CBS variety hour, too, especially the bits where Campbell on guitar and Hartford on banjo (replaced after the first season by Larry McNeeley) would do some serious picking. Renowned as a session player for the Beach Boys and others before he started having hits, Campbell had major league chops as a guitarist, though his fame as a singer overshadowed that aspect of his talent.

What producer Raymond is trying to do with the 10-song “Meet Glen Campbell” is sort of what Rick Rubin did for Johnny Cash and, more recently, Neil Diamond — make them musically relevant again with more contemporary material and introduce them to a new audience. Only in the case of Campbell, Raymond decided to do the updated songs in the classic heavily orchestrated style of Campbell’s original hits. That approach works for the most part, though I would have preferred the more stripped down Rubin-style sound. Occasionally the strings and heavenly choruses mixed in with banjos and mandolins threaten to overwhelm Campbell’s still incredibly rich and clear tenor, and the album definitely doesn’t give us enough of Campbell’s guitar playing. (An interesting side note: Buried in there somewhere in the layered sound are Rick Nielsen and Robin Zander of Cheap Trick.)

The material on “Meet Glen Campbell” is mostly superb, and he sounds right at home singing it. Highlights include his shimmering take on the British band Travis’ “Sing,” Petty’s “Walls” (which sounds like it could be a Campbell song from way back when) and “Angel Dream” (which benefits from a more acoustic backing), the Foo Fighters’ “Times Like These” (perfect for Campbell though a little heavy on the strings), Jackson Browne’s “These Days” (with more understated orchestration), Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” (another well-known tune well-suited to Campbell’s voice, though the busy rhythm track is a bit too prominent in the mix) and the stately rendition of John Lennon’s romantic ode, “Grow Old With Me.” Even the less interesting tracks — the Replacements’ melancholy “Sadly, Beautiful”; a somewhat generic-sounding rendition of U2’s “All I Want Is You”; and Velvet Underground’s repetititive “Jesus” — are worth a listen.

If you still look back fondly on his “Galveston” era, I think you’ll get quite a kick out of re-meeting Glen Campbell on this album.

TELL EVERYONE: Getting great word of mouth on the art-house cinema circuit is “Tell No One,” a French thriller based on the international best-seller by Harlan Coben and starring Francois Cluzet as a pediatrician devastated by his wife’s savage murder eight years earlier who receives an anonymous e-mail that leads to a video that seems to indicate she might still be alive. Meanwhile, police have re-opened the case and put him under suspicion again after the bodies of her apparent attackers are found near his place in the country. The closer he gets to the truth, the more the death count climbs, and it turns out someone else has been reading his e-mail and wants to know the whereabouts of his wife (played by Marie-Josée Croze). With the help of friends, including his sister’s lover (Kristin Scott Thomas), the doc tries to stay out of jail while unscrambling the past and present. What with the film’s headlong pace and subtitles, the plot can be a bit tricky to follow (Leslie and I ended up with a couple of unanswered questions that may have been holes in the story or may just have been things we missed) and I thought the everything-explained ending was a tad disappointing, but overall it’s an engrossing couple of hours of cinema highly recommended for anyone inclined to Hitchcockian suspense.

BEIJING 2008: Thanks to my daughter’s obsession with seeing as many Olympic sports as possible (I mean, even archery and trampoline!), I’ve seen much more of the summer Games than I’d originally intended. Normally I might have settled for the prime-time Michael Phelps medal chase and women’s gymnastics finals (where the anti-U.S. bias in the judging was sometimes maddening), but I must say I did get caught up in the U.S. women’s beach volleyball triumph and even some of the track and field. Unfortunately, most of the team sports I would have watched, especially soccer, were banished to the early morning hours on one of NBC’s cable outlets. Overall, the games seem to have been run by the Chinese with fascist efficiency (Mussolini made the trains run on time, remember) but with an almost total lack of spontanaity aside from the athletes. The streets were scrubbed of undesirables, security was oppressive and repressive, a small area was set aside for protests, only to have no applications from protesters granted, and where in Atlanta you had children playing in an Olympic fountain, in Beijing such features were fenced off. Yes, Beijing’s mass display of synchronized dancers, drummers and acrobats in its Opening Ceremony was impressive, but later we heard how the participants were practically held hostage and worked to the point of exhaustion. And the torch-lighting was a letdown (the torch bearer hoisted on a wire doesn’t come close to matching Barcelona’s flaming arrow or Atlanta’s Mohamed Ali), the music banal as usual at these affairs, and the fact that the organizers yanked the little girl who sang the theme song for a more photogenic lip-syncer pretty well sums up the fakery that seems to have been the Beijing Olympics’ hallmark. Oh, sure, the IOC has given lip service to having the international gymnastics body “investigate” China’s blatant use of under-age athletes, but we know that will be dropped once the Chinese turn over some freshly minted fake birth certificates. This is what happens when the IOC rewards a totalitarian regime’s abysmal human rights record with the opprortunity to play host to Olympic Games. The Olympics themselves end up diminished.

And while on the subject of the Olympics, there’s been much talk about whether London’s Games can match Beijing’s for spectacle. They shouldn’t even try. London’s Opening and Closing Ceremonies should be a joyous celebration of the true Olympic spirit and what Britain has given to the world, not a manufactured display of uniformity. Whether it’s the voices of great British actors, music from Paul McCartney or a bagpipe band or a Welsh choir, or a touch of real pomp and circumstance with the Queen, London has everything it needs to stand head and shoulders above Beijing’s artificial razzle-dazzle.

I LIKED IKE: I was particularly saddened by the recent death of Isaac Hayes because, as I’ve written here before, my encounters with him during his years living in Atlanta had showed him to be a generous, thoughtful man. I have two particularly vivid memories of my time with Hayes. One was at his Atlanta mansion, when we went out in his backyard and the kids at an expensive private school located next door starting hanging out the classroom windows, waving and calling out, “Isaac! Isaac!” He enjoyed waving back t them. The other is one I’ve related here before: I was at Atlanta's Fox Theatre to do a backstage post-concert interview with the notoriously temperamental Dionne Warwick, who suddenly had decided she wasn't in the mood to talk. Suddenly, to the rescue came Hayes, who stepped in and assured his old pal Dionne that I was a good guy and would do well by her and she really ought to do this interview. And what's more, he promised he'd sit in with us just to hold her hand. As a result, I got a much better story than I had any right to expect. Isaac Hayes was indeed a class act.

If you'd like to add to or have your say about anything in this column, just click on comment below. You don't have to be registered with Live Journal.