No, I'm not really
going to trash Glen Campbell. For the most part, his stuff was listenable to my
young ears, and what wasn't was extravagantly ignorable, but Southern Nights is one that
you just could not escape, for a couple of summers in the 70s. It was on every AM
radio at every public pool, in every car, on every beach. He was playing it on
Carson, and on Carol Burnett, and on the local newscast if they'd let him.
Another not so bad effort doomed to the LaBrea Memory Pits from overexposure.
Galveston and Wichita Lineman are actually classics, as far as I'm concerned.
Campbell is a well respected folk/bluegrass banjo player, besides having written some
crossover stuff that I felt compelled to ignore -- because I'll be honest witcha', I was never really a big country
fan even back when country music really was country music. And he toured with the
Beach Boys.
Heck, the version of Bobby Russell's Little Green Apples he recorded with Bobbie Gentry
was even okay by me. Southern Nights wasn't inherently a piece of crap, it was a
nice break in the rotation from all that blow-dried Cali studio junk (and
British and Canadian faux blow-dried Cali studio junk, which was often even
worse) that took up so much
airtime, back then. So what in the bejesus ever possessed radio programmers play
Southern Nights a million and six times a day for a year and a half, until even people
who belonged to the Glen Campbell Fan Club felt nauseated every time they heard a flatpicked banjo?
This mystery surrounds me.