You are most susceptible to the lures of popular culture when you are around 12 years old. That is when you begin to attune yourself to its rhythms, to begin to crack its codes, to develop your own particular taste signature.
I was 10 years old when The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour went on the air in January 1969. I was 13 years old when it went off the air in June 1972. So maybe it is not surprising that Glen Campbell had a real and lasting influence on me. It was while watching Glen Campbell that I first realized I wanted to play guitar.
He was not first musician I'd watched on TV; I'd seen Porter Wagoner and the Wilburn Brothers; I had consumed the Beatles and Elvis Presley. When Johnny Cash's show came on the air a few months after Campbell's I faithfully watched it too. But maybe even more than I want to admit, Glen Campbell is important to me.
Back then, I didn't know he came from Billstown, outside of Delight, the seventh of 12 children born to impoverished Arkansas sharecroppers. I didn't even know that he was a genuinely great guitar player, a studio ace who'd played on records by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, who'd subbed for Brian Wilson in the Beach Boys. When I was 12 years old, all I really knew was that Glen Campbell was cool.
By the time I got to high school, I'd sublimated this admiration. Glen Campbell was uncool -- he was a pop singer and a hack actor. I liked different, harder things then. I liked rock. I liked Dylan. I liked the Rolling Stones and the Who. Glen Campbell was a Rhinestone Cowboy. He was the same age as my dad. He went on Johnny Carson instead of Saturday Night Live.
Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me is not a bio-pic; it assumes you know certain things about Campbell, or that if you don't know them, they are insignificant compared to the salient fact that Campbell, who is now 78 years old, has Alzheimer's. In April he was moved into a dementia care facility. I'll Be Me documents Campbell's final tour, an event that grew from its original five-week slate of dates to a two-and-a-half-year campaign comprising 151 concerts around the country. (I saw the show when it came to Little Rock in September 2012 and all my feelings for Campbell came flooding back: It was an indelible, awesome experience, heartbreaking in its poignancy.)
After the film opened the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival a couple of weeks ago, I asked Campbell's fourth wife, Kim, and his children (and band mates) Ashley and Shannon when they first began to notice signs of Glen's dementia. Kim said it was a couple of years before he received his official diagnosis (a moment captured in the film), but Shannon said he remembered a time nine years before, when his father was searching for a pair of long underwear.
"I had to go into his bedroom and tell him something," Shannon said. "That, uh, I'd gotten a girl pregnant."
He said he told his father, who stared at him for a long moment. And then went back to searching for his long johns.
There is plenty of music and humor in I'll Be Me, but it's not primarily a concert film or a glimpse at life on tour. Producer-director-actor James Keach says it is very much an advocacy film, a movie that means to raise awareness about a disease that affects more than 5 million people in the United States. While Keach says he wants Taylor Swift fans to know how important Campbell was, his movie is not so much about the legend Glen Campbell was; it is a movie about the things we inevitably lose.
And the important things that remain.
What's genuinely remarkable about Campbell is how deeply rooted his musical faculty remains, how he is able -- even after being institutionalized -- to hold onto music even as his cognitive abilities fade away.
It is nice to think that even if Glen Campbell cannot recall the names of his friends and family, he understands they love him. But the truth is we can't penetrate the neural glaze that has descended upon him. That's tough. It's too late to tell Glen Campbell you love him.
Although I do. And I guess I always have.
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One of the problems with having a dedicated weekly movie section is that it's difficult to give events like the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival the right sort of coverage. Week to week we deal with the movies opening in the state, and then if we can, we squeeze in a preview or review of the festival here and there. But I want to say this year's festival was tremendous, with a world-class slate of films (I suspect a couple of movies that played the festival, I'll Be Me and An Honest Liar, which shared the juried award for the festival's best feature with Evolution of a Criminal, might get Oscar nominations).
In the three years since she took over a moribund festival, Courtney Pledger -- who defers to "her team" (which she deserves credit for assembling) -- has brought the film festival back to a position of vitality and health. I'm already excited about the prospects for next year.
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MovieStyle on 10/24/2014