The Vinyl Files Part 10 ... Glen Campbell - The Glen Campbell Goodtime Album (1970)

For the final vinyl files offering, it’s not a case of saving the best until last, more the case of saving the first until last ... 

This little beastie, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Album, by dint of my Mum’s whimsy and best intent, sometime around 1971 or 1972, became the first record I ever owned. I would have been six or seven years of age. A bold yellow price tag/sticker still adorns my near 50-year-old copy ... $2.50, which, I’m guessing, was something close to full price for a new record at the time.

As a child, I recall my older sister and I watching a lot of 70s television music “specials”, whatever the (old) NZBC deemed fit to air at the time; various incarnations of the Johnny Cash Show, the Bobbie Gentry Show, and Glen Campbell’s one-hour blocks of music blended with attempts at comedy. 

And naturally, local productions like Happen Inn, which featured Kiwi artists like Craig Scott, Ray Woolf, Bunny Walters, and my sister’s own favourite, Suzanne (Donaldson, later Lynch). These were formative influences on the family record collection, and for me personally, a gateway to other, much greater things. 

I’m not sure whether or not I expressed a specific interest in the music of Glen Campbell, but I suspect Mum buying this for me was merely a response to my own indignation about my sister building a fairly sizeable collection of Suzanne albums ... “here, have this, now shut up” ... not much more than a parental act of appeasement. 

Released in 1970, the album is collection of popular Campbell tunes as featured on his television series, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. All covers, it contains none of the big hits that established him as a country music/pop charts crossover icon. No ‘Wichita Lineman’, no ‘Galveston’, and thankfully it was a few years too early for the atrocity that is ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. 

The Conway Twitty-penned ‘It’s Only Make Believe’ was the only single extracted, going Top 10 in the US, but other notable tracks/covers include ‘My Way’ (naturally), Paul Simon’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, and Jimmy Webb’s immortal ‘MacArthur Park’. 

Sadly, it doesn’t contain the only Campbell hit I’d later grow to truly love, ‘Gentle On My Mind’. 

Campbell’s prolonged decline and struggles with Alzheimer’s - he could barely recall the words to many of his biggest hits by the time he finally stopped performing a few years prior to his 2017 death (aged 81) - are well documented in the heartfelt 2014 documentary, I’ll Be Me. 

Well worth a look. 

Anyway, thanks for this one Mum … I think.

(The Vinyl Files is a short series of posts covering the best items in your blogger’s not very extensive vinyl collection)