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) 

The Vinyl Files – Introduction

For the blog’s 600^th post (yay me, etc) I want to introduce a new “series” focusing on the small but precious set of vinyl records in my collection. I plan to roll out a post per week, over the next few months, looking at ten of the best or most important records within that collection. But first, some context … 

We all consume music in different ways. I’m not much of a fan of Spotify. I don’t have the premium option and therefore don’t “store” albums for future streaming. I only occasionally check into Spotify for one-off album previews and only rarely check out the odd playlist that platform offers. It isn’t that the cost of premium is prohibitive or anything like that, far from it, it’s just that Spotify doesn’t really hold much appeal for me. Other members of my family swear by it.

I’m relatively old-school, and most of my current music collection consists of CDs and mp3s (albums downloaded). My collection in each of these formats is extensive and varied. Some might say its huge and rather excessive. The mp3 option, for all of its flaws – compression, variations in bitrate quality – offers the portability I crave in a way that still allows me to “own” a copy or file of the music I listen to. The CD option appeals because I like to collect “physical” things and stack them on a shelf. 

Having said that, purchasing CDs is a less frequent indulgence these days, and the vast majority of new additions to my music collection in recent years have arrived in the form of album downloads/mp3 files, which are meticulously tagged and filed away with all the pedantry of a particularly speccy and spotty OCD librarian. 

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, when I first started collecting music, it was a combination of vinyl records and cassette tapes. By 1992, my collection was extensive and – in the wake of CDs becoming the most fashionable form of consumption – largely redundant. Desperate for cash, and determined to embrace the CD format just as soon as I could afford it, I sold virtually everything I’d spent the previous 15 years collecting – vinyl and cassette tapes, the vast majority sold in bulk to a trader on Wellington’s Cuba Street. Sold for peanuts. It broke my heart. 

Well, it did, and it didn’t. It did because they were my life; the only tangible thing(s) I had to show for more than a decade in the workforce. And it didn’t because my life was undergoing major change and I desperately needed the money to fund long-yearned-for overseas travel. And hey, I couldn’t fit that little lot into the one backpack I left the country with, could I?

It just made sense (at the time) and it made even more sense that when I was flush with the green stuff, I’d be able to rebuild the collection – replicate it, even – in the form of CDs, which had fast become the mainstream poison of choice. And that's exactly what I eventually did … but I also held on to a number or tapes and records I couldn’t or simply wouldn’t give up. I stored them at my parent’s abode for the duration of my travels. The most precious and sentimental stuff; the first vinyl record my Mum ever bought me (Glen Campbell’s Goodtime Album, 1970). Something passed down to me by my Dad (The Green & White Brigade’s The Holy Ground of Glasgow Celtic, 1968), and naturally enough, a childhood first love, 1978’s Solid Gold Hits Volume 22. Plus a few others, which I may or may not get to in future posts. 

Among the handful of cassette tapes I couldn’t bear to part with were The Cure’s ‘Seventeen Seconds’ (1980), and New Order’s ‘Movement’ (1981). Those albums remain firm favourites today, although I tend to listen to each of them in a newer format nowadays. 

Since then – since The Great Purge of 1992/1993 – I’ve purchased very little in the way of vinyl, but I have added a few records here and there, and I’ve “inherited” a few albums to add to that small core set. Last Christmas, when I was gifted a very cute and portable “record player” I had yet another purge because it was clear that some of the vinyl I had was simply unplayable – badly scratched, tatty, and/or filthy – and I figured there wasn’t much point in keeping them or trying to salvage them. Which means my collection today is even smaller (about 40 albums and a handful of singles) but rather more selective. I can play what remains and what remains tends to be those records I value most. That’ll be my focus in this series of blogposts. 

With new vinyl so much more readily available than it has been at any time across the past couple of decades, I also harbour sneaky plans to add to this wing of my wider music collection. But for now, it strikes me that the most unique or more interesting works in my post-purge music collection exist in the vinyl format, so I’ll try to cover off ten of the best in the coming weeks, with a short post about what makes each one so special.