Posted on 04/17/2014 12:37:30 PM PDT by FlJoePa
Glen Campbell has been moved into a care facility three years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, People.com reports.
"He was moved to an Alzheimer's facility last week," a family friend told the title. "I'm not sure what the permanent plan is for him yet. We'll know more next week."
The singer, whose "Rhinestone Cowboy" topped the charts in 1975, had been suffering from short-term memory loss in recent years. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in early 2011.
The 78-year-old Grammy winner and his wife Kim initially shared the news of his illness back in 2011 because he’d hoped to give a series of goodbye concerts, in conjunction with an album "Ghost on the Canvas,” which was released later that year.
"Ghost on the Canvas” (Surfdog), Campbell’s 61st studio album, was expected to be his last. It wasn’t. A brand new collection of recordings from the legendary singer, "See You There" (Surfdog) was released last December. With Campbell’s health apparently in decline, it’s increasingly likely the collection will be the final studio recording of the Arkansas native's career.
The latest health setback comes just days before the documentary of that final tour, titled “Glen Campbell... I'll Be Me,” gets its world premiere April 18 at the 2014 Nashville Film Festival.
Campbell was named both CMA Entertainer and Male Vocalist of the Year in 1968, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005. The veteran performer has sold more than 45 million albums over the course of his career.
It was a fad for a short time with models and a few singers...supposed to be cool but didn’t really take off, imagine that. I remember when I was in college a girl came to class one day in a baseball uniform- head to toe...everyone thought it was strange but then again we weren’t that cool I guess.
It is very sad! Oh what a beautiful voice this man has.
I guess I was too young to notice. I was 7 in 1973!
And to think, My Little Rock girl friend dropped me like a rock when I criticized him in True Grit. She had more eyes for him than me.
I don’t know, she makes the cub scout uniform look so feminine that now you have to wonder about whether boys should be wearing it.
***He became a Christian and later got messed up***
He sang a song I KNEW JESUS BEFORE HE WAS A SUPERSTAR. This was before Campbell got tangled up with Nashville Skank TANYA TUCKER.
8-year-old boys don’t wear mini-shorts.
I don’t think anyone at the time was thinking she looked like a boy, much less a little one.
Probably not.
I grew up loving country music but today's stuff? Yuck. You tune in to a country music station and all you hear is some generic version of the music with voices that seem all the same, and not good ones at that.
It's as though the industry has chosen to not seek out talented song-writers to produce memorable tunes but just to belt out something that imitates country music, of course, with the mandatory southern accent.
I can assure you that to a college aged male Linda Ronstadt in a Cub Scout uni didn’t look remotely like a little boy.
I found these two bits at songfacts; interesting how it ties together MacArthur Park and the Ronstadt family:
With the famous “cake out in the rain,” this is one of the more lyrically intriguing songs ever recorded. Jimmy Webb, who wrote the song, explained in Q magazine: “It’s clearly about a love affair ending, and the person singing it is using the cake and the rain as a metaphor for that. OK, it may be far out there, and a bit incomprehensible, but I wrote the song at a time in the late 1960s when surrealistic lyrics were the order of the day.”
The love affair Webb speaks of was with Susan Ronstadt, Linda Ronstadt’s cousin. Said Webb (in the Los Angeles Times), “MacArthur Park was where we met for lunch and paddleboat rides and feeding the ducks. She worked across the street at a life insurance company. Those lyrics were all very real to me; there was nothing psychedelic about it to me. The cake, it was an available object. It was what I saw in the park at the birthday parties. But people have very strong reactions to the song. There’s been a lot of intellectual venom.”
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Are you convinced there’s more to this song than Jimmy Webb is letting on? You might be right. The staff music composer Colin McCourt used to work for the publisher of this song, Edwin. H. Morris. The head of the company was a friend of Jimmy Webb, who once explained to him the song’s meaning - cake in the rain and all. McCourt told The Daily Mail April 2, 2011: “Jim was in love with a girl who left him. Months later, he heard she was getting married - in the park. Broken-hearted, he went to the wedding and, not wanting to be seen, hid in a gardener’s shed.
As the open-air ceremony was taking place it started to pour with rain and the rain running down the shed window made the cake look as if it was melting.
Interestingly, the man who married the girl was a phone engineer from Wichita - inspiration for another of Jim’s hits?”
I don't care what the critics say. I love "MacArthur Park."
It took my mom back in 06 and it is beyond words
There’s a good series of videos about The Band, the Music from Big Pink boys, available on youtube. Gives you some great history of that group and all of the people they worked with. Which seems to have been virtually everyone.
I think this is the link to the first video; this version includes Japanese subtitles for your added viewing pleasure:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIY9LDjcgu4
Linda Ronstadt has Parkinson's Disease, and lost her singing voice.
Wasn’t her contract pulled, and she kicked out of a Las Vegas concert after she criticized G W Bush over Iraq?
Prayers for Mr. Campbell.
later
Still playing lights out (if you’ll pardon the pun).
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