At 17, he moved to Albuquerque, played on his uncle’s radio show, and got married for the first time.
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But he kept playing - at churches, picnics, nightclubs, local radio stations. At 14, Campbell dropped out of high school and moved with some of his brothers to Houston, where they found work installing insulation. Pretty soon, he was playing it on local radio stations. Campbell, a prodigy, took to it immediately.
#Glen campbell rhinestone cowboy how to
When Campbell was four, one of his uncles bought him a five-dollar Sears guitar and taught him how to play it. He and his siblings had picked cotton for the less-poor farmers who lived nearby. He’d been born on an Arkansas dirt farm with no electricity, one of 12 kids. Glen Campbell knew a few things about struggling. That’s the song’s idea of success, of hard work paying off. This narrator has a dream: being up on a stage, gleaming in the light. Those compromises have been parts of the process, steps on the journey. “There’s been a load of compromisin’ on the road to my horizon,” he sings, and he’s proud of that. He wants a career, and he’ll do whatever it takes to get it. Instead, he just wants to play his part in the great country-music carnival.
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But he’s not picturing himself as an avatar of authenticity, either. There’s a reason why “Rhinestone Cowboy,” the first #1 single from longtime session guy and then-faded star Glen Campbell, isn’t called “Diamond Cowboy.” The narrator of “Rhinestone Cowboy,” struggling along on the periphery of the music business, isn’t envisioning riches or fame. The rhinestone is an ecstatic simulation, an agreed-upon delusion. Everyone who sees you on that stage presumably knows that you’re not wearing real diamonds, but they don’t care.
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If you’re standing on a stage, dressed in rhinestones, and the light hits you the right way, it looks like you’re made of magic. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.