The classic Glen Campbell song inspired by ‘Doctor Zhivago’
Songwriting is a funny old business because you can never quite tell where inspiration is going to come from or when it’s going to strike. Three-minute songs can take five years to write, as happened with Leonard Cohen and ‘Hallelujah’. They can also take pretty much as long as it takes to play when the wind’s in the right direction and the right kind of inspiration hits. There are a few examples of this, but you can often tell just how little time was spent redrafting. Then you get a song like ‘Gentle on My Mind’, made famous by Glen Campbell, which is in a league of its own.
In 1966, John Hartford was struggling. He was a country musician with a record deal in Nashville, Tennessee, but his records weren’t selling by the truckload, and he was making ends meet as a radio DJ, living in a trailer park with his wife Betty and young son.
On a night out with his wife, he saw the Omar Sharif starring David Lean masterpiece Doctor Zhivago. He was so deeply moved by the story of the titular Doctor and his forbidden love, Lara, that the moment he got home, he wrote a few lyrics inspired by it in about half an hour tops.
Within days, he had a finished song that he was sure would be a hit. It had to be worth it, too, as the song itself had caused enough friction between Hartford and his wife. Hartford swore that the woman he was singing about was her, but Betty wasn’t convinced. She was right to be suspicious as well, as many years later, a collaborator of Hartford’s asked him why he wrote the song and, according to a Rolling Stone interview, Hartford responded, “Well, I watched Doctor Zhivago, and I walked out of that theatre, and I wanted to drink Julie Christie’s bathwater!”
However, Hartford’s fixation led to an undeniably brilliant song, one that did some reasonable numbers for Hartford’s own career. What would make it one of the defining country standards of the 1960s, however, was its cover that came a few months later. One of the decent number of people who had heard Hartford’s version was Glen Campbell, who was so taken by the song he described it as “an essay on life”.
At the time, Campbell wasn’t the country megastar we know today but one of the most in-demand session guitarists in Los Angeles. A player so respected he’d been tapped up by The Beach Boys to fill in for Brian Wilson on tour when the troubled genius decided he didn’t want to play live anymore. However, he was never truly comfortable playing the work of others and wanted to start a solo career of his own.
After a few false starts, with ‘Gentle on My Mind’, he found the song to give him his big break.
Campbell’s version is an absolute marvel. Not the smash hit that folks believed it could be, but a critical smash that won four Grammy awards in 1968, two for Hartford’s version and two for Campbell’s, pleasingly enough. It takes a hell of a song to not just set up one but two very successful careers in country music, and ‘Gentle on My Mind’ managed to do just that in the time it takes to oven-cook a frozen pizza. Sometimes, that’s how inspiration strikes, I guess!
