The artist Don Henley called “one of the greatest” American musicians
It’s not exactly stretching to put Don Henley in the same category we usually reserved for people like Johnny Cash and Chuck Berry.
He has become an absolute pillar in the world of American music, and no matter how much ‘The Dude’ may have hated Eagles back in the day, the reason they sold a ton of records always came down to how much Henley was willing to get that extra muscle. But Henley knew that he couldn’t even hope to be nearly as big as some of his musical idols.
But when Henley first cut his teeth, rock and roll was a far cry from what he saw in the 1970s. The first flashes of people like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly had only first started, and since not every one of the biggest names made their way to the middle of Texas, Henley would listen to a mix of everything whenever he turned on the radio. It was far more eclectic, but that was the reason why his musical taste was so great.
Because if you think about it, a lot of the modern age of music can tend to put people’s tastes in individual boxes. If you like anyone from Taylor Swift to Fontaines DC, there are different avenues that you can go down that will give you more of what you already know. Not so in the early 1960s. You’d hear everything from folk artists to gospel singers to soul musicians, and yet it would all feel right playing next to each other.
And while country is normally a big hurdle for most people to clear nowadays, it made all the sense in the world to Henley. He had been indebted to listening to everyone from George Jones to Dolly Parton when he cued up his radio, and once he made a name for himself, you could hear the subtle hints of country in how much he and the rest of group idolised artists like Gram Parsons.
If you were judging purely on technical ability, the musicians in the audience always knew to pay attention to the session musicians on every record. The Wrecking Crew created some of the most electrifying pop music of the era, and when Glen Campbell struck out on his own with tracks like ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’, Henley was convinced that he was witnessing a musical legend right before his eyes.
When talking about his upbringing, Henley considered Campbell to be one of the great pillars in the world of rock and roll, saying, “There was a period in the late 1960s to early 1970s where every country artist had their own TV shows. Glen Campbell had his own TV show, [who is] one of the greatest musicians this country has ever produced. He sang and played on a lot of those early Beach Boys records.”
While it would be easy to list off the hits that Campbell had at this point, the true mark of his genius was how inventive he could be on his instrument. He knew how to make anything sound great, but even when giving one of his finest performances on ‘Wichita Lineman’, the best part of the tune is listening to what he did on the six-string bass, giving the bass world one of the finest solos that has ever been written.
Even though a lot of what Campbell did could be considered a little bit simple compared to the more seasoned pros of the genre, it was never about him trying to showboat. The greatest country artists of their time were about making the best with only a little bit of musical vocabulary, and when listening to Campbell, he took many of the basic ideas of music theory and turned them into pure beauty whenever he played.
