Campbell’s Alphabet Soup

Most pop music in the ‘90s is Frankenstein-like body snatching. Artists ranging from ubiquitous Eagles-copying country singers to Jackson 5 revivalists Hanson to alt-rock darling Beck, with his Cubist pastiches from folk, rock, hip-hop and blues, retrieve bits of the past and try to zap them to back life.

While Glen Campbell’s music is subject to raiding like the rest (“Wichita Lineman” has been covered by R.E.M. and Freedy Johnston, and it inspired “Wichita Skyline” on Shawn Colvin’s current album), the sort of career he has had is not duplicable, at least not in any First World country.

Hardly anybody grows up as poor today as Campbell did in rural Arkansas, where he was born into the Depression in 1936, the seventh of 10 children in a family headed by a sharecropper. In his 1994 autobiography, “Rhinestone Cowboy,” Campbell describes a hard, desperate upbringing in which leaving home at 14 wasn’t a Huck Finn-like adventure but an economic necessity that had to do with leaving one less mouth to feed.

His father did manage to get him a mail-order guitar, bought when Campbell was 4. It became his obsession and his ticket out. When he set out on the road, he landed in Albuquerque, where, by necessity, he learned to diversify musically.

“I was in my uncle’s band,” Campbell recalled this week from Phoenix, where he has lived since 1981. “We had a five-days-a-week radio show when I was a teenager, and we had to play Glenn Miller, Les Paul and Mary Ford, all the pop stuff. It was a well-rounded dose of music.”

He spoke first from his home, then from his car, then from the sidelines of a softball diamond, where he watched 11-year-old daughter Ashley take her cuts in a game. With kids’ shouts in the background, he strolled to the snack bar to fill her order for a Pepsi and some sour candies.

“She’s spoiled rotten,” Campbell, 61, said, fondly. “Not really. She’s beautiful and really precious.”

Campbell also has two sons in their mid-teens from his fourth, and current, marriage. Asked whether he ever resorts to the steely discipline he was raised with, Campbell said half jokingly that he has thought of sending the boys to military school to “give them a dose of on-time stuff.”

Clay, 15, plays drums in a grunge-rock band (unlike his dad, he can afford to specialize), and “runs around in those baggy things,” said Campbell--yet another parent helpless in the face of youth fashion absurdities.

Campbell’s diversified training prepared him for a remarkable career phase that no longer can be repeated: During the early and mid-1960s, he was one of the most in-demand session guitarists and backup singers in Los Angeles.

Pop has become too specialized for anybody to achieve the range and caliber of credits Campbell did. He played on Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” (Campbell recounts in his book that he stared at Sinatra throughout the session and that the star, noticing it, assumed the guitarist was gay, rather than merely awe-struck); many Merle Haggard songs, including “Mama Tried”; the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” single and “Pet Sounds” sessions (Campbell spent two years as a touring member of the band during its mid-60s peak); and numerous appearances as a brick in Phil Spector’s wall of sound, including guitar on the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin.’ ”

“An open, ringing chord sound [produced with] a capo. That was my specialty,” Campbell said.

Besides sessions, Campbell made records of his own for Capitol, starting in 1962. His break came in 1967 with “Gentle on My Mind,” followed the next year by “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” a Jimmy Webb song he decided to record after being moved to tears by Johnny Rivers’ earlier version. Two additional Webb compositions, “Wichita Lineman” and “Galveston,” completed Campbell’s ascension as the hottest pre-Garth country-pop crossover artist.

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Campbell’s popularity and his folksy, good-natured manner and hick charm landed him on national TV for four seasons from 1968-72, as host of “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.” The death of the weekly prime-time network television variety show probably puts that feat, and that degree of exposure, beyond the reach of any ‘90s pop star.

Subsequent chapters in Campbell’s story fall into more commonplace pop celebrity patterns. He fell into a whirlpool of booze and cocaine from the mid-’70s through the early ‘80s, and got pulled out of it by a renewed religious commitment and a good woman’s love--namely, that of wife Kim, whom he married in 1981.

During his partying period, Campbell became tabloid fodder, notably for his romance in 1980 with a half-his-age Tanya Tucker. Given Campbell’s utterly dismissive account of her in his book, and Tucker’s literary counterpunch last year with the assertion in her autobiography that he knocked her two front teeth out during one of their coke-fueled fights, a rapprochement between them might win an intermediary a Nobel Peace Prize.

Campbell said he wasn’t thrown by Tucker’s account of domestic violence--in which she admits being an equal aggressor. “It doesn’t put a cloud on my horizon at all. God knows what the truth is, [although] a lot of people don’t. I feel sorry for her. She still does some of the same things, stripping down in public [a reference to a 1997 incident in which Tucker crashed a show by two other country singers and flashed her breasts]. It’s got to be a terrible way of living your life.”

Campbell has settled into a fairly common routine for a star whose last big hit, “Southern Nights,” charted 21 years ago. He got onto the contemporary Christian circuit (his last mainstream pop album of new material came out in 1990). He performed for three years at his own theater in the country music tourism mecca of Branson, Mo., but got out when the routine of two shows a day, six days a week became “too restricting, cut-and-dried and predictable.”

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Now he’s contemplating a pop comeback with an album of new or previously unrecorded songs by Jimmy Webb, this time played with a simple, five-piece band instead of the grand, orchestral production of his Webb-penned hits of the late ‘60s. Campbell wants to go with an independent label, possibly a start-up company he has been in touch with. The big companies, he said, are “too busy, too one-directional” to bother with a singer who will turn 62 on Wednesday.

Still, Campbell’s versatility leads him down some improbable paths. Among his upcoming gigs, which include performances at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts tonight and Saturday, are an engagement to perform “The Star Spangled Banner” before a game by the new Phoenix baseball team, the Arizona Diamondbacks. Son Cal, who plays drums, is helping him practice.

“Yesterday we sat down and played some grunge stuff. I’m working up the national anthem a la Jimi Hendrix. It might feed back a little bit.”

Another engagement, in Florida, will be at an event marking the 50th anniversary of Israeli statehood, hosted jointly by Baptists and Messianic Jews (believers who worship Jesus while keeping Jewish customs). Campbell intends to draw on his days backing the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean and churn out a surf-rock version of “Hava Nagilah.”

Most improbable of all, Campbell says he is talking with golfing buddy and fellow Phoenix resident Alice Cooper about working up a number they can play after hours at celebrity golf tournaments.

“Coop,” as Campbell calls him, has a copycat hellhound on his own stylistic trail these days in Marilyn Manson, the latest retailer of horror-rock shtick. But Alice won’t need his guillotine and straitjacket for what Campbell has in mind: a duet on the old Donny and Marie Osmond ditty “Little Bit Country, Little Bit Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

Campbell chuckled at the suggestion that nobody could repeat the career he’s had.

“It’s a wonderful life,” he said. “Put that on a resume.”

* Glen Campbell and Ruby Lovett play tonight and Saturday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. 8 p.m. $25-$40. (562) 916-8500.