The real
name of Glen Campbell’s 2014 road show was the rather bland “Goodbye Tour.” But
nothing was bland about the farewell road show itself. At a point when Glen
Campbell was seriously demented, he could still perform songs he had written
decades earlier—a musical version of “muscle memory,” the ability to do
something without conscious thought because he had done it for so long.
When I found the DVD of I’ll Be Me at my library, I thought that I would be viewing a
biopic, not a documentary. The entire film is an examination of Campbell’s
dementia and his music. And this DVD might have been a first, a celebrity in
his last years letting the world into his most private moments, preserved. He
was 78 when he was diagnosed, but he also showed stamina—How many performers in
their late seventies have the endurance to perform 151 performances at that
age?
As the Washington
Post critic Ann Hornaday commented at the time, “What’s so bracing about
this documentary is the filmmaker goes into the dark recesses of his psyche as
Alzheimer’s continues to colonize his brain.” And the camera doesn’t just
capture the inspiring moments, as when viewers can sense the camaraderie among
the many family members when they are on the road. But this is not The Sound of Music. Campbell’s dementia
is the unifying theme.
One of Campbell’s daughters was fearful that something was
going to go very wrong. And why not? By the time the tour commenced, not long
after his diagnosis, Campbell was quite demented. He couldn’t always identify
his family members. Nor could he tie his shoelaces. And his wife simply commented,
“It’s really hard.” At one point, Campbell pronounced, “I’m the chieftain here,”
to the discontent of his family members, a sign that he was becoming
overbearing. Bill Maclay, the tour manager, suggested that the audience was
expecting a stock car race, not a concert, and they were expecting to see a
crash. At one point, the teleprompter went off, leaving Campbell untethered
from the script of his performance, and calling loudly for the people in the
control booth to get it working again. And during rehearsals, his daughter
expressed fear that her dad would embarrass himself.
When the teleprompter was working, Campbell stepped up to
the microphone and stated into it, “Play solo guitar,” not realizing that those
were directions, not the lines he was expected to deliver. Yet, somehow,
Campbell, with a lot of loved ones and staffers, managed to maintain what might
have ended in a debacle. The voice, though diminished, was still there. So was
the showmanship. Most of all, he was still able to sing, and play his guitar, entertaining
tens of thousands of his fans. He also managed to make a wan joke: “I go into
the kitchen to get something. Then I said, ‘Now why did I come in here for? I stopped that. I stopped going into the
kitchen.”
But as the documentary advanced,
Campbell began showing a surly side, almost certainly attributable to his
worsening condition and the stress of the tour. And there was an infantile
quality to some of Campbell’s actions, such as when he was shown eating a dish
of ice cream, the way a very young child would do it, intent on consuming
everything that was still in the cup with his tongue.
Country music’s èminence grise died roughly three years after he was diagnosed. I
imagine that those last years were not much fun for him or his loved ones. But
this documentary is likely to be in circulation for a long time. I recommend it
to anyone who wishes to understand the later stages of Alzheimer’s, a place no
one wants to go.
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