Saturday we trekked out to Morrisville, to [apparently] the only theater in the state showing the Glen Campbell documentary. It’s a wonderful & heartbreaking movie.
It’s not a traditional biopic – it basically starts sometime around 2011 and ends a year or two later. It’s about Glen Campbell in the immediate aftermath of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and the farewell tour that he did after he was diagnosed. You get bits & pieces of his history & achievements, but it’s almost entirely in the moment.
The most mindblowing part is seeing how the disease affected different parts of his memory in different ways. He could rarely remember the names of his children. He had to use a teleprompter for the song lyrics (and when it went offline, he was genuinely lost). But he could still follow the melodies perfectly, and most impressively, he could still play guitar like a motherfucker. Seriously. That ability was clearly stored in a completely different part of his brain, at least up to a point.
Towards the very end of the tour, even that started to break down, and that was probably the most heartbreaking part. But his doctors said that the constant playing had actually helped to exercise his brain & to keep him lucid & capable for much longer than he would have been otherwise – and that’s pretty obvious from the movie.
Sunday night it was obviously necessary to watch the new Wrecking Crew documentary, which was made by the son of guitarist Tommy Tedesco. It has apparently been the works for years & years – there was interview footage that had been shot specifically for the documentary that was in 4:3 TV aspect ratio, and in which everyone looked a *lot* younger. I’m told that the thing was hung up for years in negotiations over the rights to all the music that was of course absolutely critical to the telling of the story.
I read the fairly recent book last year, so it’s hard for me to gauge how well the movie did at telling the story. It seemed kind of loose & randomly organized, but there were so many amazing anecdotes that it honestly doesn’t really matter.
And even if you’re intellectually aware of how many hits the Wrecking Crew played on, it doesn’t really sink in until you start to hear them all back-to-back-to-back. My only gripe, given our Glen Campbell streak, is that Glen didn’t get more screen time.
Earlier this week my friend Laura tweeted a gripe about whistlers (talmbout how if people loved whistling there’d be more top selling whistling albums) & so I had to google “top whistling albums” which led me to this amazing website.
So, uh, have fun with that one, I guess.
All kinds of other Twitter Stuff happened, and I guess you can go read about it over there. Starbucks is going to solve race relations in America. I saw a bunch of dudes my age (or older) at work wearing hoodies and realized that I just can’t be a member of that club anymore. Stuff like that.