"If you can imagine it, you can achieve it 
If you can dream it, you can become it."   WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD


Dad, this is what I want to do - the Power of a Dream         July 9th, 2007


Glenn Campbell is a true super star of the music industry but this is a story about his partnership with Jimmy Webb.

In 1969 Campbell sold more records than The Beatles, a surge in popularity that came off the back of his TV show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour; and the same year he co-starred in True Grit with his friend John Wayne. ("My horse," Campbell recalls, "was frightened of his horse.").

Though his instinct for a song is uncanny - he says he wanted to record Jimmy Webb's By The Time I Get To Phoenix the moment he saw the title - he has never acquired the respect accorded to some other performers; perhaps because his songs were considered too middle-of-the-road for a pop audience, too country for the middle-of-the-road market, and too mainstream for country and western fans. He's written hit records, but sees himself predominantly as an interpreter of work by others, including Larry Weiss, who wrote Rhinestone Cowboy.

Often there is a bond between a performed and a song writer. Campbell says: 

"I have had that kind of a bond," says Campbell, "with a man who has been like a brother to me: Jimmy Webb."

When Campbell's first hit, Turn Around, Look At Me, was released, Webb, 11 years his junior, was a 14-year-old living in Laverne, Oklahoma.

"I heard that song on the radio," Webb tells me, on the phone from his home in New York, "and 'I borrowed money from my dad. I had never bought a record before."

He played the single, as he recalls, to the point that his father, a Baptist preacher, implored him to stop. "I said, `Dad, this is what I want to do. I want to write songs like this one.'

Then I went to my bedroom, and I knelt down and prayed. I said, `Dear God, when I grow up, please let me write songs like Turn Around, Look At Me and please let Glen Campbell sing them.' That was my prayer. And it was answered. In detail."

By 1967, Webb had established himself as a precocious talent in the publishing industry, and Campbell's recording of Webb's By The Time I Get To Phoenix was a big hit. But Campbell, a self-confessed "slow-talking country boy with conservative values", showed no inclination to meet the composer at first. "He did three or four songs of mine without ever talking to me," says Webb. "He knew

After Campbell had a hit with Galveston, though, their relationship turned a corner. Webb tells me how he was living in the former Philippines embassy in Hollywood "with 50 of my closest friends. Glen finally called me.

He said, `Do you think you could write another song about a town?' I'd been driving around northern Oklahoma and Kansas, an area that's flat, remote and almost surreal in its infinite distances. I'd seen a lineman up on a telegraph pole, talking on the phone. It was such a curiosity to see a human being perched up there, in those surroundings."

Readers of Rolling Stone and Mojo magazines have voted Wichita Lineman one of the greatest songs ever recorded - accolades that surprised even its composer. Certainly there's no question that this is the greatest ever record about a telephone engineer from Kansas.

I wonder what would have happened is Jimmy Webb hadn't continued to dream about writing songs like the one heard Glenn Campbell signing on the radio when he was just 11 years old.

Story adapted from Robert Chalmers article "Fear and Loving in Las Vegas."


Enjoy this issue of The Maverick Spirit...  That's it for today, until next time, continue to enjoy being a free spirit in a complicated world... 

Wayne Mansfield

P.S.  In 1902 the poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly returned the poems of a twenty-eight-year-old poet with the following note: "Our magazine has no room for your vigorous verse." The poet was Robert Browning

P.P.S.  Did you know that John Bunyan wrote Pilgram's Progress while confined to a Bedford Prison cell for his views on religion; Sir Waiter Raleigh wrote the History of the World during a thirteen-year imprisonment; and Martin Luther translated the Bible while confined in the Castle of Wartburg.
 

And for something really different:

Visit my daily thoughts and views at    Confessions of a Boy from Margaret River   where you can leave comments and ideas
on stuff that doesn't make it to The Maverick Spirit
 
Life's Little Instruction Book

When you see visitors taking pictures of each other; offer to take a picture of them together.

Never apologise for extreme measures when defending values, your health, or your family's safety.

Never sell your teddy bear, letter sweater, or high school yearbooks at a garage sale. You'll regret it later.

Source:          H. Jackson Brown, Jr  Life's Little Instruction Book
MAVERICK QUOTE OF THE DAY


"There's only one way to
succeed in anything, and that is
to give it everything."

Vince Lombardi

Samuel Maverick (1803-70) Texan rancher who, when branding of stock was introduced chose "Not to Brand." Every unbranded horse or cow he then claimed as a Maverick!

Feedback:   What's it about spelling that gets people fired up?? And a little word of encouragement never goes astray as you will see from a SMALL sample of feedback from Friday's Spirit "It's Always Too Soon to Quit."

Some thoughts on spelling first:

Jonathan,

dear soul if you must pick Wayne up on his spelling always check your own it is "aberration" not the new word you invented (abbheration?)

Brian Leaning-Mizen.
www.mindsynergy.net

Fantastic Wayne. This passage is part of a chapter for your next book, but I'm sure you know that. Congratulations, it's wonderful. And congratulations for getting up one more time than you've fallen down. Most couldn't have ridden through it with such aplomb.

Had to laugh at how the universe loves to knock us off our self-righteous perch. Your writer Jonathon was appalled at your spelling (he was kind enough to call them typos) - said they were not the norm but an ABBHERATION! (tee, hee, hee - 3 mistakes in 1 word!) - Please don't publish this - this is between you and me - I'd hate to think I was making a public laughing stock of him.

Marlene

And now some on "It's Always Too Soon To Quit."

Hi Wayne

As always thanks for the encouragement.

I too have travelled a path of seemingly unending legal struggle so I can sympathise. Like many really huge legal struggles it didn’t go well but that is not what inspired me to write to you.

I really loved your words this week about; if you have a really big dream IT will not give up on you. As a Business Coach I am often discouraged to see people yearning for a really big purpose in their lives to be ‘passionate’ about. I see people discouraged because their lives are reasonable and settled and feeling like there should be more to it. I wish people were more centred on who they are today and what they already have. For some people more is required of them in their lives and that ‘dream’ or ‘demon’ will be really obvious and entirely insistent, or to use your words haunting. For the rest of us it’s ok to be grateful with what we have and seek to make incremental changes to it.

I really congratulate you for your perseverance with your dream even at the expense of your demon.

Maya Saric - Corporate Coach Aust

Wayne

Thank You for the Maverick Spirit, I look forward in seeing it arrive in my INBOX.

Normally I would make a rule up and allow the rule to sort the incoming email. I am always busy and never get to those emails such as Early to Rise www.earlytorise.com which is an email that I used to look forward to each morning and now that it goes into the folder I have learned to ignore it.

So therefore I refuse to make up that folder and rule of the Maverick Spirit.

I read it as soon as it arrives in.

One it is jam packed with great ideas.
Two as a Franchisor the information is forward onto the franchisee of that day that is having that challenge.

I love your stuff and yes I own your Cold Calling for Scardie Cats.

Thanks Heaps for the Maverick Spirit.

John Burns

Wayne

Thanks so much for your message today – I am a coach that has finished up with a bunch of clients, successfully I might add – and now find I have quite a bit of time on my hands. Rather than going out there to get more clients, I was thinking that I probably ought to get a “real job” and earn some money while I wait around for the referrals to come.

Your message has come to me at the most perfect time so that I don’t take the supposed easy route and give up on my dreams of running a successful business that positively impacts the lives of others. Your message has me inspired and motivated to re-set some goals and go out there and do whatever I can do to keep moving in the direction of my dreams and building my business.

Thanks for again for the timely tip – I love the Spirit.

Diana

But not everyone is a Wayne Mansfield fan

Sorry mate but you spam people and harass them with your babble and you are going to pay the price.

Trying to justify it by saying you helped someone doesn't cut it.

Some can filter your brand of constant page and pages of rave to get the odd piece of useful information and some can't.

Respect works if you want to know the secret of avoiding litigation.

Thanks
Ian Gaffel
 

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Until next time then... enjoy being a free spirit in a complicated world.

Wayne Mansfield Editor

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