Glen Campbell Quotes

And I need you more than want you And I want you for all time

Who are your friends? They are the people who are there in hard times or when you're hurting beyond words. Or with a few words of encouragement and concern, make you realize you're really not lost at all. Friends comes in both sexes, in all shapes, colors and sizes, but the most important thing they have in common, is the ability to share with you, your best joys and your deepest sorrows, for they are your friends.

Carl Franzoni perhaps summed it up best when he declared rather bluntly that, “the Byrds’ records were manufactured.” The first album in particular was an entirely engineered affair created by taking a collection of songs by outside songwriters and having them performed by a group of nameless studio musicians (for the record, the actual musicians were Glen Campbell on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Jerry Cole on rhythm guitar), after which the band’s trademark vocal harmonies, entirely a studio creation, were added to the mix. As would be expected, the Byrds’ live performances, according to Barney Hoskyns’ Waiting for the Sun, “weren’t terribly good.” But that didn’t matter much; the band got a lot of assistance from the media, with Time being among the first to champion the new band. And they also got a tremendous assist from Vito and the Freaks and from the Young Turks, as previously discussed.

But more important than both TLC and the All Saints is Billie Piper. Billie’s ‘Honey to the B’ is a smokin’ hot tune, it’s up there with the greats: Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘Tago Mago’ by Can, ‘Approximately Infinite Universe’ by Yoko, Metal Box by PiL, ‘Never Ever’ by the All Saints. Er, OK, so ‘Honey to the B’ is something of a ‘Never Ever’ lite, but this contrivance, like the very existence of the All Saints, somehow elevates Billie Piper into truly over-achieving high art.

In his classic study Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from LeFanu to Blackwood, the American scholar Jack Sullivan divides traditional tales of the supernatural into two camps: the antiquarian and the visionary. The former is typified by a certain emotional detachment, coupled with subtle irony and a dry, precise evocation of a world that is recognizably our own, inhabited by sensible characters—male Edwardian antiquaries whose stolidity borders on dullness, and whose invocation of horrors is as inadvertent as it is irrevocable. The antiquarian ghost story is typified by the work of the English don M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James, himself inspired by the more open-ended horror of his Irish predecessor, Sheridan LeFanu. As Sullivan puts it, “For LeFanu’s characters, reality is inherently dark and deadly; for James’ antiquaries, darkness must be sought out through research and discovery.” The visionary ghost story, in contract, has more in common with the robust stream of American transcendentalism that emerged in the late 19th century, as well as with the hermetic and decadent artistic movements popular in fin de siècle Europe. Little surprise, then, that one of the most successful visionary writers, the British-born Algernon Blackwood, based his most rapturous and terrifying tales on his experiences in the Canadian wilderness, or that the other great supernatural visionary, the Welsh Arthur Machen, was a friend of Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and drew upon Celtic myth in his short fiction. Sullivan identified a later, third stream in supernatural writing in Lost Souls, the companion volume to Elegant Nightmares: he simply calls it the contemporary ghost story, a capacious portmanteau term that makes room for writers such as Robert Aickman, Walter de la Mare, Elizabeth Bowen and Ramsey Campbell. To this list I’d add Peter Straub, Kelly Link, Glen Hirshberg, and now, with the publication of Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, John Langan.