When a mountain disappears from our world, it feels like we are moving toward the end. When it’s a musical landmark like blues guitarist Bill Campbell, who passed away on September 6, it can be a deceiving event because so many people never even realized the mountain was there.
Born and raised in Smithville and Austin, Campbell was as powerful a presence in the area as anyone who ever played the most righteous of Texas blues, but he was easy to overlook. While he could hold his own on any bandstand anywhere, the attention and fame that often came with that world was of no interest to him. It was something that Campbell had no use for. Instead, he wanted to spread electricity from the bandstand out into an audience like he was a lightning bolt. Bill Campbell had an innate ability to turn any room in Central Texas – whether it was the 1960s at Sam’s Showcase on the Eastside, Antone’s on Sixth Street Downtown in the 1970s, or the Hole in the Wall and the Continental Club at the end of that decade – into a churchlike holy spot for what the blues could do. And that was to save lives, spread joy, and show an audience where salvation started. There have only been a limited number of guitarists in Texas over the past 100 years that had the ability to take an electric instrument and turn the mundane into the promised land. Truly, this musician was at the front of the line of those who could actually do it at will.
Guitar king Jimmie Vaughan remembers the first time he saw Bill Campbell play. It was the mid-Sixties and Vaughan was about 15 years old. He had come to Austin from Dallas with his teenage band the Chessmen to play a local club. “Campbell was like Freddie King, even then,” Vaughan recalls. “He was just the best. I was in Austin for the first time and I’d never seen anyone near my age that could play like that. I never forgot it, and when I moved to Austin in ’69 I made sure to find him.”
By then Bill Campbell had worked his way to the Eastside in Austin, the first white musician to make it there. “There were two or three little bands playing then in the afternoon and at night,” Bill Campbell once recalled. “There was always something to do and play blues there. I could get over to the Eastside with my guitar and buy a jug of wine and play. I might not make any money but there was a place on the Eastside to play. All the fun was over there. Sam’s Showcase, Charlie’s Playhouse, the Victory Grill, somewhere. I didn’t care about anything but the music. That was it. It was everything there for a few years, and everything to me. I didn’t even realize how much it meant to me until it was gone. Then as the Sixties ended the street just dried up on the Eastside. There wasn’t any scene anymore. It was all gone.”
But musicians have to keep on the move. There is no other choice. So Bill Campbell crossed back to the other side of I-35 and started looking for places to put his Fender Reverb amp onstage and play like his life depended on it. Because it did. I first heard him play at Bevo’s Westside Tap Room at the corner of Rio Grande and 24th Street. It was a divided room – half full of fraternity and sorority students and the other side patronized by the growing beatnik and hippie contingency that was starting to plant itself in Austin. There was literally a wall between the sides. In the outside back of the club was a stage for whoever wandered out there. One night in 1970 I ended up watching Kenneth Threadgill and his quartet of Chuck and Julie Joyce, Cotton Collins, and Campbell playing a devoted night of country music, with mostly Jimmie Rodgers songs and a few other standards. Campbell was on electric bass that night, but one evening a few blues players had taken over the bandstand and he pulled out his Gibson electric 335 and tore into a sound that I had never heard a man in his 20s play. I had recently heard Freddie King perform at a juke joint called the Lost Acres not far outside the nearby town of Taylor, and I was sure I would never see anyone better in my life. There was something so majestic and, well, solar about King that the room felt like it had levitated off its foundation. That’s what Campbell did to the atmosphere at Bevo’s. I knew I had discovered a key to the musical future, and also knew I would never let it get away.
It was that night at Bevo’s in fall 1970 that Bill Campbell took over a part of my life, and for the next 54 years schooled me in the blues and, really, all music, in a way only a handful of others ever have. Through years of ecstatic nights and irreplaceable days it was like the young man not much older than me became a local shaman. No one else could play like him, nor could they explain life in such unforgettable ways that I often felt he should be teaching philosophy at the University of Texas right down the street from Bevo’s. And while Campbell could often try the patience of his followers, it was almost always worth the efforts to stay on board. Through the 1970s, Eighties, and into the Nineties, the Bill Campbell 101 class was unequaled for sheer philosophical puzzles and what seemed at times like musical secrets. The man was beyond blues. He had entered our souls where secrets are learned for those who know how to listen.
In 1975, Clifford Antone opened a blues nightclub Downtown, and the world turned upside down. Every weekend, major lights like Muddy Waters, Otis Rush, Albert King, and others called the new shrine home. Bill Campbell was one of the Austinites who put the zip in Antone’s. He played in the house band and gave the club a certified blues aura. Life started getting exciting on Sixth Street and the major national names like Bobby Bland, Fats Domino, Irma Thomas, B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, and others became regular attractions. And local bands like the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Angela Strehli’s group grew into hometown heroes. In his own way, Campbell became a party of one for working solo with the out-of-town stars. There was something about the realness the guitarist exuded that gave Antone’s a sense of righteous reality. Maybe that’s because he had been a leader of the blues crew for over a decade in Austin.
I watched Bill Campbell do this over and over for years, and when he joined our bar band the Bizarros in 1978, it felt like life had been plugged into a wall socket. There was a magical way the musician approached songs, never taking the easy way out. Instead, every time Campbell strapped on a guitar and plugged into an amplifier it felt like something had happened to the ions in the air. As if the atmosphere had morphed into a field of righteous celebration with a touch of danger to it. When this man started pulling truth out of the strings on his Gibson guitar there was no other way to respond except to close the eyes and thank whatever spiritual essence was in the club. There were only a small handful of guitarists who had the compacted ability to bring normal life to a halt and turn on the sonic faucet of eternity. It was in the sounds they pulled from inside their souls, and shared with anyone who had an open portal to accept that absolute wonder Bill Campbell was capable of. These words might seem slightly stretched into hyperbole, but that can only be because it needed to be seen in person on a good night when his life allowed him to hit that place where music becomes otherworldly. That’s the place this man tried to get to every time he stepped on a bandstand. Campbell had a way of pushing himself beyond the normal plane into one of pure imagination. He really did live beyond the notes.
Still, Bill Campbell could remain an enigma to many, and even a burden to others. The great blues players are often not an easy ride off the bandstand. There can be a price to pay for up-close camaraderie. As much absolute absolution from life’s burden that the blues can offer, the offerers can extract an entrance fee. I moved to Los Angeles, and once during a visit to Austin I saw a small advertisement in the Austin American-Statesman for a benefit headlined FREE THE AUSTIN ONE. Campbell had stepped in some trouble and needed help, and the local loyalists banded together. Once Campbell was freed from jail, he moved to Los Angeles to live with me. Which turned into new bands on the West Coast, including James Harman’s Southern California bluesologists and then as the bandleader at Boz Scaggs’ new San Francisco club Slim’s. But that allure of the West Coast didn’t last a decade, and Bill Campbell returned to Austin. It was his home.
As the shows and bands became less regular, the guitarist did his best to keep pushing forward. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. But he never lost his soul or the desire to stay close to the music. As the new century started, Bill Campbell would sometimes join Gary Clark Jr.’s aggregation and play the clubs as Clark got started building a career. Campbell called me at my job at Warner Bros. Records in 2001 and suggested I come see Clark immediately. I did and Campbell was right again, just as he was in 1982 when he told me to find Dwight Yoakam and listen ASAP. Four years later Yoakam was a country superstar. Campbell was a talent scout of the highest order, and was never wrong. He had the antenna tuned in and knew where to point it.
As our long friendship grew longer, in 2010 I told Bill Campbell I wanted to write a story about him for The Austin Chronicle. Without dropping a beat the large Texan said, “Well, Bentley, if you do that I’ll have to kill you.” Pure Campbell turned up to 10. He wanted no attention. That was not his desire. Now that he’s gone, without the man who I followed for over 50 years on an unequaled off-road education of soul and sound, life feels newly empty. My guide has left, and I miss him deeply. There was never anyone like Bill Campbell. His was a universe of his own making, and that was that. The last time I visited Austin we had lunch in Bastrop, not far from his home in Smithville. We both laughed and shared endless memories, and as always I listened to someone who was one of the smartest and, yes, at his best, kindest people I ever knew. It just took getting over the wall. A pure Texan who would have fit right in at the Alamo. Bill Campbell believed in his beliefs, and would never back down. And he found the music of the spheres, on the East Austin street corners and joints, downtown blues clubs, Los Angeles rock & roll clubs, and uptown San Francisco night spots. For this man, it never changed. He could hear the truth, and tell you what it sounded like. R.I.P. BC. You earned it.
This article appears in September 13 • 2024.