The Wichita Lineman Page 11
There is little ambiguity about the greatest couplet ever written. The punchline – the sucker punch – of ‘Wichita Lineman’, the line in the song that resonates so much, the line that contains one of the most exquisite romantic couplets in the history of song – ‘And I need you more than want you / and I want you for all time’ – could be many people’s perfect summation of love, although some, including writer Michael Hann, think it’s something sadder and perhaps more profound. ‘It is need, more than want, that defines the narrator’s relationship; if they need their lover more than wanting them, then naturally they will want them for all time. The couplet encompasses the fear that those who have been in relationships do sometimes struggle with: good God, what happens to me if I am left alone?’ Hann is certainly right when he says that it’s a heart-stopping line, and no matter how many hundreds of times you hear it, no matter what it means to you, it never loses its ability to shock and confound. There is also another more prosaic interpretation of the line, however, one that mirrors Brian Wilson’s ‘God Only Knows’, in which Wilson says that while he may not always love the object of his desire, as long as there are stars above her she never needs to doubt it. Meaning: my love could not be greater, and no matter how much I need you, my love for you is so immense that it matters not one jot. Bob Stanley, the musician and author, says that the line is the most beautiful in the pop canon, ‘one that makes me stop whatever I’m doing every single time I hear it’.
‘It came out without any effort whatsoever,’ Webb told me. ‘I don’t remember putting any particular concentration behind it, which may be why it flows. When I started seriously performing in my later years, about twenty years ago, I moved east and I played all the big nightclubs in New York, and I think I was exposed to an audience that really appreciated the finer points of songwriting a little bit more than maybe the surfer guys that I grew up with. People would come up to me and say, “How did you write that line?” And I would say, “Excuse me?” And they would say, “How did you write that line, ‘I need you more than want you / and I want you for all time’?” I’d say, “I don’t know. It felt right, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Then – and I’m being very candid with you – I began to notice it more and more, and then I had guys coming up to me after the show and saying it was the greatest line ever written. I’d laugh. Then it got to a point where a guy would come running up to me and say, “The greatest line ever written!” And I’d say, “Let me guess.” It became so pervasive it became like a meme. I have a black T-shirt I sell at my gigs that’s kind of a silhouette, kind of an artsy, nice picture of a lineman, and on the back it says, “I need you more than want you and I want you for all time.” And these T-shirts sell like hot cakes, they fly off the table.
‘I was trying to express the inexpressible, the yearning that goes beyond yearning, that goes into another dimension, when I wrote that line. It was a moment where the language failed me really; there was no way for me to pour this out, except to go into an abstract realm, and that was the line that popped out. I think the fascination comes from the fact that it just pushes the language a little bit beyond what it was really meant to express, because it could be deemed perfectly nonsensical – “I need you more than want you / and I want you for all time.” I mean, those are all abstract concepts, all jammed up together there. But that’s because it’s trying to express the inexpressible.
‘I don’t judge, but I evaluate a person’s sensitivity by their ability to respond to poetry. Not just my lyrics and not just James Taylor’s lyrics and not just Joni Mitchell’s lyrics … because when Joni Mitchell wrote ‘A Case of You’, she broke my heart, it was like someone swung a sledgehammer against a teapot. I still can’t say that line without losing control of my emotions. That was also a case where she was trying to express the inexpressible, so she had to push the language.
‘It’s almost childishly simple, but it suddenly dawned on me that I was a conduit for all kinds of emotions that people were either incapable of expressing or unwilling to express. The song became the real e-mail – emotional mail. The songwriter is almost a trader in feelings. I realised somewhat later that I deal almost exclusively in the emotional wreckage of life. It’s where I live, and that can be really, really dangerous.’
And Glen Campbell, who spent much of his life on the road? ‘I want you for all time – I always say that to my wife, because it cheers her up,’ he once said. ‘We got some grown kids and they say, “Oh, you guys. You guys are like lovebirds.”’
‘Good songwriting is still important,’ said Webb. ‘It is a continuing miracle that an art form so potent and influential in the emotional lives of human beings is available to virtually anyone who wants to enjoy it. There’s a subtext to classic hit songs, and that subtext is the common experience. By its very nature, it isn’t very easy to explain the intangible hook that fastens on to everyone.’
‘Wichita Lineman’ sounds as good to me now as it did when I first heard it fifty years ago. It has never palled or suffered through overexposure. I never wince when I hear it. Some neuroscientists believe that our brains go through two stages when we listen to a piece of music that we like: the caudate nucleus in the brain anticipates the build-up of our favourite part of the song as we listen, while the nucleus accumbens is triggered by the peak, thus causing the release of endorphins. Accordingly, they believe that the more we get to know a piece of music, the less fired up our brains will be in anticipating this peak. This thesis starts to evaporate further when you consider that received wisdom says that the more complex a song is, the more it will endure. ‘Wichita Lineman’ is anything but complex. It might have an unusual structure, and the lyrics might be particular, but it’s not exactly ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, not exactly comparable to the type of intricate prog rock made by the likes of Yes, Camel or Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
I once read about a professor who ran a music-therapist programme at a New York university. He said we hang on to songs because they are part of our ‘identity construction’, and that we are always trying to use them to get back to our lost paradise. What I certainly know is that I don’t tire of ‘Wichita Lineman’ for the same reason I don’t tire of listening to the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’, Brian Protheroe’s ‘Pinball’ or Nick Drake’s ‘One of These Things First’ – because it defies the injustice of repetition.
* There is a strong element of sadness about the song, one that is purposeful and created on purpose. Sadness, or the impression of sadness, is something employed by so many singers, not least David Bowie. When, as a child, he first heard Danny Kaye sing ‘Inchworm’, he not only marvelled at how sad he sounded, he also decided that he wanted that feel for his own singing voice and to develop the ability to sound sad when he wanted to. Bowie referred to the song constantly, and there is a good case for it being his very own Rosebud.
5: THE LINEMAN’S AFTERLIFE
I believe that all roads lead to the same place, and that is wherever all roads lead to.
WILLIE NELSON
There are hundreds of versions of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, possibly even thousands, and it has become as much of a classic as ‘My Way’, ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Hallelujah’. One of the most disturbing cover versions is by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, which John Peel once said was the best interpretation, by some considerable distance. The most elaborate version, however, is by Isaac Hayes, who turned the song into something of a Brobdingnagian epic. By deliberately fusing soap opera and ghetto chic, in the late sixties and early seventies Hayes created his own highly rhythmic, symphonic environment, and in this way was as influential as Sly Stone. Both men moved away from R&B and into traditionally white areas: Stone into rock, Hayes into the orchestral world of Burt Bacharach, Carole King and Jimmy Webb.
Of course, one wonders why. Cover versions are often redundant, and rarely remembered. Some can be little more than cheap photocopies, with someone hitherto unknown (or, maybe, far too well known) colouring in the original and try
ing not to go outside the lines. Some can be transformative, but often they are nothing but corruptions of your favourite memories (I would imagine if you had formative experiences with, or fond memories of, New Order’s ‘True Faith’, you would probably think George Michael’s cover is pointless; ditto Robbie Williams’s live version of Blur’s ‘Song 2’ or Simple Minds’ frankly confusing version of Prince’s ‘Sign o’ the Times’). Others are just plain perverse: does anyone really want to hear William Shatner cover Pulp’s ‘Common People’?
Another son of a sharecropper (this time from Memphis), Isaac Hayes joined Stax Records in 1964, aged twenty-two, eventually writing, arranging and producing dozens of hits for Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas and Johnnie Taylor (‘Hold On, I’m Coming’, ‘Soul Man’, ‘B-A-B-Y’, etc.). It was his 1969 solo LP Hot Buttered Soul, though, which really brought him personal acclaim, and at the time it was cited as the most important black album since James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, seven years earlier. Hot included an eighteen-minute version of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ and an elaborate reworking of Bacharach’s ‘Walk On By’, Hayes draping white-bread orchestral arrangements around his seemingly interminable monologues, almost as though he was experimenting with various convoluted seduction techniques. With his lush raps and funereal beats, Hayes gave you the impression he could turn a thirty-second hairspray commercial into a three-hour symphony, complete with several different movements and at least a dozen costume changes. He had a dark-brown crooner’s voice which perfectly suited this type of rich ballad, and all the others which came in its wake: ‘It’s Too Late’, ‘Windows of the World’, ‘The Look of Love’, ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’, etc. He was a remarkable arranger, and the bulk of his 1971 LP Shaft – in which he reached critical mass while winning two Grammys and an Oscar – is almost worthy of Bernard Herrmann. Talking about Hot Buttered Soul, he once said, ‘Like rock groups, I always wanted to present songs as dramas. It was something white artists did so well, but black folks hadn’t got into it. Which was why I picked those, if you like, white songs for that set, because they have the dramatic content.’
Hayes’s version of ‘Phoenix’ is monumental, containing an audacious ten-minute rap that invents a back story around Jimmy Webb’s Phoenix couple. ‘The rap came out of the necessity to communicate. There’s a local club in Memphis, primarily black, called the Tiki Club. One night there I heard “Phoenix” and I thought, “Wow, this song is great, this man must really love this woman.” I ran down to the studio the next day and told them about the song, and they said, “Yeah, yeah.” They didn’t feel what I felt, I thought maybe they weren’t getting it. The Bar-Kays were playing the Tiki Club a few days later, so I told them to learn the song and that I would sit in. I told them to keep cycling the first chord, and I started talking, just telling the story about what could have happened to cause this man to leave. Halfway through the song, conversations started to subside, and by the time I finished the song, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.’
As for the record, he said, ‘To preserve the vibe we cut it live, with no retakes – if you listen hard on the CD you can hear how my vocal mike picked up my fingernails clicking on the organ keys as I played those big swirls. When I played the whole album back to the company bigwigs they sat there in shock. I got worried and said, “Well?” After a while the promotions manager said, “That motherfucker is awesome. Won’t nobody give it airplay, but that ain’t even gonna matter.”’ He was right, as within three months the album had outsold every LP the company had on release, reaching the top of the soul, jazz and pop charts. By the end of 1970, the album was platinum.
Jimmy Webb loved it. ‘The whole talking blues thing at the beginning was like a novel – a major opus. It was to do with the Delta blues tradition, that way of telling a story, although people sometimes forget he did a great job at singing the song too. I’d produced the Supremes, I understood R’n’B and soul artists, so it wasn’t so far-fetched to me. Isaac was a precursor to rap and hip-hop, he was trying to create something new.’
I remember playing Hayes’s widescreen epic in 1977, when the Summer of Hate (©) was officially in full flow, and at a time when even owning a copy of a Who album was suspicious. Back then, owning an Isaac Hayes album was considered contrary rather than damaging to one’s street cred. Over time, liking an unlikely or perennially unfashionable record ceased being socially unacceptable, becoming instead a Guilty Pleasure (©). As it was for many of my generation, 1977 was something of a benchmark. That year, I spent most of the summer bouncing between the Roxy, the Marquee, the Red Cow and the 100 Club, watching the likes of the Clash, the Jam, the Damned, and Adam and the Ants. This was also the summer when I moved up to London, at the age of seventeen, to join a foundation course at Chelsea School of Art. Every day I would walk to college along the King’s Road, and every night I would wander off into Soho, taking the number 11, 22 or 19 bus, destined to end up in a basement listening to extremely loud punk music.
It was, and remains, like it was for many of the others who spent their formative years listening to three-chord leather-jacket rock, one of the happiest times of my life. At the time, I looked like Johnny Ramone (shaggy pudding-bowl haircut, black plastic jacket, drainpipe jeans and dirty white plimsolls) and hadn’t a care in the world. But while it is assumed that when us baby punks made our way back to our homes (in my case, the Ralph West Halls of Residence on Albert Bridge Road, which serviced all the central London art schools) we hastily put imported dub or hardcore industrial albums on our turntables, many of us listened to the music we were now being encouraged by the music press to unceremoniously dump. So while we would certainly listen to Two Sevens Clash by Culture, Horses by Patti Smith, Autobahn by Kraftwerk and various Throbbing Gristle bootlegs (horrible then, and horrible now), we would still wind down (what chilling out was called back in the day) by listening to Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Isaac Hayes, John Martyn or one of the seminal records of 1977 – released in August that year – Steely Dan’s majestic Aja. For while we spent our evenings jumping up and down in sweaty West End venues, we were still dreaming of driving down Sunset Boulevard in a big fancy car listening to super-slick West Coast music. And although the snarky, sarcastic Steely Dan obviously hated anything to do with West Coast culture, they actually made the slickest West Coast music of all. My room may have been covered with Sex Pistols posters, but my heart was elsewhere: in California, the deserts of Arizona, the west coast of Ireland … Notting Hill in the late fifties. On the perimeter of sleep, I would lie there and imagine myself living the lives in those songs, believing my own life to be full of the same possibilities.
Another record that got heavy rotation in my room at Ralph West (although admittedly after most people had sloped off to their own) was Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits, a Capitol album with a tightly cropped photograph of Glen’s head on the cover, poking out of an especially loud orange shirt (an orange that was almost identical to Campbell’s skin tone). As I was studying typography as part of my course, I knew the cover type was Stencil Bold, an especially cheap font that gave the whole thing a patina of naff. At the time, it was, I suppose, a Guilty Pleasure, not that I’ve ever really believed in them.
‘Wichita Lineman’ was never a Guilty Pleasure, though, never had a hint of embarrassment about it. Sure, it was draped in melancholy, and there were vaporous traces of country all over it, but there was nothing boilerplate about it. Designed to be cinematic, writ wide in CinemaScope, it was predetermined to evoke the never-ending plains of the Midwest, something too grand to be cute. Through the fields of wheat and milo and Sudangrass and flax and alfalfa came the strains of a record destined to define itself like no other, a record with a big sky, a horizon and a man attending to a telegraph pole.
You’ll read stats that will tell you that ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ is the third most recorded song of all time, and although ‘Wichita Lineman’ can’t match that, its interpreters have certainly been more idiosyncratic, a
nd over the years, as the song has developed momentum, it has attracted more and more admirers, and more who have wanted to conquer it: (deep breath) R.E.M., Stone Temple Pilots, Patti Smith, Keith Urban, Dwight Yoakam, Billy Joel, Melissa Etheridge, the Dells, José Feliciano, James Taylor, Dennis Brown, Maria McKee, Ray Charles (who gets bonus points for his spoken-word ad-lib near the end – ‘That’s me, baby!’), the jazz pianist Alan Pasqua, O. C. Smith, Ken Berry, the Lettermen, the Fatback Band, Tom Jones, the Scud Mountain Boys, Peter Nero, Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66, Cassandra Wilson, Gomez, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Celtic Thunder, Johnny Cash, the Meters, the White Stripes, Villagers, ‘Tennessee’ Ernie Ford, Urge Overkill and more.
Sammy Davis Jr recorded an extraordinary version on his 1970 Motown album Something for Everyone. Davis was a great dancer, a great mimic, a great comedian and a great singer, but what he really was, was a great performer. And while some marvelled at his range (one critic said his voice always sounded too epic for such a small body), listening to his voice today his emotions sound premeditated. Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett sang from their core, whereas Davis was essentially a song-and-dance man at heart, so his singing was textbook rather than heartfelt. But what a textbook. His version of ‘Wichita’ is almost comically funky, and yet it works. Employing the tropes of the rhinestone ghetto, when he sang it on his TV show Sammy & Company he was wearing a coffee-and-cream gingham jacket, a bright-pink shirt with an aircraft carrier collar, buckets of jewellery and an overgrown pencil moustache.
‘Listen, I’ve had the good fortune of working for the past decade and a half or so,’ he says to the audience, teasingly. ‘And every once in a while, when you have groovy friends and a groovy audience, you get to do something you didn’t like to do. Now, those of you who have seen some of Sammy & Company have occasionally said to me, “You obviously dig country and western.” And I don’t want to say anything real strange, you know, but shucks almighty’ – his voice going all country – ‘I’ve been known to be called Pea-Picker every once in a while … And we do do a couple of toe-tappers. So, we’re gonna do a little country and western for you. Well, let me put it this way, this is about as country and western as I’m gonna get … I am a lineman for the county …’