The Wichita Lineman Read online

  ‘I’m surprised really because it was such a simple little thing,’ said Webb, when I asked him if he understood why so many people think ‘Wichita Lineman’ is the best song ever recorded. ‘But I’m aware of people’s feelings towards it, to some degree. It still sounds great today …’

  INTRODUCTION: THE SLEEPER

  Ars est celare artem.

  (True art is to conceal art.)

  For many years I thought I was the only person who liked Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’; in truth I thought I was the only person from my generation who might have heard of it, let alone actually listened to the record. The song was as much a part of my childhood as the other records my parents filled the house with, and along with Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Matt Monro, the work of Glen Campbell saturated my life. Actually, to be more accurate, it saturated my parents’ life. I just happened to be there at the time.

  I wish I could remember where I was when I first heard it, I really do, but nothing bubbles up. It was just one of those songs that was always around, like the others my parents often played at home by Sinatra, Martin, folk singer Bob (‘Elusive Butterfly’) Lind, country star Roger Miller, one-hit wonders Esther and Abi Ofarim (‘Cinderella Rockefella’), the Seekers (lots and lots of them, from ‘The Carnival Is Over’ and ‘Georgy Girl’ to ‘I’ll Never Find Another You’ and, my favourite, ‘A World of Our Own’) and Dutch calypso duo Nina and Frederik. Actually, I think these were probably my mother’s records. Her favourite, Dean, blasted daily through the walls, and as I heard her singing along, even as a boy I could tell she wasn’t really happy, and that she was singing about a world that would never be within her reach, resigned instead to a life of compromise and domesticity. How she semaphored this, I don’t know, but even when she was happily singing, her sadness appeared to define her. You pick things up as a kid. Especially when your parents are always fighting.

  ‘Ah, Dino,’ she would say emphatically, as though she were wistfully remembering some romantic Sorrento holiday. ‘What an old smoothie.’

  She was being dismissive while at the same time taking a kind of ownership of him, but even she couldn’t disguise the fact that she obviously found him completely exotic. Imagine! She owned not one Dean Martin record but several! Back in the sixties, to my parents’ generation, buying a new record – be it single, EP or album – wasn’t incidental, it wasn’t like buying a pack of cigarettes. It was like buying a fridge or a television set. I can still remember my mother saying to my father, on more than one occasion, ‘Shall we listen to the new Dean Martin record again?’

  Swells, she called them, when she mentioned Dean and Frank, and that’s what they were – swells.

  These were the first pieces of vinyl I ever remember holding, racked in a vinyl-coated dark-green box – with a cheap, goldish metal lock on the lid – just big enough to hold about forty seven-inch singles. There were all sorts of singles in there, mostly in thin, brightly coloured paper sleeves, and all looking as though they’d been imported from America. I’ve still got my parents’ beautifully scratched 45 of John Barry’s wistful ‘Vendetta’, still got an EP of various tracks from Songs for Swinging Lovers, still got Topol’s ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ (from the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof). There was lots of Herb Alpert, too, and if history can be caught in a single breath, then there are few better ways of explaining the populuxe aspirations of American suburbia during the late fifties and early sixties (when the advertising industry began to believe its own publicity) than by listening to the piercing yet sweet ‘Ameriachi’ sound of Alpert and his Tijuana Brass.

  These were largely American tastes, but then at home we were steeped in Americana. Not only that, we almost felt American.

  Lying around the house also was a record by Les Baxter, the soundtrack composer who, along with Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, helped invent the hyper-world of exotica. How esoteric of my parents. Baxter excelled at space-age bachelor-pad music, creating enchanting little symphonies that conjured up exotic images of the Gold Coast, the South Pacific, the Andes, even other planets.

  Home for me was rather less exotic, namely a bungalow in a small Norfolk village, an overspill community from the local US Air Force base, which was full of American pilots and their beehived wives, who all appeared to wear pedal-pushers, stilettos and completely opaque Jackie O shades (the wives, not the pilots). Even when they were picking up their children from the local school. I spent much of my childhood on air-force bases, both British and American, so I suppose it’s no surprise that from an early age I latched on to the obvious manifestations of US pop culture – food, clothes, cars and the records of Dean Martin. From England’s 1966 World Cup victory through to the moon landing in 1969, Martin was rarely off our turntable, and many of my early memories revolve around listening to ‘Return to Me’, ‘Volare’, ‘Under the Bridges of Paris’, ‘You Belong to Me’ and ‘Napoli’. For me, these songs were gaudily exotic but homely at the same time, and defined a certain kind of sophistication, no matter how ersatz it may have been.

  I would stare at those Dean Martin singles for hours. They all had heavily stylised photographs of him on the picture sleeves (which, even back then, were so brittle they were in danger of cracking). Martin was a hypnotically attractive figure, even though he himself was as unselfconscious as a performer could be. Dean Martin looked like he swung not just because swinging was cool, but because it was easy. And Dean Martin was nothing if not easy. His singing style was practically weightless; disdaining obvious effort and explicit emotional involvement, it suggested the detachment of a new kind of hipster. When he sang, Dino unfolded with an exaggerated smirk, an effortless shrug of the shoulders. These impressions would gather momentum as I got older, but even as a boy I found him quite fascinating. I would, wouldn’t I, if my mother liked him so much?

  It wasn’t just the music, of course. It never was. The man pictured on the single, EP and LP sleeves lying around the house was like no man I had ever seen; you didn’t get many Italian-Americans swanning around East Anglia dressed in herringbone sports jackets, butterfly-collared shirts and polka-dot cravats. And certainly not in pink V-neck cardigans, white silk socks and black suede loafers. Not even on the US Air Force bases where I grew up. But then that was the point, I guess. Dino inhabited a world that wasn’t easily accessible to an eight-year-old who was yet to buy his own trousers, let alone visit the Sahara Tahoe.

  Other obsessions would soon occur – the Beach Boys, followed in quick succession by David Bowie, Steely Dan, Tom Wolfe and the Ramones – but I never forgot the slightly louche, debonair gadabout who sang like an angel and dressed like a gangster on his day off. Soon enough I realised that Dino wasn’t alone in his sartorial elegance, and after discovering Frank Sinatra – with his club bow tie and straw hat – and the rest of the Rat Pack (Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop), perhaps unsurprisingly I became quietly obsessed with fifties and sixties Americana.

  In tandem with this, I started to develop a completely unironic taste for the loungecore torch song, although in those days it was known by the rather more prosaic moniker of ‘middle of the road ballad’ – particularly those sung by Glen Campbell. His image was slightly more confusing, as he looked like someone pretending to be a cowboy. If I stared at the cover of the Wichita Lineman album long enough (and the ability of teenage and pre-teen boys in the sixties and seventies to stare at record sleeves was quite phenomenal; I’ve often thought that if I had adhered to Malcolm Gladwell’s famous 10,000-hour rule and spent four hundred days doing something else, I could have become a champion chess player, Tour de France cyclist or concert pianist), I came away thinking that the man on the front didn’t really match the man singing the songs. He was wearing a brown suede jacket, a red polka-dot shirt (the kind of thing that Dean Martin may have been able to get away with), clinically parted hair, bright white teeth and a pleasing down-home smile.

  For me there was far too much optimism going on here.
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br />   I eventually worked out that ‘Wichita Lineman’, like most of Glen Campbell’s great songs, had not been written by Campbell himself, but by somebody called Jimmy Webb, someone who someone else had called the Master of Sad – the author of terrifically maudlin songs such as ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘Where’s the Playground, Susie?’, ‘Galveston’, etc. (Campbell called the songs ‘hurt soul’). If you read reports written at the time of Campbell and Webb’s alliance, you’ll see that this was meant to be a great crossover marriage, the maverick pop composer consorting with the clean-cut country singer, the Democrat cavorting with the Republican, as though some gigantic sociological barrier had just been bridged. This was the harmonising of America. At first glance they certainly looked like different people, and Jimmy Webb didn’t seem to smile as much in his photographs. Their partnership, however, would turn out to be alchemic, as enthralling an alliance between writer and singer as has ever been achieved in popular music.

  In anyone else’s hands, ‘Wichita Lineman’ could have been overly sentimental and somewhat odd. The idea of a telephone repair man listening to, and falling in love with, a woman singing down a phone line – if indeed that’s what she was doing – is bizarre, to say the least, and not the sort of thing you could have imagined Frank Sinatra warming to. But in Glen Campbell’s hands it became such an evocation that it had middle America enraptured.

  Later, looking deeper, I discovered Campbell had played guitar on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, recorded the little-known Brian Wilson classic ‘Guess I’m Dumb’, and that he had played the guitar himself on ‘Lineman’, on a Danelectro six-string bass. As I got older, I became even more intrigued by ‘Lineman’, reading as much about it as I could find – which, pre-Internet, wasn’t much. I sought out Jimmy Webb concerts and Glen Campbell concerts, and once even wrote a piece about the provenance of the song for the Independent. As a teenager it was one of those records I listened to when I wanted to feel sad. Seriously, if you wanted to feel sorry for yourself, then ‘Wichita Lineman’ was the way to go. I would spontaneously start singing it as I was walking down the street, or when I was in the pub, or – later – even at dinner parties, much to my wife’s horror. There were other songs I loved, but few that managed to pull me up like this one. I loved ‘Beyond the Sea’ by Bobby Darin (an English interpretation of ‘La Mer’ by Charles Trenet), ‘On Days Like These’ by Matt Monro (the theme from The Italian Job), ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ by Shirley Bassey (the second of her three James Bond themes) – all of them rather morose, plaintive songs, albeit with terrific melodies – but none of them had the ability to lift or tear me up like ‘Wichita Lineman’.

  It was when I started researching the song that I found out – shock, deep shock – that it was actually unfinished, and that Jimmy Webb had never intended it to be recorded or released in this form.

  It was the perfect imperfect song.

  One of the reasons I liked the record so much was because it didn’t really sound like anything else. Even in those years when I first started hearing it, and before I started to develop a typical schoolboy (and rather granular) obsession with genre and taste, I thought there was something odd about it. Something fundamentally different. It wasn’t a traditional pop song, wasn’t rock and wasn’t your usual cornball country. I suppose in essence it’s a great We’ve-Gotta-Get-Outta-This-Place-type song, a record that manages to articulate our desire to be somewhere else, to inhabit another life, even though it celebrates the everyday. I think another reason I liked it was because I figured no one else could assert ownership of it. Far from being concerned with the bridging of distance to find a tribe, in this particular case I was proactively seeking isolation. This wasn’t teenage one-upmanship; I wasn’t trying to be esoteric, wasn’t trying to impress my friends with a record they’d never heard of, but I’m sure part of my fondness for it stemmed from me being fairly sure that no one else my age would feel the same way about it.

  The older I got, the more I realised how wrong I was.

  Apparently, or so it seemed, there were dozens of people I knew who liked it, and just as many who appeared to be as obsessive as I was about it, and who appeared to venerate it as much as I did. Bob Dylan once even said it was the greatest song ever written. ‘The song’s so enthralling as it’s a mystery,’ journalist and magazine guru Mark Ellen told me. ‘As you know, Jimmy Webb had sent off a rough version to Glen Campbell, and Campbell recorded it as it was. That’s partly why it’s so intriguing, as it’s unfinished and it doesn’t explain itself. You have no real idea what it’s about. I was fourteen when it came out and thought a lineman was a railroad worker mending the railway lines. It didn’t matter. The song paints a vague picture of a barren landscape and longing and loneliness. It’s like a pencil sketch, and you fill in the colours yourself.’

  I think we all had a suspicion that there was a hidden, deeper meaning contained within it, a metaphor perhaps. But there appeared to be no irony involved in the construction and performance of the song, and it wasn’t as though this was in any way a cogent satire on American society … so what could it be? And then I figured that the reason we probably all liked it so much was because of its simplicity, its transparency and its honesty. There was no metaphor here, only the plaintive extrapolation of a universal truth.

  A relatively simple tale of a lonely telephone repair man diligently working in the vast open plains of the American Midwest, ‘Wichita Lineman’ is the first existential country song. It’s also probably the greatest existential torch song ever written. Whereas a lot of pop holds the world at a prophylactic remove, ‘Wichita’ is not only subtly engaging, but after listening to it repeatedly you get a sense that the subtext of the song contemplates what it might mean to find transcendence in such work. And it only takes two minutes and fifty-eight seconds to do so.

  ‘Up close by the Kansas border and the Panhandle of Oklahoma there’s a place where the terrain absolutely flattens out,’ said Jimmy Webb, who as a boy travelled those roads in his father’s car. ‘It’s almost like you could take a [spirit] level out of your toolkit and put it on the highway and that bubble would just sit right there on dead centre, and it goes on that way for about fifty miles, in the heat of summer with the heat rising off the road in this kind of shimmering mirage, the telephone poles gradually materialising out of this far, distant perspective, becoming larger and then rushing towards you.’

  Jimmy Webb’s memory is foolproof.

  ‘It was when I was in High School, and I was fifteen or sixteen. I was in my dad’s car, and I suddenly looked up at one of these telephone poles and there was a man on top of it, talking on the telephone, and he was gone very quickly, and I had another twenty-five miles of absolute solitude to meditate on this apparition. It was a splendidly vivid, cinematic image that I lifted out of my deep memory while I was writing this song about an ordinary guy.’

  It was all about the silhouette. Webb could see him on top of this pole talking or listening or doing something with the telephone. For some reason, the starkness of the image stayed with him like a photograph. Later, when he was trying to write the song, he imagined what his narrator would say if he picked up the telephone there and then.

  And then Glen Campbell sings those immortal words: ‘And I need you more than want you / and I want you for all time …’

  Fifteen words that manage to capture the salient emotion of every teary ballad that ever plucked your heart strings, a couplet that can break, mend or hold your heart in under ten seconds, a handful of words that, as the critic and broadcaster Mark Steyn pointed out, echo those lines in the old Hollywood show tune ‘Stranger in Paradise’, where someone hangs suspended in space, until they know that there might be a chance that someone cares.

  ‘What I was really trying to say was, you can see someone working in construction or working in a field, a migrant worker or a truck driver, and you may think you know what’s going on inside him, but you don’t,’ said Webb. ‘You can’t assume
that a man isn’t a poet. And that’s really what the song is about.’

  This wasn’t music that strode out of the shadows like the opening credits of a spaghetti western; no, this was music that meandered into view, hovering in the middle of the lawn and hissing like a sprinkler.

  ‘Wichita Lineman’ was not of the moment. It might have been a bit melodramatic, and yet the record didn’t announce itself with any great fanfare. It didn’t capture the zeitgeist. How could it? ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, for example, which had been released three years earlier, was epochal, and as soon as it hit the radio, lives began to change, and culture started to churn. Nothing similar was expected of ‘Wichita Lineman’, as it snuck out without much ambition, other than some hoped-for commercial success. It stretched outside the confines of country radio for sure, but it would take years for the song to become the phenomenon it is now and find its resonance.

  At the time, ‘Wichita Lineman’ went largely unnoticed, as it appeared in the midst of a world still grappling with the transitional tropes of the counter-culture. When you had a generation espousing ‘Make Love Not War’, who was going to notice a quirky and overly melodramatic country tune about a telephone repair man? If Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was all about ‘Beethoven coming to the supermarket’ (in the words of the arch Yippie Abbie Hoffman), then Jimmy Webb’s opus was surely just about the prairie coming to the radio.

  To those who were taking notice, the song may have appeared to be slightly strange, although any idiosyncrasies harboured by ‘Wichita Lineman’ would surely have been obscured by the knowledge that the man singing it on the radio had previously been responsible for two hit records that – on the surface at least – seemed to be archetypes of contemporary country pop: ‘Gentle on My Mind’ and ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ (which had actually been written by Webb himself). Webb’s song may have been about the harvesting of emotion rather than the dignity of labour, but it couldn’t compare to songs about dancing or fighting in the streets, or to the media attention being focused on the denouement of a decade seemingly dedicated to all forms of cultural insurrection, however randomly it may have manifested itself.