The Wichita Lineman Page 6

  Glen Campbell didn’t need to be sold on ‘Phoenix’ either, as he had already heard Johnny Rivers’s version as he was driving to Gold Star Studios one day. Slapping the steering wheel with both hands, with typical confidence he said to himself, ‘“I could cut that record and make a hit out of it.” I was homesick at the time, and was going back to Phoenix a lot, tracing back my steps to home, so it really resonated.’ Initially Webb wasn’t sure that Campbell was the right person to record it, although he was certainly more suitable than either Paul Peterson or Johnny Rivers. ‘There was some kind of a surreal fit between his voice and those songs,’ said Webb. ‘It’s very hard for me to look back and say, “Oh, a-ha, now I see why we were successful.” Because at the time it certainly wasn’t anything that I was in control of.’

  ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ is where Campbell and his team first used sweeping strings to offset the confessional nature of Webb’s somewhat sombre lyrics, adding some sweetness to the melodrama. Campbell worked on the song with Al De Lory, and between them they altered the arrangement and then layered it with the kind of lush, sophisticated, almost cinematic strings that wouldn’t normally have been used on a country song. Between them, almost accidentally, they had created an entirely novel kind of mature pop: countrypolitan.

  And it worked. It was maudlin, wistful and structured rather oddly, and yet ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ was a huge commercial hit for Campbell, reaching no. 2 on Billboard’s Hot Country singles chart. It recounts a road trip to Oklahoma, as the narrator imagines what his lover is up to back home when she finds the note he left telling her he’s leaving – for good this time. Frank Sinatra would call Jimmy Webb’s subtle, almost somnambulant song the best saloon song he’d ever heard (although he also appears to have said the same thing about Webb’s ‘Didn’t We’ – ‘This torch song is as big as the one on the Statue of Liberty,’ he said), but it wasn’t written in a traditional linear way, as it didn’t appear to have a traditional chorus.

  What he delivered was a cross-genre pop-country classic that had both melodic sophistication and lyrical piquancy: a wistful vocal offset by a beautiful melody, and of course a heavily orchestrated arrangement sweetening those bittersweet lyrics. ‘Jimmy Webb is just an exceptional writer,’ said Campbell. ‘He pours his heart out, and the music comes from the heart, the chord progressions running to so many different [directions]. I used to do a lot of hillbilly music when I was a kid, you know you’d get, “Oh darlin’ I love you, do you love me no more?” You know, I thought that was good, but then when I started getting into the Jimmy Webb end of everything I was just “wow”. It really opened my eyes up.’

  ‘One thing you must admit is that [Phoenix] has a beginning, a middle and an end,’ said Webb. ‘It tells a story with a certain clarity and pathos. And that would be my description of a songwriter’s job. And we don’t have much time to do it! We don’t have as much time as Norman Mailer had to write Ancient Evenings. It used to be two and a half minutes, then three, then after The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” they said we could have a bit more. Then of course Richard [Harris] and I came along and busted that all to hell with “MacArthur Park”.’

  When Campbell was interviewed by the New York Times later in the year, he said, ‘A change has come over country music lately. They’re not shuckin’ it right off the cob anymore. Roger Miller opened a lot of people’s eyes to the possibilities of country music, and it’s making more impact now because it’s earthy material, stories, and things that happen to everyday people. I call it People Music.’

  This didn’t pass unnoticed. Rolling Stone, which unsurprisingly spent most of its time embroiling itself in the world of alternative culture, immediately saw this for what it was: new. ‘It is becoming fashionable in the trade to eschew such terms as pop-country, town and country, and contemporary-country, presumably because no two people agree on what they mean,’ wrote the magazine’s John Grissim Jr in June 1969. ‘A year ago the use of hyphenated hybrids had more validity, if only to distinguish Hollywood’s country sound from that of Nashville, at least until Music City caught up. Now both cities have finally got it together: lyrics are a little more generalized – no “clouded blue haze” but neither are there such lines as “I would send you roses but they cost too much so I’m sending daffodils.” Arrangements are plush, make full use of strings, horn, and vocal backing and seldom rely solely on standard chord progressions. Percussion is pronounced but rhythmic patterns with a 4/4 or 3/4 structure are often more complex than those favoured in Nashville. The result is a blend of pop and country which has brought down on Hollywood the wrath of country purists and simultaneously made a great deal of money for Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell. Though primarily a pop writer, [Webb] has almost single-handedly created a kind of suburban country sound.’ (One popular with an increasingly urban population.)

  Webb himself wasn’t just gratified by Campbell’s fidelity to his song, he was impressed that he’d somehow managed to reinvent it.

  ‘There are a million reasons why a song does or doesn’t become a hit,’ said Webb. ‘I’ve given the matter a lot of thought and I think it’s almost supernatural. A hit record is almost a small miracle. There are so many elements. Does the singer sound like he should be singing the song? Is it the right song for him? What about the arrangement? Is it overdone? Is it not big enough? What about the players? Was the drummer too heavy-handed that day? Did he have a hangover? What day of the week was it? What was the temperature in the room? Was it too humid and did it affect the instruments so that it came out sounding flat? Did it have the magic to it that translates to sounding good in a car? What makes a record sound good in a car? It’s not going to be a hit if it doesn’t sound good in a car.’

  According to the great lyricist Don Black (who, among hundreds of other songs, wrote the words to ‘Thunderball’, ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ and ‘On Days Like These’), as far as Webb’s ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ is concerned it’s all about the immediacy of the opening line: ‘You’re there, you get the picture so early on.’ Even though its geography was suspect, ‘Phoenix’, with its carefully delivered slow-release drama, was like a little movie, a travelogue that sat outside every genre of music it was surrounded by. It wasn’t really country, it certainly wasn’t soul, and it wasn’t a real pop song, not having a proper chorus.

  Which is just what Jimmy Webb wanted.

  ‘The city I chose, Phoenix, is right on Route 66,’ said Webb. ‘And it sounded right on the space–time continuum of the singer travelling on the highway, even though it’s a little distorted, going from one city to the next.’

  When you listen to ‘Phoenix’, even though the protagonist has walked away from his lover, simply leaving a ‘Dear John’ letter, you end up siding with him rather than her. And that’s as much to do with Campbell as with Webb, because on the record he almost sounds victimised. Campbell credited the fact that he and Webb had grown up within one hundred and fifty miles of each other as one of the reasons why they eventually got along: ‘That’s what we grew up with – the good songs, the good lyrics, the good big-band stuff. [Webb’s] melodies and chord progressions were as good as anything I’d ever heard.’

  Webb had written ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ about an affair he had had with a girl called Susan Horton, whom he had dated when they were students at Colton High School, in San Bernardino. The homecoming queen had run off to Lake Tahoe to work as a cabaret dancer, eventually marrying a schoolteacher, inspiring Webb to write ‘The Worst That Could Happen’, which would go on to be a hit for the Brooklyn Bridge in 1969. Horton was also the inspiration for Webb’s next hit, his most ambitious project yet, the extraordinary ‘MacArthur Park’, a song he had spent a month finessing while living in the actor Richard Harris’s house (‘He taught me how to drink,’ said Webb). Such was his fame that Webb was now hobnobbing with people whom six months previously he knew only by reputation.

  The lyrics to ‘M
acArthur Park’, like the structure of the song itself, were elaborate and melodramatic. Harris sang the song in his rasping talk–sing voice, and when he successfully mastered the line about the cake being left out in the rain, the song clicked. Originally part of a song cycle Webb had originally called The Cantata, it was grandiose, almost baroque, but it worked.

  Webb has consistently said that people find the lyrics to ‘MacArthur Park’ infuriating. His critics initially said they were obviously based on a psychedelic trip, but everything in the song is real. Webb would leave his low-rent apartment in Silver Lake, and then walk over to MacArthur Park, in Westlake. There, between Wilshire and 7th Street, he’d wait for Susan Horton to get off from her job nearby selling life insurance. ‘I used to eat lunch in the park,’ said Webb. ‘It was a place you could be away from the dreariness of a really bottom-scale apartment.’ And yes, there would be old men playing checkers by the trees. He says he’s been asked a thousand times: ‘What is the cake left out in the rain?’ He says he used to go to the park to eat cake – simple. He obviously saw it as a great metaphor, too.

  The producer Bones Howe had commissioned Webb to create a pop song with classical elements, different movements and changing time signatures for his new act, the Association. He thought they needed a bit of class, and believed Jimmy Webb was the man for the job. ‘MacArthur Park’, which is actually more of a suite than a song, was everything he wanted, but when Webb presented it to the band, they refused to record it. At the time, Webb had just been commissioned to write some music for an anti-war pageant starring various random, incongruous Hollywood stars, including Richard Harris, Mia Farrow and Edward G. Robinson. After rehearsals he would go for a drink with Harris, drinking pints of Black Velvet – 50 per cent Guinness, 50 per cent champagne. One night after a few, Webb said, ‘We ought to make a record.’ He’d just seen Harris in the film Camelot and decided his voice was good enough to carry one of his songs. A few weeks later, he received a telegram: ‘Dear Jimmy Webb. Come to London. Make this record. Love, Richard.’

  The songwriter – who had never been to London before, never even been to Europe – got on a plane and moved into Harris’s apartment in Belgravia. Over the course of two days, they tore through thirty or forty of Webb’s songs, with Webb playing the piano and Harris standing around in a multicoloured kaftan offering his drunken suggestions. ‘MacArthur Park’ was almost at the bottom of Webb’s pile, and by the time they got around to it, both of them were deep into the brandy. Halfway through the song – which at the time was a lot longer – Harris slapped the piano and said, ‘Oh, Jimmy Webb. I love that! I’ll make a hit out of that, I will.’

  And together they did.

  Webb recorded the backing track back in Hollywood, with himself on harpsichord, accompanied by a dozen members of the Wrecking Crew. They rehearsed it a couple of times, then played it right through, eventually using the first take and painstakingly adding the orchestra later. When Harris did the vocals at a London studio, he had a large pitcher of Pimm’s by the microphone. Webb knew the session was over when the Pimm’s was gone. This was maybe why Harris couldn’t sing the title correctly. He’d say, ‘Jimmy Webb, I’ve got it!’ Then he’d sing, ‘MacArthur’s Park …’, adding an unnecessary possessive. As the session progressed, though, Harris grew in confidence. At one point, he said, ‘I think the vocals are a little loud. We need more orchestra.’ A few months later, when the record was finally released, he was saying, ‘Jimmy Webb! The damn orchestra’s too loud!’

  At first, they felt like the guys who’d created the A-bomb, almost afraid of what they’d done. They had doubts about releasing it as a single, but when radio stations began playing the album track in its entirety, Webb was asked to do a shorter version as a single. He refused, so eventually the record company put out the full seven-minutes-twenty-one-seconds version. George Martin later told him the Beatles rushed into the studio in order to lengthen the fade-out of ‘Hey Jude’ using a tape loop, trying to close the margin between their song and the seven minutes and twenty-one seconds of ‘MacArthur Park’. The song was a surprise hit in both the US and the UK, reaching no. 2 and no. 4 respectively. It even worked as a love letter. Webb always knew that Susan Horton, the girl who inspired the song, would hear it and know what it meant. ‘A long time after I had written it, I found out she had moved to Lake Tahoe and become a dancer,’ said Webb. ‘When I came into some significant money, I hired a Lear jet, flew up there, and said, “I’m not going back without you.” We lived together for three years. Then it turned into a soap opera.’

  The song was a soap opera itself, a huge wedding cake of a song, less like a pocket symphony and more like a nesting doll. Christopher Hitchens would one day refer to it as ‘the horror song’.

  Webb and Harris fell out for a while because of a misunderstanding over a car. Apparently, Harris had promised to give Webb his Rolls-Royce Phantom V if ‘MacArthur Park’ went Top 10 in the US. When the song did exactly that, Harris wouldn’t give him the car, but instead wanted to offer him another model. ‘He wanted to give me another Rolls-Royce, but I didn’t want another Rolls-Royce,’ said Webb. ‘I wanted his.’*

  * Anecdotes recording Harris’s excessive behaviour are legion. Once, having been on a four-day bender with fellow drinker Richard Burton, he turned up back at his West End apartment, and as soon as his girlfriend opened the door, shouted, ‘Why the hell didn’t you pay the ransom?’ Another time, having collapsed in the Savoy, on being stretchered out of the lobby he lifted his head a couple of inches and said to an elderly couple coming into the hotel, ‘It was the fish.’

  3: THE HARMONISING OF AMERICA

  Can you write me a song about a town?

  GLEN CAMPBELL

  A dribble of bass, searing strings, some tremolo guitar, the drums brushing like tumbleweed across an empty dry highway and one of the most plaintive vocals ever heard on record, Jimmy Webb’s paean to the American Midwest describes the longing that a lonely telephone lineman feels for an absent lover whom he imagines he can hear ‘singing in the wire’ he’s working on. Like all great love songs, it’s an SOS from the heart; there are even snatches of synthesizer-generated Morse code heard after the lyric, ‘And the Wichita lineman / is still on the line …’

  Although it begins like a redneck work song, ‘Wichita Lineman’ would prove that Jimmy Webb was a singular talent. Even though he had been a professional songwriter for just two years, he had already developed a discernible style: one foot in Vegas and another in the Valley, composing songs that refused to be framed by genre. Whereas at Motown his quirks quickly became something of a problem, once he was successful they came to define him. Using idiosyncratic structures and anxious, dissatisfied lyrics, he appeared to embrace the Great American Songbook by disrupting it.

  ‘I tend to think of music in a universal [way],’ he said. ‘From my days playing in church, and talking with Satchmo when I was a teenager I just never drew a line. It was all music to me. I took Jimi Hendrix literally on the subject: “One day there will be a Universal Music and it will bring mankind together. It will end hatred.” Because I feel that way and think that way … I never closed any doors. I have been open to the Great Spirit to use me however he sees fit and have lived the most marvellous life. I wouldn’t trade places with anyone.’

  In ‘Wichita Lineman’ this contrariness would be sweetened by Glen Campbell’s calming tenor, a voice that soothed as it beguiled. It was released on 14 August 1968, but there is almost nothing about the record that is representative of that year. Yes, the sonic quality might give it away to some degree, and yes, the lyrics reference an analogue experience that seems almost quaint in an era dominated by the cell phone, but there is nothing here that screams 1968.

  Like 1966, over the years 1968 has acquired an almost numinous quality, even though it was a dark time of assassinations and riots and witnessed the resurgence of the right. This knee-jerk response to the cultural, political and sociopolitical upheavals of 1
966–7 seemed designed to appeal to a silent majority whose silence was almost imagined as a civic virtue. Even so, it developed in spite of a surge in the counter-culture, which was itself fragmenting into hundreds of alternative lifestyles.

  In 1968, San Francisco and New York were the cool cities in the US. LA didn’t really come into it. There was a hipster scene in Hollywood and Laurel Canyon, and yet this was mainly a music business/film industry axis, a more gentrified iteration of the rainbow-coloured charm of the Love Generation. Still, to a country boy like Jimmy Webb, who wanted nothing more than to fit in to the glitzy counter-culture, it had started to feel like home. Because he was suddenly so rich, Webb’s newly acquired abode had become colonised by a bunch of music-biz freeloaders who liked nothing better than sitting by the pool and drinking someone else’s expensive wine. America at the time was dividing into two kinds of people: those who lived in a new kind of way and were rejecting the post-war ideals of suburban advancement, and those who were keen to understand this disruption. On the one hand (which by the summer of 1968 would probably have been covered with a henna tattoo) you had a generation who were excited by experimentation and whose lifestyle expectations were increasingly imaginative; and on the other you had those whose ideas about consumption were now being called into question.