The Wichita Lineman Read online

  Muscle memory.

  ‘And I can remember one day driving past and having a grown-up thought – because I was just a kid at the time. I saw the guy clearly with a phone in his hand – and I didn’t realise they had phones, I thought it was just sparks and tape and pliers. And I saw this guy with the phone in his hand talking to someone in this elevated position – there may even have been elements of the crucifixion involved in this, I’m not sure! – but there he is up this pole talking on this wire that goes for fifty miles and my imagination ran wild. “I wonder who he’s talking to and what he’s talking about.” And because I was a very romantic teenager I thought he must be talking to his girl. So really “Wichita Lineman” is that conversation. It’s that conversation without ever saying it’s that conversation.’

  Although the song is set on the Kansas–Oklahoma border, Webb actually wrote it on a piano in his house in LA. These days Webb says the best way to write a song is to find a quiet place, using a simple tape recorder, a legal pad, a notebook and a full heart, but a quiet place was not what he had when he started writing ‘Wichita’, as it was written on a green baby grand in the chaotic environment of the former Philippine consulate on Camino Palmero, high up in the Hollywood Hills. It was in a part of Hollywood that was full of chocolate-box Tudor-style castles and faux-Arabian mansions. At the time he said the only things he needed were a piano, some cushions and some ‘good weed’. Webb was writing for mainstream artists, and yet his songcraft was of a different vernacular altogether. Rather desperate to align himself with the counter-culture, he had turned the twenty-three-room mansion into a living artwork, a house full of friends, freaks and freeloaders. The mansion was such a mess it looked like he’d decorated it by setting off a hand grenade.

  ‘I was living in a kind of communal environment with twenty-five or thirty of my best friends,’ he said. ‘My house looked like a harem.’ Guests included Tiny Tim, Jimi Hendrix and apparently, on one awful occasion, some serious undesirables. ‘People knew you could come there if you needed something to eat or somewhere to crash. One day, there was a guy at the door with two women and a picnic basket asking for something to eat. I went down to the kitchen and someone was making sandwiches for them. I stuck out my hand and said, “Hi, I’m Jimmy.” And he says, “Hi, I’m Charlie Manson.” Wasn’t until years later that it came crashing in on me.’

  Four blocks from Grauman’s Chinese Theater – in Webb’s words, ‘a synoptic garden of silent film’s golden hours’ – it was a more than faithful reproduction of a grand Spanish hacienda. ‘It was a lovely big place in a doomed, authentic Hollywood neighbourhood – a building with a tiled roof, tiled floors, chandeliers, carved staircases. There were a couple of clowns who came into my music room and spray-painted my piano green, I think, because of [the lyrics to] “MacArthur Park”: “All the sweet, green icing flowing down”. They thought it was pretty funny.’ Consequently, he found himself having to compose the new song while his piano was still wet. He cleared some of the people out of the room, put out some of the joints and shut some doors. And then started doodling on the piano.

  ‘So, I spent the afternoon trying not to brush up against the piano and writing a song at the same time. That whole afternoon was a comedy, with a sticky green piano and several desperate calls from the recording studio.

  ‘It wasn’t an important piano, it was a rental but it hadn’t dried properly and I was trying to work on it and the piano was sticky and they had gotten some paint on the keys, so I was really sort of struggling with that. It was chaos, as there was a band practicing in the basement, and someone’s three-year-old running around, and there were constant deliveries. So I’m sitting there with this piano which is distinctly compromised because it’s been vandalised during the night before and I was getting a little bit irritated.’

  Glen Campbell would not stop calling.

  ‘I don’t want to exaggerate, but they probably called me at least three times while I was working on it and said, “How’s it going?”, you know?’ Webb told me. ‘Encouraging me on the phone. Now I look back on it, I presume they were just standing there waiting for me to finish it.

  ‘I kept thinking about the flat country along the Panhandle in Oklahoma, driving along, and I had seen these telephone poles along the road. It was kind of a surreal vista and hypnotic, and if you’re not careful, you can, like my dad says, go to sleep and run off in the bar ditch.

  ‘There’s a place where the terrain absolutely flattens out. 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. It goes on that way for about fifty miles. In the heat of summer, with the heat rising off the road, the telephone poles gradually materialise out of this far, distant perspective and rush towards you.

  ‘I thought, “I wonder if I can write something about that? A blue collar, everyman guy we all see everywhere, working on the railroad or working on the telephone wires or digging holes in the street.” I just tried to take an ordinary guy and open him up and say, “Look, there’s this great soul and there’s this great aching and this great loneliness inside this person, and we’re all like that. We all have this capacity for these huge feelings.”

  ‘Northern Oklahoma is an area that’s real flat and remote – almost surreal in its boundless horizons and infinite distances. I’d seen a lineman up on a telephone pole, talking on the phone. It was such a curiosity to see a human being perched up there.’

  Putting himself up on his pole, Webb spent two hours on his green baby grand in his mansion and wrote what he thought was three-quarters of a song. He ploughed on, building the narrative, feeling he was on to something. It swayed. It was morose. It told a story. And he liked it. ‘It just wasn’t finished,’ he said. ‘There was a whole section in the middle that I didn’t have words for, which eventually became the instrumental part.’

  This was the poetry of solitude, a world of humming wires and trucks and trains on their endless journeys across the Plains states. Webb remembered the sound of the wires, looking up and seeing men working up in the sky. He also remembered seeing them from the perspective of sixty miles per hour and spying a little dot on a pole and seeing him come closer and closer until he was gone in an instant. Sometimes the man would be talking on a little telephone. It was a lonely, romantic, prairie gothic image, and Webb tapped into it with a song about a guy who can’t get over a woman.

  Glen Campbell and his producer Al De Lory kept calling him and asking if he was done, and Webb kept putting them off. He wasn’t sure if the song needed a bridge, another chorus or a final verse; he just knew it wasn’t ready. Around four o’clock, he was done, although the song wasn’t. He felt it lacked something and, try as he might, he couldn’t crack it. ‘I phoned and told them that it didn’t have a third verse, but they were impatient and on a deadline.’ So he put the cassette tape in a manila envelope and he sent it over anyway. He said if they liked it, then he’d have a go at finishing it. When he sent the tape over, his note contained a little drawing of a skull and crossbones, with a scribble warning them that the song wasn’t finished. Sometimes, when he was sure of a song, when he knew he had written something really good, he would describe himself as like being a hound with the sound. But not this time. He thought what he had done was special, but incomplete. And if they didn’t call back and ask him to finish it, then there was no point doing it himself.

  Webb met Campbell a few days later, on the set of a commercial for General Motors (a business deal that Webb said kept him in new Corvettes for the next three years), and after the shoot invited him back to the mansion to hear some of his other songs (the GM song that Webb wrote for the ad was called ‘Song for the Open Road’, and you can still find it on YouTube today, complete with a ‘Wichita’-style acoustic-guitar fill). On arrival, Webb took Campbell straight into his music room with the green piano, where they started talking about ‘Wichita Lineman’. The composer reiterated that t
he song wasn’t really complete, but then Campbell pulled an acetate out of his holdall and said, ‘Well, it is now.’

  As he listened, Webb couldn’t believe his ears. There was a bright new intro courtesy of Carol Kaye, the sweeping strings gracing the upper registers, and then Campbell’s voice, which was more than a match for the melody. When verse three rolled around, he found out what they had done with the missing stanza. ‘Glen had detuned a guitar down to a “slack key”, Duane Eddy style, and simply played the melody note for note, which was an extreme compliment.’

  When they first heard Webb’s demo, a few days earlier, neither Campbell nor De Lory could believe their luck. ‘When I heard it I cried,’ said Campbell. ‘It made me cry because I was homesick. Every hair follicle stood up on my body … It’s just a masterfully written song.’

  Webb might not have known it, but Campbell and De Lory were convinced he had written something extraordinary. Later that same day, they started recording the song, in the enormous 2,700-square-foot Studio A in Capital Studios, in North Vine Street, Hollywood; and if the song had only taken two hours to write – incomplete or not – it took even less time to record. The casting couldn’t have been better, as the team consisted of the Wrecking Crew’s very best players: Carol Kaye, the Crew’s most prominent bassist; Jim Gordon, the drummer who had played on the Pet Sounds sessions, as well as records by the Union Gap and the Byrds; rhythm guitarist Al Casey, who had played with Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Johnny Burnette and Eddie Cochran (and who had also played on ‘Up, Up and Away’); plus Campbell himself, the Crew’s very best guitarist. (Years later, when Campbell, in his sixties, was touring the UK, a journalist friend of mine wondered why he had only three guitars on stage, compared to the seventeen that a very famous guitarist who was also touring Britain at the same time had on his. ‘That’s simple,’ said the very famous guitarist. ‘He’s a much better player than I am, and he doesn’t need seventeen guitars.’) At the supplementary session a few days later, when they added the orchestra, they were ably abetted by a five-piece horn section, a woodwind player called Richard Hyde, a percussionist called Norm Jeffries and a fourteen-man string section.

  Affectionately, the Crew called Campbell ‘the hillbilly’. ‘Glen was a heck of a guitar player, and I had this Danelectro bass guitar that had special pick-ups and a bridge and strings on it, and got a great gutty sound, and [on “Wichita”] he picked it up and did the solo,’ said Kaye. ‘He was fantastic, and what a funny guy! He would crack us up all the time. During breaks, Glen would sing us all these dirty country songs or off-colour hillbilly songs to make us laugh, and boy, did he have us going! But what a guitar player. He was great at rock’n’roll soloing. We used to kid him that he was so good that he was going to be a big singing star. And then he becomes a big singing star. I heard “Wichita Lineman” at a drug store one time, and it just brought tears to my eyes, because that tune meant a lot to me.’

  Kaye had already become known as the First Lady of Bass, having switched from playing guitar one day in 1963 when the bassist didn’t turn up at a session. Her first recording after having switched instruments was ‘Help Me Rhonda’, and she would go on to play bass on Pet Sounds, the Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’, ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’’ by Nancy Sinatra, Joe Cocker’s ‘Feelin’ Alright’, the Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’, Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘I Am a Rock’ and the majority of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound-era productions, as well as most of the Monkees’ records.

  After half an hour or so in the studio she started to think that ‘Wichita’ lacked something at its beginning. A few years previously she had come up with the walking intro for Sonny and Cher’s ‘The Beat Goes On’, immediately giving it a radio-friendly hook. This time she did something similar, creating a jazzy descending six-note nervous-tic introduction that set up the strings perfectly, bouncily picking out the notes on her six-string bass with her hard plectrum on her medium-gauge flat-wound strings. Campbell loved not just the idea, but the sound of it, too. Kaye’s bass was a Danelectro, a solid-body electric bass (actually made out of Masonite hardboard) that had a more trebly sound than most standard Fender-type basses or acoustic double basses. He liked the sound so much he asked Kaye if he could borrow the guitar for the middle section that Webb had been unable to deliver, using it for the guitar solo that effortlessly follows the melody. ‘Jimmy Webb suggested a couple of bass notes to use, and it all worked out,’ said Kaye. ‘I played more towards the end to build excitement for the end part. At the end, as usual, I gave it more gas on the long fade, and Jimmy and I went double-time a bit.’ (The Danelectro was also used later by Campbell on ‘Galveston’, although Kaye tragically lost it one day when she left it in a car in a parking lot outside Gold Star.)

  ‘The famous bass lick at the start of “Wichita Lineman”?’ said Webb, rhetorically. ‘Now, that’s an intro. It has a function. There’s a reason for it. On the radio, it lets people know, oh, it’s that one, it’s that story that I like, I’m going to listen. So Motown had all this down. When they cut fifteen Top Ten Supremes records in a row, each one had a great intro. There was something going on that was valid and knowledgeable.’

  Kaye kept playing her warm jazz motif throughout the song. ‘I was keeping it very simple, because when you first get the tune rolling, you want to stay in the background as much as possible,’ she said. ‘Then when he starts singing, the hair kind of stood up on my arms, I thought, “This is deep.”’

  For her, the session was a good date, just an overall good date that has taken on enormous importance over the years. ‘It was amazing to create a nice bass line for it, but everybody makes out that that lick that I played was so good. They asked me to play a lick, so I played a lick. You keep the bass line simple when the tune is especially good and add a few nuances here and there as a framework – you’re there to make the singer and not to overshine them.’

  The drums on ‘Wichita Lineman’ are almost incidental, just a brushwork stroll, although the man who played them would live a life larger than he imagined, a life that would outlive ‘Wichita Lineman’. Jim Gordon had already played on Pet Sounds, ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’, and would later go on to play with the likes of John Lennon, George Harrison, Traffic, Steely Dan and Frank Zappa. He would also author the instrumental coda of ‘Layla’ by Derek and the Dominos, which alone would grant him entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. However, what he would eventually be remembered for is the brutal murder of his mother: having wrestled with mental issues all his life, on 3 June 1983 he attacked his seventy-two-year-old mother, Osa Marie Gordon, with a hammer, before fatally stabbing her with a butcher’s knife, claiming a voice had told him to kill her.

  Al De Lory’s contribution to ‘Wichita’, however, would be all-important, using an arrangement involving sweeping violins to evoke a vast empty space and the loneliness of the lineman. They were sweet, too, adding something warm and romantic, like snow in a Dutch Golden Age painting, making everything brighter. A few of Kaye’s bass improvisations ended up being incorporated into the record’s string arrangement. ‘Al De Lory later wrote some of the string parts to play the same licks I had improvised on the rhythm track, which was a common procedure in those days,’ said Kaye. ‘All arrangers did that: Quincy Jones, if he was short on time, would have his usual funky rhythm section – us – do some improvisation and he’d write the band on those licks we’d improvise. An honour, really. So for Al to merely copy a little of what the bass invented for the string lines, this was usual stuff back then. The arrangement was just a chord chart and so I mostly aimed for the roots, or chordal notes, making up the lines. I also made up a pentatonic fill into the chord a few times, a lick that Al De Lory used, writing it for his overdubbed string parts. It sounds arranged, but it wasn’t arranged. As many other composer/arrangers do, hiring the rhythm section to create and lay down rhythm tracks, and then copy our lines to insert into horn or st
ring parts – it was common to get the rhythm sections to invent their parts, and using them later in arrangements.’

  ‘Some guys will go off the deep end and start writing for themselves and lose their audience,’ said De Lory. ‘There is a balance of artistic and commercial appeal, and for me it was always an experience. There is a magic involved in these things, and it is hard to put your finger down on where the magic is coming from. You can’t really analyse it. It’s more, “C’mon. Let’s play, guys.” And you play together. As a sideman in the studio, when there was a hit song, you felt the presence of great material. It gave you ideas. You were totally turned on by that song.’ At the time, he said that country pop was here to stay. ‘It was Glen’s voice and the strength of those songs that inspired me to write arrangements that exceeded my expectations.’ When Capitol signed Campbell in 1962 and expressed a desire to break out of doing bluegrass instrumentals, De Lory was charged with steering him towards a more appealing country-pop staging post. With ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ he had come up with a pin-sharp architectural blueprint, and with ‘Wichita Lineman’ he was halfway through building the cathedral. All those hours working on Phil Spector records had not been wasted.

  A finishing touch was to bring Webb’s Gulbransen electronic organ into the studio to create the sound effect of a telephone signal travelling along a telegraph wire. Webb had been showing off his vintage Gulbransen church organ to Campbell up in his house in the Hills (during a break in recording while De Lory wrote the orchestral score), suggesting the keyboard’s unique ‘bubbling’ sound echoed what he imagined to be the noise the signals made as they passed through the telephone wires. Campbell agreed – ‘I got chill-bumps all over,’ he said – and organised for the machine to be dismantled and reassembled at Capital Studios, where Webb came to record his augmentation.