The Wichita Lineman Read online

  Webb told me: ‘Glen said, “Here at the end I want it to sound like that record ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados,” which was a big surf instrumental which had these big electronic effects on it that no doubt came off of an organ, because that’s the only place you could find that. I said, “Well, see what happens here,” and I just held two notes down, and the organ automatically takes those two notes, either a fourth or a fifth, and it cycles them up and down the keyboard. Of its own volition it does this, and it’s a very shivery, icy, almost like outer space kind of sound. It sounded very technological, like top-secret communications or something. Glen went crazy and said, “We have to get that, we gotta put that on the fade.” And so he called and got them to send four men to bring it over to the studio.

  ‘We didn’t have samplers or synthesizers in those ancient days. I selected a preset that was one of my favourites. I played open fourths and fifths up and down the keyboard with only two fingers, using an F chord. The organ emitted a sound like a satellite or some other high-powered electro device, the open fourths and fifths shivering up and down in a fascinating tintinnabulation loaded with reverb. You can hear it there to this day, sounding a little like the Northern Lights, like vibrating signals from outer space moving upward and downward in fourths and fifths.’

  This sound mimicked what a lineman might hear when attaching an earpiece to a telegraph line without equalisation or filtering. What you’d actually hear would be high-frequency tones fading in and out, caused by the accidental rectification of heterodynes (referenced by the lyrics, ‘I can hear you through the whine’).

  ‘We recorded it, and that’s the sound that people associate with that record,’ Webb said, ‘and it wasn’t very much at all, it was just me holding down two notes, which was exhilarating.’

  ‘Jimmy Webb was there, playing the keyboard, and the way that Glen sang it was so great,’ said Carol Kaye. ‘It’s just a good song and when you have a really good song to work with, it makes your job easier. Things pop out real quick. You get the right lines real quick and all that stuff. It was just a nice date, too. You had Jim Gordon on drums. Jim in those days was a very sweet and nice young man. He got that groove on the drums. A lot of people don’t know it, but I played the wrong notes! I kept thinking I was going into the B-flat chord, so I’ll play a B-flat major seven, which I did, and, at the last minute, I went – whoops! – down to F. So, that’s the story of that. But it turned out okay, you know.’

  What Webb didn’t know was that De Lory’s uncle was a lineman near Bakersfield, in Kern County, California. ‘So as soon as I heard that opening line,’ said De Lory, ‘I could visualize my uncle up a pole in the middle of nowhere. I loved the song right away.’ With the basic backing track cut in less than ninety minutes – the backing track you hear on the record was done in one take – De Lory took it home to work out his orchestral arrangement, writing an evocative score in which the strings echoed the sighing of the telephone wires. The famous fade-out suggests that our hero has made it back down to terra firma and is now contemplating a long, slow walk into the sunset, strolling like a cowboy, his tools sitting on his belt where his guns might have been.

  In a way, the glory of ‘Wichita Lineman’ blossomed out of an intricate mesh of almost mundane practicalities. The recording process was exactly the same as it always was at the time; however, on this occasion there was genuine alchemy afoot.

  Almost immediately, people were trying to work out just why ‘Wichita Lineman’ worked the way it did. Allen Morrison, writing in American Songwriter, thought he had it down. ‘“Wichita Lineman” can serve as “Exhibit A” in any demonstration for songwriters of the principle of “less is more,”’ he said. ‘On paper, it’s just two verses, each one composed of two rhymed couplets. The record is a three-minute wonder: Intro. First Verse. Staccato telegraph-like musical device. Second verse. No chorus. Guitar solo. Repeat last two lines of second verse (“and I need you more than want you …”). Fade. There is no B section, much less a C section.

  ‘Why did such an unlikely song become a standard? There are many reasons, but here’s one: the loneliness of that solitary prairie figure is not just present in the lyric, it’s built into the musical structure. Although the song is nominally in the key of F, after the tonic chord is stated in the intro it is never heard again in its pure form, with the root in the bass. The melody travels through a series of haunting changes that are considerably more sophisticated than the Top 40 radio norms of that era. The song never does get “home” again to the tonic – not in either verse, nor in the fade-out. This gorgeous musical setting suggests subliminally what the lyric suggests poetically: the lonely journeyman, who remains suspended atop that telephone pole, against that desolate prairie landscape, yearning for home.’

  The song has several melodic skips in it, a technique that Webb borrowed from Burt Bacharach, whose melodies were often unpredictable and veered off in unusual directions. The interruptions and narrative quirks created their own melody, one Webb may not have originally thought of. Linda Ronstadt – for whom he would later write songs – compared the structure of his songs to Brian Wilson’s: ‘[Brian’s] remind me of a beautiful horse that will give you the smoothest ride of your life if you know how to ride it. Jimmy, on the other hand, might buck you off at any turn.’ His songs are different, she said, while ‘the sounds that result from Jimmy’s lyrics are pegged to his own vocal style: a choirboy sweetness fortified by a rich har-de-har Oklahoma farm-boy twang. I love his singing.’

  Perhaps one of the strangest things about ‘Wichita’ is the fact that it doesn’t have a harmonica on it. When presented with the half-finished demo of the song, the obvious thing for Al De Lory to have done would have been to take the guide melody of the unfinished chorus and replace it with a harmonica, altering the mood of the record while making it substantially more country. Instead, Campbell used a guitar, giving it a big injection of electrified blues and changing the record completely. The mouth harp had become synonymous with the blues, adding a layer of authenticity that a lot of record buyers hadn’t been exposed to and giving them an edge that money literally couldn’t buy. A harp added instant flavour, which is why country artists adopted it, using it to add vibrancy and a hint of home. Adding some harp to ‘Wichita Lineman’ would have made it completely western, giving it extra wistfulness and ennui. After all, in a way that’s what the harp is there for, adding chills to Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar singalong ‘The River’, giving some colour to Neil Young’s savanna ballad ‘Heart of Gold’ or topping and tailing Bob Dylan’s prairie plea ‘I Want You’. (‘The harmonica is the world’s best-selling musical instrument,’ Dylan supposedly said. ‘You’re welcome.’) The harp makes everything authentic.

  ‘Wichita Lineman’ didn’t need any help with authenticity. It was a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching no. 7 in Britain and no. 3 in the US. How strange was that? A mournful ballad without a proper chorus, about a man who spends his day up a telegraph pole. Who on earth would write a song like this? Who on earth would record it? And who on earth would buy such a thing?

  ‘The rule is that nothing ever works out the way you want it to – that’s our business,’ said Webb, many moons ago. ‘But in this particular case, it was a hit. A lady wrote me from Texas and said that she loved the song, that she and her husband Elmer played it almost every day, but they didn’t understand why the young man had to die at the end. You have to sit and think about that but the line is, “The Wichita lineman is still on the line.” He’s still up there, hanging on the line; in other words, his body is still up there. People will take things and run whichever way. But in a way, that’s the beauty of the three-minute song, that its appeal can be so broad so as to make it a success with a couple of million people at the same time. How do you actually get a reaction from two million people at the very same moment? That’s what a hit is. But I think they’re all hearing it slightly different.’

  The following year, Campbell
and Webb were determined to make lightning strike thrice. Their next collaboration? ‘Galveston’, another song about a town.

  4: THE HEART OF AMERICA

  The Midwest: it’s neither here nor here.

  ANON

  As Stewart O’Nan says in Songs for the Missing, the sins of the Midwest are flatness, emptiness and a necessary acceptance of the familiar. All American characteristics seem more pronounced in the Midwest. Like New York, but then again completely unlike it, the Midwest is a melting pot, the crucible in which pioneers from the Atlantic states and from every country in Europe quickly fused into the generic American identity. To wit: Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Walt Disney, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, Henry Ford, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower – all of them came from the Midwest. It is the breadbasket of America, the corn belt, the barn belt, the heartland. If the West is the eternal frontier, then the Midwest is the homestead.

  When you say ‘Midwest’ to an American, they see a small town in the middle of fertile farming country. The familiar Midwestern landscape consists of gleaming silos and white houses sitting amidst interminable green fields of corn, linked by endless meandering rivers and hot-to-the-touch highways that lead to rectangular towns dominated by local businesses that line generic Main Streets surrounded by frame homes with wide porches decorated with hanging pots of geraniums and large flapping national flags that all look as though they’ve just been ironed. Homes suffused with the aroma of coffee and freshly baked bread.

  The Midwest is Main Street USA, and in 1968 it was really no different. There is more industry these days, and more fluid migration, but in many respects the Midwest is almost immune to change. Kansas hasn’t changed much over the years, either, and it’s still the home of the brown dust storm, of tornadoes, of ranch dressing, and – like its neighbours North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska – it has a seemingly institutionalised inability to elect a Democratic governor. It is as Republican as the days are long: 83.5 per cent of Beckham County, the largest city of which is the birthplace of Jimmy Webb, Elk City, voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Not only did the Russians attempt to sway the result of the presidential election in Oklahoma, they also attempted to affect their local elections a year later, while there are also suspicions they were involved in the midterms, too. And although Trump may have tacitly accepted Vladimir Putin’s denial that Russia meddled in any election, not all of his supporters actually care. One Republican voter who rang American TV network C-Span had no complaints about Moscow allegedly undermining her country’s democratic process. ‘I’ll try not to sound too awful, but I want to thank the Russians for interfering with our election to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president,’ she said.

  The terrain here has always been challenging, often brutal, but the Midwesterners’ positivity can be summed up by the opening number in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Golden Age musical Oklahoma!, ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’. If you were a Midwesterner, you probably understood what it meant to have a Norman Rockwell view of America.

  ‘The Midwest is always patronisingly called that part of America referred to as the flyover states, and as so many pop songs are written about New York or Los Angeles, it’s encouraging to hear a song written about a part of the country that’s actually the heart of the country,’ said the journalist and broadcaster Stuart Maconie. ‘The Midwest is always imagined as the Heart of America, that place where good men and women live lives of quiet desperation, and where values are upheld forcibly. “Wichita Lineman” is a celebration of the Everyman, not the small man, not someone forced into submission by the dignity of labour, but the Everyman who stands tall and proud. It espouses traditional values, but not in a Trumpian way, as the song is too nuanced, too odd for that. I can’t imagine a guy going into a bar in Wichita tonight and putting this on the jukebox. He’d probably punch in something by Jimmy Buffett, or a more traditional country song. I think the messages in “Wichita Lineman” are too oblique, and actually quite opaque.’

  The impression of the Midwesterner as honest, decent and straight-shooting is still difficult to shift. In Michael Ovitz’s 2018 autobiography, Who Is Michael Ovitz?, the former Hollywood super-agent, and the man who helped invent the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), tells a captivating tale about the negotiations involving David Letterman’s proposed move from the NBC network in 1991. As Ovitz scuttled around, trying to secure Letterman a better deal elsewhere, he was contractually forbidden from discussing money. Many would have tried to circumvent the issue, but in Ovitz’s words, ‘We couldn’t address it without running afoul of Dave’s contract, and Dave, with his Midwestern ethos, was glad to skirt the subject, anyway.’ It still seems the Midwesterner is a romanticised version of Uncle Sam: all the good parts, and none of the bad.

  If the American Dream of hard work and upward mobility is alive anywhere, it’s in the Midwest, even though over half the nation’s population lives within fifty miles of a coast. Culturally there continues to be a defensiveness in the region that probably stems from a feeling of disempowerment, although it’s worth remembering that that feeling of disempowerment is somewhat counteracted by the highly disproportional representation that these largely low-population areas have in the US Congress. The Midwest used to be considered the moral heartland of the US, not least because on the East Coast religious belief was rarely associated with sophistication. To belligerent easterners, the open expanses of the Midwest were seen as the places where crops could be raised, timber cut down and minerals extracted. And so the region didn’t develop as organically as the rest of the country. While the South developed through its expansion of the slave and plantation economy, and while the West celebrated its independence by being so far away (not to mention by being a beacon of entrepreneurial spirit), the Midwest was tied to the east. It was New England settlers who founded many of the region’s cities and towns; it was the East Coast banks that funded the land grabs and the railroads; and it was eastern financiers who invested the money to build the Midwest’s agricultural economy, and the manufacturing economy that followed it. So perhaps it’s no surprise that people on the coasts accuse Midwesterners of having a collective inferiority complex.

  People certainly like to diminish them. Many years ago, in Granta, Bill Bryson did about as much as anyone can to indelibly stamp the characteristics of a Midwesterner on the literary passport of the metropolitan elite. But then seeing that he was born in Des Moines, Iowa, he probably had a right to: ‘In this he was like most Midwesterners. Directions are very important to them. They have an innate need to be oriented, even in their anecdotes. Any story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point into a thicket of interior monologue along the lines of “We were staying at a hotel that was eight blocks northeast of the state capitol building. Come to think of it, it was northwest. And I think it was probably more like nine blocks. And this woman without any clothes on, naked as the day she was born except for a coonskin cap, came running at us from the southwest … or was it the southeast?” If there are two Midwesterners present and they both witnessed the incident, you can just about write off the anecdote because they will spend the rest of the afternoon arguing points of the compass and will never get back to the original story. You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a wind-blown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane.’

  I was staying in New York in the summer of 2018, and I kept bumping into a middle-aged couple in the hotel lift, as they went up and down to smoke in the street. They were from Ohio, and one morning as we were chatting I asked them what they considered to be the centre of the Midwest. And if I got one answer, I got six. Playing up to Bryson’s stereotypes, the husband’s salvo went something like this: ‘Well, of course Ohio is shaped like a heart and so it’s always thought of itself as the heart of Am
erica, but then Kansas is actually halfway across the country. Michigan maybe. Missouri. Illinois, I suppose. Some would say Nebraska, but then that’s more of a Plains state. What about Pennsylvania? No, I would say that’s too east.’

  When his wife appeared in the lobby with the cigarettes, he asked her the same question. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. The Midwest is not the West, it’s not the South and it’s not the North-East. Iowa? Pennsylvania maybe? But no, that’s too far east …’

  In 2017, the Midwestern writer Amanda Arnold said that perhaps what ultimately binds the heartlands together is not so much what really happens within them, but how they are perceived: ‘As a land where Midwest Nice is the widespread temperament, evangelism is woven into everyday discourse, where angry people in historic manufacturing cities voted for a racist populist, and where things in general move just a bit more slowly.’ She laments the fact that people outside the region have difficulty imagining Midwestern literature – and, therefore, the region in general – beyond Protestant work ethic, American Dream-chasing and the hard-working immigrants of the early twentieth century. And yet many of those ideas continue to define the Midwest, as well as defining the motives for escape or geographical pivot. The Little House on the Prairie might be enough for some, but for others their nights are spent dreaming about California.

  ‘Wichita Lineman’ is based completely in the Midwest, and it perfectly sums up its location; however, it is just as representative of the West, being full of evocation, searching, hope and a sense of place. It is also a song with no political stripe.

  ‘Perhaps we tend to slight the significance of the Midwest because its history is largely a narrative of the accumulation of ordinary events into large-scale change rather than a story of dramatic turning points,’ said the authors of an internal report on the Midwest by Ohio State University. ‘It has been a place that encourages people to do what is necessary to accomplish an assigned task; a place that nurtured hundreds of women who in the early 1870s suddenly refused to tolerate the effects of intoxication and marched into saloons and stores demanding that the proprietors not sell alcoholic beverages; a place that produced generals like Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, John J. Pershing, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, men who did what was necessary to win wars without being seduced by the charms of fleeting glory.’