by Dylan Jones
THE
WICHITA
LINEMAN
SEARCHING IN THE SUN
FOR THE WORLD’S GREATEST
UNFINISHED SONG
DYLAN JONES
For Louis
I think it’s prima facie evidence for the existence of God because for me to grow up and actually end up working with Glen Campbell is almost unbelievable.
JIMMY WEBB
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface: My Father’s Place
Introduction: The Sleeper
1 Becoming Glen Campbell
2 Becoming Jimmy Webb
3 The Harmonising of America
4 The Heart of America
5 The Lineman’s Afterlife
6 The Beautiful Mundane
7 County Music
8 Still on the Line
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Image Credits
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
PREFACE: MY FATHER’S PLACE
When I play it’s mostly music, but there’s a real demand for stories. I started doing it almost fearfully. I began playing maybe fifteen songs, and doing some stories. Over the last ten years, I’ve got to remember to play ten songs, with more stories, and the audiences seem to love it.
JIMMY WEBB
Once upon a time, Long Island was a very particular musical laboratory, the place you came to witness the latest cell division of rock and roll. If you lived on Long Island in the seventies and someone said, ‘Meet me tonight in dreamland,’ there was only one thing you were going to do, only one place you were going to go.
Back then, if you needed any litmus test as to who was about to cut through, wanted to find out which heavily touted newbie actually had real talent, you went to My Father’s Place, a 7,000-square-foot cabaret club in Roslyn, a historic village up in Nassau County. U2 made their American debut here; in 1976, it was where the Ramones performed their most important out-of-town dates; and back in 1973, an aspiring Bruce Springsteen performed here to just thirty people. He loved the place so much he came back four more times, even after he became more famous than the club ever would be. Here, twenty-two miles from Manhattan, up-and-coming comedians like Eddie Murphy, Andy Kaufman and Billy Crystal made their starts. In an era when comedy and rock went hand in hand, if you wanted to break into either industry, My Father’s Place was where you came.
In the fifteen years before the club closed in 1987, My Father’s Place hosted more than six thousand shows by over three thousand acts. The club’s owner, Michael ‘Eppy’ Epstein, refused to book cover bands, and so the club became known as somewhere aspiring artists could perform. Billy Joel. Todd Rundgren. Madonna. Aerosmith. Along with CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, the club became a nurturing ground for proto-punk and new-wave bands such as Iggy and the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Runaways, the Police, Blondie, Talking Heads and Television.
Early in 2018, Epstein reopened the club not far from the original venue, in the basement of the newly renovated Roslyn Hotel (formerly the Roslyn Claremont Hotel, but now reimagined as a boutique country inn), and six months later, in October, I came to have a look myself, or rather I came to see Jimmy Webb. Even though he lives not far from it, this was the first time he’d played the new venue, and it was something of a big deal for him. Webb regularly plays in New York, in London, in Sydney, all over the world. But there’s nothing like playing in your own backyard.
The Roslyn is a rather unprepossessing place that reminded me in part of one of those resort hotels in the Catskill mountains (albeit somewhat smaller). The surrounding area is generic middle-class America; not full of the Oklahoman homesteads of Jimmy Webb’s childhood, but instead the kind of white clapboard homes that pepper this section of Long Island in the same way that swimming pools litter certain parts of Los Angeles. If you ever wanted to see the houses and hoses and sprinklers on the lawn that Richard Harris invoked in ‘The Yard Went On Forever’, one of the ferociously eccentric songs that Jimmy Webb wrote for the actor in 1968 – the same year he wrote ‘Wichita Lineman’ for Glen Campbell – they are here, in this white-bread enclave of Oyster Bay.
The basement looked as though it had played host to a succession of wedding receptions, birthdays and hen parties, with its pink neon, wood panelling, turquoise ruched drapes and jellyfish chandeliers. Webb’s performance was a brunch gig, and the menu in the club reflected this: mimosas, chicken paillard Caesar salad and eggs Benedict; popcorn dipped in truffle, black pepper and Parmesan; lollipop wings, pickles, candied nuts and kimchee. Plus, of course, the obligatory lemon ricotta pancakes with smoked salmon and Chardonnay – a signature combo here.
Ashley, my server for the afternoon, having ascertained that I was from London told me enthusiastically that her father was originally from Sheffield, the unspoken assumption being that of course I had probably met him at some point. Such is the eternal optimism of the second-generation immigrant.
There were two hundred people in the club, all of whom had made a small pilgrimage to see the man known as America’s Songwriter, a man responsible for some of the greatest popular songs of the twentieth century, the Midwestern genius who wrote ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ and ‘MacArthur Park’, the man who, in the space of a few months in the summer of 1968, became the most famous songwriter in America. All for $50 plus lunch.
I hadn’t seen him perform since 1994, when, for three weeks in September, Webb, then a sprightly forty-eight, had given Londoners a chance to experience his voice in person for the first time in over a decade. The Café Royal’s Green Room had been operating as a supper-club venue for just over a year, hosting small, personal concerts by the likes of Eartha Kitt, Michael Feinstein and Sacha Distel, where dinner and cabaret would set you back L48 per person. Even at this point in his career, Webb was obviously an old hand at cabaret, making a point of trying to build a Vegas-style rapport with the audience from the first song in. There were small jokes, polished witty asides and plenty of music-industry anecdotes. A tall man, he spent most of the concert crouched over his keyboards, his ponytail bouncing behind him, with his eyes shut and his head pointing heavenwards, as if leaning towards divine inspiration. He began with an uplifting version of ‘Up, Up and Away’, before leaving the sixties behind and addressing ‘The Highwayman’, ‘Still Within the Sound of Your Voice’ and ‘The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress’. Rolling Stone once said that Webb has a voice like an old Mustang, but there were times during the evening at the Café Royal when the car appeared to be running on empty. And yet he ploughed on: ‘Didn’t We’, ‘If These Walls Could Speak’ and ‘MacArthur Park’ were followed by an obligatory medley of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘Galveston’ and the pearl of the evening, ‘Wichita Lineman’. Here, finally, was a moment of genuine beauty, when Webb’s compassion and latent melancholia seemed to overshadow any inadequacies he may have had as a vocalist, causing ripples and fleeting epiphanies all over the Café Royal.
In Roslyn, there was a low-level buzz in the audience; not feverish anticipation, but something altogether more nuanced. The people gathered here today had come to see a man they’d often read about, but whom most had never seen, making Webb something of an enigma. At the meet and greet afterwards he was (discreetly) mobbed by people saying how great it was to finally meet the man who wrote these wonderful songs and hear him sing them in person. The audience had come to hear the songs as much as they’d come to see Jimmy Webb. After all, in the sixties, these tunes helped build a new kind of America, tunes that for many defined a generation. ‘I never got to hear Berlin or Gershwin perform
in a club, however, I will be able to say I saw Jimmy Webb sitting at a Steinway … performing his songs,’ said Stephen Sorokoff of the Times Square Chronicles. ‘Words and Music that are embedded in the musical soul of our country, and will be played for generations to come. I hope it’s not too over the top to say, but for the non-music lovers out there, I can only compare it to hearing Thomas Jefferson reading the Declaration of Independence …’ Webb has other fans, too. ‘At an age when other singers are losing their voices, Mr Webb finds his mercurial, unguarded singing … attaining the gritty authority of a soft-hearted country outlaw’s,’ wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times.
After the servers finished gathering the plates and glasses in the basement, it was suddenly show time. The lights dimmed, and Webb, dressed entirely in security-guard black, walked quickly through the audience and straight away sat behind the black Yamaha grand, before adjusting his microphone and beaming at the crowd. The applause kept going until he reached the stage, but even if it hadn’t, I can’t imagine he would have felt slighted, because what Jimmy Webb has in spades is confidence. Not arrogance, but a Midwestern confidence that is immediately infectious. Happy in himself and comfortable in his skin, he almost seemed oblivious to his surroundings, and gave the impression he’d actually behave the same if he were playing Carnegie Hall this afternoon rather than a glorified supper club in Nassau County.
And then he started, methodically making his way through his extraordinary collection of hits, an eclectic bunch of songs that are among the most successful ever recorded. Every time he got a hint of recognition from the crowd – and as so many of his songs are famous this happened every time his fingers returned to the piano – he smiled a big Liberace-type Midwestern smile of genuine warmth, demonstrating a little bit of old-school Vegas on Long Island’s North Shore.
The crowd was completely smitten, which makes any criticism of his vocal abilities seem rather churlish. Would they have applauded any more enthusiastically if he’d hit every one of the notes he’d missed? Unlikely. Impossible, actually. Could they have been any more rapturous in their appreciation if he’d been rather less approximate with his interpretation? I wouldn’t have imagined so.
Every night Jimmy Webb seems to get away with it, singing these famous songs he invented with as much passion and pathos as he probably did when he first wrote them; maybe with more, actually, as the songs have had time to wrap themselves in the misfortunes of experience. This afternoon he sort of slid his way through his tunes – almost walking–talking them like Burt Bacharach does – interrupting them with well-worn stories that mentioned everyone from Frank Sinatra and Richard Harris to Billy Joel and Kanye West, the somewhat legendary session guitarist Carol Kaye and, of course, his dear departed ‘brother’, Glen Campbell. He has become self-deprecating about his voice – ‘They don’t pay me as much when I sing,’ he joked to the audience – and on a few of the songs he asked the crowd to join in on some of the tougher passages. Of course, what this meant was that today a further two hundred people could claim to have sung a song with Jimmy Webb.
By the time he got to ‘Wichita Lineman’, however, Webb’s voice had settled down to the extent that he performed it almost perfectly. Almost beautifully, in fact. Just like he’d done a quarter of a century ago in London. He has never had the pipes his partner Glen Campbell had, but this afternoon Webb’s interpretation of his greatest song was just about as good as it could be, given the circumstances (the primary circumstance being the fact that the man who wrote it had just celebrated his seventy-second birthday). And as he carefully slowed the song down – moving down through the gears – the piano keys started mimicking the Morse code refrain that has always signalled the song’s finale, Webb’s fingers delicately tinkling over the horizon. This was close to a faultless performance, with Webb reaching for notes with his body as much as his voice.
Then, after ninety minutes, he was gone, replaced by the piped strains of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue pouring out of the house PA, and scooting off to the lobby for the obligatory photographs and CD and book signing. He was effortlessly charming with those who queued for the merchandise, and no smile, no handshake, no awkward selfie appeared to be too much trouble. The night before I had seen his fellow My Father’s Place alumnus Bruce Springsteen perform his one-man show at the 960-seat Walter Kerr theatre on Broadway, and it wasn’t just their stagecraft that was so similar, it was also the affection they showed the audience, ever mindful of who pays the ferryman.
There were two parts of Springsteen’s show that were particularly revealing: one that grabbed you almost before you’d sat down, as he spent the first five minutes of the show self-deprecatingly demolishing any right he may have had to represent the working man; and then, conveniently, just before the end of the evening, when he talked about the two central motivations that seem to propel all performers – namely the desire to leave home and explore new lands, and then, inevitably, the unnecessarily tortuous search for a way back. It’s said of the US that the further west you go, the more there is of nothing, and in many respects that’s one of the country’s greatest metaphors. Home: it’s what the search for success is all about.
Jimmy Webb was in a similarly reflective mood this afternoon, riffing on his own Faustian bargain. ‘I suppose when I was young my mother had made a contract with me,’ he said, smiling at his audience. ‘I would play piano for an hour a day and she wouldn’t hit me with a stick. That was the contract. It was simple, really. And when I started improvising on my piano I seriously thought I could make something of it. And it worked. By the time I was twenty all my dreams had come true. I was a farmer’s boy who was now living in California, in Hollywood. I had a big house, lots of cars … but something wasn’t quite right.’
The crowd was suddenly restless, unsure as to what was going to happen next, perhaps worried that their Sunday afternoon might be veering off into sadness. ‘I was stuck in the middle, being a traditional songwriter in one way, and a kind of pretend hippie in another. And I wasn’t accepted by either … So the only thing I could do was continue to write my songs …’
And then his fingers hit the keys again, and all was right with the world. At least up in Roslyn.
The night before, he had played a gig up in Purchase, in Westchester County, and after a fairly punishing touring schedule involving performances all over Europe and the US, he was happy to be playing places where he could drive home afterwards. For the last fifteen years or so he has lived in Bayville, on Long Island Sound, and he likes to look at the seagulls and the ospreys as he walks along the beach with his second wife, and manager, Laura. Laura’s mother was sitting next to me in the club, and she could not have been happier with her son-in-law’s performance, and seemed equally pleased with his appearance in that day’s Newsday. ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ she asked rhetorically, showing me her copy.
A few weeks after this performance, Webb would be inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame, something which pleased him no end, and which he was looking forward to enormously. ‘This is just totally unexpected,’ he said to the crowd. ‘I have attended a couple of the ceremonies and I was there once to induct Johnny Maestro and the Brooklyn Bridge [Webb wrote their 1968 hit “The Worst That Could Happen”], so I’ve been around the proceedings. But I never foresaw being inducted myself.’
On stage in Roslyn, he was also full of appreciation for being allowed to play on such hallowed soil. ‘This is such an iconic club, and when I think of all the great people who have played here, I’m humbled.’ He said he hoped that his performance would help ‘further embed myself into the Long Island zeitgeist’, but then said that he was sure the only reason he’s accepted here on Long Island is because he lives down the street from Billy Joel.
Over the next few months the Roslyn would also play host to Black Uhuru, Gary U.S. Bonds, Randy Jackson, the Tubes, Steve Forbert, Billy J. Kramer, Brand X and Bettye LaVette, a perfect example of the eclectic democratisation of the mod
ern club circuit in a world where musicians can’t make money from record sales any more. Few of them would have the emotional pull of Jimmy Webb, however; few of them would be able to perform songs that continually offer such connection and transcendence.
This afternoon, before he started gearing up for the emotional denouement of ‘Wichita Lineman’, Webb told the story of how one of his sons came to him a few years ago and told him a song of his was on the radio. Not one of his classics, though, but a new version of something he’d written fifty years previously. The song his son had heard was Kanye West’s ‘Famous’, which contained a substantial sample of Nina Simone’s 1968 recording of Webb’s song ‘Do What You Gotta Do’.
‘So I listen to this record, and apart from the fact that Kanye West is saying some pretty repugnant things about Taylor Swift, this was basically my song with a lot of rapping over the top,’ said Webb. ‘I have to tell you I was quite upset. But my publisher eventually sorted it out, not that he knew anything about it when I called him to complain about it. But he called me one day to tell me he’d managed to get me 45 per cent of the publishing. And so I thought to myself, “Well, Taylor’s a big girl.”’
As the audience erupted with laughter, Webb peeled off another anecdote, this one involving Art Garfunkel and Frank Sinatra (or Mr Sinatra, as Webb still calls him). There would be many other stories, many other tales involving Willie Nelson, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Linda Ronstadt, Waylon Jennings, Glen Campbell and, of course, ‘Wichita Lineman’, which might just be the best story of all.
Life is long and songs are short, though ‘Wichita Lineman’ manages to squeeze a lifetime of emotion into just three minutes, and the story of how it came to be, how it was written, assembled and produced is one of the most intriguing in all of pop. This Midwestern small-town song would flood our psyche and make us feel alive, ignoring gravity as it carried us all up into the sky above the Kansas–Oklahoma border.
