by Dylan Jones
It could be argued that the recording is a cleverly constructed composite, made up of Jimmy Webb’s words and melody, Glen Campbell’s voice, Carol Kaye’s talismanic bass line, Al De Lory’s strings and the Gulbransen organ. But, Difford said, ‘I bet if Jimmy Webb played it on an acoustic guitar it would sound just as mystical. I’m sure it would be spine-chilling. Even though he can’t sing it as well and the arrangement wouldn’t be there, you would have it in your head because that’s what you’ve grown up with, I think. The seed has already been sown, and you can’t get rid of it.’
For Difford, ‘Lineman’ is probably in his list of the top ten songs ever recorded, although he wouldn’t have said that twenty-five years ago. ‘I think good songs like that need to breathe, like wine. You need to take the cork out and listen to them quite a few times for them to bed in and to understand the geography of how the song has been created, the landscape of it, if you like. I think, speaking for myself, when I was younger I didn’t have the ability to see that, because I was too self-obsessed with being who I was. Once you’ve got rid of that ego and that cloak, you soak up everything, and I think that’s the glorious thing about this song. Now I can listen to it and say, “Oh my god, what a stunning track.”’
‘“Wichita Lineman” was part of the soundtrack of my childhood – even in an era that was full of great music [the dying days of the sixties], and Webb’s love song reached out from the radio and grabbed you by the heart and soul,’ said Tony Parsons. ‘Although it is totally American, you didn’t need to know where Wichita was or what a lineman did (come to think of it, I still don’t), but to understand the emotions of the song you did not need to be American, you just needed to be human. And it was a time when popular music had room enough for artists – and Jimmy Webb was an artist, not writing for money or the market, but writing for the ages.
‘It would sound great today. It still sounds great today. A love song, but about real love – yearning, longing, aching. Not love fulfilled. Not pop-chart fluff. Not a happy ending. I think the genius of the song is that it places you at the centre of the action. You might not know what a Wichita lineman was, but you knew how he felt.
‘It was a song for its time, and for a divided nation, tearing itself apart. It came out when America was on the news every night – the richest land in human history, but desperately unhappy and at war with itself. Jimmy Webb always felt like he was waking up from the American Dream.
‘As for Glen Campbell, in a way he was the American equivalent of Jimmy Page, an absolute veteran of the recording studio, a master of session work, completely on top of his craft before he ever stepped into the spotlight. These days talent is thrust raw and blinking into the spotlight. That is why new talent often seems so pitiful and thin these days. Glen Campbell was a great singer, given a song written by a genius.’
In the early nineties, what was previously – and completely pejoratively – called ‘easy listening’ came back in a major way, at least in the UK. Actually, it’s not strictly accurate to say it came back, as it hadn’t really been ‘here’, or indeed anywhere, in the first place. But suddenly it was everywhere – critically acclaimed by respectable critics in music magazines, lauded in newspapers of repute, and played on the radio and in clubs – almost as though it was being re-appreciated because every other form of music had already been resuscitated. Noel Gallagher was gatecrashing gigs by Burt Bacharach, and Austin Powers was a genuine role model. All of the people I had been championing for years, both in public and in private, were now being held up as bastions of great craftsmanship or facilitators of ironic cool. All of a sudden, the writers of children’s TV themes from the sixties and seventies were being told that their zippy little ditties had madeleine-like qualities, able to stir the soul like a formative novel, a piece of confectionery or indeed a classic pop single. As everything from heavy metal to rockabilly to northern soul had already been hoiked back on deck, there was literally nothing left to resurrect. After loungecore, which is how it was rebranded, there was nothing else to re-evaluate. Suddenly, simply by standing still I was cool again, or at least my musical taste was. I had all those rare Japanese Burt Bacharach CDs that the music monthlies were now extolling; I had all those Helmut Zacharias singles, courtesy of my parents; and I didn’t need a bunch of newly minted loungecore experts to tell me all about the apparently obscure baroque German cousins of John Barry, as I had a West Hampstead basement full of the stuff.
Of course, this reappreciation of the world of Burt Bacharach, John Barry and Glen Campbell didn’t last, and after a few years the worm turned again and all anyone appeared to be interested in was the Verve. Not that any of this affected me much. Of course, the commercial aspects of this newfound interest meant that there were now hundreds more CDs of hitherto difficult-to-find vinyl available to buy, and the publicity surrounding this new cottage industry meant that there was a wealth of new information about artists that even I – something of an obsessive – had found it difficult to track down, although there didn’t appear to be that many new fellow travellers. People had moved on, leaving me to wallow in a world designed and soundtracked by the likes of Mandingo, Alan Hawkshaw and the Free Design.
This was my happy place, but then it always had been, ever since I was young. Albert Goldman (old muckraker that he was) once said that music was a way for us to keep young, not by trying to stay cool and relevant, but by an almost generational refusal to grow up. To extrapolate, pop stars became surrogate parents, keeping us away from the horrors of growing up and the onslaught of real life.
For me, the horrors of real life had always been at home, being regularly beaten, punched and locked for hours under various staircases in US Air Force quarters, hit so hard by my father I developed a stammer that made it impossible for me to say my own name until I was five years old. If it wasn’t me being hit, it was my mother, who was always jumping into her Ford Anglia, disappearing off to see her girlfriend and leaving me to fend for myself, allowing my father to practise more hours of unsupervised torture. Music for me became like Christmas, which was the only time I can remember my parents not fighting, and consequently the only time I can remember not being used as a punchbag by my father. I remember imploring him to stay at home as long as possible after Christmas, in a bid to keep the family unit together for as long as possible, watching daytime TV, making SodaStream cola and pretending that all was right with the world.
And while I would find it easier and easier to find things to be myopic about, it was the world of easy listening that became my haven. Burt. John Barry. Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb. The three-panel gatefold cover of the Carpenters’ 1973 album Now & Then, where they’re photographed in a newly polished red Ferrari Daytona outside their beautiful suburban tract house in Downey, California? I wanted to live in that picture.
In my own pubescent way, like Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb, like millions of others, I thought that the West Coast would bring some sort of salvation, some sort of redemption. Could have been Downey, could have been San Bernardino, could have been Hollywood. Actually, could have been anywhere.
I was seventeen when I discovered that there were other people my age who liked ‘Wichita’ as much as I did. One of the first people I ever met at the Ralph West Halls of Residence – and actually the friend I’ve known for the longest time – was a fashion student at St Martin’s called Corinne Drewery. She came from Lincolnshire but looked as though she’d just stepped out of the time machine that had delivered her – in something of a rush, I’d say – from Carnaby Street in 1966. She wore dresses that could have convincingly been worn by Sandie Shaw, along with all the other accoutrements of Swinging Sixties dress – big plastic earrings (so big they looked like miniature hula hoops), charity-shop shoes and the palest of eye shadows. As I was a surly art-school punk with a leather jacket and a sneer, I think she took me on as a project and sort of forced us to be friends.
Corinne still maintains that when she introduced herself to me in the
dining room at the Ralph West, I responded with, ‘Please don’t talk to me. Please leave me alone and never talk to me again’ (or words to that effect). As she was dressed in a pink plastic carrier bag at the time, I think my response was perfectly understandable. But then Corinne really did have the most extraordinary taste in clothes. One day she would come to breakfast wearing a dress made entirely from plastic fly strips, the next she would look like one of the B-52’s (although I could make a fairly good case for the B-52’s basing their entire look on Corinne). We used to go clubbing together, and I had to suffer the indignity of looking for warehouse parties in yet-to-be-gentrified places like Hoxton and Hackney at three o’clock in the morning, with Corinne looking like one of the Jetsons. One night, as we were on our way to yet another party in the backstreets of King’s Cross, we were attacked by a gang of proto-hoodies (casuals they were called back then), and I was stabbed in the head and in the back, cut with a switchblade razor. Admittedly, I looked like a forties pimp at the time, complete with zoot suit and goatee beard, although my predicament wasn’t helped by the fact that Corinne was dressed as a dayglo flowerpot.
We soon discovered we had similar tastes in music, and while she had arrived at her choices via a lifetime spent in the northern soul clubs of Manchester, Blackpool and Wigan – whereas I had arrived at mine via a similar lifetime spent in sweaty pubs nodding along to dodgy prog-rock bands – by the summer of 1977 we liked almost exactly the same old music: classic Motown, Burt Bacharach, Jackie Trent, John Barry and, yes, ‘Wichita Lineman’. Because of this, we became fast friends, and as she was a pretty good singer, and as I was a so-so drummer, it wasn’t so surprising when we ended up in various bands together. Eventually I decided that I didn’t have what it takes to be a professional musician (i.e. talent: I once turned down an offer from Steve Diggle, after he left the Buzzcocks, to be in Flag of Convenience as I knew I couldn’t hold a candle to the Buzzcocks’ original drummer, John Maher), although Corinne soon forged a more than successful career with Andy Connell (formerly of A Certain Ratio) in Swing Out Sister (a great band with a terrible name), who were formed out of the ashes of the UK electro scene. Back in the eighties, Swing Out Sister had huge hits with songs like ‘Breakout’, ‘Blue Mood’ and ‘You on My Mind’, and in the decades since have released over a dozen extraordinary albums of cool, late-night loungecore (mixed with lashings of urban strings and sixties soul), the sort of music that makes you want to slip on a turtleneck and move to the ski lodge in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Swing Out Sister are, it has to be said, my kind of thing. And their album covers always look the same: Corinne’s perennially cool bob looming into the frame like the baby in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Andy reclining on some retro chaise longue, looking as though he doesn’t have a care in the world.
It is always difficult when someone you know writes a book or makes a film or a record or anything remotely creative, as it might be rubbish, and you might hate it. Weirdly, not only did I love Swing Out Sister’s music, I’ve loved everything they’ve done in the thirty-odd-year period since. Genuinely loved it. In fact, sometimes I think I’ve loved their music more than they have themselves. Their first LP, 1987’s It’s Better to Travel (another terrible title), contained a clutch bag of hit singles, though it was 1989’s euphoric Kaleidoscope World which firmly established their loungecore credentials. With such beautiful songs as ‘Forever Blue’, ‘Where in the World’ and ‘Coney Island Man’, the album was a love letter to luxury, a paean to the five-star pop days of yore. ‘Coney Island Man’ was almost an homage to Bacharach himself, and worthy of inclusion in any great sixties espionage thriller involving a coastline drive (the Riviera, the Santa Monica Freeway, Sorrento, whatever), an implausibly sunny day and a flame-coloured open-top sportscar driven by a wispy blonde in a Jackie O headscarf and Argentine air-hostess sunglasses.
On ‘Forever Blue’ and another song from the same album, ‘Precious Words’, the band drew on the talents of Jimmy Webb, and by all accounts he completely transformed them. ‘He seemed surprised we wanted to work with him,’ said Drewery. ‘We had finished the album and cheekily asked if he would arrange two songs, which he did beautifully – they were so good we did instrumental string mixes of the two so you could hear his arrangements in all their glory. He came to Master Rock Studios in Kilburn High Road, and it was amazing to see him at work with a full orchestra, as orchestral musicians are never usually impressed by pop sessions. They seemed somewhat humbled to be working with one of the greats. I offered to make him a cup of tea. When I had left the room, he asked Andy if I would be attending the session. When he told him that I was actually here, and that it was me who was making him the cuppa, he said, “Corinne is making me a cup of tea? Streisand or Sinatra never did that.”’
Corinne and Andy met up with Webb in New York a few years after they had worked together and discussed, among many other things, his writing collaborations with the 5th Dimension and Glen Campbell. ‘He said what a great and talented guy Glen was to work with, but was keen to point out that they didn’t share the same political views,’ said Corinne. ‘He was so fascinating to talk to. He also told us his kids, who later formed a band, the Webb Brothers, were just starting to make music, and that he had told them to read the complete works of Dylan Thomas before attempting to write a song. It was a great insight into his lyrics, a great insight into “Wichita Lineman”.’
The song still crops up in the most unusual places, and in some of the most expected. Instrumental versions can still be heard in the lobbies, cocktail bars and lifts of those hotels that haven’t yet been overhauled and turned into mid-century modern theme parks, and it’s never surprising to hear it pumping out behind the counter of a sports bar in a small Midwestern airport. A few years ago, I spent a long weekend in New Orleans, caught in a fantastic vortex between Allen Toussaint, Dr John, Tom Jones and (believe it or not) Hugh Laurie, and on my final night, tired but inquisitive, I ventured out into the French Quarter, intent on getting lost, and curious as to whether the historic heart of the city still had the ability to make you feel venturous and tempted. After an evening spent in the kinds of places that seemed to valiantly uphold the city’s reputation for the eccentric, the skanky and the sodden, I ended up in what I suppose would be described on TripAdvisor as a vintage heavy-metal gay bar, full of heavily tattooed women (and a few men) who appeared to have an enthusiastic penchant for the likes of Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Deep Purple, AC/DC and Blue Öyster Cult. Perhaps predictably – given the city’s inability to be anything other than surprising – after an hour or so of pretty generic weapons-grade HM, whoever was in charge of the playlist did a quick volte-face, and ‘Wichita Lineman’ came pouring through the PA, causing the enlivened clientele to liven up even more. The DJ had obviously been hitting the local creole absinthe that day, as he followed this with Roy Harper’s ‘One of Those Days in England’ and Television’s ‘Prove It’, immediately making this particular Louisiana heavy-metal gay bar a shoo-in for any best bar in the galaxy competition.
The silhouette of the lineman on the pole is the same today as it was fifty years ago, and while it might seem that the use of cell phones could obviate the need for the telegraph pole, they still transmit electricity. The linemen look the same, too, wearing hi-viz like any other utility worker, but basically the same, still hanging off poles as though they were abseiling down a cliff face. In the summer of 2018, on holiday in Formentera, as I cycled off to the local town I saw a truck ahead of me, a truck full of poles and tubes and reels of wires and boxes and boxes of metal harnesses. And up in the air, swinging slowly from a pole, were two of them, trabajadores utilitarios, bright in their vests, sweating in the thirty-degree dusk but no less attentive. Stupidly, I felt they were an omen, when they were simply going about their work.
Perhaps they were, as three weeks later I met Jimmy Webb in New York, as arranged, to talk to him about his greatest creation.
8: STILL ON THE LINE
Home i
s a pretty good place to be.
JIMMY WEBB
It’s obviously not necessary to meet a person in order to have an opinion about them, or indeed their records, and in some cases it’s probably best not to. There are artists whose music I love but whom I don’t especially want to meet in case I don’t like them, but there are some people you’d fall over yourself to meet. Obviously it’s rarely the waifs and strays you want to talk to, it’s the bona fide legends. And you want the experience to produce two things: selfishly you want the encounter to give you a greater understanding of their personality (and – a great failing in a journalist, I know – privately you want to like them, too), and professionally you want to walk away with sufficient secrets to build on the established understanding of their work.
I have interviewed enough celebrities to know that, from the moment we meet, there is often a kind of war of attrition between us. Because they are famous they have usually created a self – a self that is not completely them, but curiously is not not them either. Which is what the journalist and profile writer Thomas B. Morgan noted back in the mid-sixties: ‘Most better-known people tend toward an elegant solution of what they, or their advisors, call “the image problem”,’ he said. ‘Over time, deliberately, they create a public self for the likes of me to interview, observe, and double-check. This self is a tested consumer item of proven value, a sophisticated invention, refined, polished, distilled, and certified OK in scores, perhaps hundreds of engagements with journalists, audiences, friends, family, and lovers. It is the commingling of an image and a personality, or what I’ve decided to call an Impersonality.’
