The Wichita Lineman

by Dylan Jones

  ‘Technically, I suppose the song is about the point where the Midwest meets the West. This is where the Santa Fe Trail used to head out for California, and you can still see the ruts out there of the wagons. So really, this is kind of the West and New Mexico, which is where all the outlaws went after they robbed the banks, you know. There was a lot of shooting and a lot of outlaws and stuff going on in Missouri and Oklahoma, and we refer to that whole genre as westerns, but you are right, it’s smack dab in the middle of the country. But it was a different time, when the West was closer to the centre of the country. As America expanded and more people moved west, so our idea of the West kept being pushed closer to the coast.

  ‘My family actually started in Virginia. Long ago, I traced my genealogy, using a Mormon genealogist out of Salt Lake City. I traced our family back through Alabama to Georgia to Virginia at the time of the Revolution, so when I look back at my DNA, I’m 61 per cent Irish. There is such a big fear of immigration in the country right now, but I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for immigration, and my family have been here for two hundred years. This administration very conveniently forgets that every square foot of America was taken from someone by force, lethal force and cruelty beyond imagination. It isn’t like God prepared America for his special people, who came over and were white, but there are people here who sort of think that’s the way it happened. Every square foot, someone died for. Probably a brown person. Texas was stolen from the Spanish, California was stolen from the Spanish. If you read our history books, that’s not what you read. You read that there were wars, but they were predations by the Indians on the peaceful settlers. They gave them black hills in Dakota – for as long as the rivers run and as long as the sky is blue, as long as the hawk flies – until some knuckleheads found gold up in the hills, and then Custer was sent in there to drive them out.

  ‘So I sort of recognise my place in westward expansion. My genealogist said one time that the churchyards of Georgia are full of Webbs. “If you ever want to see your ancestors, go to Georgia,” he said. And in the Civil War, we were on the wrong side – my family were wearing grey. And so, when the family got to Oklahoma, little Jimmy was born. I was raised down in the south-west of Oklahoma and moved to West Texas, which was a hotbed for the whole rock and roll thing. I was a big Buddy Holly fan and soon decided I wanted to be a songwriter.’

  And then he brought out that huge Midwestern smile, before settling on an even bigger Midwestern frown.

  ‘There’s lots of Wichitas. If you look at a map of the Midwest, there is a Wichita, Kansas, a Wichita, Oklahoma, there’s a Wichita, Texas. There’s also very prominently a Wichita River, and the battle of the Wichita River was a massacre. George Armstrong Custer rode in at dawn on a defenceless village. All the men were out hunting; it was winter. Every living thing – every woman, every child, every fucking dog – he killed everything that moved in that village, and the army had the temerity to call it the battle of the Wichita rather than the massacre at Wichita. But in my mind I decided that’s where it was – in Wichita, in Kansas. The song was about many places in the area, but it’s set in Wichita, Kansas. That’s it.’

  He stopped for a while to consider again how he felt when he wrote it, and a thought occurred to him, one he couldn’t remember having before. ‘Maybe for a while it was “Arkansas Lineman”, but who knows? The way I work, I’m moving so fast that unless I had my notes, unless I had actually the pieces of paper that I had on the piano that day, I couldn’t say whether it was originally “Arkansas Lineman”. I never went through that because it was like releasing an arrow.

  ‘These days it takes me a lot longer to write a song, because you get to the point where you measure everything. Once you realise you are going to be judged on everything, you measure everything. You go, “Do I really want to use that word? How is that going to play?” you know? “Do I really have the right wires on top of this telephone pole?” Because when I wrote the song, I didn’t know; I didn’t know that much about the technicalities of being a lineman.’

  While the Oklahoma Panhandle might be short of landmarks, it is not short of history, a no-man’s-land that no state wanted, a haven for outlaws and vigilantes. It still feels a little like that, and the roads here are no different today to how they were in 1968. As you drive west along Highway 412 – a relatively recent addition to the highway system – for instance, the road really does go on for ever. I needed to see for myself, and when I did, I wasn’t disappointed. To look at these roads, these poles, this sky, it’s easy to think that nothing much has changed in the fifty years since Jimmy Webb wrote about them. It’s the same on the dirt roads. In this part of the country, in this sacramental place, all you can really see is sky, as the floor below is almost incidental, a wide yellow mass of scrub broken only by hundreds, thousands of telegraph poles. There is simply nothing here, only distance, and the sensation of being completely alone. It’s unsettling, but also strangely empowering. Out here, in the mythical, physical West, your only friend is the radio, your only respite from heat, sky and memory. Driving out here is not so dissimilar from driving along Route 66, where it’s easy to imagine yourself hauled back in time to a place before the Interstates, when the only way to get from A to B was to start early. It is desolate. Sure, it is romantic and gives you a sense of existential ennui, but mainly it is desolate. There is wheat, and there is tumbleweed, and there is tarmac. And sky and poles and not much else. People have compared the experience of driving along these long stretches of road to being in a sensory deprivation tank, with nothing to see, smell, feel or hear, and at times the landscape can overwhelm you, almost becoming abstract as the miles keep building. The thing that keeps you going is the horizon, the never-changing, unforgiving horizon. Today that horizon is littered with wind turbines, which can make the telegraph poles that still flank the old routes look a little like old men staggering towards the county line, looking for home, rolling like crucifixes westward towards the coast, stoic and metronomic.

  As ineffably joyful journeys go, the drive through Oklahoma is one of the best, as well as one of the longest, the roads snaking their way through one dustbowl town after another, concrete and asphalt ribbons down which millions of tourists once pushed their Detroit steel, looking for the new world or simply the definitive road experience. On the extraordinarily evocative drive west from Boise City to Guymon on Route 64, it’s not difficult to picture in one’s mind the hard times described in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Towns out here finish before they begin, fading into scrub. These are moonscapes of monstrous proportions, with two-lane blacktops cutting through them like charcoal arrows. To drive on Route 64 or Route 66, which runs parallel to the south, is to step back in time, to relive an age when driving was still an adventure, not a necessity. After World War II, when the car was still king, these roads that had once been the service roads to California became the stuff of fantasy. The country towards the west of Oklahoma can make you feel light-headed with solitude – creviced arroyos, harsh desert and wild bush scrub. ‘Sometimes, toward either end of a long driving day,’ wrote Tom Snyder in one of his roadside companions, ‘a run through this country brings up an ancient German word, Sehnsucht. It has no equivalent in English, but it represents a longing for, a need to return to, a place you’ve never been.’

  It is a sensation that springs to mind when thinking about ‘Wichita Lineman’.

  Here, in western Oklahoma, as the late afternoon starts to fold into the evening, and as shadow begins to add some context to the landscape, any feelings of deprivation – sensorial or emotional – are banished, as the sky takes over, morphing into a kaleidoscopic canopy.

  The only constant is the telegraph poles, a glissando to the sea …

  There are so many pictures in Jimmy Webb’s life, pictures that trace the career of a man who caught fame early and who mirrored its well-worn narrative arc before coming out the other side with a reputation the size of Mount Rushmore. Glen Campbell, too, had
the same pictures, the ones of him as confident young buck who became so successful he even – for one year only, in 1968 – outsold the Beatles, before succumbing to those hoary old clichés of wine, women and dope. He, too, can still be seen on YouTube, pumping out his classic hits in his rehab years, wiser and with a stronger voice than ever.

  Most of these pictures are good for both of them, although the images we like the best are the ones of them in their prime, in their pomp, when the world was at their feet and when their songs had found their way into our hearts for the very first time. We might not have fallen in love with ‘Wichita Lineman’ until the seventies, the nineties, the noughties, whenever; and we might not have fallen in love with it until last week, but we fell in love with it in its infancy. We love hearing Glen Campbell sing the original, and we love watching him sing it most when it was released, in 1968, when he was thirty-two and Jimmy Webb was still only twenty-one. The strongest image we have of Webb is the one where he sits cross-legged in his white turtleneck sweater, his white jeans and his little white boots. He has a Beatle cut, a hint of stubble, and wears an expression that could be sufficiently described as sanguine.

  The image many love of Glen Campbell, or at least the one I love, is a still from his appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968, where he performs ‘Wichita Lineman’ against a set composed largely of huge, angular telegraph poles that look as though they have been designed by Saul Bass. A sunset has been painted approximately on the backdrop. Campbell stands with one foot against the base of a pole, strumming what looks like a Fender Bass VI and smiling over the top of the camera, looking as though he’s peering up into the sky, forty feet above the ground perhaps. He’s wearing a modish brown suit, ankle boots and a pale-yellow roll-neck, perfectly groomed but also having the appearance of someone who has quite literally just walked in off the street.

  Then, as the song reaches one minute and twenty seconds, he turns and looks directly into the camera, his matinee parting and the cleft in his chin telling you he means business. Show business. This was Glen Campbell’s face for the world to see. And maybe Jimmy Webb’s, too. Campbell blinks, feeling rangy and freewheeling, and then he drops the bomb, the bomb that never stops: ‘And I need you more than want you / and I want you for all time …’ And in the mind’s eye, the telegraph poles appeared to be flashing by in rhythm.

  Having both taken a metaphorical trip along Route 66 to find fame and fortune, their greatest success would be an anthem celebrating the Midwest, the place where both of them were born.

  Unsurprisingly, of all the recordings that Campbell made of Webb’s songs, ‘Wichita Lineman’ remains Webb’s favourite. ‘It was a perfect marriage between a song and a voice,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing today to listen to that record and realise how highly pitched his voice is, because all of our voices have dropped in the intervening years. But he sung so high and he was such a smooth singer, and there was a note – it was very plaintive, almost like a dying fall – to his intonation, to things that are almost indescribable, almost intangible. But I don’t think that the record has lost any gravitas since it was made. You put it on and it still sounds as though that song and that singer were meant to be together.

  ‘Over the years I’ve changed my mind a little bit about “Wichita Lineman”, as I’ve realised it must be better than I thought it was, but I always come back to the fact that I didn’t finish it. If I had finished it, it wouldn’t have been as clean. Because it was kind of an interrupted creative process, because Al De Lory wrote a sort of precognitive arrangement, and it was almost childishly simple. He was a minimalist before his time, before its time, and you can hear it on “Wichita Lineman”. Glen also has the perfect instrument for that song; it was absolutely written for his voice, and I knew exactly where his voice was on the piano. “Wichita Lineman” stands up as a record, it still sounds great. If it came on the jukebox right now in this place’ – he looked around the empty Wall’s Wharf bar – ‘bam! There is an immediate identification of that sound, that voice. There is a pairing between the song and the voice. I attribute a lot of its longevity to that, because it’s not really coloured by any particular era, just it’s a phenomenal record. The record is like a Picasso line drawing. I can say that because I didn’t make the record besides holding down the two notes on the church organ. They made the record, and Glen knew how to make records. He’d already made thousands of records. He had played on “Viva Las Vegas” with Elvis Presley, he’d done “You’ve Lost That Loving Feelin’”, he played on “Johnny Angel”. The depth of his knowledge of what to do in the studio, you can’t count that out. You can’t disregard that as a factor.

  ‘He came over to my house one day to watch a football game, and I put a record on that I had been toying with, by Allen Toussaint. I said, “Listen to this guy.” Some of his stuff was pretty far out; it was borderline, sort of psychedelic in a way. We finally came to “Southern Nights”, and he listened to it and with kind of a glazed look over him – he forgot all about the game – he said, “Can I have that?” And I said, “Don’t ask me, it’s Al Toussaint’s, it’s already recorded.” And he says, “No, can I have that record?” I said, “Well, I’m not really finished with it, but I guess so.” He grabbed it, and it was like a Warner Brothers cartoon – he went out the door like boom, like the coyote. Then a couple of weeks later it came on the radio, his version of “Southern Nights”, and it was a huge hit. Glen completely took it apart and put it back together again, and when he got finished with it, man, there was no doubt: when it came into a radio station it was going onto the turntable.

  ‘I have a kind of angst against people who try to diminish Glen as being any less of a musician than he was, any less of an intellect than he was. He was a record man, through and through, and he came up with those session players, the Wrecking Crew, so he had already sat through a hundred thousand sessions where they didn’t cut any hits, so he sort of knows what an un-hit sounds like. I gave him all the credit in the world for “Wichita Lineman”. He knew it was finished. Whether I knew it was finished or not, he knew it was finished.’

  Call it a working-man blues, call it a hymn, call it people music, call it whatever you want. The beauty of ‘Wichita Lineman’, like the constant retelling of how Jimmy Webb came to write it, is in the repetition. ‘I’ve never worked with high-tension wires or anything like that,’ he said. ‘My characters were all ordinary guys. They were all blue-collar guys who did ordinary jobs. And they came from ordinary towns. They came from places like Galveston and Wichita and places like that.

  ‘No, I never worked for the phone company. But then, I’m not a journalist. I’m not Woody Guthrie, I’m a songwriter, and I can write about anything I want to. I feel that you should know something about what you’re doing, and you should have an image, and I have a very specific image of a guy I saw working up on the wires out in the Oklahoma Panhandle one time with a telephone in his hand talking to somebody. And this exquisite aesthetic balance of all these telephone poles just decreasing in size as they got further and further away from the viewer – that being me – and as I passed him, he began to diminish in size. The country is so flat, it was like this one quick snapshot of this guy rigged up on a pole with this telephone in his hand. And this song came about, really, from wondering what that was like, what it would be like to be working up on a telephone pole, and what would you be talking about? Was he talking to his girlfriend? Probably just doing one of those checks where they called up and said, “Mile marker 46,” you know? “Everything’s working so far.”’

  Everything’s still working now.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  When I told members of my immediate family I was writing a book about ‘Wichita Lineman’, they pretty much all said the same thing: ‘That’s nice. Why?’ (although Jimmy Webb himself was just as incredulous when I told him the same thing). Hopefully this book goes some way to answering that question. As well as thanking Sarah, Edie and Georgia, I’d like to th
ank all the people who helped with the book, for their enthusiasm, their contributions, their wise words, their suggestions and their expertise. So, a huge hearty round of applause please to Jimmy Webb, Carol Kaye, Laura Savini, Lee Brackstone, Jonny Geller, Anne Owen, Ian Bahrami, Paul Weller, Chris Difford, Elvis Costello, Jon Savage, Corinne Drewery, Tony Parsons, Robert Chalmers, Mick Brown, Deyan Sudjic, Dan Papps, Jo Vickers, the Mark Hotel, Linda Ronstadt, Bill Prince, Andrew Collins, Stuart Maconie, Mark Ellen, Neil McCormick, Rod Melvin, Robin Derrick, Robert Elms, Alex James, Mark Steyn, David Hepworth, Barney Hoskyns, Jason Barlow, Amy Raphael, Bob Stanley and Doug Flett. There are so many sources for the research and quotes used in this book, and the following publications have been incredibly helpful: Billboard, Country Music Review, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Esquire, Evening Standard, The Face, Financial Times, British GQ, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Los Angeles Times, Mail on Sunday, Melody Maker, Mojo, Music Week, New Musical Express, New York Post, New York Review of Books, New York Times, New Yorker, Observer, Q, Record Mirror, Rolling Stone, Scotland on Sunday, Scotsman, Sounds, Sunday Express, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times, The Times, Uncut, Vanity Fair and Washington Post. I have also raided the top and bottom drawers of dozens of websites, Wikipedia and Wikiquotes included, many of which are extraordinary in their obsession with detail. Rock’s Backpages has also been extremely helpful.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Amis, Martin, The Moronic Inferno (Jonathan Cape, 1986)

  Bull, Andy, Coast to Coast (Black Swan, 1993)