The Wichita Lineman

by Dylan Jones

  Teenage insurrection had been around since the fifties, since Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, although this was the first time that people had started to talk about a generation gap, a vacuum that had started to create many ill-considered commercial propositions. Exhibit A was the 1968 ABC TV series The Mod Squad, featuring a trio of undercover cops (‘One black, one white, one blonde’) who had been recruited to form a task force as an alternative to being incarcerated. The ABC ads for the show were beyond parody: ‘The police don’t understand the now generation – and the now generation doesn’t dig the fuzz. The solution – find some swinging young people who live the beat, get them to work for the cops.’ These young people represented suburban culture’s fears regarding uppity youths: one was a longhaired rebel evicted from his parents’ Beverly Hills home; one was implicated in the Watts riots; and the third was a renegade flower child. All were co-opted by ABC to try and bridge a gap that was only just beginning to form.

  America was splitting. When Robert Kennedy was wrestling over whether to run for president, he received letters from irate Democrats telling him to get his hair cut. ‘Nobody wants a hippie for President,’ said one. Ironically, when he eventually declared his candidacy, he did just that: got a haircut.

  To some, Jimmy Webb was seen as a member of the old guard rather than a pupil of the new school, which is why this newly minted LA celebrity had to go out of his way to ingratiate himself with his peers. One day they would all be reclassified as baby boomers, but for the time being they had to battle with the petty bifurcation of their generation. The sixties might be too protean to be hemmed in by calendrical niceties, but in 1968 the counter-culture had really begun to impinge on the mainstream. The Nixon years had yet to start, as the presidential election wouldn’t be held until November. That month Richard Nixon would defeat the Democratic nominee, incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey, ushering in a period of cynicism in mainstream politics that wouldn’t truly end until the somewhat anti-climactic win by peanut farmer Jimmy Carter in 1976. Those in the political centre who had been in two minds about Nixon and had thought that his reactionary leanings might be tempered by the possibility of office were soon disabused of this fanciful notion when he chose Spiro Agnew as his running mate. While the governor of Maryland had initially been seen as a moderate, by the time he was chosen by Nixon he had already swung to the right. Under a Nixon/Agnew administration, the sixties really would be over. There should really have been no doubt about Agnew, as he had shown his true colours by campaigning to ban the Beatles’ ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ because the Fab Four sang that that was how they ‘get high’.

  One of the biggest flashpoints of the year was the Democratic Convention, which took place in August, in Chicago, and involved violent clashes between demonstrators and police, producing one of the most polarising showdowns of the decade. Inside the convention hall, Vice President Hubert Humphrey easily beat Senator Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic presidential nomination, by 1,761 votes to 601. The delegates chose to adopt Humphrey’s platform, which endorsed President Lyndon Johnson’s unpopular Vietnam policies, rejecting McCarthy’s anti-war stance. Protesters smeared the reception halls with Limburger cheese, which was their way of saying that politics stank. However, what was really focusing the delegates’ minds was the carnage being enacted elsewhere in Chicago. Several miles away, thousands of protesters poured out of Grant Park into a miasma of tear gas and truncheons. Ten thousand demonstrators had gathered in the city, only to be met by twenty-three thousand police and National Guardsmen. Some demonstrators were bent on disrupting the convention by whatever means necessary, while others focused on more bizarre tactics, like holding a counter-convention offering the likes of a nude grope-in for peace and prosperity, and workshops on joint-rolling, guerrilla theatre and draft-dodging. For weeks there had been rumours that LSD was going to be poured into the city’s drinking water, with some of the more imaginative protesters sending out ‘stud teams’ to seduce the wives and daughters of the delegates – all designed to unnerve and undermine the Democratic delegates and keep the police guessing. Chicago became a city under siege, with armoured jeeps with barbed wire on their bumpers delivering armed troops to patrol the streets.

  Nineteen sixty-eight has been called a hinge point in American history, and as the political turmoil of the decade continued to unfurl – the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis was swiftly followed by Robert Kennedy’s assassination in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign – so the culture at large started to twist and turn. Traumatic event followed traumatic event as a huge array of social and political trends reached critical mass. The country found itself in a ferocious culture war over so-called values issues – crime, abortion, patriotism, prayer in school, freedom of speech, etc. – all magnified by popular culture and dramatised by an increasingly aggressive news media. It was no wonder that many Americans thought their country was having a nervous breakdown.

  The year’s most influential song was Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild’, soon to be the signature tune of the decade’s end in Easy Rider. Big books included The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, while photographer Eddie Adams helped sway public opinion regarding the Vietnam War when he published his picture of Saigon police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan summarily executing handcuffed Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém with a pistol shot to the head early in the Tet Offensive. Văn Lém was actually an assassin and the leader of a Viet Cong death squad who had been targeting and killing South Vietnamese National Police officers and their families, but he still became an unwitting poster boy for anti-war protesters. (The phrase ‘fog of war’ was invented for events like this.) And while Time magazine’s Man of the Year cover featured the Apollo 8 astronauts (William Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell), the year’s most abiding cultural takeaway was the malfunctioning computer in Stanley Kubrick’s metaphorical masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Few on either side of the cultural divide would have forgotten where they were when they first saw the movie and heard HAL 9000 stumble his way through his version of ‘Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)’. It didn’t matter what branch of the entertainment industry you were in, whatever you did was played out in front of a blinding wall of insurrection and disruption. The civil unrest that took place in Paris in May even led John Lennon to ponder on the nature of revolution. His new song, ‘Revolution’, was the first to be recorded for ‘The White Album’, although he was unsure as to which side of the fence he should fall on, hence the ambivalence of the lyrics, where, as far as destruction is concerned, he asks to be counted both out and in. When he re-recorded the song for the B-side of ‘Hey Jude’, Lennon said we should categorically count him OUT.

  While Jimmy Webb certainly had long hair, and voted Democrat, and wore blue jeans, and looked like a sort of entry-level hippie, he wasn’t writing about overthrowing The Man, wasn’t letting his freak flag fly. His experience was so particular, his success so novel, it’s almost worthy of a Hollywood movie: ‘A country boy moves to California from his mom and dad’s Oklahoma farm and lands a job writing songs for some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Too wild for the country, but not crazy enough for the city, JIMMY WEBB is lost in paradise. Coming to a theatre near you soon.’

  Where did Jimmy Webb fit in to one of the most transformative years of the sixties?

  By 1968, Webb was a fully fledged songwriter for hire, and he actually wrote ‘Wichita Lineman’ to order. ‘I’m a muse writer and I write for myself primarily and I write from personal experience and I write about emotional things I’m going through,’ he said at the time. ‘Sometimes it’s political, it can be animal, vegetable or mineral. But sometimes, if you’re a professional songwriter, they do approach you and say we need a song about this. And if you’re a real songwriter you should be able to do that.’

  After the phenomenal success of ‘Phoenix’, Glen Campbell had asked for a follow-up. Campbell was
recording the album that would eventually become Wichita Lineman, but midway through the sessions he realised he didn’t have enough songs. A few days after the Grammy Awards at the end of February, where he and Webb had accidentally met for the first time, and where Campbell seemed more intrigued by the length of his benefactor’s hair than anything else he might have to offer, and after a night of extraordinary celebration for both of them, the singer called Webb at home and asked him for a follow-up to their big hit. He had had such ridiculous success with ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ that he wanted to repeat the formula and to see if the man who had written it – whom he had never properly met, not yet, not to talk to at length – might be able to weave his magic once again. Because even though Campbell had started out as an orthodox country-pop singer, having worked with the likes of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson and having had such a huge hit with ‘Phoenix’, he understood the power of transgression.

  ‘Glen called me up and asked if I could write another song about a town,’ said Webb. He resisted, thinking he’d done that already. ‘And I said, “I’m not sure I want to write a song about a town right now. I think I’ve overdone that.” We sort of negotiated a little bit, as he wanted another town originally, Houston or something like that.

  ‘Then Glen said, “Well, can you do something geographical?” A road song, by any other name. So I spent the rest of the afternoon sweating over “Wichita Lineman”.’ Sticking to a theme, Webb wondered where his ‘Phoenix’ protagonist might end up, having left LA. Thinking back to his past, he remembered driving across the Oklahoma and Kansas flatlands and seeing telephone linemen ‘hanging against a lonely, desolate landscape’, and he knew he had his subject. As a boy, Webb would walk up to the wires, and they actually were singing. And the sound that the wires used to make was a high humming, almost like a drone.

  An image occurred to him of a long, flat Kansas country road, with telegraph poles careering away from him in the distance, shimmering in the summer sun. No contrast, just horizon, just a long line of telegraph poles disappearing into the distance and a lonely figure suspended against the endless sky of the badlands. The kind of place where the air hangs like a gauze, where the countryside is full of grain silos and flat brown fields, and where a rooster-tail of dust rises up every time a car clicks down a long, dry highway.

  This was the Kansas–Oklahoma border, a place full of solitude, emptiness and vast expanses of not very much at all. (One should never forget that when Dorothy arrives in Oz, she looks around and, awed by all this newfound beauty and splendour, says, ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.’ And they weren’t.)

  As cities are so infused with memory, so country – especially Big Country – offers a blank canvas onto which you can paint your own stories. This is what Jimmy Webb did with this song, painting a narrative of existential ennui, a macro-/micro-story of personal longing. The vista he paints sounds like a movie, a cowboy movie, the strings evoking the wide-open spaces of the plains, the harsh shadows just before twilight, the nomadic nature of the people who live, work and wander there. ‘Wichita Lineman’ in some respects sounds like the theme to a TV western series – if that doesn’t come across as being too reductive – a song to stir the heart, trick the mind and evoke the big Midwest landscape within it. And if not a TV theme, then maybe a painting or a movie. Maybe both: an Andrew Wyeth landscape with de Chirico shadows directed by John Ford.

  Webb already had a lot of ‘prairie gothic’ images in his head. ‘I was writing about the common man, the blue-collar hero who gets caught up in the tides of war, as in “Galveston”, or the guy who’s driving back to Oklahoma because he can’t afford a plane ticket [“Phoenix”]. So, it was a character that I worked with in my head. And I had seen a lot of panoramas of highways and guys up on telephone wires … I didn’t want to write another song about a town, but something that would be in the ballpark for Glen.’

  He wasn’t interested in repetition, wasn’t interested in doing an imitation of ‘Phoenix’, so instead he thought he could do a ‘Phoenix 2’ and just swing the camera in a different direction to see what it would see. He knew he wanted ‘Wichita’ to be a character song, knew the protagonist couldn’t be rich, aloof or a blow-in. He had to live and breathe Wichita. ‘I wanted it to be about an ordinary fellow,’ he said. ‘Billy Joel came pretty close one time when he said “Wichita Lineman” is “a simple song about an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts”. That got to me; it actually brought tears to my eyes. I had never really told anybody how close to the truth that was. He had his thumb right in the nerve there.’

  The name of the town was all-important; Webb knew it needed to be evocative and not too corny. When I first became aware of the song, Wichita as an actual place was completely abstract, mythicised to the extent that it could have been anywhere between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Californian coast, anywhere from Tijuana to Chicago. Seriously, was Wichita even on the map? Because of the song, the town itself now has an obvious romance associated with it, one not entirely of its own making. The name ‘Wichita’ is derived from the Choctaw word ‘Wia chitch’, meaning ‘big arbour’, a reference to Wichita’s large grass lodges, which in pictures look like giant yurts. The original town emerged in the 1860s as a trading post on the Chisholm Trail, which was used after the Civil War to drive cattle overland from ranches in Texas all the way through to Kansas. The portion of the trail originally marked by Jesse Chisholm went from his southern trading post near the Red River to his northern trading post near Kansas City. Wichita then became a destination for cattle drives north from Texas to the railroads, earning it the nickname ‘Cowtown’.

  In the twenties and thirties, entrepreneurs in the aeronautical business established aircraft manufacturing companies in Wichita, including Beechcraft, Cessna and Stearman Aircraft. The town would soon become a production hub for US aircraft, and so quickly went from being Cowtown to ‘The Air Capital of the World’, lurching from the old world to the new almost in the time it takes to put up a new billboard. Nowadays it is largely known as the home of Pizza Hut, which was founded there in 1958, and for being the headquarters of Koch Industries, the vast industrial corporation run by two conservative billionaire brothers.

  The town is halfway between Oklahoma City and Kansas City (the largest city in the state), and yet it is really in the middle of nothing, a town most notable for a song that somebody haphazardly wrote about it, a town literally on the edge of nowhere. Kansas is cowboy country, a quintessential Midwestern state that epitomises the US heartland, with its rolling wheat fields, prairie, steppe and grassland; a Great Plains state, one of the many that lie west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rockies. It is still regarded as the heartland of America, the backbone of the nation, a flyover state where people are scarce but true; landlocked and flat, the kind of place where the light is almost entirely absorbed by what it strikes. The White Stripes mentioned the town in their most famous song, ‘Seven Nation Army’, holding it up as a paragon of what they (and those like them) had managed to escape, and what they might one day need to return to (essentially it is Jack White’s treatise on the pressures of fame).

  At a Jimmy Webb tribute gala in 2003, Billy Joel performed ‘Wichita Lineman’, addressing the audience as he played. ‘Anybody here been to Wichita?’ he asked. ‘Miles of prairie, endless plains, a couple of telephone poles, and the prairie becomes mind-numbing. I heard this song and it made me think about almost everyone in a different way … It starts off, “I am a lineman for the county …” and I’m thinking is that a football player, what the hell is a lineman? “And I drive the main road …” So why should I care? “Searching in the sun for another overload …” Overload, now I’m getting interested. “I hear you singing in the wire / I can hear you through the whine …’ W-h-i-n-e, OK? “And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line …” And then the electronic pulse. Oh, I get it, it’s about telephones, and technology and stuff. This guy’s a telephone repai
r guy! And then he starts talking about this voice … “And I need you more than want you …” I need you more than want you? Isn’t that almost like a dis? And then he says, “I want you for all time.” Holy shit, he must really need her then. It’s as if anybody, anyone you see, a guy working in construction, maybe he’s got the soul, the vision of a Thomas Hart Benton, maybe a commercial fisherman, with his heavy gear, has the spirit of a John Steinbeck, and maybe a guy climbing up a telephone pole has the spirit of a Samuel Barber …’

  And maybe a mailbox out front shaped like a covered wagon.

  There was of course no clue as to who this woman was, no steer as to what she must be thinking herself, nothing offered concerning her own hopes and fears. Was she a cheating wife, the waitress he met in a diner, a corrosive temptress or a childhood sweetheart? Unlike ‘Phoenix’, Webb’s object of desire wasn’t part of the narrative, she was just the object of desire.

  For inspiration, Webb again remembered Susan Horton, the unrequited love he appeared to be able to conjure up at will. He had often written of his first great love: ‘Up, Up and Away’ was about meeting her, ‘MacArthur Park’ was about spending a lovely, perfect afternoon together, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ was about leaving her and ‘The Worst That Could Happen’, the no. 3 hit for the Brooklyn Bridge, was about her marrying another man. And so ‘Wichita Lineman’ became another in a series of love songs aimed at the woman who would eventually marry Linda Ronstadt’s cousin, although remain Webb’s close friend. ‘It’s about that first love affair he was in,’ Campbell said. ‘She just tore him a new rump, boy.’

  ‘I grew up in this flat country in Northwestern Oklahoma where you could literally see fifty miles in front of you, if you can imagine that,’ said Webb. ‘If you stand on a matchbox you can see a hundred miles. It was a featureless world, like being on Mars, except for the telephone wires gracefully draping out towards the horizon. And those wires and the men that worked on them and their equipment was one of the only things to look at. So that was a very vivid image.’