The Wichita Lineman

by Dylan Jones

  Their report contradicts at least one defining aspect of the Midwest, namely that instead of being identified geographically, the region could actually be defined psychologically. Because fundamentally the Midwest is a collection of disparate communities held together more or less by a civic culture that likes to think it transcends (or at least ignores) differences (forgetting for a moment that rather a lot of them actually voted for Trump in 2016).

  In 1966, Allen Ginsberg wrote ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’, an anti-Vietnam poem, which originated as a voice recording that Ginsberg made with a tape recorder as he travelled in a bus across the Midwest. Ginsberg juxtaposed images of the Kansas landscape with snippets of media reports about the war, linking the violence there with the conservative values of the heartland. He believed that Wichita, where Carrie Nation originally championed the temperance movement, ‘began a vortex of hatred that defoliated the Mekong Delta’. He was drawn to Wichita because he was fascinated that so many people he knew had lived there. During the post-war years, Wichita wasn’t just a hub of the John Birch Society, it also produced a lot of beat poets, most notably Charles Plymell, Michael McClure and Bruce Conner (along with publisher David Haselwood), who played such important roles in the beat scene that they were called ‘the Wichita Group’. A product of East High and Wichita University, they were the first of many young Kansans who would be a part of the new culture that would shape the artistic future of America.

  Long, multi-sectioned, snake-like, ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ is an extraordinary piece of work, as powerful and as damning now as it was then (it was used recently in Ang Lee’s adaptation of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk). As Ginsberg drives to Wichita, his poem attacks the media and the advertising and entertainment industries, creating a barrage of deliberately contradictory words and images.

  Vaulting in its ambition and kaleidoscopic in execution, Ginsberg’s mantra references a panoply of villains, saboteurs and fellow travellers, scooping up Bob Dylan, William Blake, Junction City, the Viet Cong, the Republican River and the McConnell Air Force Base along the way. By invoking icons of transcendence – Christ, Allah and an assortment of Indian holy men – he tries to reclaim the American language for a greater good. It is full of manipulation and juxtaposition and dozens of scattershot images. ‘Wichita Lineman’ has only one idea and only a few, albeit powerful, images. Both are obviously haunting in their own right, but while Philip Glass’s accompanying music – added to Ginsberg’s poem in 1988 – gives ‘Vortex’ an even greater sense of relevance, it is ‘Lineman’ that feels the more profound. Listening to ‘Vortex’, it is easy to think that there was a singular America, one with a common goal, a place where hopes and dreams were shared and where disappointments were kept in check. One day Bruce Springsteen would make a career out of making music that made you feel like making the most out of your life, because it was the only life you were ever going to have; in a way, ‘Wichita Lineman’ managed to do this in just sixteen lines.

  The sound of ‘Wichita Lineman’ was the sound of ecstatic solitude, but then its hero was the quintessential loner. Who knew what he was thinking? All we knew was how he felt about the woman he loved. He was a working man. He would haul himself up and then string, fix and call those telephone lines in sick. He had a sweat-beaded neck, a mottled denim shirt and a yellow hard hat. In fields of sky-high corn against cornflower-blue skies, he sat way up in the air, way over the horizon, making sure our lines of communication were still open, the great enabler, the benevolent blue-collar Everyman. What a great metaphor that was, and what a great metaphor he was, a man who needed a woman more than he actually wanted her, a woman he wanted for all time, a man feeling the need to tell everyone else about his predicament because he couldn’t settle the situation himself. Could he keep her? Had he lost her? Indeed, did he even really know her? Here, deep in American Arcadia, was a man in true existential crisis.

  David Crary, a real-life lineman who repairs high-voltage power lines across America, was interviewed by the BBC in 2011. He said that he wouldn’t change the words of the song for the world. ‘I think Jimmy Webb hit the nail on the head. It describes a lot of linemen, what they go through on the road, away from their family. When I hear that song, or when I’m singing it, it brings lots of memories back of storms that I’ve been on, whether they’re ice storms, hurricanes [or] tornadoes. The most important part is getting back to your family in one piece.

  ‘We were on a vacation the first time I heard Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” and I believe we were going to Missouri, about ’72, 1973, we was all in a station wagon, me and my two brothers and my mom and dad, travelling some curvy roads. I was the youngest kid so I had the very back with no seat, on a sleeping bag and the radio station, you know, it was a radio station that we probably hadn’t listened to because we were so far away from home. We were just scanning the dial trying to find some music and I remember hearing the song and thinking, “It has to be a cool job if you’ve got a guy singing about it on the radio.” The job of a lineman is the person that you see in the bucket trucks that’s climbing the poles in the backyard. We work everything from high-voltage lines that feed the cities, come from the power plants, down to a secondary voltage that you use in your house. Sometimes it looks like a kind of war zone when you go in there, especially on hurricanes. This last trip in Chicago it was like a microburst storm collapsing which produces, you know, eighty-five-, ninety-mile-an-hour great winds, there was a lot of broken poles, a lot of trees laying in the lines. We worked five days on that storm, got all these people back on.’

  Critic and broadcaster Mark Steyn said that as far as he was aware, ‘Wichita Lineman’ is the first song about someone who works for a utility company since the pre-electric era. ‘There’s “The Lamplighter’s Serenade” [by Hoagy Carmichael and Paul Francis Webster], which Jimmy Webb’s pal Frank Sinatra recorded in 1942 at his very first session as a solo singer, and “The Old Lamplighter” [by Charles Tobias and Nat Simon], which was a big hit for Sammy Kaye a couple of years later. And they’re both kinda sorta romantic in that, if there are couples courting in the park, the dear old gentleman sportingly leaves the adjacent lamppost unlit. And that’s charming, but it’s not full-strength, searing, aching love on the line like “Wichita Lineman”. It’s so plaintive and evocative; and if you’ve ever heard or seen the sonic hum between two telegraph poles when the wind blows, you’ll know what a great image of desolation it is – of human connection, and of the man it’s bypassing. It’s also a very American image – in the sense that in almost every other developed nation the electric lines are buried.’

  ‘It’s a working man’s song for sure,’ said the broadcaster Robert Elms, ‘because it’s specifically about a man being defined by his job, but you could also say that it’s the great American novel squeezed into one three-minute song.’

  ‘One of the reasons the song is so special is because it’s about work, it’s about the working man,’ said Stuart Maconie. ‘No one writes about work anymore, they’re simply writing about the emotional turmoil of the singer’s world. But this is a song about a man with a job, a man who’s proud of his job. In the sixties, work, the very idea of work was denigrated, and if you had a job, you worked for The Man. You had to be free. So in that respect “Wichita Lineman” is an anomaly because it’s a celebration almost of employment, a celebration of the work ethic. It’s an existential song about work.’

  This is probably one of the reasons the song took so long to worm its way into the critics’ hearts. In many people’s eyes it was nothing more than a modern-day version of a cowboy song, with a truck substituting for a horse. Was there any difference between Merle Travis’s ‘Sixteen Tons’ and ‘Wichita Lineman’? The fundamental ingredients of a country song were either (a) romantic (and often marital) woes, or (b) job dissatisfaction, whether you were down a mine, out on the prairie or driving a truck. And to the layman, ‘Wichita Lineman’ was no different. Country celebrates those who give everyth
ing they have to their jobs; how the job treats these people in return is another story altogether – or maybe another song. Country songs tend to refine disgruntlement, and there are few things a functioning songwriter likes to do more than write a song about being short-changed by women (or men), politicians, the songs on their car radio, the night, the rich, their dog and maybe even God. Pride permeates many country songs, a belief in diligence and commitment. Loretta Lynn can sing with conviction about being a coal miner’s daughter (and Merle Haggard can even pretend to be an Okie from Muskogee), whereas a lot of modern country singers can only sing with conviction about their relationship with their hairdresser. Similarly, on Dolly Parton’s exuberant ‘9 to 5’ she goes out of her way to make the best of her situation rather than wallowing in self-pity. Hell, she even hires a horn section in the process.

  Working for a living has always been a fundamental part of the country-music sensibility, a genre in which the distance between performer and consumer is negligible. The history of country music is filled with songs about work and workers. The Father of Country Music, Jimmie Rodgers, wrote a dozen songs on the subject, mostly about trains and train men, but also about mule skinners, sailors and farmers. In 1969, a year after ‘Wichita Lineman’, Merle Haggard famously wrote the country classic ‘Workin’ Man Blues’, which earned him the title of the Poet of the Working Man, although Johnny Paycheck (real name Donald Eugene Lytle) pipped him at the post by making a hit out of David Allan Coe’s ‘Take This Job and Shove It’.

  Nevertheless, ‘Wichita Lineman’ was, literally, a picture of loneliness, one filled with humanising regret. One critic said that one of the most pertinent things about the record is how desolate it doesn’t sound. ‘It’s lush, an odd counterpoint to the laconic lyrics. The triumphant galloping off at the end: why triumphant? Especially when it sounds like he’s run out of words? It’s a brilliant use of constraint and counterpoint.’

  Campbell’s voice is emotional, but he’s not histrionic, not in the way that Scott Walker, say, or Tom Jones would have been had they been singing it. Campbell’s voice, demeanour and tone suited Webb’s songs so perfectly because, as the Guardian’s Michael Hann wrote, ‘He wasn’t yet an established part of the MOR firmament, he could still convince as an everyman, and these were very much the songs of an everyman – filled with wistfulness, regret and the truest of all emotions, but the one least frequently expressed in love songs, ambivalence.’*

  The relationship between Campbell and Webb was brought up by Paul Weller when I asked him about the song. ‘What do I like most about it? It’s got a great title for a start, an intriguing title that makes you want to know what the story’s about. And it is a great story as well. The third thing is the voice, Glen Campbell. He was a great foil; he was to Jimmy Webb what Dionne Warwick was to Burt Bacharach [another Midwestern boy, born in Kansas City]. It was such a great marriage. I don’t really think of “Wichita Lineman” as easy listening, I just think it’s a great song.’

  Again, it’s the yin and the yang.

  ‘Glen’s vocal power and technique was the perfect vehicle for these, in a way, very sentimental and romantic songs,’ said Webb not so long ago. ‘And I think that we made some records that were very nearly perfect. “Wichita Lineman” is a very near perfect pop record.’

  The tension between Campbell and Webb was there from the off. ‘Well, the first thing he ever said to me,’ said Webb, recalling the night at the Grammys in February 1968, just a few days before he wrote ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘was “When you gonna get a haircut?” And yet I found out very quickly that there was hardly anyone who could stand on the same level as him as a guitarist. And could stand behind me, watch my hands moving on the piano and just play along on the guitar, which is like a virtual impossibility. And partially, because of the tension, I think, between us, out of that came, I think, some of the, maybe some of the nicest records of that period.’

  ‘“Wichita Lineman” works because of the clash between generations and world views,’ Jon Savage told me. ‘Between conservatives and hippies, between tradition and innovation. If it had just been Glen Campbell, it would have been just straight pop-country, but if it had been just Jimmy Webb, it would have lacked that grounding in mainstream America that gives the song such depth. I think of it rather like Dionne Warwick’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?”: what we teens then might have thought to be Middle of the Road America coming to grips with the realities of the country in 1968. The tension between apparently easy forms and incisive lyrics meant that those two records are more powerful than many blasts of psychedelic alienation. The string arrangement is sublime, and the verse hits an unexpected chord change. “Overload” is definitely not a word you’d expect to hear in a country song. It’s a song of empty space and loneliness, but Campbell roots it in the everyday – the character being a telephone repair man is a stroke of genius.’

  Rolling Stone said that ‘Campbell sings the tune’s now-iconic refrain – “The Wichita lineman is still on the line” – in a voice that sweeps skyward during the final moments, almost as though the song is actually being delivered forty feet above ground.’

  Campbell’s prime strength was his ability to cope with Webb’s often ornate lyrics. ‘I tried to sing them as straight as I could sing them, and put as much emotion into them as I could. And it really worked. I didn’t really care what I sounded like.’

  The Morse code at the end of the song was a masterstroke, even if it sounded not dissimilar to the guitar-line intro of the Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’, which had come out two years earlier. It would crop up again in 1972, as a motif in David Bowie’s ‘Starman’ (achieved through a treated synthesis of guitar and piano). ‘The SOS subtly underlines why the song doesn’t resolve musically,’ said Mark Steyn, ‘because, underneath all the stuff about his job, it’s a cry for help: the poor lineman is what’s really overloaded.’

  ‘People often talk about them as though they’re the same thing but our love of “Wichita Lineman” is the perfect illustration of the difference between a song and a record,’ said David Hepworth. ‘It’s a good song, of course, but it’s a brilliant record. From the Carol Kaye bass figure that opens it to Al De Lory’s strings it’s the perfect product of the old studio system. There’s just enough ornamentation but not too much. And it’s sung not by the author but by a man who sounds as though he might conceivably work with his hands. It’s the kind of record they literally don’t make any more for lots of reasons. If they did make it now they would ruin it by filling in all the gaps through which it breathes. It also makes me wonder why nobody sings about their job nowadays.’

  A writer’s relationship with the person who has sung their song to fame can be extraordinarily complex. While someone like Bernie Taupin appears to have always had a completely reasonable and nurturing relationship with Elton John, the relationship between, say, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel has been fraught, to say the least. It was Simon who wrote the songs and Simon who appeared to object to the acclaim his partner received from simply singing them, occasionally blind to the fact that Garfunkel had a sublime and unimpeachable voice. (When somebody remarked that Jerome Kern had written ‘Ol’ Man River’, the wife of Kern’s lyricist Oscar Hammerstein interrupted sharply. ‘Indeed not,’ she scolded. ‘Jerome Kern wrote “dum dum dum-dum”. My husband wrote “Ol’ Man River”.’)

  I know someone who heard the song before it had been recorded. Doug Flett, a songwriter friend of mine, was visiting a Los Angeles recording studio in the summer of 1968 when a young, Nehru-jacketed Jimmy Webb pushed his head around the door. Would Doug like to hear a demo of ‘Wichita Lineman’, this new song he’d written? Would he? With his partner Guy Fletcher, Flett would go on to write ‘The Fair Is Moving On’ and ‘Just Pretend’ for Elvis Presley, ‘Is There Anyone Out There?’ for Ray Charles, ‘I Can’t Tell the Bottom from the Top’ for the Hollies and ‘Fallen Angel’ for Frankie Valli, but at the time had only just started writing. He
was on a reconnaissance trip to LA to meet publishers and agents, so an invitation to hear a new song by one of the hottest songwriters in the industry was something of a gift. Quick as a flash, Flett followed Webb into his own studio, where he was afforded the luxury of hearing Webb belting out his demo version of the song, complete with improvised coda. Even though Webb knew it wasn’t complete, he seemed proud of it. Maybe he was playing it because he genuinely wanted Flett’s opinion, although considering the hierarchy involved, most likely this was just a case of the master giving a masterclass to a novice (even though Flett was actually eleven years older than Webb). Flett was even blown away by Webb’s singing, which shows you how in thrall he was. ‘It wasn’t just the song,’ said Flett. ‘It was the voice, a beautiful, haunting thing.’

  The fundamental reason Flett liked the song so much was one particular line, the dying fall, the line about needing someone more than wanting them. For an aspiring lyricist, this was something else again. And all from the pen of a man who was barely twenty-one.

  While it’s often disconcerting to be stirred by language that resists comprehension, the ambiguity of a song’s words can often be its prime attraction. How many songs that you love, which you can sing along to on a regular basis, contain great swathes of unintelligible phrases, where the vocals appear to almost randomly skirt across the surface of the tune?