The Wichita Lineman

by Dylan Jones

  The most unusual version is by the Dick Slessig Combo, a band who appear to create dreamy instrumental arrangements of songs from the late sixties and early seventies, and who stretched the song from three minutes to forty-three. This is the longest version of any song you’ve ever heard, elongated, expanded and slowed down so that it sounds even more like a lament, with a hyphen of silence between each note. The first time I heard it, it sounded like Chris Isaak performing an especially lazy version of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’, before veering off into the fringes of prog and ending up like something the Durutti Column might have recorded for their famous sandpaper album (or, as one reviewer said, a hybrid of Steve Reich, bluegrass and Jackie-O Motherfucker, or an American backwoods version of Neu! in ‘motorik’ mode). This prolonged version ‘exposes just how good the song’s “bones” are’, said Mark Sullivan from sitdownlistenup.com. ‘Yes, portions of the song repeat, but this is far from jazz interpretation. These repeated phrases are not variations, but more like playing a particularly interesting part of a song over and over to properly appreciate it before moving on to the next part of the song, similar to rewinding a cool scene in a movie before moving on. Or maybe the closed loop just evokes a stuck record. Like film, music is a temporal medium. Although spending more time with a painting or a sculpture often leads to a much deeper relationship with the work as additional detail is absorbed, the detail was all there the whole time. A piece of music, on the other hand, is realized over time, doling out its details in increments. Slowing down a tune forces us to focus more on the moments as they come together. Dick Slessig Combo’s diffuse rendering of “Wichita Lineman” makes us more mindful of each individual note, but enough of the melody drifts in and out that we never entirely lose track of the whole of which the notes are a part.’

  When the song eventually finishes you feel as though you’ve just stepped out of a cinema during the day, into a sudden shock of sunshine.

  In Cassandra Wilson’s version, from 2002, she slows the song down to nearly six minutes, and her vocals don’t start until she’s half a minute into it. She changes the lyrics, too, turning it into a piece of badly realised journalese, singing a love song to her own Wichita lineman and telling him that she needs him more than she wants him.

  The song has been honoured in other ways, too. Homer sang snippets of ‘Wichita’ on The Simpsons, the Boo Radleys recorded a song called ‘Jimmy Webb Is God’, and in 2000 Mark Bowen and Dick Green launched an independent record label called Wichita Recordings (strapline: ‘Still on the line’), whose acts included Bloc Party, the Cribs, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket, and Peter, Bjorn and John. They took its name from ‘Lineman’ simply because it is, they believe, the greatest song ever written, while their logo – a telegraph pole against the sky – was the result of a Dick Green doodle in a bar. It’s even been adopted on the football terraces – ‘I am a lineman for Notts County,’ for instance.

  The song makes a cameo in DBC Pierre’s Booker Prizewinning Texan black comedy Vernon God Little (once described as Huckleberry Finn for the Eminem generation, the eponymous hero a ‘Holden Caulfield on amphetamines’), which uses Glen Campbell’s biggest hits instead of a Greek chorus, Pierre peppering the novel with mordant soundtrack choices in much the same way as Bret Easton Ellis does in American Psycho, only this time as power lines and fence posts shoot past on the side of the road. ‘Instead of trying to figure it out, I call some Glen Campbell to mind, to help me lope along, crusty and lonesome, older than my years,’ says our protagonist. ‘“Wichita Lineman” is the song I call up, not “Galveston”. I would’ve conjured Shania Twain or something a little more savvy, but that might boost me up too much. What happens with sassy music is you get floated away from yourself, then snap back to reality too hard. I hate that. The only antidote is to just stay depressed.’ It’s there, too, in Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons, an Everyman song sung by an Everyman as he brings in the laundry; and it crops up in the second series of Ozark.

  Of course, one may have thought that a song so fetishised may have become meta over the years, either by a process of accretion or simply because of its popularity. Over time this has happened to ‘My Way’, has happened to ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, has happened to ‘Mamma Mia’, but there is nothing ironic or cute about ‘Wichita Lineman’, and in spite of its iconic status it has somehow remained pure. The other obvious way in which songs have been given a new lease of life is through hip-hop sampling, and in this way various Guilty Pleasures have, over the years, developed a redemptive quality; this has happened to everyone from Spandau Ballet and Phil Collins to Hall & Oates and Steely Dan. ‘Wichita’ has largely escaped this. Ghostface Killah’s ‘Pokerface’, produced by K. Flack a few years ago, used a sample of Sunday’s Child’s 1970 version, while more recently the young Wichita rapper XV and the producer Just Blaze – who is most famous for his work with Jay-Z – assembled the track using samples of the Dells’ version.

  ‘Wichita Lineman’ is one of the very first examples of what would one day become known as Americana – which, as David Hepworth describes it, is anything written or sung by a white American that mentions a city or a highway, a term intended to reflect the fact that the people who like country music don’t like the idea of country music. Country music can be sentimental and mawkish, but as soon as you step out of the genre, emotions become more abstract, more nuanced, more rounded. The difference between country and Americana is the difference between Happy Days and American Graffiti, between Radio 2 and Radio 6 Music, between a cowboy hat and a beard.

  The song also became popular with what I rather facetiously referred to a few years ago as ‘Woodsmen’, those bearded and rather earnest musicians in lumberjack shirts and scowls who talked wistfully of remote cabins in north-western Wisconsin or renovated chicken shacks in the Californian woods, singers of indeterminate age who back in the noughties fronted bands of sullen subordinates who couldn’t quite believe how successful they were. For a while Woodsmen were everywhere. The big one was Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, followed in no particular order by the Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, Arcade Fire, Great Lake Swimmers, Beirut, Band of Horses, Volcano Choir, Iron & Wine, My Morning Jacket, Calexico and all the rest. When the New Yorker published a piece about My Morning Jacket, they said, ‘You know these guys are bearded without seeing a photograph of them.’

  Johnny Cash covered ‘Wichita’, too, towards the end of his life. ‘One person can’t save another person, but almost,’ Rosanne Cash once said about her father meeting the producer Rick Rubin. The union between the former hip-hop producer and the veteran country singer in the early nineties resulted in six American Recordings albums (plus a box set of outtakes) that completely revitalised Cash. The records re-established him both because of the material he covered and the way in which he was portrayed – warts and all. ‘Wichita Lineman’ appeared on the fourth album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, with Cash sounding for all the world like a man who had spent his life waiting to sing this song. At this stage in his career it was impossible to capture any hope in Cash’s voice, only experience, but then that’s why the records were so successful.

  ‘When you listen to the material that he recorded with Rick Rubin, you can hear the life he’s led, how his voice was affected by the drugs he took, especially on “Wichita Lineman”,’ said Peter Lewry, the editor of the Johnny Cash magazine The Man in Black. ‘In the Fifties artists would take pills to stay awake and then go to sleep because of the hectic touring schedule. John turned to pills but unlike most artists, John became dependent on them. Not a day went by when he wasn’t taking pills, and he was arrested for smuggling pills into the country and his life was on a downward spiral by the mid-Sixties to late Sixties. In fact, in a lot of programmes you see he looks so ill that a lot of people are amazed that he ever survived the Sixties. It was a struggle for him at the end. He worked hard on the songs, I mean he was even getting to the point where he couldn’t
record a whole song, they’d have to piece it together because he would struggle with breathing. He was in a wheelchair at the end, but he’d go into the studio every day. His voice in the last few years has a raw edge and especially with “Wichita Lineman”, which in my opinion was much better than Glen Campbell’s version, more feeling in it – I think he puts the story over better, and maybe that’s down to John’s life, the hard life that he lived. He just seemed to put an edge on it.’

  The Johnny Cash version doesn’t make for much of a karaoke song, although the original has proved to be more robust in this guise than you might imagine. Logically, it shouldn’t be a karaoke song, and certainly not a successful one. As most karaoke interpretations are usually based on the best-known version of the song, and as Glen Campbell is such an accomplished singer, it’s surprising that so many people think they can get away with singing it. ‘My Way’ doesn’t bring the same problems, because all you really need to do is talk your way through it. Neither does ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, which you can basically shout.* The same can be said of any ABBA song, as all you’re really doing is repeating the words in a very loud voice, which isn’t so different from singing a terrace chant at a football match. ‘Wichita Lineman’, though … well, that requires some pipes, requires a person to limber up before running up to it. Seriously, are you ready to attempt the plaintive denouement that is the song’s final line? Yet still they come, these men and women whose need to be associated with the song, whose need to be seen choosing the song supersedes any ability they might have for actually completing the exercise successfully.

  The first time I heard a semi-public rendition of the song was in the Groucho Club, in London’s Dean Street, sometime in the early nineties. It was late at night, and a bunch of us had tumbled in there after an awards ceremony either to celebrate a much-deserved win or offset the injustice of losing. Having loitered at the bar, I had missed the rump of our party disappearing into another part of the club, the part where the piano player held court. It was his job to add some sweetness to the night by accessorising the evening with instrumental versions of whatever took his fancy, frankly. Essentially, he was a cocktail pianist, but when you consider the kind of cocktails that are popular in the Groucho – the espresso martini, the Negroni, anything containing at least two shots of absinthe – you understand how inadequate that description might be. Pianists in the Groucho could play you Sinatra’s hits, if they so desired, or a little light Bacharach, although they were happiest when exploring the rather more esoteric tributaries of popular song.

  So I was surprised when I heard the rest of my gang suddenly burst into song, hurtling through Jimmy Webb’s convoluted lyrics, as the pianist, who was predictably far less emboldened by strong drink than they were, vamped behind them – half a bar behind them, to be exact.

  ‘How could this be?’ I thought to myself. Surely I was the only person who knew this song? Surely I was the only one melancholic enough to have memorised the words? Well, apparently not. I repeated this exercise dozens of times – maybe even hundreds of times – over the next few years, often with one of the original culprits (Robin, Simon, Alex, Tris, Oliver, Robert, etc.), and frequently bolstered by a random newspaper editor, politician or boldface name who had made the mistake of turning up that evening. (‘Glen Campbell is an honorary Irishman,’ said my friend Oliver. ‘When I grew up, every show band played it, every pub played it … We all thought it was an Irish song.’) Giving an impassioned, drunken, melodramatic version of Jimmy Webb’s most famous song at an hour when most right-thinking members had already slipped into the night, homeward bound, became something of a rite of passage. Simon, who was always one of the most enthusiastic participants – if not always one of the most accomplished – used to say that one of the rules he lived by was knowing that it was time to go home whenever anyone started singing ‘American Pie’. It didn’t take long to realise that Don McLean’s iconic shopping list of a song had been replaced. If only Simon had listened to his own advice.

  After a while, having spontaneously performed it in hotel bars and restaurants all over the world, it became easy to sing, the only line that might cause me to falter being the one about that stretch down south. What I soon learned was that you have to attack that stanza as though it might never end, singing it out in the same way you breathe into one of those machines at the doctor’s that are designed to judge your lung capacity, because to try and add nuance when you don’t know the song very well is only going to cause you heartache, perhaps more than even Jimmy Webb imagined.

  According to Alex James, Blur’s redoubtable bass player, the Groucho was ‘a proudly exclusive, sugary cocktail of celebrity, money, frocks and genius’. In the nineties, it was run largely by women, the fiercest of whom was Gordana, who was not only the most feared manageress, but also the staff member who would berate James most often. ‘You can’t keep riding that bicycle down the stairs,’ she would shout. ‘Someone is going to get hurt. What? Well, I’m not surprised you’ve got a sore leg. You’re a bloody idiot! And if you want to pay the pianist five hundred pounds to play “Wichita Lineman” for an hour, get him to come round to your house to do it.’

  Somewhat by default, it became my own karaoke song of choice, beating off competition from ‘On Days Like This’ by Matt Monro or Bobby Darin’s ‘Beyond the Sea’. I’d sung ‘True’ by Spandau Ballet, attempted ‘I’m Your Puppet’ by James and Bobby Purify, ‘Hold On, I’m Coming’ by Sam & Dave and ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams, as well as ‘Same Old Saturday Night’ and ‘Learnin’ the Blues’ (both made famous by Sinatra), but it was always ‘Wichita’ I came back to, like a haunting refrain.

  Someone who loves the song even more than Alex James is the club’s resident pianist, Rod Melvin. Rod has been playing the piano at the Groucho since 1995, having previously worked at the Zanzibar, Le Pont de la Tour, L’Escargot, the Lexington and various other clubs and restaurants in London. Along with Ian Dury he is a former member of Kilburn and the High Roads, and in his time has played with Brian Eno, Tony Visconti and the Moodies. Hired by the general manager Mary-Lou Sturridge, and encouraged by her then partner, Hamish Stuart from the Average White Band, Melvin started doing the late shift, mixing classics with personal favourites, ‘Didn’t We’ and ‘Wichita Lineman’ included. ‘Mary-Lou started allowing people to sing around the piano, so people would come in, late at night, and join in,’ said Rod. ‘Then one night [the journalist] Simon Kelner came in, started singing “Wichita Lineman”, and a tradition started. Suddenly I was playing it three times a week.’

  For Melvin, it is a joy to play. ‘Some tunes you don’t tire of playing over and over again, and in this case it’s the combination of the chords and the melody. Even if I’m not singing, it’s a very visual song. When you start playing those opening chords, and you get that first melody, there’s something about the space. I always get pictures. You know in movies when you get those scenes of roads going through fields for miles? It’s like that, with these telegraph poles, something about that spaciousness, of someone alone in this vast space. It goes into another key, in the middle, which is significant, I think. Because different keys have different feels. So the first half is quite sad, but has beautiful chords. Then it shifts. The song doesn’t start or finish on the root key, which is very unusual. For a simple song it’s incredibly complex, a little like Randy Newman. You can tell that once it starts to become predictable, Jimmy Webb veers off in another direction. “Up, Up and Away” is another complex song. As for “MacArthur Park”, how would you come up with that? It’s crazy. And that line, “I need you more than want you …”, it’s very economical in its use of words to convey what it does. Jimmy Webb said the Beatles influenced him when they did “Penny Lane”, by using place names, and having a cinematic sweep. It’s incredibly sad. God, it just gets you from the first line. And then it keeps getting better.’

  He often segues into David Bowie’s ‘Starman’, making a virtue of the Morse code coda
, ‘which works brilliantly if you do it properly. Get it wrong and you’ve ruined two songs.’

  In 2010, I went to see Glen Campbell perform at London’s Festival Hall. He looked trim, appeared to have all his own hair (he was seventy-four at the time) and could still execute the difficult parts of his songs. His band was more than adequate, and the arrangements of his hits were in accordance with the records. Of course, he left ‘Wichita Lineman’ till last, and what a thing of great beauty it was. The arrangement was identical to the one he had used on Jools Holland’s Later … a few years previously, which made the song sound modern, while being respectful to the original. I was moved, nearly teary, and afterwards decided to go to the Groucho Club for a nightcap. Bizarrely, it was the first night in living memory that Roddy wasn’t playing it on the piano.

  ‘I met a well-known photographer one night in the Groucho who lives in LA and who knows Jimmy Webb really well,’ said Melvin. ‘He loves his music so much he used to go round to his house and lie under the piano when he played. I don’t know anyone who loves the song more than Alex James, though. Along with “Up, Up and Away” and “California Girls” and “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, he’d be very happy for me never to play anything else.’

  Like Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson had the ability to mix euphoria and melancholia in the space of a single song, often in the same melody, and occasionally in the same note. Given his history of personal problems (an aggressive and belligerent father, a dysfunctional family, a fragile mental state, addictions, weight problems and a long-standing overbearing therapist), it’s hardly surprising that Wilson’s best music always had an innate sadness, a tender quality, which can be found in such diverse Beach Boys songs as ‘Our Prayer’, ‘Wind Chimes’, ‘The Lonely Sea’, ‘Melt Away’, ‘Guess I’m Dumb’ (the song he recorded with Glen Campbell), ‘Surf’s Up’, ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ (written in response to the JFK assassination) and his greatest triumph, ‘Till I Die’ (a version of which appears on their 1971 LP Surf’s Up, though a vastly superior extended instrumental version was released on Endless Harmony in 1998). As legendary rock journalist Nick Kent has so eloquently written, Wilson wrote ‘harmonies so complex, so graceful they seemed to have more in common with a Catholic Mass than any cocktail acapella doo-wop’. Wilson called his work ‘rock church music’, while every one of his classic songs contains a ‘money chord’. Mark Rothko, eat your heart out.