The Wichita Lineman

by Dylan Jones

  The remarkable thing that Wilson achieved was to create a world that wasn’t there before, a world that not only celebrated a Californian dream world, but also invented an inner world where Wilson – and anyone who ever listened to a Wilson record – could go and be comforted. In this case his music acted as medication, therapy or, in Wilson’s case, a piano standing in a box full of sand. The other remarkable thing is the way in which Wilson’s world connected with so many millions of people. The awful irony of his fabulous invention was his complete inability to enjoy it himself, even though it gave so much enjoyment to so many others. In Barney Hoskyns’s gripping book Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes and the Sound of Los Angeles, Jimmy Webb said, ‘I don’t think that the Californian myth, the dream that a few of us touched, would have happened without Brian, but I don’t think Brian would have happened without the dream.’ Wilson fuelled a fantasy, and surf pop was born.

  The Californian coast is a celebration of fantasy, a Pacific kingdom of sunshine, sand and surf, a reconstructed world of wonder where plastic palm trees sway beneath artificial moons, and where David Hockney paintings come to life. This post-industrial landscape aspires to be a terrestrial paradise, a near-tropical dreamland where vistas of magnificent natural beauty vie with car parks littered with neo-Mexican shopping malls, where giant redwoods and valleys of golden poppies surround the state’s popular cathedrals of kitsch. This is a life of abundance, where anything is possible and little is real. A lot of California looks like a grandiose campsite, a frontier state where much looks as though it were thrown up overnight. Here, little looks permanent, making the landscape look as untamed as it looks manicured. But there are few things more enjoyable than hurtling down the Pacific Coast Highway in a rented convertible, few things better than the Californian sun hitting your Ermanno Scervino sunglasses, the spray from the surf hitting your windscreen, the wind rushing across your face and the sound of the Beach Boys blasting through the in-car stereo. For California, Brian Wilson always had unlimited praise.

  As did Jimmy Webb.

  When we describe the way music makes us feel, it’s often got something to do with abandon – feeling completely separate, cut off, falling through the air, walking through the woods, flying way above everyone, standing on the cliffs looking at the midnight ocean, crouching in a cornfield and peering into the valley … Levitating.

  One of my least successful book ideas – when I told my agent about it, he told me to go and have a long lie-down – was a music and travel book identifying the best soundtracks to listen to in various places around the world. I thought this was a brilliant wheeze, an encyclopaedia of great road songs, awesome beach ballads, soaring urban anthems (lots of Clash, U2 and, yes, even Billy Idol) and the exact Kraftwerk tunes you’d need for a ten-day skiing holiday in the Alps. Yet there is no record that evokes a landscape more powerfully than ‘Wichita Lineman’. It is not just that the guitar line sounds so nomadic, it is the imagery the song conjures up: the imagery of Ed Ruscha, of electricity cables black against silkscreen cornflower, the imagery of small towns, big towns in the fifties and sixties – a cluttered horizon full of billboards, traffic signs, fast-food neons, gas stations and, yes, telegraph poles.

  It’s perhaps not wise to contradict someone like Pablo Picasso, but on this occasion I have no choice. ‘Painting is not done to decorate apartments,’ he said in 1945. ‘It is an instrument of war.’ He was referring, obliquely, to his enormous canvas capturing the agony when the Luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria, at General Franco’s behest, carpet-bombed the Basque town of Guernica. Yet on the subject of painting, Picasso was just about as wrong as a genius can be. Social commentary is a spectrum, and not every work of art has the ambition of Guernica, just as not every song wants to kick-start a revolution. Painting, in common with all of the arts, invariably acts as a second- or third-hand accompaniment or counterpoint to its locale, a way of lifting the spirits in a darkened room or giving a Caribbean sunset extra gravitas. In some cases it’s designed to fit into the service lifts of Upper East Side apartment blocks, and in others it’s designed to sit in the lobbies of large Swiss banks. It’s why we buy prints of famous paintings, why wallpaper was developed and why furniture designers now have egos the size of George Sherlock sofas.

  This is particularly true of music. While pop records that aspire to great art could conceivably be listened to anywhere, a lot of very good pop music has the effect of making a landscape look even grander than it does already, making a blue sky appear even richer, painting a suburban landscape in the correct hues of fifties Americana or underscoring the intensity of a Chicago backstreet. Great pop music, whether it was designed to or not, expresses an abnegation of responsibility. And this is especially true if you are on holiday or at leisure – that moment when a searing power-chord shooting across a cloudless sky fills your heart with whatever you want it to or encourages you to lean your foot a little more heavily on the accelerator pedal. If you’ve ever chosen the scenic drive home, then you’ll know the feeling.

  Which means, I suppose, that music can also be a decorative art. While many of us buy records because we have a fundamental attachment to the preoccupations of the people who make them – when we’re young, at least, or pretending we still are – at other times we buy them simply because we happen to like the way they sound: they encourage us to engage with our surroundings, but also allow us to distance ourselves from them.

  If you’re driving just north of Los Angeles, say, climbing up the Pacific Coast Highway on your way to Santa Barbara, hearing ‘Sleepwalk’ by Santo & Johnny will not only transport you out of California, it might just lift you right into outer space. Music and landscape make perfect bedfellows. John Peel’s perfect dovetail of sound and vision appears on page 153 of his part-autobiography, Margrave of the Marshes. It is 1961, and Peel is driving from New Orleans back to Dallas. ‘The drive gave me one of the greatest musical moments of my life. I had been driving for some time and it must have been two or three in the morning as I started through the richly forested area of East Texas known as Piney Woods.’ There was hardly any traffic on the road, and as the highway rose and fell through the trees, past tiny little towns that were barely shacks and shop fronts, ‘the moon, which shone brilliantly directly in front of me, turned the concrete to silver’. Peel recalls that he was listening, as everyone did in that area at that time, to Wolfman Jack, the maverick DJ who broadcasted from a station called XERB, over the border in Mexico. The Wolfman was just about the most exotic man in pop back then (he is immortalised, for those that care, in George Lucas’s love letter to the period, American Graffiti), and as Peel came over the top of yet another hill ‘to see another tiny town below me, he played Elmore James’s “Stranger Blues” and I knew that I would never forget the perfect conjunction of place, mood and music. Nor have I.’

  For music and landscape to co-exist in a perfect state, everything needs to work in 5.1 surround sound, the sort that makes you jump when the drums come in, the sort that sends you careering down a ravine after a particularly notable key change. For me, that notion of perfection is usually embodied by John Barry, Burt Bacharach or the Beach Boys – especially their more maudlin music – and the golden dunes of California. I close my eyes and I could be kicking sand on Malibu beach; clench them a little tighter and I’m transported right into a Rousseau painting, walking between 2D tigers and childlike palm trees.

  Like Burt Bacharach’s lyricist Hal David, Jimmy Webb relished images of mobility and movement – cars, highways, trains, even balloons – as well as all the telegraph poles from here to the horizon. Cars would become an obsession for Webb, and central to his songwriting. When he became rich – and he became rich almost as soon as he became famous – one of the first things he did was buy himself some automobiles.

  In 2017, as he was being chauffeured by GQ’s motoring editor Jason Barlow in a McLaren 570S Spider to a gig he was about to play at St James’s Church in Londo
n’s Piccadilly, Webb waxed lyrical about his vintage AC Cobra – bought directly from legendary racing driver Carroll Shelby, the man who created the Cobra, one of the most genuinely iconic cars ever made.

  ‘You could actually drive in those days,’ he said. ‘Once you hit the Nevada state line, there was no speed limit, it was like being on the autobahn. I’d run that thing up to 120, 130 mph. It was terrifyingly easy. But then it would start doing a little dance, so I was never that keen to see how fast it would really go. All it would take would be to drop a tyre on that soft shoulder on the freeway and I’d be a firework. It would have ensured my everlasting fame, I guess.’

  He was talking about 1968, the year he made it, the year he came into some serious money. He had another Cobra, and he had it on very good authority that it was originally built for Steve McQueen, but he turned it down. He thought it was too dangerous. Shelby sold it to Bill Cosby, who went out for a ride in it with his little daughter one day and said, ‘Take it back.’ It was too fast. Then it was sold to an Englishman who lived in California part of the time. One night, presumably after a few drinks, he drove it off the Pacific Coast Highway.

  ‘In fact, I watched mine burn one day,’ said Webb. ‘It was a primeval device. The battery sat between the seats, but I was taking nice women out at the time, so I asked the guys in the shop to move it into the boot, in a bracket with safety cables to keep the bracket vertical. Made it into a Californian dragster, basically. I said to my brother, “You ought to feel the acceleration in second gear, man.” So I did that one day to show him, and the car blew up. The battery had detached, and whatever fuel vapour was in there ignited, and it went up. Took out my left eyebrow in the process. We grabbed garden hoses out of the neighbours’ yards. I don’t know what the hell we thought we were doing, it was already an inferno. But I rebuilt it. I put sixty grand into it.’

  As a road song, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ doesn’t bear much scrutiny where the timings are concerned, and there are some people who have even produced maps to show how improbable they are, but as Webb said himself, ‘Sometimes as a writer you come to a decision like that and you just flip a coin. You could try “By the Time I Get to Flagstaff”, but does it work as well?’ One such person approached him one night after a concert, ‘And he showed me how it was impossible for me to drive from LA to Phoenix, and then how far it was to Albuquerque. In short, he told me, “This song is impossible.” And so it is. It’s a kind of fantasy about something I wish I would have done, and it sort of takes place in a twilight zone of reality.’

  The car would be emblematic of America’s aspirations in the fifties and sixties. Every new Cadillac had to outdo and outgrow the previous model. Each car had acres of chrome and dozens of winking lights, like a mobile jukebox. The 1959 Caddy had lethally sharp-looking tail fins, which had sprouted rocket-shaped tail lights that seemed to be clinging precariously to their sides. The Cadillac, like much music of the time, was a prime example of what the American design critic Thomas Hine defined as ‘populuxe’, a fifties aesthetic that fused populism with luxury. ‘The decade was one of America’s great shopping sprees,’ he said. ‘Never before were so many people able to acquire so many things, and never before was there such a choice.’ It was the era of the newly created world of mass suburbia, where everything family-owned – the house, the car, the furniture, the hi-fi (on which to play your Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra records) – was provisional; even if it didn’t wear out, one always had the hope of being able to move up the ladder to something better. ‘There were so many new things to buy – a power mower, a more modern dinette set, a washing machine with a window through which you could see the wash water turn a disgusting grey, a family room, a two-toned refrigerator, a charcoal grill, and, of course, televisions.’ Or a Jet Age Cadillac, each year, every year.

  In America in the fifties, suburbia determined popular culture, and in some part of their being every suburbanite wanted a new car. This was the decade of the automobile, when America took to the roads with a vengeance, exploiting the highways and driving anywhere just for the hell of it. Which is why it’s not at all surprising that the fifties and sixties produced so many songs about cars. Jimmy Webb certainly wrote his fair share: ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ is just one long, convoluted road trip, while ‘Wichita Lineman’ is written completely from the perspective of someone in a car moving slowly along a country backroad.

  As David Hepworth once pointed out, many of us have internalised the names of places referenced in the Great American Songbook, at least those concerned with moving from country to city, from city to city, ‘and from the city back to the theoretical peace of rural life’. These migrations, both large and small, are what we expect to hear about in a lot of American music, whether it charts the movement along Route 66, Chuck Berry’s ‘Promised Land’ or even the geographical impossibilities of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’. We can remember them all: Memphis, Tulsa, Pasadena, Chattanooga, Birmingham, Georgia, San Francisco, San Jose, Muscle Shoals, Asbury Park, Rockaway Beach, Highway 61, 53rd and 3rd, (coast to coast) LA to Chicago, Tucson to Tucumcari, and even the New Jersey Turnpike, which is obviously one of the first places one should go to look for America.

  ‘To any foreigner who grew up hearing “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo”, American towns are the most musical on the planet,’ wrote Mark Steyn.

  The Mason–Dixon Line has been responsible for many songs which deal with its figurative significance, not least Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. Written in 1973 as a response to two songs by Neil Young, ‘Southern Man’ and ‘Alabama’, which dealt with racism and slavery in the South, Skynyrd’s almost reactionary retort was both a putdown of Young and a celebration of the band’s heritage. Acknowledged as a chanson de revanche, in a wider and more contemporary context it can be seen as analogous to the espousal of Trumpian politics, or at least the insidious nature of Trumpian beliefs. When Ronnie Van Zant, the band’s lead singer, defiantly says that Watergate doesn’t bother him, he was not only bemoaning the liberal obsession with Nixon, but also speaking for the entire South, asking that they should not to be judged as individuals for the racial problems of southern society in the same way they wouldn’t judge ordinary northerners for the failures of their leaders in Washington.

  In some respects, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is a populist anthem, the kind of broadly drawn broadside that should appeal to those who like their ideologies reduced to slogans. But then by definition any successful protest song condenses an argument into a chorus. It is perhaps surprising that there have been so few contemporary populist anthems – are there any? – as well as so few anti-populist songs; after all, a world in which Donald Trump, Brexit and Matteo Salvini have thrived ought to have emboldened those on both sides of the divide. Of course, it is untrue to say that the protest song is no longer a cultural force, as hip hop has been criticising government, shouting (literally) about social injustice and addressing the ubiquity of police brutality in black communities since the late seventies (which is why Public Enemy’s Chuck D famously dubbed hip hop ‘the black CNN’ all those years ago), but hip hop has almost become a protest genre in its own right, and so in many people’s eyes is less influential.

  The writers of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ long denied that it was a white supremacist anthem, insisting that the lyrics were more ambivalent; and while this might be true, it remains an unusually powerful invocation.

  ‘Wichita Lineman’ is anything but.

  Los Angeles has always had an abundance of cultural entry points, but for me it’s forever associated with one image: the photograph – taken by Terry O’Neill – of Elton John on the blue-carpeted stage at Dodger Stadium in 1975. Elton, wearing a sequined Dodgers baseball kit, is sitting at his piano, which is also covered in blue carpet, and is about to launch into ‘Benny and the Jets’ in front of the 80,000-strong crowd. The picture is so vivid you almost expect it to start playing the song, like a
musical birthday card.

  At the time, Elton was the biggest star in the world, and his two shows at the home of the LA Dodgers that year were the pinnacle of his early success. As the DJ Paul Gambaccini once said, no single photograph better demonstrates the hold a rock star can have over the public.

  ‘Benny and the Jets’ is also the quintessential LA record, and you can guarantee you’ll hear it on the radio whenever you visit the city. You’ll also hear every other great seventies song. Most of the great ‘landscape’ driving music was made in the seventies, so it feels completely natural when the likes of America’s ‘Ventura Highway’, the Doobie Brothers’ ‘Long Train Runnin’’ or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’ come hurtling out of the rental car’s speakers – accompanied, of course, by a flash of neon light, a plume of purple smoke and a wash of dry ice.