The Wichita Lineman

by Dylan Jones

  Some say that Los Angeles is just New York lying down, although it’s a hell of a lot younger; in fact, in LA, by the time you’re thirty-five you’re older than most of the buildings. You’ll certainly be older than the cars, because LA is the most car-obsessed city in the world. (It was once said that the cars are so cool in Hollywood that children there don’t wear masks on Halloween; instead, they usually dress up as valet parkers.) And if you haven’t got a white Range Rover or a Mercedes S65, then frankly you’re nobody.

  There are more cars in California than people in any of the other states of the US, while LA’s freeway system handles over twelve million cars on a daily basis. The lucky residents of LA County spend an estimated four days of each year stuck in traffic. Everything revolves around the car here (why else would someone open an all-night drive-in taxidermist?), and whereas most European films usually involve a small boy and a bicycle, all decent American films involve a car chase.

  There are now so many purpose-built digital radio stations that it’s possible to choose what you want to listen to for any journey, whether it’s exclusively music made in the nineties or the thirties. On a recent trip to LA, as I drove through Bel Air, past the mansions and the gate lodges of Beverly Hills, the exotic Chandleresque haciendas, rustling palms, lawn sprinklers and chirruping crickets, and up into the Hollywood Hills (where it’s still possible, if you’re wearing a patchwork denim waistcoat and a pair of purple velvet loon pants, to catch a whiff of 1972 patchouli oil, joss stick and body odour), I found a station pumping out an assortment of Elton John songs, including a few from one of his semi-great forgotten albums of the seventies, Rock of the Westies. This is the great lost Elton record, an alternative Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, an uneven but fascinating album containing half a dozen classic songs: ‘I Feel Like a Bullet (In the Gun of Robert Ford)’, ‘Dan Dare (Pilot of the Future)’, ‘Feed Me’, ‘Street Kids’, ‘Grow Some Funk of Your Own’, etc.

  As I listened to the songs in my car, gunning it down Sunset Boulevard with the midday sun and the palms above me, I felt myself being transported back to the LA of the mid-seventies. Suddenly I was driving through a bright blue Hockney dreamscape, surrounded by CinemaScope billboards for Shampoo, Tommy and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All of a sudden my trouser bottoms got a little wider, my lapels turned into aircraft carriers, my cologne became a little more pronounced, my shoes sprouted three-inch stack heels and my denim waistcoat was suddenly made of silver lamé. Oh, and guess what? I was now sporting a pair of tinted spectacles the size of Texas. There was a copy of Rolling Stone on the passenger seat, along with a packet of More cigarettes, a paperback of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and an eight-track cartridge of Supertramp’s Crisis? What Crisis?

  The one California song I’ve never particularly cared for is its most famous. In fact, I’ve always found the idea for the song more interesting than the record itself. Written by Don Felder, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, ‘Hotel California’ is ostensibly a song about materialism and excess, written during a decade when California was no longer simply being portrayed as a daydream pleasuredome and was starting to be used as a metaphor for indulgence and ennui. Henley has excused the song hundreds of times, principally describing it as a snapshot of the excesses of American culture and the uneasy balance between art and commerce. ‘Everyone wants to know what this song means,’ he said. ‘I know, it’s so boring. It’s a song about the dark underbelly of the American Dream.’ Like so many songs written about California in the seventies, it was a song about an outsider’s journey from innocence to experience.

  Bernie Leadon was the only band member at the time who was from the state (Timothy B. Schmit, who joined in 1977, was also from California). Don Henley was from Texas, Joe Walsh from New Jersey, Randy Meisner from Nebraska, Glenn Frey from Detroit and Don Felder from Florida. Felder said this about the song: ‘As you’re driving in Los Angeles at night, you can see the glow of the energy and the lights of Hollywood and Los Angeles for 100 miles out in the desert. And on the horizon, as you’re driving in, all of these images start coming into your mind of the propaganda and advertisement you’ve experienced about California. In other words, the movie stars, the stars on Hollywood Boulevard, the beaches, bikinis, palm trees, all those images that you see and that people think of when they think of California start running through your mind. You’re anticipating that. That’s all you know of California.’

  Don Henley put it another way: ‘We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest. “Hotel California” was our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles.’

  The temporality of places such as New York or Miami is what makes them so exciting, so operative, so full of movement. Wichita, in our imagination at least, is always there. When Jimmy Webb writes, ‘And if it snows that stretch down south / won’t ever stand the strain,’ he knows it, and because of that we know it too. This is always going to be the case: that stretch down south is always going to be there. The song immerses itself in the wilderness of the Midwestern imagination, a liberation from all that is not wild.

  One wonders how big a city has to be, or how small a town, to have a song written about it. By now, most state capitals must have had a song written about them (with the exception of Juneau and Annapolis, obviously), and even the most inconsequential conurbations have popped up in songs by the kings and queens of Americana and been celebrated by the finest minds in alt.country.

  Randy Newman’s ‘Baltimore’ first appeared on his 1977 album Little Criminals, with the narrator being a disaffected citizen of the city bemoaning the hard times that had resulted in a sharp decline in the quality of life there. It’s vague social commentary, a hastily written post-mortem, but it’s beautiful. No, not everyone in Baltimore liked it – online message boards are still full of withering insults, my favourite being, ‘Go sodomise yourself with a chainsaw, Randy Newman’ – yet it very quickly began to be regarded as one of Newman’s very best songs. Melancholy lyrics, a hypnotic piano riff and a plaintive vocal make for one extraordinarily maudlin travelogue, one that could easily be called ‘Chicago’, ‘New Orleans’ or ‘The Bronx’. Or indeed, these days, even neighbourhoods in San Francisco or Santa Barbara. Time magazine got it right when it said that Newman the lyricist is a refreshing irritant. ‘And Newman the composer is a sweet seducer. His music is a lush amalgam of Americana.’ Or chalk and cheese in the same bun.

  Just a few years after I eventually learned to drive, I organised a road trip across the US with one of my very best friends, Robin, a journey that would take us all the way from New York, Philadelphia and Washington down through the Blue Ridge Mountains, Nashville and Memphis, before joining Route 66 and continuing on to LA, via Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada. And of course, I made an individual mix tape for every state, starting off on the Eastern Seaboard with lots of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, Southside Johnny and Tom Petty, before moving into the southern states with plenty of Neville Brothers, Dr John and Allen Toussaint, and then joining the dustbowl motorway accompanied by fairly generic seventies FM rock – the Steve Miller Band, the Eagles, Foghat, Boston and some more Tom Petty. Like feathers on a freeway, Petty’s songs are meant to bounce around your car as you cruise down the highway on a journey to the past. Built on a sound based on the Big Jangle, they actively encourage nostalgia, songs you’re meant to play as you’re driving home from work, or out into the desert, or back to the sixties. Some would say he was celebrated for using nostalgia as a survival tool, but I had to have his songs on my tapes.

  It seemed imperative to have the Eagles, too. For many of my generation, at a certain point in our development they were the band that we loved to hate more than anyone else. When I was at art school in the late seventies, admitting you liked the Eagles was tantamount to admitting that you not only knew nothing about music, but also that you probably harboured a secret desire to light joss sticks and cover yourself in patchouli oil. Worse, it hinted that you may have be
en slightly more interested in cruising down Ventura Highway in an open-top Mustang rather than slumming it at the back of some dirty nightclub above a pub on the outskirts of Basildon.

  Even so, in preparing for our road trip I had failed to understand that the radio stations in the States are built for long journeys, and that the soundtrack to my journey would be supplied whether I liked it or not. There was no need for me to make a cassette compilation of Steely Dan’s ‘King of the World’, Robert Plant’s ‘Big Log’ or Neil Young’s ‘Powderfinger’, as they – and everything else I’d recorded for the journey – were being played on the radio every half an hour anyway.

  ‘Good job you recorded this,’ deadpanned Robin as we trundled through New Mexico, after we’d listened to ‘Take It Easy’ by the Eagles, ‘because they’ve only played it six times on the radio today.’

  ‘Take It Easy’ mentions Winslow, Arizona, and it was just outside Winslow that we found the journey’s own Holy Grail. The sun was falling in the sky, promising a rich, dark sunset as we sped along the highway towards Two Guns. In the distance the Juniper Mountains cut across the horizon like tears of pale-blue tissue paper. As we gunned towards them we looked to our left and saw a deserted drive-in, standing forlorn in the dirt, casting shadows that stretched all the way back to town. Suddenly I felt like an extra in American Graffiti, sitting in the custom-built bench seat of a hot rod, my cap-sleeved right arm around my girl, my ducktail brushing the rear-view mirror and Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’ pouring through the dashboard speaker.

  Here was the true spirit of Route 66 in all its faded glory. Like the highway itself, the Tonto Drive-In was a totem of America’s glorious past, a testament to the new frontier, the freedom to travel and the democratised automotive dream of the fifties, when a car was still every American’s birthright. This deserted cathedral, standing stoic and proud in the burnt sienna sunset, was, quite literally, the end of the road. Suddenly California – with all its promises of eternal youth and ‘two girls for every boy’ – seemed a long, long way away.

  Of course, my epiphany was ably abetted by the tapes I’d made. We weren’t hearing ‘Wichita Lineman’ every half an hour on the radio, nor were we blessed with ‘Are You There (With Another Girl)?’, ‘On Days Like This’, ‘The Ipcress File’ and all the other loungecore songs I’d recorded just for moments like this. So all my work had not actually been in vain.

  A few years later, I was driving down the Californian coast from San Francisco to LA, and I listened to digital radio all the way, moving the dial through ‘stations’ that played music from every decade of the last eighty years. If I’d have driven long enough, I probably would have heard everything that’s ever been recorded, from Louis Armstrong to CeeLo Green, from the Andrews Sisters to Tyler the Creator, from Big Bill Broonzy to Death Cab for Cutie. It was a joyous experience, but it could have been anyone’s.

  So the next time I did a Californian road trip, from LA to San Diego via Santa Monica and Palm Springs, the soundtrack was worked out in some detail: I started off with some Erin Bode and Nightmares on Wax, followed swiftly by Example, Midlake and Ed Sheeran, before moving on to Bon Iver, Here We Go Magic and Ducktails. Sure, I could simply have listened to the radio and probably enjoyed myself just as much. That wasn’t the point. This was my journey and I was the one who was going to decide what it sounded like.

  It’s hardly surprising that journeys are often best accessorised by film soundtracks. By its very nature, the soundtrack is a supplementary medium. It’s intrusive and indistinct by turns, following its film like a shadow. But if, as Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen says, good music should sabotage expectations, then it would be easy to say that there is very little good music in the movies. Aural clichés are as widespread as visual ones: jazz for the city, narcissistic flutes in the suburbs; Aaron Copland-style orchestration for small-town Americana; scratchy guitars and piping horns for urban thrillers. For pastoral, copy Debussy; for devastation, rework Barber or Albinoni; for a western, hire Morricone (the man who put the opera into horse opera).

  Once I even made my own. In the summer of 1990, I was in Carmel, in California, about to have dinner at Clint Eastwood’s restaurant, the Hog’s Head Inn (at the time he was the town’s mayor). As I walked down through the centre of town, I passed one of those generic new-age shops, the ones that sell everything from joss sticks and expensively framed Grateful Dead posters to designer lava lamps and spa creams. It also sold various CDs of ocean sounds – Californian ocean sounds to boot. And as I had been in love with the idea of the Californian ocean from the age of about ten, I had to buy one.

  And I bought it with one thing in mind. Almost as soon as I got home to London I put it into the CD player and then played one of my bespoke Beach Boys cassettes over the top, so I could listen to ‘Surf’s Up’, ‘Till I Die’ and ‘California Saga’ with the sound of the Big Sur waves crashing against the rocks in the background. I had replicated almost completely my Californian experience – which was designed primarily so I could listen to a surf soundtrack ad nauseam as I drove along the Pacific Coast Highway in a rented Mustang – which meant that whenever I wanted to, I could take myself back to Route 101 and ‘Cabinessence’ without leaving the confines of west London. The Durutti Column’s ‘Sketch for Summer’ has birdsong on it, as does Virginia Astley’s 1983 mini-masterpiece From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, which comes complete with its own natural soundtrack, in the shape of field recordings of birdsong and sheep. There is a little light piano, some woodwind and some ambient vocals, but mainly this is the sound of the countryside, an instrumental accompaniment to a typical British summer’s day. Some songs are even transfigurative, and whenever I hear ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ by Fairport Convention, I immediately sense I’m walking along a deserted British beach in the middle of winter, surrounded by little but cloud.

  With ‘Wichita Lineman’ I’m still in that rented Mustang, bombing for the border.

  * If you are ever asked about television’s greatest moment, there obviously can be only one answer: the final two minutes of the final episode of The Sopranos (first shown on 10 June 2007). In this scene, when Tony Soprano glances upwards and the screen falters and turns to black many of us thought our Sky+ facility had decided to implode at the least opportune moment in TV history. Although as the credits began to roll we realised that this was perhaps the only way for David Chase’s epic family saga to extinguish itself. Chase says that the show’s audience was always bifurcated, and that on one sofa you had a small army who only wanted to see the Bada Bing mob whack people, while on the other you had another bunch who were far more interested in the family dynamic.

  ‘I sort of knew that the people who wanted the big bloodbath at the end were not going to be thrilled with the ending, but what I did not realise was how angry those people would get,’ said Chase. ‘And it was amazing how long it went on. Especially when you figure that we had a rather significant war going on.’

  Ultimately, the show’s finale was all about the conflict. The theme of the final episode, no. 86, was ‘Made in America’, as much of a reference to Iraq as it was to the financial discomfort zone many US citizens found themselves in. Chase says he didn’t want to be didactic about it, but all we needed to know about the subtext was there on Tony and Carmela’s faces, when their son AJ tells them he wants to join up. And the final song in the final episode of the greatest television show ever made, the record that will forever be synonymous with closure? Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, the hugely successful single from their 1981 album Escape. Which certainly confused the hell out of me.

  ‘It didn’t take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact,’ said Chase. ‘I did something I’d never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, “What do you think?” When I said, “‘Don’t Stop Believin’’,” people went, “What? Oh my god!” I said, “I know, I know, just give a listen,” and little by little, people s
tarted coming around.’ When the episode was aired, reactions to the denouement were mixed. ‘I hear some people were very angry, and others were not,’ said Chase. ‘Which is what I expected.’

  Since then, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ has become a karaoke classic, as popular as any ABBA or Take That song. Journey’s lead singer, Steve Perry, initially refused to let Chase use the song until he knew the fate of the leading characters, and didn’t give final approval until three days before the episode aired. He feared that the song would be remembered as the soundtrack to Tony’s demise, until Chase assured him that this would not be the case. Strangely, he was right. In 2009, it was performed in the pilot episode of the hit US TV series Glee, and for a while was the best-selling digital song not released in the twenty-first century.

  6: THE BEAUTIFUL MUNDANE

  Reporter: Glen, have you played music all your life?

  Glen Campbell: Not yet.

  Glen Campbell finished 1968 as the US’s top-selling artist, outdistancing the Beatles by a considerable margin. That year, four of his albums sold over a million copies. In December alone, he accounted for over $4.5 million in LP sales. He picked up four Grammy awards, was named the Entertainer of the Year by Nashville’s Country Music Association and somehow ended up as the honorary chairman of the National Arthritis Foundation. He was a genuine phenomenon. The Academy of Country and Western Music also named him the Best Male Vocalist of the Year and Top Television Personality, and presented him with an award for Best Album. He started 1969 with more of the same: television, movies, awards, state fairs, guest appearances, records, concerts.

  It was Campbell’s relationship with Jimmy Webb that made his career, and it was Webb’s relationship with Campbell that made his. ‘You need a good piece of poetry up front and then a great melody to go with it,’ was Campbell’s summation of Webb’s genius. After ‘Wichita Lineman’, the pair would continue to work together, off and on, for years, with Campbell performing Webb’s songs and both of them appearing together in concert; they even worked on an album together, Reunion, in 1974. In 1969, there had been that third town song, ‘Galveston’, written by Webb and performed by Campbell. The first two collaborations spun tales of journeys, love and longing, personalising the universal by juxtaposing the prosaic with the extraordinary. ‘Galveston’ was originally an anti-war song, until it was tweaked by Campbell to make it more ambiguous. He even appeared in a promotional video wearing a uniform, even though the line that resonates so much is the one in which he says he’s afraid of dying.