The Wichita Lineman

by Dylan Jones

  As someone who understood the power of dissonance, it’s ironic that Webb will probably be remembered most for his ability to add a little sweetness to the day, something he does so expertly in ‘Galveston’. Here he persuades Campbell to elongate the name of the city, to give it some gravitas, to make it appear more romantic as well as more iconic. Even so, Webb was expecting to hear some Samuel Barber-type strings on the record, only to be disappointed by Campbell’s rat-a-tat-tat let’s-go-kick-their-ass arrangement. Still, it’s hardly surprising that Webb often wants to sweeten his songs as well as novelise them; after all, for a man who is so sentimental and nostalgic about the expiration of grace from our way of life, home is of paramount importance to him, even more than it was when he was a lanky farmboy. In ‘Galveston’ he adopts the POV of a soldier who flashes back to romantic encounters by the Gulf to help get over his dread of dying in combat.

  Not long after the song was a hit, Webb appeared in a street parade in the city, part of its shrimp festival (it is next door to Louisiana), and was pelted as he walked through the streets with his long hair, wearing a Pierre Cardin suit and an extravagant scarf. ‘I was in the middle of a politically polarised situation,’ he said. ‘People didn’t know how they felt about the song – is this guy a peacenik or what?’ They would give him the keys to the city, so the act of acknowledgement was obviously more important than any ideological nuance.

  Webb’s original lyrics in the second verse were obviously anti-war, although in Campbell’s version they were altered to become rather more patriotic. ‘I’m not a writer, I’m really a “song doctor”,’ Campbell once said. ‘If I hear a good song that I like, I’ll change lines and chord progressions, and make it my own.’

  Unsurprisingly, ‘Galveston’ became especially beloved by members of the armed services. According to Webb, the sailors aboard two US Navy warships stationed in the South China Sea, USS Galveston and USS Wichita, used to stage mock musical battles on the open seas using his songs. As it awaited refuelling, the Galveston would play ‘Galveston’ over its PA to the approaching Wichita, which responded by blasting ‘Wichita Lineman’. (Four decades later, R.E.M. would release a response song called ‘Houston’.)

  More importantly, because ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘Galveston’ and ‘Where’s the Playground, Susie?’ (another Jimmy Webb classic that was released in April 1969 as the second single from the Galveston album, and again written about Susan Horton) were such massive hits, they redefined what a pop single could be: complex emotions and idiosyncratic arrangements and orchestrations, coupled with Campbell-like no-frills delivery and emotional purity.

  ‘Galveston’ certainly helped Campbell’s upward trajectory. In the summer of 1968, in the wake of his success with ‘Phoenix’ and ‘Wichita’, he guest-hosted The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The successful appearance led to his own variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, which ran until 1972. The likes of Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and Linda Ronstadt appeared on the programme, which also gave a national platform to rising country stars like Willie Nelson. ‘He exposed us to a big part of the world that would have never had the chance to see us,’ said Nelson. Having become a proper TV star, Campbell built himself a gargantuan 16,500-square-foot house on a hill high up in Laurel Canyon.

  A young Steve Martin was a writer on the show. ‘He just went along with it,’ says Martin. ‘He was completely game, and completely fun, and had kind of a down-home sense of humour. It was just an incredible treat for us young writers to be introduced to talent at that level at such a young age.’

  Campbell looked like a cowboy, so much so that he was cast opposite John Wayne in the ageing hero’s 1969 vehicle True Grit. Campbell was blond as the midday sun, solid as a hay bale and with a seemingly never-ending supply of hats, embroidered denim, western shirts and cowboy boots. He later said that his acting was so amateurish that he ‘gave John Wayne that push to win the Academy Award’. Wayne didn’t appear to be too enamoured of his co-star, however, and gave him the same advice he gave Michael Caine when he first came to Hollywood: ‘Kid, talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much. Then you’ll be fine.’ Campbell’s first starring vehicle, Norwood, flopped, however, and the hits dried up until he bounced back into town with the studied countrypolitan pop of ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ in 1975. ‘Cowboy’ had already been turned down by both Elvis and Neil Diamond by the time it was offered to Campbell. A reflective piece about pursuing the American Dream, it immediately became one of Campbell’s signature tunes. According to its author, Larry Weiss, the chorus came from the 1944 movie Buffalo Bill, in the last scene of which Bill rides out on a white horse, in a white outfit and with a long white beard, and thanks everybody for giving him such a great life.

  There would be more country albums, too, as Campbell attempted to reconnect with a constituency he had always been in two minds about. He tried what a lot of crossover artists had done before, and would do again, namely get more country – very country. Dolly Parton had done the same thing: after all the fame, the smash records and the hit movies – there was a time when you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing ‘Jolene’ or ‘9 to 5’ – the country girl moved away from commercial music and successfully reconnected with the genre she grew up with – bluegrass. ‘If I could have made a living, and still had the career, doing this kind of music, I would have done that,’ she said. ‘I had to get rich in order to afford to sing like I was poor again. Isn’t that a hell of a note?’

  Campbell would marry four times, producing five sons and three daughters (some of whom would eventually play with him on stage, which contributed to much sibling rivalry between the various families). In 1980, after his third divorce, he said, ‘Perhaps I’ve found the secret for an unhappy private life. Every three years I go and marry a girl who doesn’t love me, and then she proceeds to take all my money.’ That year, he started a short, tempestuous and very high-profile relationship with the singer Tanya Tucker, who was twenty-three years his junior. At the time, he was battling alcoholism and cocaine addiction, so the affair made him tabloid catnip. He showered her with jewels, spent nearly $60,000 on her birthday party and at one point was going to underwrite a high-fashion boutique, Rhinestone Cowgirl, that she was planning to open in Beverly Hills. In his heyday Campbell had been saddled with nicknames such as the ‘Farmboy Choirboy’ and the ‘Hip Hick’, but his dalliance with Tucker soon put paid to those. She had exploded into the country charts at the age of thirteen with ‘Delta Dawn’, rapidly racking up half a dozen other hits while posing in black leather and tight skimpy tops. Overnight she became the wild child of country and western. When they started seeing each other – she only twenty-one and he a forty-four-year-old grandfather – she boasted, ‘He’s the horniest man I ever met. Men are supposed to slow down after forty, but it’s just the opposite with Glen. I mean, I thought I could handle a lot.’ The relationship faltered, apparently because of Campbell’s jealousy, although their behaviour seemed to be aggravated by a relationship with booze and cocaine that could apparently be called ‘attentive’. (‘He did cocaine more than just about anybody,’ said his friend Alice Cooper.) After they split, Tucker would file a $3 million lawsuit against her former lover, charging ‘Battery, Mayhem, Assault with a deadly weapon, and Fraud’. The case was settled out of court, although never again would Campbell be called the Farmboy Choirboy. Because if, with his voice, he had once been able to weaponise sadness, with this kind of tabloid behaviour all he had managed to do was encourage pity. In 1981, for instance, he became embroiled in such a heated argument with a member of the Indonesian government on a long-haul flight that he promised to ‘call my friend Ronald Reagan and ask him to bomb Jakarta’.

  After his years of substance abuse, it perhaps wasn’t any great surprise that Campbell would eventually find religion – obviously such a well-worn stepping stone on the Nashville path to redemption – and because of this he developed some particularly unsavoury opinions
, notably involving the pro-life movement. And then in 1982 he married Kimberly Woollen, a Radio City Music Hall Rockette, who helped Campbell get sober.

  ‘On our first date he took me to a restaurant at the Waldorf and before we ate he bowed his head and said a prayer and I thought, “Oh good, he believes in God,”’ she said. ‘Of course, as the night went on I also found out he had an alcohol problem. But he [was] always such a great person; so generous, so sweet and loving and kind. It was just the alcohol that turned him into a monster. He was obnoxious. He was mean. It wasn’t the Glen I knew him to be. So we got involved in the church and started studying the Bible together and got some godly friends around who encouraged you. We started surrounding ourselves with family. His brother came to live with us and Shorty said, “Glen, I don’t want you to end up like Elvis, you really need to stop drinking.” Gene Autry called him and said, “The booze is no good, Glen.” So a lot of people who loved him encouraged him. He would fall down drunk five nights a week. Just pass out. I would never advise anybody to do what I did; go into a relationship knowing that someone is so messed up.’

  Jimmy Webb also witnessed Campbell’s bizarre duality. ‘With Glen, there used to be something definitely disconcerting about the mix between the Holy Bible and the cocaine. He would be delivering the most astounding lecture from the Old Testament, and at the same time there would be lines laid out on the table. It was just surreal.’

  In 2003, Campbell fell off the wagon in spectacular fashion and was arrested for a hit-and-run, pleading guilty to extreme drunken driving and leaving the scene of an accident, and spending ten days in jail. Robert Chalmers interviewed him for the Independent on Sunday in 2007, in the Orleans Casino in Las Vegas, and enjoyed the way in which the singer could talk about his misdemeanours without rancour. He was in a happy place and could largely laugh at some of the scrapes he’d been in. Largely. ‘If there’s a drawback to frequenting a public area such as this, it’s that many of the looks he does attract are connected not so much with his artistic output, as with his arrest for driving while intoxicated near Phoenix, Arizona, in November 2003,’ wrote Chalmers. ‘The police photograph – to his great distress – has become the most famous single image of Campbell: wide-eyed and handcuffed wearing a reversed baseball cap, Arizona Diamondbacks T-shirt, shorts and trainers. The picture was taken after his silver BMW performed a bold and unorthodox manoeuvre, resulting in a collision with a vehicle driven by a sommelier called Mr Roote.’ Campbell compounded his crime by kneeing the police officer in the thigh while resisting arrest. The officer said he smelled alcohol on Campbell’s breath, and when he knocked on his car door, the singer kneed him in the leg, landing himself an aggravated assault charge. After pleading guilty he was sentenced to ten days in prison, but when he was questioned about it later, he said, ‘I wasn’t really that drunk. I was just over-served.’

  Eventually he got clean. Eight years later, the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone went to LA to interview him, offering a vignette of the Campbells’ churchly domesticity: ‘We are sitting in a large sunlit villa looking over the Malibu hills and surrounded by memorabilia from Campbell’s career. There are trophy cabinets and rooms full of photographs of Campbell with Elvis, Dean Martin, Ray Charles and Sammy Davis Jr and everybody who was everybody – permanent reminders of who he was. Huge leather-bound Bibles, far too heavy to pick up, lie on tables. Kim was brought up in the Methodist Presbyterian church, he in the Church of Christ, Baptist, but early into their marriage they joined a Messianic synagogue that follows the Old Testament but believes Jesus is the Messiah. The Campbells eat kosher and celebrate Jewish festivals. On Friday nights, Campbell blesses the bread and wine.’

  ‘God saved me,’ he told Hattenstone.

  The abuse never seemed to affect his voice, though. It was always sweet, but never too sweet, even when he was singing dentist music. ‘He had the pure flowing tone of a crooner but with something smoky in there, a whiskey catch at the back of his throat that tugged at the heart of a melody and left listeners feeling every shift in the lyric,’ wrote Neil McCormick in an obituary of Campbell in the Irish Independent. ‘He had an impossible range that could pluck notes out of the ether but somehow made every song he ever sang sound easy.’ Obits tend to go one of two ways, either by using inordinate amounts of flattery or by diminishing achievement. McCormick was fulsome in his praise, meaning every word of it. ‘His readings of Webb’s country gothic classics surely stand amongst the greatest records ever made,’ he wrote. Webb once told him it was easy to write his vastly ambitious, deeply romantic songs knowing he had Campbell to sing them.

  McCormick also mentioned one of the reasons why Campbell was such a great interpreter of Webb’s material, something that had actually been acknowledged by both of them: namely that he always seemed a little bit out of time himself. Campbell sat between two stools, between country and pop, between the swing era and rock and roll, between old-fashioned values and new-fashioned attitudes. He was in his own vortex, in a cultural never-never land. McCormick describes watching him on his Saturday-night TV show, handsome and wholesome, yet with an edge that came, perhaps, from his country roots. ‘There were subtle dimensions of doubt and pain that resonated in his rich chord changes and lush orchestrations, the inescapable sense there was more going on than met the eye.’ He was, as he sang himself, a rhinestone cowboy.

  ‘He had that beautiful tenor with a crystal-clear guitar sound, playing lines that were so inventive,’ said Tom Petty in 2011. ‘It moved me.’

  Campbell was always very respectful of Jimmy Webb, and more than grateful that he had benefited so much from his partner’s ability to write songs that helped define him as an entertainer. There are dozens of old clips of Campbell appearing on TV chat shows, willingly sitting down in the comfy chair opposite the likes of Johnny Carson or Craig Kilborn, often with a guitar in his hand, and always with a big smile on his face. The singer always took his success seriously, never took it for granted, and understood that the people who bought his records and turned up at his concerts could just as easily change their minds and start spending their money on someone else. So, for him, appearing on one of those chat shows wasn’t a chore or an inconvenience, it was all part of the show, all part of the entertainer’s life. And wasn’t he lucky to have one?

  As he sinks into the chair, you can often detect a nervous glance at the host, which is when you can see Campbell’s carapace crack for a moment, as he looks across and wonders what the smart-ass TV men were going to say to him, instinctively worrying that they were going to make some gag or other. But even when they did – and it usually seemed to be affectionate – he’d flip whatever it was right back at them, his all-enveloping smile getting bigger as he did so. He’d try and keep the conversation light, remind everyone how lucky he was, what fun he was having, and how he was sure that their lives would be improved no end by buying into whatever he was on the show to push.

  He would often be asked about his relationship with Jimmy Webb, and then the smile would be put away. When discussing his friend, Campbell would be even more respectful than he was about his own career, paying homage to a man he would repeatedly call a genius, a man who conjured such beautiful songs. Occasionally he would become proprietorial, in a way that a football manager might be about a player, where the emphasis on the relationship inevitably infers that one works for the other, although even when the singer hinted that the songwriter was a hired hand, he made sure that everyone knew his hands were the finest in the business. Glen Campbell loved Jimmy Webb. He had his back.

  ‘Webb’s stuff is a little bit country. But … actually I don’t like to segregate music,’ said Campbell. ‘To me it’s like segregating people … People who say, “That’s Country and I don’t like Country” gotta be pretty narrow-minded. Either that or they don’t know a damn thing about music. “I don’t like country music” – that’s the dumbest remark I ever heard. Then you start naming off some country songs and they say, “Is that Countr
y? I didn’t know that.” There’s good in all music. It’s like when I record, I don’t aim at anything. I just find a good song and go do it like I want to. And if the country fans gripe or the pop fans gripe, I can’t help it.’

  In 2006, when Campbell was in his seventies, he said that he still sang ‘Wichita Lineman’ with genuine emotion. ‘I think it’s as good a chord progression and melody as I’ve ever seen. I’m so glad that I had hits with songs that I like,’ he said, ‘because I know a lot of guys who say, “If I have to sing that song one more time I’m getting out of the business.” That’s so stupid.’

  It’s easy to spot those entertainers who begrudge performing their earlier, more successful work, perhaps the songs that made them famous. They’ll look upon them as sketches, bagatelles, mere crumbs that pale in comparison to the bigger, grander, more mature work they’re performing now, in spite of the fact that neither the critics nor the public appear to be taking much interest in it. Glen Campbell never felt this way, and he was more than happy to play ‘Wichita Lineman’ or ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ if that was what the TV producer wanted. It would be great if he could play one from the new album as well, yet he understood that he had a sturdy and popular enough back catalogue to satisfy demand.