The Wichita Lineman

by Dylan Jones

  And that was that.

  In the same way that Parker didn’t entertain the idea of missing out on any royalties, so Elvis never really understood the concept of ‘the album’. As pop began to expand in the mid-sixties, and as concept albums became commonplace, Elvis stuck to the time-honoured formula of an album being a portmanteau collection of singles, bits and pieces and not much else. His albums were all filler, no killer. Elvis was never going to be interested in making anything like Sgt. Pepper or Wish You Were Here, but he also had no interest in producing a modern echo of Songs for Swinging Lovers, the Frank Sinatra LP that is often credited with being the first concept album. Elvis could be an exemplary interpreter of popular song, and when he chose the right one, he’d find it relatively easy to turn it into a classic, or turn in a version that made people say he ‘owned it’. But, absurdly, he couldn’t knit together a dozen of them, had no interest in running alongside Simon & Garfunkel or Todd Rundgren, or even keeping up with Fleetwood Mac or Neil Diamond, a man who probably wouldn’t have had a career were it not for Elvis. He was such an influential figure that he could have commanded the very best songwriters in the world to pitch him songs. Would Lennon and McCartney have turned down an opportunity to write an entire album for Elvis? Would Dylan? Would Jimmy Webb? Towards the end of the sixties, Lennon and McCartney’s relationship was in such a parlous state that writing to order might have encouraged them to be more collaborative. Also, even though Elvis had long been diminished in their eyes by a decade of poor product, neither of them could ever forget the debt they owed him, would never forget the debt the entire industry owed him, and they would have looked upon the project as an honour. At the time, they were thinking about the past a lot, and having tired of the convoluted way they had been recording for the last three or four years, were looking forward to recording live again, feeling like a band again and focusing on simpler material. When they initially started recording Let It Be, they would break into old rock and roll classics in between their new songs, bashing away at ‘Stand by Me’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Words of Love’ and ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’. Imagine if a relationship with Elvis had been formed, and imagine him singing some of the more spartan material Lennon would go on to record for the Plastic Ono Band LP … Imagine, for instance, Elvis singing ‘Working Class Hero’. Imagine Elvis hearing a demo of ‘Let It Be’ and deciding that he had to record it before anyone else, including the man who wrote it. But of course he was never going to hear the demo because he never socialised, never travelled, and kept himself to himself, living out Groundhog Day at Graceland. Elvis wasn’t going to a cocktail party, Elvis wasn’t hanging out at the wrap party for Easy Rider, wasn’t going to the Oscars, wasn’t going to appear on The Tonight Show, wasn’t going anywhere outside Memphis, not if he could help it.

  ‘He loved “MacArthur Park”,’ Webb said of Presley. ‘I don’t say that to brag. It’s been documented. I have a tape of him singing it. At that time, though, I wanted to get a song done by Elvis. But as I was leaving after my meeting with Elvis, Col. Parker followed me to the door and said, “I guess we won’t be seeing you here again.” I said, “Oh, really?”’ Parker wanted only songs to which he could get full publishing rights, and as Webb says, ‘I didn’t need Elvis to record “MacArthur Park”. It was already a number one hit. Col. Parker was a crude man … He was the man who told Elvis he shouldn’t record with the Beatles.’

  The closest that Webb came to a collaboration with Elvis was making him the subject of his 1991 song ‘Elvis and Me’, based on his various meetings with him.*

  * Glen Campbell befriended Presley when he helped record the soundtrack for Viva Las Vegas in 1964. He later said, ‘Elvis and I were brought up the same humble way – picking cotton and looking at the north end of a southbound mule.’ Campbell was a terrific mimic, and one of his best impressions was Elvis singing ‘That’s Alright (Mama)’.

  One night in early 1976 they were on stage together in Las Vegas. ‘It was just incredible,’ said Campbell. ‘In Vegas, I was kidding him. He introduced me and said, “Campbell, I understand you’re doing an imitation of me. I just want you to know it will always be an imitation.” And I said, “I’m not gonna do it no more. I got to gain some weight first.” He laughed, and the audience went, “Oh, hey, boo.” I said, “Can’t you take a joke?” Elvis could take it, but the audience just got on my ass. Elvis said, “Well, when you’re down here next I’m coming down and I’m gonna sit in the front row and read a newspaper and heckle.” The audience laughed, and I said, “Elvis, if I’m singing as good as you are, I won’t care.” Backstage we were talking, and I said, “Did you believe the way the people reacted?” Elvis said, “Yeah, I know, it’s like everything is supposedly taboo because people are afraid they will say something that isn’t true.” He didn’t say lied, he said tell you something other than the facts. That makes life so much harder to deal with than if people tell you what they think. People are afraid to say, “Hey, Elvis, you’re fat.” I didn’t say, Hey Elvis you’re fat, I just said you better back away from the table. I mean there are cool ways of handling it. In fact, I was teasing and said can I have some of your old clothes. He said, “Campbell, you ain’t getting ’em. I’m gonna grow back into them.”’

  Their mutual respect was huge. Elvis would cover Campbell’s ‘Gentle on My Mind’ during his From Elvis in Memphis sessions with producer Chips Moman in 1969, while a year later Presley suggested Campbell recut Conway Twitty’s fifties hit ‘It’s Only Make Believe’, which he did, yielding a massive worldwide hit. Both Campbell and Presley would become top draws playing Las Vegas in the late sixties, often seeing each other perform. As Campbell would recall, ‘When we played … in Vegas, [Elvis] would go in for a month, and I’d go in for a month. Then we’d switch. Elvis had more charisma in his little finger than everybody else put together. What d’you call it? Electricity.’

  7: COUNTY MUSIC

  At the CMAs [the Country Music Awards], I performed with Little Big Town and we just did this transcendent version of ‘Wichita Lineman’, which they’ve been doing all summer on their tour … It keeps me young to be around this new generation. I learn things about what’s going on. It’s a conduit to the real world.

  JIMMY WEBB

  In 2018, ‘Wichita Lineman’ was on the set list for the concert tours of Toby Keith, Little Big Town and Guns N’ Roses. In the fifty years since it was released, hundreds of boldface names have come out of the closet and expressed their admiration for the song. It seems an entire generation had been harbouring deep love for Jimmy Webb’s greatest creation ever since it was released. Acknowledging this was almost as important as feeling it. In October 2006, the Rolling Stones played Wichita for the first and presumably last time. ‘We are the virgins of Wichita,’ said Mick Jagger from the stage, before strapping on an acoustic guitar and treating the crowd to the first verse of ‘Wichita Lineman’. Jagger smiled. ‘I bet everyone who comes here does that.’

  Rolling Stone would rank it the sixteenth greatest country song of all time (‘The sound – a haze of soapy violins and expensive chord changes – had more to do with the onset of soft rock than the rudiments of country, but the subject matter was a new spin on an old story. Country calls it individualism; Webb called it loneliness’); Time Out ranked it the twenty-ninth greatest country song of all time; the NME said it was one of the best twenty-five country songs of all time; while Pitchfork understandably listed it as one of the two hundred best songs of the sixties.

  Webb would never write a third verse, claiming that would have been gilding the lily. Part of the charm of it, for the writer, was that it was minimalist. Not only is it unfinished, he said, it also contains a false rhyme (‘time’ and ‘line’), something that Webb says he didn’t notice until years after he’d written it.

  ‘What is incredible to me is that I never heard it before, and then all of a sudden I did!’ he told me. ‘“I need you more than want you / and I want you for all time
/ And the Wichita lineman is still on the line.” Those consonants are different, that’s a false rhyme. Which doesn’t mean much in pop music, to tell you the truth, as people by and large don’t pay any attention to them. But the true lyricists – the Oscar Hammersteins, the Lorenz Harts, the Cole Porters, those guys – they were pretty fastidious about this kind of stuff. However, I think that “Wichita Lineman” might be one of those cases where it’s probably worth it.’

  When we eventually met, Webb also admitted to another mistake in the song, one I wasn’t aware of.

  ‘I might as well tell you, because someone is going to want to talk to you about it. I made technical errors when I wrote the song. I had two different kinds of power lines on my telephone pole. I talk about an overload, which is something that happens to high-tension wires, but I cast the main character as a telephone repair man, fixing the line.’

  Getting his wires crossed, literally.

  ‘Some of the guys from the union have scolded me about that from time to time, but it’s very hard to explain poetic licence to a union member …’

  Andrew Collins, the journalist and former editor of Q, has written extensively about the song. ‘It feels like a story and yet, broken down, the lyric is quite spare. But it’s not a poem, and Webb’s not just a wordsmith. Glen Campbell brings the song to heartbroken life and a country authenticity to the sound pictures. His vocal is coffee-smooth – perhaps sipped from a flask – and conveys the plaintive in our lineman’s lament for lost love in such a sincere and moving way you could never see him as a telegraphic stalker. He means it, man. And the held note at the end of “still on the liiiiiiiiine” seems to echo around the wide-open plains, as if the shot is panning back, wider and wider, until he’s a speck on a stick.

  ‘The string arrangement does some daring wire work, too. After a descending guitar twang and patted intro beat, there they swirl, filling the Kansas sky with sun, while violins and a keyboard get to work on the pre-digital approximation of a telegraph’s bleeps and whines. Invention permeates.

  ‘It’s a downhome, nice-and-simple, over-easy slice of life which finds symbolism in the horny hands of the working man and creates something almost space-age out of its allotted instruments. And it’s sung by Campbell like it matters. My friend Stuart Maconie called it the “greatest pop song ever composed”, and I think his tribute is contained in the word “composed”. “Wichita Lineman” doesn’t feel written, or knocked out to order, it’s a novella that’s been inspired by real life and if it’s a little bit country, it feels more local than that.

  ‘It’s county music.’

  ‘I first heard the song when I was about six or seven, on pop radio, although I really got to know it when my dad bizarrely bought an album called Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits, which wasn’t actually by Glen Campbell,’ said Stuart Maconie. ‘It was one of those cheap Top of the Pops records where the songs are actually recorded by other people, but even then I knew that “Wichita Lineman” was something special. Here you have this man with an inexplicable inner life, an unfathomable, unnamed man who has this extraordinary inner life. He has this Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Harold Pinter aura about him, as does the song. Less is more. In some ways the song’s incompleteness is its salvation, as it’s actually quite thin, allowing us as listeners to fill in the rest. How Jimmy Webb managed to create such an extraordinary work in the space of a few minutes is remarkable really. It’s a work of genius. It’s impossible to copy. I’d go so far as to say that it’s not just the perfect pop song, it’s almost perfect as an idea, existing outside of the song itself. As an idea, “Wichita Lineman” is the most perfect song that’s ever been written.

  ‘Why do I love it so much? Because it’s not a young man’s song, it’s a song that develops more and more the older you get, almost like a slowly unfolding photograph. It’s a song that you don’t grow out of, you grow into. It creeps up on you and never lets go. Also, you can’t deny that Glen Campbell looks the part; he looks like the kind of man that would sing this song. It was the right time, right place, right singer, right song. In that respect it’s perfect. It seems to exist in a state beyond the usual understanding of recognition. It is somewhat separate from everything around it.’

  That’s it precisely. ‘Wichita’ seems to exist in a space of its own, a place of its own, seemingly hovering above the ground, almost in its own bubble. Impervious to seasons, immune to its surroundings, it’s like the extra-terrestrial haze in a fifties sci-fi movie, a bit disconcerting at first but actually completely benign.

  Sadness is a perennial emotion in music because suffering springs eternal. A morose ballad will not just flatter the songwriter – who will feel as though they are mainlining genuine melancholy, and thus creating actual art – it will flatter the listener, too, as their feelings have in their eyes been validated by a work of great depth. Country Music Hall of Famer Harlan Howard once described country songwriting as ‘three chords and the truth’, which try to capture universal sentiments. Other writers need to bleed themselves before they can splurge, coming back from the brink with a cunning word about the human condition. In a way, ‘Lineman’ was the perfect fusion of both, the personal made public, the private writ large.

  ‘I love the song because it’s as though it’s been in my life for ever,’ said the journalist and author Amy Raphael. ‘I can’t remember where I first heard it – I was only one when it came out – but it always reminds me of my father. It’s so cinematic. Completely cinematic.’ Or, as Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley said, ‘Americana in the truest sense, evocative and hyper-real.’

  Someone who knows oceans about the complexity of writing about the human condition, especially the intricacies of domesticity, is Chris Difford, who, among many other wonderful things, is the lyricist in Squeeze. A longterm fan of the song, he is in awe of Webb’s songwriting talent, of his ability to create his own language out of the prosaic and the generic. ‘His style, both lyrically and musically, is unique,’ he said. ‘His lyrical threads often don’t make sense, you know – the cake left out in the rain, and the Wichita lineman. At first, I thought it was about the train; I didn’t know it was about a guy up a telegraph pole. But then I used to think it was a drug-reference song and I was forever trying to find out what the references were. There are certain turns of phrases and certain red herrings that he puts in his lyrics that I think always tripped me up, and I thought he was like an Elvis Costello of his time in a way, a very intelligent use of the English language in an American way. It’s a kind of lyrical journey that I was never comfortable with, as I was more comfortable with British lyricism. So, whenever I heard his lyricism, I had to remove myself from the picture somewhat. I just wondered if he was on drugs all the time, and that’s what made it special.’

  He didn’t hear the song until he was in his late twenties, as his musical background ‘had a very small iris to it, it was very English’. The only American music he cared for was the absurdity of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart and the joy of the Allman Brothers, and much beyond that he didn’t really care to venture. ‘Then I started to get into James Taylor and Neil Young and all the people that I had missed, the music that had been tabooed when I was young. It was like a second coming, as suddenly I’m bathing in Joni Mitchell and James Taylor and Jimmy Webb songs.

  ‘As for this song, it is very dense, you can’t nick from it at all. It’s locked in as a song. There’s no way of penetrating it or trying to mimic it. It’s the imagery that makes the song so special,’ he said. ‘The fact that he observed a man up a pole, fixing a wire, and made that into a song – something I can only dream of doing – I think that’s a gorgeous bit of imagination. I often see people in strange situations in the street and think, “Oh, I’d like to write about that, that would make an interesting song,” but I don’t think I could do it as much justice as he does, just because of his turn of phrase. It’s almost like it was an unfinished language, like the song itself.

  ‘Just take t
he strings. They could almost be written by Burt Bacharach. They are so melodic and so off the scale they almost grate against the melody of the song. Listening to it, you think, “Oh, I’m not sure about that, but it makes sense.” That’s what Burt Bacharach does with such style.

  ‘Jimmy Webb was writing domestic stories in a very complicated way. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to understand them. As a lyricist I’m constantly stealing off other writers by listening to the metre, to the idea, to the phrasing and to the emotion, because that’s what songwriters do naturally. You simply can’t do that with Jimmy Webb, you can’t steal from him. You really can’t, because it’s a story all of itself.’

  Difford found ‘Wichita Lineman’ impressive because he grew up on a fodder of American television and was seduced by the images in the great American pop of the sixties. ‘I always thought songwriters in America spoke a different language. Route 66 is an obvious example, because you can’t write about the M25 or the A21 in the same way. When I eventually heard the song, I always imagined Glen Campbell performing the song on the back of a horse somewhere in the desert, with a telegraph pole and the sun off in the distance.

  ‘For me, this was all stuff to be dreamt of, but then when I joined a band and went to America, I discovered it actually was there. Hours and hours on a tour bus have taught me that those poles exist and somebody had to put them up, but it took someone to write a song about them, and that’s extraordinary in itself. I remember I got a train from Denver to Chicago because I didn’t want to fly, and it took three days, the most boring train journey of my life. It was a really uncomfortable trip, in the middle of summer, and the thing that kept going over in my head was, “Somebody made these tracks.” So these workers would come from a small town, they would get paid very little to build these tracks, and then eventually they would get on a train and maybe end up in Chicago. So they actually paved their journey for themselves. America is just full of those kinds of dreams.’