Wichita Lineman

I’ve had this song in my head for at least two weeks. Does that happen to everyone, or just songwriters? And it’s not like a traditional brain worm, where a catchy bit repeats over and over. Sometimes I’m visited by the opening melody, sometimes it’s the two-line chorus, sometimes the bridge and sometimes it’s just the simple but sincere baritone guitar solo.

It all began while watching Rick Beato’s excellent recent interview with Billy Joel. Rick’s very last question is “what’s a perfect song?” Billy immediately turns to the piano and plays the first few bars of Wichita Lineman. A wide, warm thump of recognition and acknowledgement hit my chest. All of the song’s lyrical and musical brilliance is distilled into those few bars. I could hear the hit record and Glen Campbell’s plainspoken delivery. Once he’s delivered “I am a lineman for the county, and I drive the main roads”, Wichita Lineman’s melody and lyric takes hold of you and carries you, fully engaged and enchanted, all the way through to the final “still on the line.”

I wasn’t crazy about the song when it was on the radio. I was eighteen and listening to things like Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bookends’, Crosby Stills, Nash and Young’s ‘Deja Vu’,  and, of course, The Beatles. My self-imposed musical and cultural parameters eschewed that kind of extravagant, old school string arrangements. But I really liked (and continue to like) Glen Campbell. When I was fifteen, I’d watched him, as an unknown “regular” on the Shindig musical variety show, sing Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” Orbison was one of my favourite singers so I watched in spine-tingling awe as Campbell sang the song perfectly, adding a few soaring, extra and higher notes to the final “crying”.

While I wouldn’t have admitted liking the song at the time, I could have sung it word for word, with only a little help with the order of the verses. Like a lot of other songs I pretended not to enjoy at the time (Credence Clearwater comes to mind) Wichita Lineman easily slipped past my artificial eighteen-year-old boundaries and was welcomed into my subconscious heart and mind.

Then I watched Rick Beato’s interview with Jimmy Webb, who wrote the song. He told an anecdote about James Taylor calling to say: “I thought you told me this song was in F”.  “It is in F” Webb says to Beato, but “it never goes to F.” What follows is a somewhat humble-bragged, peak music nerd, inside ball discussion of the musical complexity of the song. I love this stuff. The underpinning structures of that simple unforgettable melody are complicated! Webb also discusses the genesis of the song’s subtle but ingenious telegraph key motif. I love this stuff.

Then I watched Billy Joel at the 2010 Songwriters Hall of Fame awards, taking apart the lyric almost word by word. “It made me think about almost everyone in a different way,” he said before playing and singing a bit of it. “It’s as if anybody, anyone you see, a guy, you know, working on construction, maybe he’s got the soul of a poet. A commercial fisherman has, you know, with his heavy gear has the spirit of a John Steinbeck, and maybe a guy climbing up a telephone pole has the spirit of a Samuel Barber. And that’s what this song did to me.”

This resonates with me. This isn’t a moon in June lyric. Despite being the words for a massive hit song, these lyrics are also art. This is a good place to point out that Jimmy Webb also wrote “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, “Galveston”, MacArthur Park” and Up, Up and Away”. The first two of which were also big hits for Glen Campbell.

So then I started watching videos of Glen Campbell singing Wichita Lineman live, and saw that as time went by he began to sing the song with much more nuance than his performance on the recorded version, which is lacklustre by comparison. Onstage, he eventually also adds an emotional repeat of “still on the line” and, after a pregnant pause; “and I’m doin’ fine” at the close of the song. (Captured in the video above). The finale of the original recording was the epitome of anti-climax. Glen sings “and the Wichita lineman is still on the line” and the over-lush orchestra takes over – for way too many bars – and then slowly fades out. The updated arrangement is a welcome improvement, reminiscent of the change he made to the Orbison song in 1965. As a singer I also noticed, and have fixated on, the way he sang the word “Wichita” – over time it had transformed into something like “Wicha toe” with a strong emphasis on the “toe” part. I kinda like it. If you watch the video, notice what a facile and accomplished guitar player Campbell is. He was an in-demand session player for years before his solo singing career began, playing on hits like; “Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra, “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees and “Hello Mary Lou” by Ricky Nelson. I have watched many YouTube videos of Glen Campbell country-shredding and pickin’ and grinnin’. He was a remarkably talented man. One of my all time favourite albums is “Meet Glen Campbell”, a 2008 release featuring songs by U2, Green Day, Tom Petty, and Foo Fighters. It sounds weird, but trust me …

But I digress … significantly. I think Wichita Lineman is a perfect song, but not the perfect song. Lucky for all of us, there are many perfect songs. Some perfect for one person but not another. Some perfect for an unrepeatable moment in time. Some for good times and some for bad times. But yeah, Wichita Lineman is a perfect song. Hopefully, rabbit-holing it like this will help to exorcize it from my head.