Jimmy Webb was living in Hollywood, accompanied by 50 of his closest friends and a green baby grand piano, when he got a call from Glen Campbell. The country star had a studio session booked, and a shortage of songs. Could Webb write him a new one? Something in the vein of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, the Webb number with which Campbell had had a monster hit in 1967.
Webb spent a couple of hours tinkering at the piano, coming up with a tune, and a set of lyrics that fitted an image that had come to him. “Some time earlier, I’d been driving around northern Oklahoma, an area that’s real flat and remote, almost surreal in its boundless horizons and infinite distances,” he told Blender magazine in 2001. “I’d seen a lineman up on top of a telephone pole, talking on the phone. It was such a curiosity to see a human being perched up there in those surreal surroundings.”
In the lineman, out alone on the open prairie, Webb hit on a perfect vessel to ruminate on the nature of love: the man wholly alone with his thoughts, switching between the job (“If it snows, that stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain”), his ennui (“I know I need a small vacation”) and his relationship. “Wichita Lineman” is a brief song — just 12 lines, the final three repeated once — yet it contains multitudes. The combination of the economy of the lyric — “And I need you more than want you / And I want you for all time” — and the sweeping melancholy of the melody gave it a universality, and a strange ambivalence: it’s not swooningly romantic, it’s anxiously romantic.
Campbell’s single was released in October 1968, reaching number three in the Billboard Hot 100, as well as number one in Canada and number seven in the UK. A slew of covers followed immediately: the website SecondHandSongs lists 29 by the end of 1969 alone. Tony Joe White played it straight; Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66’s treatment was less intoxicatingly bizarre than one might have hoped for; Tom Jones hammered the subtlety out of it; Smokey Robinson and the Miracles were more delicate, but Robinson’s glorious falsetto is not that of the titular character.
“Wichita Lineman” was irresistible to country artists, to easy listening stars, and to soul and funk artists, who often used it as a gentle palate cleanser: on their 1971 album Live at the Sex Machine, Kool & the Gang followed their instrumental rendition with a furious version of Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher”. The best of the soul versions, perhaps, came from O.C. Smith, who teetered on the brink of overwrought, without quite tipping over.
As the 1970s passed, the cover versions started to dry up (though David Bowie's “Starman” picked up on its Morse code-like bridge motif), before picking up again when a new generation began to genuflect before Webb’s songcraft. These artists didn’t always have Glen Campbell’s ease with the song: Heaven 17’s Glenn Gregory, never the most relaxed of singers, sounds as if he’s sitting very uncomfortably atop the telephone pole on B.E.F.’s 1982 version. But the Chicago alternative band Urge Overkill recorded it as their debut single in 1987 in a way that sounds both wholly respectful and wildly inappropriate.
Perhaps the oddest homage to Webb and Campbell came, however, when it started cropping up in the live set of a band who, in their feral heyday, wouldn’t have been caught dead singing a Glen Campbell song. And yet, in front of 80,000 headbangers at last year’s Download festival, Guns N’ Roses offered their take.
Ultimately, though, few songs have ever been so perfect, and few have entered the world in a version so perfect that it proved impossible to improve on.
What are your memories of ‘Wichita Lineman’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Nashville Catalog; Virgin EMI; Columbia/Legacy; Virgin UK; Touch and Go Records
Picture credit: Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images