Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman Almost Didn’t Make It To the Line
(Prelude: On March 11, 2020, I talked to Jimmy Webb in advance of his scheduled appearance at the Long Island music club My Father’s Place. Within a week or so, that appearance and virtually every other live music performance for the next 18 months had been or would be cancelled. So nothing was published. But Webb turned 78 this week, as fellow music nut Matthew Auerbach noted, and since I write a lot about artists who have died, it seemed like a fine idea to write about someone who’s important, interesting and still alive.)
Jimmy Webb didn’t want to write “Wichita Lineman.”
It’s good that he did, since over the past 56 years the song has been performed by artists from Guns N’ Roses and R.E.M. to Ray Charles and Sergio Mendes and Brazil ’66. That’s not bad for a tune modestly ticketed at its conception as Glen Campbell’s next country single. It’s enshrined in the Grammy Hall of Fame, as well as Rolling Stone’s top 500 songs and the Library of Congress. Homer Simpson sang it.
Still, Webb was looking for a way not to write it.
“Glen called me,” he said, “and told me ‘We’ve got an album coming out and we’re in a bind, getting a bunch of crappy songs. Can you write me a follow-up to “By the Time I Get To Phoenix”?’
“I said I was trying to get away from songs about places. Glen was disappointed, but he said something maybe more geophysical, staying away from the town itself, but telling a story in cinematic terms.
“That resulted in ‘Wichita Lineman.’ I remembered how I used to drive with my father through the Oklahoma panhandle. It’s 50 miles to New Mexico and all you see are telephone poles and wires. No buildings, no buffalo, no nothing. Just guys working on the poles.”
For lyrical purposes, the Oklahoma lineman became the Wichita lineman — a character Billy Joel once described as “an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts.”
“When I read that Billy had said that,” Webb said, “it made me cry.”
One of the funny things about the song, Webb mused, is that while listeners focus on the lineman, that wasn’t the only element he was seeing as central to the story.
“When we were kids [in Oklahoma],” he said, “we would go down to the railroad tracks and listen to the wires. They actually sing. They have pitch. They make music.
“When I wrote the song, I could see them talking.”
He wrote the song “in an afternoon,” he said, except in his mind it wasn’t yet fully written. It had two verses and needed a third. It didn’t have a bridge.
“About three weeks later, I ran into Glen and said, ‘That song I sent you, it wasn’t finished.’ He said, ‘Well, now it is.’ He’d already recorded it.”
“Wichita Lineman” came right in the middle of Webb’s peak stretch, between “Up, Up and Away” (1967) and “Galveston” (1969), when this kid who was still in his mid-20s kept turning out the likes of “MacArthur Park” and “The Worst That Could Happen.”
Philosophically, the soaring buoyancy of “Up, Up and Away” contrasted sharply with the wistful “Phoenix” and “Wichita.” Their common ground lay in siren melodies perfect for easy listening charts yet also complex enough to engage serious musicians and inspire a long stream of often differing interpretations.
“With ‘Wichita,’ the first time I thought I might have something semi-important was when James Taylor recorded it,” Webb said. “He just sang the living bejesus out of it. When he hits the high note at the end, I was thinking, ‘How long can he hold it for?’ It must be a minute. It’s such a wonderful interpretation.”
Other interpretations of his songs have, well, surprised him.
“There have been some radical changes,” he said. “The difference between what I write and what people record can be almost shocking.”
That’s one reason why, by the early 1970s, Webb was recording his songs himself and hitting the road to play them — both the ’60s classics and the new ones he kept writing, like “The Highwayman” or “Still Within the Sound of My Voice.” He wanted his audience to hear the songs as he did.
“When someone makes a record,” he said, “they’re making it for an audience that requires certain things — rhythm, tempo, intonation and so on.
“All that is on the table to be changed. So when I play the songs, they can sound radically different [from what listeners are used to]. To me, they’re more complex. You hear more of my influences, like Irish hymnals.
“When I first played ‘Galveston’ for Glen, it was a lot slower. My version is elegiac. Glen’s has almost a patriotic feel.”
Growing up, Webb himself heard songs from all over the map, though his father was a Baptist preacher and ex-Marine who would allow young James to listen only to gospel and country music. That never works, and by the time Jimmy’s teenage years had arrived, so had Elvis Presley. His mother had encouraged him to learn piano and organ, and he eventually studied music at San Bernardino Valley College, which led him to stay in Los Angeles and try to make a living as a songwriter. His father warned him he would fail, but wished him luck and gave him $40.
Looking back, Webb said, the songs of the 1950s and early 1960s formed a better learning ground than their reputation might suggest.
“You had ‘The Purple People Eater’,” he said, “but you also had ‘El Paso,’ a wonderful cinematic ballad. You had Burt Bacharach, you had ‘I Think I’m Going Out of My Head’ and ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.’ Every songwriter wishes they’d written that. Then you got to Pet Sounds and the Beatles records.
“And there was Dylan, who was like John the Baptist. He was the voice in the wilderness telling us something was about to happen, and it did. I don’t think anyone compares to Bob. Maybe Springsteen.”
One artist who particularly spoke to him then, he said, was Joni Mitchell.
“I used to listen to her and I’d feel my fingers flying,” he said. “Her choice of chords and her lyrics took me to a transcendent place.
“I was influenced. I was pushed. This was better songwriting. This wasn’t the top-40 we grew up on. This was a dive deeper and deeper into the psyche. She turned conversation into songwriting.”
That golden era of songwriting. Webb suggested, ended on a high note.
“My favorite Beatles album was Abbey Road,” he said. “And I think Abbey Road also told us it was coming to an end.”
In the early ’70s, he said, “We still had artists like Randy Newman and Jackson Browne. But by the late ’70s, we were in the midst of a lot of tacky, insignificant music.
“I’m not crazy about most of the songs I hear now, either. Which, I know, makes me sound like Grumpy Old Grandpa.”
He was laughing as he said that, but not apologizing — the same way he was laughing and not apologizing several years earlier when he was talking about “MacArthur Park” and admitted, “I still have no idea where the damned cake came from. Or why anyone would leave it in the rain.”
What made him shake his head more vigorously was recalling how, as a teenage kid from the quintessential traditional American heartland, he found himself in the company of Frank Sinatra.
“Just to walk into a room and see him sitting in front me” was surreal, Webb said. “And then I spent a lot of time around him. He loved songwriters. He’d have me play for him.”
In 1979 Sinatra recorded “MacArthur Park,” partly because he savored the way Webb tucked a song inside a song.
“I knew Sinatra for almost 30 years,” Webb said. “He was a great guy. He never made me feel like an outsider. I was sort of a member of the family.
“When people tell you they do not want to meet their heroes, I found that actually isn’t true. I’ve met many of mine, and I’ve been very pleased. Liza Minnelli was like the girl next door.”
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line.
