Dylan Jones' luminous excavation of Jimmy Webb's song 'Wichita
Lineman' offers a portal into a defining moment of American cultural
history. The sound of Wichita Lineman was the sound of ecstatic
solitude - but then its hero was the quintessential loner. What a great
metaphor he was: a man who needed a woman more than he actually wanted
her. Here, deep in American Arcadia, was a man in deep existential
crisis.
Written in 1968 by Jimmy Webb, "Wichita Lineman" is the first
philosophical country song: a heartbreaking torch ballad still
celebrated for its mercurial songwriting genius 50 years later. It was
recorded by Glen Campbell in LA with a legendary group of musicians
known as "the Wrecking Crew", and something about the song's enigmatic
mood seemed to capture the tensions of America at a moment of
unprecedented crisis. Fusing a dribble of bass, searing strings, tremolo
guitar and Glen Campbell's plaintive vocals, Webb's paean to the
American West describes a telephone lineman's longing for an absent
lover who he hears 'singing in the wire' - and like all good love songs,
it's an SOS from the heart.
Mixing close-listening, interviews and travelogue, Dylan Jones explores
the legacy of a record that has entertained, perplexed and haunted
millions for over half a century. What is it about this song that
continues to fascinate and seduce listeners, and how did the parallel
stories of Campbell and Webb - songwriters and recording artists from
different ends of the spectrum - unfold in the decades following the
song's success? Part biography, part work of musicological archaeology,
The Wichita Lineman opens a window onto America in the late twentieth
century through the prism of a song that has been covered by myriad
artists in the intervening decades.
