Mojo - The Music Magazine

When Jimmy Webb was asked in MOJO 201 how he felt about the multiple strange interpretations of his insoluble 1968 composition, you detected a certain annoyance at the fact that people couldn't quite decide on exactly what the song was about. "I've heard more stupid things," he said, when asked how he reacted to the idea that Wichita Lineman was about cocaine. "I got a letter from a couple from Texas, she said they listened to it every day - can you believe that? She asked why he had to get electrocuted at the end of the song. I got another letter from a jock, he was happy I'd written a song about football. But what was serious and really hurt was when it was said that it was about mainlining heroin. I had to do some PR to stop that." It's perhaps understandable that some songwriters would be peeved by their listeners' inability to pinpoint the core meanings in their work but Jimmy Webb, the man responsible for such epic-pop Gordian Knots as MacArthur Park and The Yard Went On Forever? Surely not. The enduring power and beauty inherent in Wichita Lineman is as much to do with its shrouded meaning and muzzy narrative, as it is in its perfect spectral execution.

Written and recorded in less than two days at the end of 1968, Wichita Lineman was always an incomplete narrative. Instructed by producer Al De Lory to write a "geographical" follow-up to his previous smash collaboration with Campbell, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Webb drew on memories of driving through the boundless flatlands of northern Oklahoma, and the surreal spectacle of the lone telegraph workers, high up on the telephone poles. Writing the piece in just half an hour at the green baby grand in his LA home he was, crucially, never able to find words for the song's middle section. Campbell cut the track in under ninety minutes in Capitol's Studio A, with L.A.'s superior sessioners the Wrecking Crew, the gaps in Webb's narrative filled in later by De Lory's peculiar, sweeping string arrangements, Morse code like violin stabs and the humming electronic tremolo outro provided by Webb's Gulbranson organ.

So what remains unknown in Webb's narrative? Well who is the Wichita lineman? Is it the narrator, eerily addressing himself in the third person, or is it another telegraph worker competing for the affections of our "singing in the wires" beloved? It's a small matter but an important one, especially given the song ends with Campbell singing that "The Wichita lineman / Is still on the line". Are we to read that as an eternal state of loss, of longing, existential torpor or futility in the face of that eternally present 'other man'? In the process, Webb's refusal of the explicit brings extra layers of meaning to such lines such as "I know I need a small vacation but it don't look like rain / And if it snows that stretch down south won't ever stand the strain." We know that this is a man who won't (or possibly can't) speak in absolutes so what is he trying to say here? Is he just referencing the rigours of the job and his need for a holiday, or is he trying to convey something more, about his state of mental well-being? And what are we to make of De Lory's Morse code? Another hidden message?

Campbell's exquisitely weary delivery of these ambiguous lyrics is essential to their shifting meanings and this original version of Lineman - which reached Number 3 on the US charts in December 1968, selling over 700,000 copies - and remains the definitive interpretation. Other versions have shown that they may appreciate the song's ghostly melody but they're clueless in regards to the point of that veiled lyric. The normally excellent Cassandra Wilson, for example, royally ballses everything up. First she changes the lyric to "My man's a lineman for the country", which leads to "I hear him singing for the wires" and "my Wichita lineman is still on the line..." What in sod is all that about!? As soon as the woman knows that someone is listening in, where is the mystery, the spookiness, the loneliness and loss? Suddenly it's a song about a woman who's married to a man who listens in to her phonecalls when he's out at work, all with her consent. Then she truly buggers it all by singing "I know I need him more than want him / And I want him for all time". So it's you who needs him, Cass? So why is he the one pining for you, or doing whatever he's doing, out on the wire? Gibberish!

Willie Hutch gets similarly tangled up in knots, trying to decide who's who, and the unctuous Grammy Award-winning version by James Taylor, messes with the subtlety thanks to his slight changes (from "is still on the line" to "well he's still on the line") and odd, faint Jamaican diction and he, like R.E.M., can't resist vamping at the end, the repeated "still on the line" phrase now suggesting boredom ("He's still on the line!? Jeez!") rather than mystery or despair. Even Glen goes and screws up the ambiguity on a live 1968 version from The Smothers Brothers Show, singing "I'm the Wichita Lineman!" Next you'll be telling us who the Walrus is.

The amazing OC Smith, well he sounds like he doesn't care who the Wichita lineman is, as long as he's got a good Goddamn groove going but, the only other good version I can think of is Charles Stepney's and The Dells' 1969 medley of Wichita Lineman and By The Time I Get To Phoenix where Marvin Junior's baritone brings a barely veiled blue collar anger to the lyrics, keeps the ambiguity and, in melding the two songs makes you realise that Jimmy Webb's narrator could just be the same guy in both songs, who decides to take his "small vacation", a thousand miles west, in Phoenix, Arizona. Far enough away, and another thousand miles back to his home-town on the bay, in Galveston.