Glen Campbell - Wichita Lineman

One of the reasons Jimmy Webb’s songs are so enduring is his ability to see a commonplace, everyday thing and somehow imbue it with ache, wonder and tragedy.  One day in 1968, while making a long, solitary drive through Oklahoma, Jimmy spotted a ‘lineman’, a poor bastard whose job it is to drive out to bum-eff nowhere, shimmy up telephone poles with those cool handsets and repair broken telephone lines.  Jimmy must have sped by him in a second flat, but it was an image that stuck with him – an image of a solitary man, alone against the endless prairie horizon, patching the lines of communication between two imagined paramours, only experiencing love indirectly through their overheard conversations.  This imagined tragedy was committed to paper and became the song ‘Wichita Lineman’, often covered but never performed better than the first fella to put it to tape, Glen Campbell (pictured below).  This is, for my money, a shining example of songwriting done right.  From the rich, whirring backdrop, the outstanding vocal performance, to the quirky evoking of telegraph communication in the chorus, there’s plenty to latch on to in this gem, but as with most Jimmy Webb songs, the real prize is his prose:

I hear you singin’ in the wire / I can hear you through the whine

Jimmy’s lyrics expose him as a man who sees romance in everything, even the mundane, and especially the tragic.  This sort of outlook must make the world a far less boring place.  She wasn’t waving goodbye, she was fanning the flames.  The doctor frowned and prescribed penicillin but what he really meant was that love had torn a scar down me from crown to crotch and the searing flames of rapture would burn eternally, fed, ever hungering, by my ardor and clawing, tearing, desperately as they’re ripped reluctantly from within, spilled screaming into the porcelain.  That’s not a sandwich, it’s a towering edifice to edibility, a shimmering shrine to sustenance, before which one must bow down before they mow down.  That sort of thing.  Anyhow, listen to the song.