Glen Campbell started his career as a guitarist with the Wrecking Crew, that loose collective of session musicians that contributed to thousands of studio recordings in the 1960s and 1970s (and who were also Phil Spector’s de facto house band). The list of artists whose recordings he played on is a who’s who of the American sixties music scene (he was best mates with Elvis, too), and all this was before he became a successful solo artist in his own right. His first real hit, in 1965, was a version of Buffy Saint-Marie’s Universal Soldier, and in 1967 he scored hits with Gentle On My Mind and By The Time I Get To Phoenix.
That last song was written by Jimmy Webb and, buoyed by its success, Glen Campbell had phoned Webb and asked him if he had any other “geographical” songs to follow it up. He hadn’t, but he wrote one anyway: Wichita Lineman. Webb’s inspiration for the lyrics came while driving westward on a straight road through Washita County in rural south-western Oklahoma. Driving past a seemingly endless line of telephone poles, he noticed in the distance the silhouette of a solitary lineman atop a pole. In Webb’s own words:
It was a splendidly vivid, cinematic image that I lifted out of my deep memory while I was writing this song. I thought, I wonder if I can write something about that? A blue collar, everyman guy we all see everywhere – working on the railroad or working on the telephone wires or digging holes in the street. I just tried to take an ordinary guy and open him up and say, ‘Look there’s this great soul, and there’s this great aching, and this great loneliness inside this person and we’re all like that. We all have this capacity for these huge feelings’.
Webb delivered what he regarded and labelled as an incomplete version of the song, warning that he had not completed a third verse or a middle eight. Campbell soon nailed the lack of a middle eight section with some of his Wrecking Crew pals (adding a baritone guitar interlude as well as the orchestrally arranged outro known to British Radio 2 listeners as DJ Steve Wright’s theme music!). Webb was surprised to hear that Campbell had recorded the song when he ran into him:
‘I guess you guys didn’t like the song.’
‘Oh, we cut that’
‘But it wasn’t done! I was just humming the last bit!‘
‘Well, it’s done now!'”
And what a lovely song it was, too!
