The Greatest Songs Ever! Wichita Lineman

As “Wichita Lineman” was being shipped, Lyndon Johnson was ordering an end to American bombing in Vietnam, and, shortly after, Richard Nixon would replace LBJ in the White House. Jimi Hendrix was featured in Look magazine, Cream were earning platinum records and the Bosstown Sound hype was flooding the media. The first 747 took to the air, the Apollo 8 astronauts orbited the moon and NASA selected the crew for the first lunar landing.

It hardly seemed an auspicious moment to release an old-fashioned homesick country ballad, but Glen Campbell and producer Al De Lory had booked sessions in Capitol Records’ Studio A in Los Angeles, and they were short of material.

“Glen and I had previously hit with ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ ” recalls the song’s composer, Jimmy Webb. “I was living in Hollywood, in the former Philippine embassy, with 50 of my closest friends — a bunch of people hanging out. I paid the bills. I had a green baby grand piano. I got a call one day from Glen saying, ‘We’re recording; do you think you could write us another ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’?”

Despite his reservations about simply copying an earlier hit, Webb felt he could craft something with a geographical reference in the title, in a style similar to that of “Phoenix.”

“Some time earlier,” he says, “I had been driving around northern Oklahoma, an area that’s real flat and remote — almost surreal in its boundless horizons and infinite distances. I’d seen a lineman up on a telephone pole, talking on the phone. It was such a curiosity to see a human being perched up there in those surroundings.”

The image returned to Webb, and he spent two hours that afternoon “noodling on the green baby” until he came up with a tune. “Except that it wasn’t finished. There was a whole section in the middle that I didn’t have words for, which eventually became the instrumental part.”

What Webb didn’t know was that De Lory’s uncle was a lineman in Kern County, California. “So as soon as I heard that opening line,” De Lory recalls, “I could visualize my uncle up a pole in the middle of nowhere. I loved the song right away, and I knew it was right for Glen.”

Overruling Webb’s insistence that “Lineman” wasn’t finished, De Lory asked for a demo, which Webb recorded by simply placing a tape recorder on top of his piano.

Campbell familiarized himself with the demo, and within two days he was laying down the basic track in Studio A with his old colleagues from L.A.’s finest session team, the Wrecking Crew. “Carol Kaye was on bass, and she gave us the opening lick,” he recalls. “Then I used her bass, a Danelectro, to play the guitar solo.”

They cut the track in less than 90 minutes. De Lory took it home to work out an orchestral arrangement.

Meanwhile, Campbell dropped by Webb’s house, where he had a revelation. “Synthesizers were very rare in those days,” Webb says, “so I’d buy elaborate church organs with lots of stagey effects. I had a Gulbranson, which had a humming, resonating, reverberating electronic sound with a tremolo quality, but also an echo, so there was a lot of sustain. Kind of a bubbling noise.”

Webb demonstrated the sound to Campbell, suggesting that it might be good for evoking the sound of signals in telephone wires. “I loved it right off,” says Campbell, “so I ordered a company to come and dismantle this huge organ and move it to Studio A.”

Webb followed the organ to the studio and, on arrival, heard De Lory’s orchestration, including the signature Morse code-style violin stabs on the chorus of the song. “I was just the tiniest bit irritated that Al hadn’t asked me to do the strings,” he says, “because I was crazy about playing with orchestras. But Al’s arrangement was wonderful. I wouldn’t add anything to it or take anything away.”

Within 20 minutes, Webb added his Gulbranson sound. “Just three notes, but it produced a kind of electronic chiming — which might be a telecommunications sound, a satellite sound or something of that nature,” Webb says.

The sound appears as the track fades (at 2:44), and De Lory later doubled some of the keyboard with strings — the perfect finishing touch.

By December 21, 1968, “Wichita Lineman” had reached number 1 on the country singles chart, selling more than 700,000 copies in two months. On January 11, 1969, it hit its Billboard chart peak of number 3, and on January 22 the Recording Industry Association of America certified the song as gold.

Two months later, at the eleventh annual Grammy Awards, “Wichita Lineman” earned a Best Engineered Recording nod for the efforts of engineers Joe Polito and Hugh Davies.

“Every element in the track was perfect,” Campbell says. “It’s certainly the song that put me on the map.”

“It’s a beautiful, sad, yet not depressing piece of music,” says Mike Mills of R.E.M., who occasionally perform the song live. “It’s one of the most evocative songs I’ve ever heard.”

Country-soul siren Shelby Lynne concurs. Like R.E.M., Lynne has covered “Wichita Lineman” in concert; she’s in a perfect position to appreciate the song’s enduring charms. “I’m a fool for great melodies and great lyrics,” she says, “and that song has both. And those chord progressions are just fantastic.”

Webb feels the same way. “People say my songs and Glen’s voice were a perfect combination. He brought my music into the mainstream, placed it squarely in front of the public. My life would have turned out a whole lot differently if he hadn’t.”