It might have been penned more than half a century ago, but Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman remains a source of fascination for listeners and other songwriters.
Made famous by Glen Campbell when it was released in 1968, the song has become a fixture on ‘greatest of all time’ lists but, as Webb reiterates in a new interview with The Guardian, Campbell actually recorded it based on an incomplete demo.
“I said, ‘But Glen, it isn’t finished,’” Webb told Campbell when he found out that he’d already cut the song. “He said, ‘It is now.’”
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Webb also recalls the moment that the idea for Wichita Lineman hit him, which came as he was driving through the plains of Oklahoma.
“Nothing out there except endless railroad tracks and telephone poles. Then suddenly there’s a guy at the top of one of the poles. He’s got his phone, he’s talking to somebody and then … whoosh! He goes by. I never saw him again, but I never forgot him.”
A lot of time has been spent dissecting the lyrics to Wichita Lineman and trying to establish exactly what it’s about, and everyone is entitled to find their own meaning in the song. Webb admits, though, that some interpretations have been far removed from his own.
“You wouldn’t believe what some people thought it was about,” he says. “One guy who wrote to me thought it was about a football lineman, and a woman thought the young man in the song gets electrocuted because ‘the Wichita lineman is still on the line.’”
Webb can laugh about this, but other dissections of the song have hit him very differently – such as Billy Joel’s deconstruction at the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
“He said, ‘And I need you more than want you … that’s divorce, right?’” Webb remembers. “The audience were roaring. Then he got to ‘and I want you for all time’ and said, ‘Ultimately Wichita Lineman is about an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts.’ And I got tears, you know.”
At his creative peak, Webb – now 80 – was writing so many songs that not all of them ended up being recorded, but some of these are now seeing the light of day on his new album: Yours For The Taking: The Found Songs of Jimmy Webb. Some of these are sung by Webb on his own, while guests on others include Graham Nash, Michael McDonald, Marc Cohn and Amy Grant.
Beyond that, Webb has also written songs for another album, so how does he keep doing it? “By listening to other people’s songs and trying to copy them,” he says, which seems like as good a piece of advice as any.
