The late Glen Campbell, well, he just wasn't cool enough once upon a time, was he? But as the years went on, he gained solid cred and so did the man who wrote songs for him, Jimmy Webb, whose greatest song may well be The Wichita Lineman.
It’s a strange song, full of strange pictures, allied forever in our consciousness to Campbell's plaintive but optimistic vocal. If it was a short story, it would have been the first one maybe in one of those stout anthologies of American stories that appeared around 30 years ago in venerable, fat paperbacks, edited by fellows like Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff.
Your reviewer's first trip out of Ireland in late December 1975 was on a long-distance truck through Europe. The hits of Glen Campbell were on the cab stereo, truck drivers must have liked him, my new trucker pal, Ned, did anyway.
Galveston, By the Time I Get to Phoenix and Wichita Lineman – all Jimmy Webb songs - became mixed up by sonic association with lit-up high rise buildings in Arnhem or that stop, again by night, near dense green trees close to the city of Mainz. There I was on the footpath, telling myself I was in Germany for the first time in my life. There was the intense chill of sitting in an empty cab in Rotterdam, while the driver processed papers as Ireland got used to EU bureaucracy.
These were songs about American places, but the point is they travelled well through Europe, being in essence road songs that depended on the redolence of place names. For many aficionados, Wichita Lineman, written in 1968, might be the best of the Webb road songs, its cinematic images in your head as streaming rain is washed away to the percussive off-beat of the wipers.
The song, in Campbell's version, made the number 3 spot on the US pop chart, and was in the Top 100 for 15 weeks. In this country, you will hear it regularly enough, inevitably following a request to play it on The Ronan Collins Show. Those Webb songs still travel well for those of us of a certain age, and even for those of us below a certain age. Indeed Conor O'Brien of Villagers, born 1984, does a very creditable version of The Wichita Lineman.
The song describes a telephone lineman's yearning for his lover, he hears her 'singing in the wire’ - what an image that is, pure poetry. In Jones' account of the song's history, the amiable country singer of Scottish descent who made it into an immortal hit is the subject of chapter one, Becoming Glen Campbell. Webb, the writer, is the subject of chapter two, Becoming Jimmy Webb and thus it proceeds.
Before it became Glen’s song, it was a matter of Jimmy sitting down to a piano on his own, dreaming it up, or channeling it, more like. He fixed his gimlet mind's eye on that magical-sounding location, Wichita and all that radiated from it in the writing of the song.
Campbell believed the reason why he got on so well with Webb, and the reason he ended up recording his songs, was down to the fact that they grew up within 150 miles of each other. Webb was born in Oklahoma in 1946, Campbell was born in Arkansas ten years earlier in 1936, before his family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. "That’s what we grew up with," said Campbell, " the good songs, the good lyrics, the good big-band stuff. (Webb’s) melodies and chord progressions were as good as anything I’d ever heard."
This 270-page book interweaves the biographies of both Webb and Campbell with the background to the songs that brought both musicians together some 40 years ago for a fruitful spell as they pooled creative forces and became firm friends. The author draws on his own story too, one which includes a memorable road trip, 30 years ago, across that vast country, from New York to Nevada, by way of Texas, New Mexico – Campbell country – and Nevada.
Dylan Jones is an interesting choice as the man to write this work because he was, through his youthful years, successively, a Dean Martin, Beach Boys, Bowie, Steely Dan and Ramones ‘obsessive,' with of course, Campbell/Webb hoving into sight at some point. Otherwise there would be no decent book, crafted with love.
Obsessives are good for books such as this one. However, it is best if they haven't always been obsessive about the subject matter, as the adulation tends to get too heady and po-faced. So there is a sense of useful counterpoint here, a sense of someone coming at a song and a singer and a song-writer from an unlikely angle. Too much could be made of that, however, and many of us anyway love lots of things in our eclectic age.
In sum, Jones’ affection for Webb and Campbell and his easy-worn knowledge of the details of their lives and songs is infectious and engrossing.
