I first heard Wichita Lineman when Glen Campbell recorded it back in 1968.  Something about its aching wistfulness just grabbed me, even back then, well before I had any interest whatever in the dating and mating game. In 1968 I was in Junior High School (they call it Middle School nowadays…). I was 14 that summer, and already starting to get teased for my utter indifference to the opposite sex. But thanks to a really brutal sex ed class taught by our gym teachers, who loaded our little adolescent brains with a ton of horrific lies about homosexuals, I knew I couldn’t possibly be one of those. Girls just weren’t all that interesting, and the guys who big deal out of sex were morons.  I was above all that crap.

Yet even then, something about songs of loneliness and longing spoke to me.  Maybe it was because my family had just moved, again, and I’d had to leave another group of hard won friends behind.  Maybe it was that best friend who said he’d write and he never did.  Maybe it was seeing all the guys start turning their attention towards girls, and something deep down inside of me just knew, somehow, that I was going to have a much harder time of it then they would.  Yet, I very seldom paid any attention to the lyrics of a song.  My ear always treats the vocalizations as just another part of the music.  Lyrics are just too literal for the place where I go, when the music sweeps me up.  Railroading was the first context I’d heard the term ‘lineman’ used, and so for years I vaguely thought Wichita Lineman was about a train engineer, working a lonely branch line somewhere in Kansas. But it’s about a telephone lineman…

I am a lineman for the county and I drive the main road
Searchin’ in the sun for another overload

It’s a Jimmy Webb song.  A lot of the popular radio songs I used to listen to once upon a time, have turned out to be Jimmy Webb songs.  By the Time I Get to Phoenix.  Wichita Lineman.  Galveston.  Brad DeLong said of MacArthur Park that one of its many great beauties is that "…the schmaltziness of the metaphors and similes is so extreme and unbelievable that they deconstruct the ideas of "schmaltz" and "kitsch." Nobody could use these metaphors with a straight face. Yet the narrator of the song somehow does."  I’ll never listen to Galveston again the same way, after DeLong pointed out on his blog that it was about a solider in Vietnam, cleaning his gun for the next battle, knowing he would die before his love back home could see him again.  Webb’s father was a Baptist minister and ex Marine.  His mother died when he was still a teen.  All of his most popular songs were all composed when he was between 19 and 21 years of age.

I hear you singin’ in the wire…

The song is about a lineman who randomly hears a person’s voice while he is working on the lines, perhaps while he was testing the lines with an earphone, but considering the lyrics it’s more likely he’s hearing induction of local radio station signals directly into the wires. The radio and TV stations on the great plains are allowed to use considerably more power then here on the coast, for obvious reasons. Sometimes, those long stretches of copper wires will actually serve to rectify a strong signal, making them sing…

…I can hear you through the whine

That wistful whining of the strings in the Glen Campbell version of this make a lot more logical sense when you know all this, and yet you don’t need to know it at all: the sound works perfectly as music.  It evokes, at least for me, the emotion the lyrics speak to.  I have traveled the great plains just about every year I could by car, and it’s even more lonesome there then the southwestern deserts ever get. The Big Empty is how I think of it, beautiful though it is.  And far from the noise of the cities and the Interstates, it’s Quiet.  So quiet sounds normally masked to you begin to come forward.  You hear the wind gently rustling the tall grass.  You hear grasshoppers jump from one blade to the next.  Stand out there long enough, perfectly still, and you can start to hear your own heart beating.

And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line

Picture someone working those telephone lines alone in that gently rolling sea of tall grass. In 1968, long before cell phones and the internet and satellite TV, those long stretches of copper wire vaulting from one horizon to the next were all that kept the people of the plains in any sort of direct contact with the rest of the world.  His job is important to his people. He is keeping them connected to each other.  But what of him?

I know I need a small vacation but it don’t look like rain
And if it snows that stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain

Working high on the telephone poles in the middle of The Big Empty, you could easily imagine yourself the only person on earth. Yet the wires in your hands are alive with the high pitched confused noise of busy human chatter. The sound rises and falls as you work, like the quiet hiss of waves washing gently up on a shore, and then drawing back into the sea. The human race is having a conversation with itself. But its all jumbled together, out of phase, mixed with random harmonics and radio frequency heterodyning. All you hear is a gentle whine coming off the wires. But the human ear, like the human eye, tries to discern order within chaos. The lineman hears, or he thinks he hears, a voice…and it beguiles him.

And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line

Perhaps the voice fades back quickly into the whine and he never hears it again.  Perhaps it comes and goes.  The song does not say.  Perhaps the lineman hears it randomly from then on while he works out on the lines.  A beautiful, beguiling voice, keeping him company while he gets on with his life out in The Big Empty.

Highway 64, Near Guymon, Oklahoma – June 2006