What makes this song such a rarity is it’s located so strongly in the world of work. And so few songs are. And this brilliantly evokes a whole working world – with real specificity and real power. (If you don’t know – and I confess I didn’t - a lineman is one of those guys who installs, maintains and repairs overhead power and telephone lines.) In song-writing terms, this song is a masterpiece of simplicity – it covers so much ground so quickly.
The song also has a really strong sense of place. The writer Jimmy Webb was inspired by seeing a lineman half way up a telephone pole talking on the phone in the middle of miles of empty countryside in the Oklahoma Panhandle. But the song is actually set in Wichita, Kansas. Kansas is the home of the prairies – and as someone who spent a year at Kansas University – I can testify to the fact that this part of the world – consisting of huge expanses of flatlands covered in grasses – really is The Big Country, with an unending horizon. When the sun sets in Kansas, it sits on the rim of the horizon for hours.
Glenn Campbell’s sweet but smoky tenor is made for this song. He actually had a freakishly large vocal range, but you get a sense, listening to him, he rarely strayed from his comfort zone. You can hear the hidden power in the first verse. When he sings another overload, he suddenly takes the song really high but without any sense of straining.
The two verses give a really vivid picture of working conditions:
I am a lineman for the county
And I drive the main road
Searchin’ in the sun for another overload…
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.
On one level, the song could be read as being about alienation. The job pressures are felt so keenly because they cut him off from the one he loves; he is exiled from home. This is a song about the intense loneliness of working away from home. Because he feels personally responsible for delivering the power/telephone signal in a whole slice of the countryside (a county in the Midwest of America is about 800 square miles on average) in his mind he can’t really take a vacation.
Clearly linemen in the world of the song are over-worked and understaffed (by design, some would argue, to preserve profit margins). There’s no sense that if he’s off work, anyone would take his place. More insidiously, he has internalised the pressures on him by only asking for a small vacation (instinctively moderating his demands for time off). Note: he hasn’t actually asked for a vacation; he merely recognises that he needs one. Then he argues with himself about how possible it would be to take a vacation – because his ability to take one is weather-dependent. In essence, he’s internalised the voice of his manager. If it rains, he implies, he could take a holiday, presumably because it’s impossible to work in the rain. But, by the same token, if winter weather sets in, he will be needed more than ever. Catch 22. Basically, he is someone who has to work all the hours God sends. Choice here is an illusion. Because he is professional and he is conscientious, he carries on working. In effect, he is an unsung hero, one of the guys who just keep turning up.
But what is miraculous about the song is the way the job pressures become the focus and frame for a very moving love song. The pressures make him all the more acutely aware of what he is missing; of the collateral damage to his relationship. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, to coin a cliché. Each verse about the job has its corollary – a chorus which gives space to an inner voice pining for love:
I hear you singing in the wire
I can hear you through the whine
And the Wichita lineman
Is still on the line…
And I need you more than want you
And I want you for all time
And the Wichita lineman
Is still on the line.
In the line I can hear you through the whine, paradoxically, what is ugly becomes beautiful. The electric hum becomes the sound of her, a metaphor for her. There’s a beautiful pun on still on the line. On one level, he is still on the line in the sense of still being on the telephone talking to her. But he is also still on the line in the sense of still hanging from a telephone pole, still hard at work. It’s no coincidence that the music of the song at this point emulates the sonic vibrations you might hear on telephone wires – there’s a kind of electronic pulsing sound.
The second chorus is rightly famous for the beautifully romantic couplet, And I need you more than want you/And I want you for all time. The first line – almost damning with faint praise – is undercut by the extraordinary second, which goes into romantic overdrive, creating an image of infinite desire. It’s almost as if the first line is deliberately downbeat in order to throw the second into relief. The second line then forces a complete re-evaluation of the first line, creating an image of need that is off the scale. The statement, overall, manages to be both logical yet profoundly illogical at one and the same time. But it’s an attempt to express an inexpressible emotional truth. In interviews, the writer of the song Jimmy Webb has said he wanted to show that even an ordinary worker could have the soul of a poet. If that was his objective, you have to say he’s more than succeeded. In addition, he’s provided a remarkable illustration of how good Country music, as a genre, is at detailing the lives and experiences of blue-collar workers.
*While researching this song, & listening to videos of Glen Campbell singing it, I was struck again and again by how powerful some of the below-the-line comments posted by listeners were. It’s a measure of how much the song resonates. One listener – who was a lineman himself – posted that the only time he didn’t get a bollocking for arriving late for work was when he told his boss he was listening to Wichita Lineman on the radio. That was seen as a more than acceptable excuse. Another lineman posted that the song had been played at a colleague’s funeral and had reduced the entire male half of the congregation to tears.
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