Wichita Lineman [w/free AUDIO today]
A song, the same song but different, and a make-believe memory.
This is a special piece for me, first drafted long ago, revised many times over the years, still imperfect but ready enough to be out there. I’ve included my voiceover file for everyone today, although normally only paid subscribers will receive that benefit. Ideally I would have played and added a custom piano track to this one as background music, but tech glitches got in my way. That said—make sure you take a moment to listen to the two embedded song videos below, especially if you’re not familiar with “Wichita Lineman”…
It was a late afternoon about ten years ago and I was driving somewhere without the kid, so I switched from his favorite pop station to WTMD, a local college NPR outlet known for its terrific indie and alternative music programming. The first sound I heard was a piano playing one high note, brightly but delicately repeated in a rhythm like a line of Morse code. I was mildly startled. It was an unexpected sound since even this eclectic station was still mostly committed to the hegemonic timbres of folk or rock guitars. As that one high piano note gave way to some plangent arpeggiated harmonies, I recognized the tune’s bones right away, although not this particular version. It was what I knew to be a Glen Campbell classic. Its unique sonic contours rose up in my memory from somewhere in early childhood but it was an unfamiliar voice singing, a voice that strained slightly to make that octave leap at the end of the first stanza, then clarified into a slow, tender vibrato. I was riveted by its vulnerable beauty.
There was something about the piano and voice presentation that struck me so intimately, in part because I could see my own hands playing in the rich, fluid manner I was hearing, and could imagine my own voice preparing to reach for that challenging high note. It takes energy to make that leap, but you don’t want to hit it too hard.
By the time the accompanying acoustic guitarist joined up in mid-song with a twangy solo break, I had arrived at my destination and was sitting in the parking lot with the engine still running. I realized I was holding my breath. The vocalist came back in and soon I heard the song’s most memorable, most romantic, most heartbreaking line, and as soon as he sang it, all the air fell out of my lungs.
And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time.
WTMD had played some of my own songs on occasion, had invited me and my band to perform live on the air, and had helped promote a big, collaborative Pink Floyd homage I’d dreamed up and produced in 2013 (an eclectic jazz-influenced reinterpretation of The Dark Side of the Moon). I’d long felt a proprietary affection toward the station. The DJ at that particular hour was a fan of mine who’d flirt shamelessly whenever I ran into him around town, but he did so in such a boyish, open manner, it had never bothered me. I love your music and I just have to say I have always had the biggest crush on you. A wide smile on his ginger-bearded face. I’d smile back and let myself be flattered while finding gratuitous reasons to mention, again, my husband and son.
On one occasion this DJ had asked me what was going on with my career, why I wasn’t out on tour or gigging around town more often. I explained that I wasn’t pursuing the music business aggressively at the moment. If something big happened by…happenstance…if some amazing opportunity came along, I’d pursue it but I didn’t have the wherewithal to be very ambitious at the moment. Mommyhood and all, I said. It was a partial truth, a convenient shorthand for a whole long story of ambivalence, exhaustion, and self-doubt. The flirty DJ nodded with a knowing, acquiescent smile as if I’d said something quite reasonable, as if there was no need to apologize further for my lack of drivenness. This surprised me. It was far more common for people to look at me as if I were slightly nuts or maybe just lazy. They wanted to urge me to push as hard as I could toward some presumed dream of fame and fortune, a dream they assumed I still harbored, and if not, they were excited to harbor it on my behalf.
Now as I sat in the idling car with the radio on, it was that very DJ on the airwaves introducing “Wichita Lineman,” performed by its original songwriter, Jimmy Webb, on a recent recording called TEN EASY PIECES produced almost thirty years after the Glen Campbell hit. That name was vaguely familiar to me but my mommy-brain couldn’t pinpoint it right away. The DJ took a moment to mention some of the other songs Jimmy Webb had penned during a long, award-winning Nashville career: “Up, Up, and Away,” “Galveston,” “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” “MacArthur Park.” All songs I had permanently stashed away in my inner, endless, gray-matter-recorded mixtape many decades ago. I made a mental note to order TEN EASY PIECES from iTunes as soon as I got home.
The DJ was doing the station’s regular feature called Five O’Clock Shadow, and so he immediately queued up the original Glen Campbell recording after the Jimmy Webb. It was in the same key but had a slightly more driving tempo, and the strings-heavy arrangement was far less melancholy. Even as the music turned relatively upbeat, a chill passed through me. From out of nowhere I was thinking of my father, of all the terrible things my mother had said to me about him after they divorced. That he had told her he’d grown tired of her before they even got married. That he had been cheating on her from the first months of their arrival in the US. My mother should not have been telling me any of those things—frankly, I wasn’t even sure how much I was supposed to believe—and yet I allowed myself to listen to her. I felt it was my duty, and I was desperate to hear something, anything to break open the angry silences and absolute lack of narrative coherence that had defined our household for so long. I craved her stories, no matter how shitty they were. How often and for how long had our father abandoned us all those years ago? How often had he left me alone in the care of this enraged, ranting, undoubtedly frightened and heartbroken woman?
Once I became a parent I realized how easy it was to feel the strain—from your past, from your present, from the world around you—and to pass that along as impatience and anger to the people you live with. I realized it was easy, and yet I had deliberately structured my life so that I could minimize external stresses and be as calm and kind a parent as I could, working imperfectly off a deliberate playbook instead of mindlessly repeating generational harms.
The daily news had always affected me too strongly but I could muster resilience when my growing boy and I could listen to NPR on the way to and from school and sometimes discuss what we were hearing together. He was becoming a pretty worldly young person, far more aware of politics and history than I was at his age. Several years later, during the Trump administration, I had to stop listening to radio news entirely. It was all…too….loud. My son and I would drive in silence or flip to a pop station to hear the current crop of hits. We would sing along together to Ed Sheeran or The Chainsmokers, Demi Lovato or Imagine Dragons, Taylor Swift or Shawn Mendes. As the boy-o entered his high school years and separated himself bit by bit from me, this was our one continued context for easy, instinctual bonding, those mass-appeal songs whose lyrics we had memorized and whose frequent Auto-Tune excesses we gently mocked.
(Oh yes. I had insisted that he, as against all his unwittingly ignorant peers, learn the difference between a genuine human singing voice and the overproduced robotic sound that had come to corrupt almost all pop vocal recordings. A little later on I was glad to know he was developing his own peer-influenced tastes out of my earshot, stuff he learned about from Instagram, heavier hip-hop and heavy metal rock tunes, profane and funny and dark. You shouldn’t listen to my playlist, Mom. You’ll think the lyrics are inappropriate. I secretly smiled when he told me that. It is in the natural order of things. A little early exposure to your pet enthusiasms is fine, but ultimately—and with apologies to Khalil Gibran—your children’s music is not your music.)
Sometimes I try to think of my parents as the young adults they were, heroically leaving home, finding themselves alone and probably afraid in this not-always-welcoming foreign nation, America the only sometimes Beautiful, arriving already damaged by their families in different yet weirdly complementary ways, rendered emotionally incompetent in part by a small-minded fundamentalist religious fervor, neither one of them equipped for stable adulthood or honest communication, let alone loyalty, reliability, friendship, peace.
From the tadpole stage, I swam in the troubled waters of their unhappiness. Their private miseries formed me. My mother used to tell me I was always angry as a child. Is that really true? Was I angry in the womb? Was I angry as a clump of sexless cells? She also used to tell me,You knew! She thinks I knew my father was having affairs. This seems implausible. A strange projection of a young wife’s bitterness, perhaps. Yet I understand what she means. Was I not built to reflect her pain?
I imagine myself at two years old, going on three, hair in a convenient bowl cut, new teeth growing askew in my mouth. I stand barelegged in a short purple felt dress at the big picture window of our rented house in our brief hometown of Montreal to bang on the cold glass, yelling DADDY DADDY DADDY DADDY DADDY while my mother behind me weeps and rages.
I am always angry. I was born angry. I will die angry. (That was the story then.) But I thought I could be free of them, Mom and Dad, thought I could will myself into a whole new family-free identity forged from pop songs and badass, borrowed Manhattan attitude and lofty ambition. I thought I could fill the dark pit with the kind words of friends, the encouragement of teachers and mentors and bandmates, the sales of concert tickets, the statistics of track downloads. Was this delusional or just naive? It’s true I had entered the marketplace and found a healthy number of people glad to know me, just as libertarian zealots might applaud. Those people, those fans, could triple, quadruple, be multiplied by one hundred thousand. Besides the money, what difference would that make?
My father is nowhere to be found.
My betrayed, distraught mother puts the television on.
It was kept high up on a shelf, higher than normal, or maybe I just remember it that way because I was so small, a tiny skinny brown mouse of a girl, sparking with hurt.
It’s The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. A familiar strings intro begins. The studio audience applauds. Glen sits at the lip of the stage with his guitar. He begins to sing. He’s smiling in a sweet, open way. It’s as if he doesn’t know how sad this song actually is, this brief musical poem about deep loneliness and missed connections.
Jimmy Webb will later tell interviewers that the song was never quite finished in his mind, but if that’s the case, it is pure and perfect in its unfinished state, like a three-quarter-built cathedral with scaffolds suspended in the air forever.
Glen is a polished vocalist and stylish guitarist, a maker of hits. The octave leap is nothing for him; his voice spans it effortlessly, like a muscular arm taking one strong powerful freestyle stroke through still waters.
Glen sits under the lights at the lip of the stage and he smiles and he sings.
For just a moment I turn away from the ice-cold window and pull out of my tantrum to open my ears and eyes and stare up at the TV screen—transfixed, becalmed, silently memorizing each word and each note.