Glen Campbell Stories

(written by Jimmy Webb)

 Glen Campbell (#1 country, #3 pop, #1 adult contemporary, 1968)

 Glen Campbell’s professional career began in 1954 as a member of his uncle’s country band in Albuquerque, New Mexico. By 1960 he had decided to make his way to Los Angeles in an attempt to make his mark as a session musician. His prowess on the guitar was immediately noticed and Glen became a member of the “Wrecking Crew,” the West Coast’s answer to Nashville’s renowned “A Team.” The Wrecking Crew was a group of musicians that played on almost all of the biggest pop records coming out of Los Angeles by such artists as Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, The Monkees, Jan and Dean, Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, to name just a few.

While working as a session player, Campbell also made his vocal debut with a modest #61 tally on Billboard’s Hot 100 pop chart with “Turn Around, Look At Me” on the tiny Crest label. This small success helped Glen secure a record deal from Capitol Records in 1962. His first release for Capitol, a cover of Al Dexter’s 1944 number one country hit “Too Late to Worry, Too Blue to Cry,” provided Campbell with another minor pop entry, but when subsequent singles failed to chart, Capitol strongly considered dropping him from the label.

In a last-ditch effort, Campbell was teamed with producer Al De Lory in 1966. Together, they first collaborated on a song called “Burning Bridges” which became Glen’s first top 20 country hit in early ’67. His next notable single was “Gentle on My Mind” which somehow became a country standard despite its mediocre chart peak of only #30. The real breakthrough occurred when Campbell recorded the first of his nine chart placements written by Jimmy Webb: “By The Time I Get to Phoenix,” which landed at #2 for two weeks on Billboard’s country chart and topped out at a decent #26 on the pop survey. Glen picked up a total of four Grammy awards for “Gentle on My Mind” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and major stardom was just around the corner.

With Campbell’s record of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” along with The Fifth Dimension’s mega-hit “Up, Up and Away” and actor Richard Harris’s #2 record “MacArthur Park,” Jimmy Webb was about the hottest songwriter in Los Angeles in late 1967.  “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” (based on Webb’s real-life breakup with a girlfriend) had been out for about six months, although Jimmy and Glen Campbell still hadn’t met. They finally ran into each other one day at a session and Glen asked Webb if he had any more “town songs” (obviously thinking about a follow-up to “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”). Jimmy replied that he didn’t at the moment, but he promised to come up with something. He went home that afternoon and began writing “Wichita Lineman” specifically for Campbell.

Webb’s inspiration for the lyrics came from a time he remembered driving through Washita County, in rural southwestern Oklahoma. At the time many telephone companies were county-owned facilities, and their linemen were county employees. Heading west into the setting sun along State Route 152 in a very flat, desolate and wide-open part of Oklahoma, Webb drove past a seemingly endless string of telephone poles, each looking exactly the same as the others. Then, in the distance, he noticed the silhouette of a solitary lineman atop a pole. He described it as “a prairie gothic image.” Webb then “put himself atop that pole and put that phone in his hand” as he considered what the lineman might be saying into the receiver (the lyrics describe the loneliness that a telephone or electric company lineman feels while he works, and his longing for an absent lover). Reportedly, the storyline of “Wichita Lineman” was based around the same ex-girlfriend that had inspired the earlier hit “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” In order for the new song to be more identifiable with listeners, “Wichita” was substituted for “Washita” because it “sang better” as Webb put it.

Webb wrote the first verse and part of a second verse of “Wichita Lineman” and sent a rough demo tape of it over to the studio to see if Campbell and his producer Al De Lory liked it. Jimmy planned to finish the second verse and write a third verse and a chorus if they liked what he had done with the song so far. Otherwise, Webb felt there was no need to spend any more time on it. When he never heard back from Campbell, Webb assumed he just wasn’t interested in the song. When he saw Glen several weeks later, Jimmy asked him, “So, whatever happened with that ‘Wichita Lineman’ thing? I guess you didn’t like it, huh?”

“Didn’t like it?” Glen retorted. “We recorded it!”

“But it wasn’t finished!” Webb protested, to which Campbell laughed and replied, “Well, it is now.”

Due to the short lyrical content, Campbell and De Lory simply added a long guitar solo that mimicked the melody of the verse to make the song long enough. De Lory then added a beautiful string arrangement for the introduction and fade-out, making it a huge crossover smash (reaching #1 country, #1 adult contemporary and #3 pop) becoming Campbell’s second-biggest career hit (next to “Rhinestone Cowboy’). Not too shabby for an unfinished song.

Jimmy Webb was Glen Campbell’s all-time favorite songwriter, creating what Glen determined as the best melodies and chord progressions of any he had ever heard. As I mentioned earlier, Campbell charted with nine Webb songs. In addition to the two mentioned in this story, Glen had good-sized hits with “Where’s the Playground Susie” (#28, 1969), “Honey Come Back” (#2, 1970), “It’s a Sin When You Love Somebody” (#16, 1975), “Still Within the Sound of My Voice” (#5, 1988) and Campbell’s third-biggest career record, 1969’s “Galveston,” another of Jimmy’s superb “town songs” that topped Billboard’s country chart for three weeks and peaked at #4 on the Hot 100. Additionally, in 1979, Campbell was the first to record Webb’s “Highwayman” a full six years before the song slammed into #1 for Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson.

In 2019, Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” was inducted into the Library of Congress’ “National Recording Registry,” the highest honor a recording can achieve.