THE WICHITA LINEMAN

A lively biography of the song that Bob Dylan once called the greatest ever written.

Musical maven and GQ editor-in-chief Jones (David Bowie: A Life, 2017, etc.) is plainly smitten by Jimmy Webb’s unlikely story of a telephone repairman who rides a cherry picker into the sky in order to attend to malfunctioning wires, which the author calls “the first existential country song.” That may or may not be true, but it is unforgettable, one of the city-named story-songs that propelled Glen Campbell to fame and a natural successor to Webb and Campbell’s previous hit, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” Webb considered “Lineman” incomplete when he gave it to Campbell, and indeed it is light on lyrics, certainly as compared to his opus, “MacArthur Park.” Campbell ran with it, turning to the extraordinary talents of the session cohort called the Wrecking Crew, with bass player Carol Kaye doing beyond-the-call-of-duty work with her improvised introduction. One flaw that Jones uncovers: Webb had the hero of the song fixing the wrong kind of wire—a high-tension line can experience an overload but not a telephone line, leading him to remark ruefully, “it’s very hard to explain poetic license to a union member.” Still, poetic license aside, the song is instantly recognizable and consistently makes critics’ lists of the best pop songs of its era, if not of all time. Jones focuses ably on meaning and affect, more as they have to do with the lyrics than with the unusual chord pattern, which makes the song so distinctive; a little more attention to the structure of the music and how it evolved would have pleased the hearts of geeks. Even so, the author’s account satisfies, without a wasted word or the usual clichés of pop-culture writing and with plenty of quotations from the principals involved in making the song an enduring hit.

An affectionate homage to an indisputably great song, one that readers will listen to with new ears.