The Wichita Lineman by Dylan Jones

That, for me, is 'Wichita Lineman,' a song I heard as a boy that has stayed with me all my life. I like it now for the same reasons I liked it then. I liked it because it took me to places I hadn't been, to places nowhere near me, places unknown. It was a complete escape. It may have been a song full of longing, full of anxiety and want, yet to me it seemed to announce a vortex of calm.

I love "Wichita Lineman." Who doesn't? It's a perfect song: only sixteen lines long, but perfectly balanced, a song about loneliness and longing on the high prairie in which the wistful lyrics are matched perfectly by the sweep of the music itself. Dylan Jones calls it the perfect imperfect song, because it wasn't finished when songwriter Jimmy Webb sent a demo off to Glen Campbell to see if he liked it. Campbell, knowing a sure thing when he heard it, recorded it within weeks, not waiting for Webb to add to--or perhaps monkey with--what was already one of the finest country songs ever written. And it was huge. Campbell outsold the Beatles that year, 1968, largely thanks to the success of "Wichita Lineman." It's a song that seems divorced from the social upheaval that was coursing through the country in 1968, but it tapped into something timeless about the United States of America, a large and lonely place.

Dylan Jones' book is an ode to "Wichita Lineman," which Jones treasured as a child in the U.K. and only belatedly learned, after years of private regard, that just about everybody in the world likes it, too. The Wichita Lineman is a history of a song, of how the lightning got bottled, and to write that history Jones writes the history of the Webb and Campbell, two men who were thrust together by a kind of destiny. Both grew up poor, in the parts of the country that don't get covered in popular music--Webb in Oklahoma and Campbell in Arkansas--but the buttery polish of both men's styles was formed in the studios of Los Angeles. As Jones describes it, each man was to the other a kind of revelation: while still a young man in Oklahoma, Webb heard one of Campbell's songs on the radio, and was so struck he declared he'd write for the man with that voice one day. And he got his chance when Campbell, hearing a lesser artist's version of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" on his own car radio, slapped the steering wheel and decided he could make it a hit. He did, but it's no surprise that the greatest collaboration between the two of them was the one that Webb wrote specifically with Campbell in mine. (Jones goes on, naturally, to discuss the longstanding partnership between them, which produced a small handful of masterpieces, like another favorite of mine, "Where's the Playground, Susie?")

One of the things I enjoyed most about The Wichita Lineman was learning the history of Campbell's career, which was even more far-reaching than I knew. As a member of the legendary session group called the Wrecking Crew, Campbell had a hand in half of the biggest popular hits of the 1960's; you can hear him playing guitar--he was known as a guitar virtuoso as well as a terrific singer--on "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" and "I'm a Believer." (In fact, because the musicians were rarely credited, it's impossible to know for certain how extensive Campbell's contributions were.) He played on Pet Sounds and briefly subbed for a post-breakdown Brian Wilson on tour with the Beach Boys, in exchange for which Wilson gave Campbell the song "Guess I'm Dumb," maybe his best song not written by Jimmy Webb. Webb, of course, is still alive, and his interview with Jones that ends the book helps put the song in its proper context, but there's a certain mysteriousness to Campbell's career that seems amplified now that he's dead.

As you might expect with any book about a single song, it feels a little padded. Jones' musical knowledge and passion are on display, and his reflections on how "Wichita Lineman" fit into his own personal musical history are part of what makes the book compelling. But you don't have to go far to find him suddenly going on about like, Neu! or Prefab Sprout for pages at a time. Perhaps you couldn't publish it, but one gets the sense that the book might have been better if, like "Wichita Lineman" itself, had done a little less. But I will say this: there just aren't that many songs you wouldn't get tired, if you had to read a whole book about them, of hearing on a loop in your head. That as much as anything is why The Wichita Lineman is successful.