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.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I slide open a glass door and go onto Lou’s balcony. I’ve never seen San Francisco from so high up: it’s a soft blue-black, with colored lights and fog like gray smoke. Long piers reach out into the flat dark bay. There’s a mean wind, so I run in for my jacket and then come back out and curl up tightly on a white plastic chair. I stare at that view until I start to get calm. I think, The world is actually huge. That’s the part no one can really explain.

A Visit From the Goon Squad initially turned me off because of the guitar on the cover. It's silly, perhaps, but my experience with books that prominently feature rock and roll has been that they tend to be goofy pangyrics aimed straight at baby boomers. And the fictional songs... they make Lost's You All Everybody look like I Wanna Hold Your Hand.

But the acclaim Jennifer Egan's novel got everywhere convinced me to pick it up, and its accessible writing sucked me right in when I finally started it. That, and the opening section, about a cynical pickpocket named Sasha. I was immediately impressed at Egan's ability to sketch out a believable character quickly--a real benefit for a novel with as many wide-ranging characters and stories as this one has.

As the cover indicates, music does play a large role. Most of the players who get their own sections are connected in some way to a band called The Flaming Dildos, a band fronted by Bennie Salazar and his enigmatic friend, Scotty. But in reality, the book really works in practice more like a collection of short stories revolving around a recurring cast, of which Sasha, Scotty, and Bennie form only a small part. They're joined by a skeezy record executive safari-ing in Africa, a closeted gay football player in rural America, and dozens of others.

If there's a recurring theme in these stories, which jump in time between the 70s and the near future (maybe 2020 or so) and place (Africa, New York, Italy), it's the way time has a way of changing, crushing, flattening out, and sometimes, rarely, even fulfilling dreams. I won't lie--a lot of the characters have arcs that end in less than cheery places. There is a technique, which seems to me to be uniquely Sparkian, where Egan will sometimes spell out a character's entire future in the middle of a story that ends when they're still a teenager. In a way, this is depressing--learning that a bright young teen grows up to commit suicide at 20, or that a young girl ends up hooked on crack has a way of bringing a reader down--but at the same time, Egan skillfully uses this narrative irony to highlight the eternality of the good moment that is currently happening. Whatever happens going forward, those shining moments can't be snuffed out.

There's also the recurring question of image. Is Scotty an amazing guitarist or a burnout? Is Sasha a housewife or a wild child? Is a Mugabe-like dictator really so evil, or is it all a matter of perspective? And does it matter?

And if Dolly could get people to ask [if he was dating a starlet], the general’s image problems would be solved. It didn’t matter how many thousands he’d slaughtered—if the collective vision of him could include a dance floor, all that would be behind him.

And there is a hope, something just out of the grasp of these characters, elucidated near the end by Bix, who will go on to a reasonably happy ending himself:

“We’re going to meet again in a different place,” Bix says. “Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us.” “Where? How?” Drew asks. Bix hesitates, like he’s held this secret so long he’s afraid of what will happen when he releases it into the air. “I picture it like Judgment Day,” he says finally, his eyes on the water. “We’ll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We’ll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it’ll seem strange, and pretty soon it’ll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.”

Finally, Visit includes a lot of structural play--there's a chapter that's a clear piss-take/homage to David Foster Wallace, complete with endnotes that are longer than the text. There's a section, surpsingly affecting, that takes the form of a Powerpoint presentation. There's a chapter in 2nd person. But in all the play, Egan never loses the emotional thread of the stories she tells. And that's a lot more rare than finding someone who can put together a tricky sentence.