Wichita Lineman

My partner loves this song. I used to hate it, but now I sing along with it.

Love it.

Love it too. It is ripe for a cover.

I used to think it was about a sports player. Lineman being a position in some sort of ball game. Football I think.

Someone telling me they don't want my ass would trigger me

O.P., fifty years ago today was 1968, not 2018.

Takes me back to when I grew up in the 70’s and things were much simpler.

That would be October 22nd, 1968

R5 How about this one?

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I love the song, it's been covered by a few people R3. Keith Urban, Michael Stipe, Little Big Town, Cassandra Wilson.

#9 "Honey" came out in early 1968 and became the biggest #1 tear jerker of all time. I still like it.

R9 Honey was #1 for 5 weeks from early April to early May 1968. One of the biggest hits of that year.

Love this song!! It surprised me too because it’s not really “my type” of music.

The instrumentation on it (especially toward the end) is beautiful and stunning.

I’m not sure why this song stands out to me (I don’t personally know that much about song construction) but it does....

It also makes me yearn for a time when songwriting was a real skill and artists wrote and played beautiful original music.

Honey is such a sad song. It’s about a dead mentally disabled young bride. I miss when songs were about more in life than fucking, dancing and partying.

It has been described as the first existential country song.

Don't compare some dead retard kid song to the songwriting of the great Jimmy Webb. Honey, give me a break. Even Mrs. Hanks sings Wichita Lineman.

Glen Campbell had such a gorgeous voice.

Him and Jimmy Webb together were unbeatable.

50 years ago. "Hey Jude" was the #1 beat selling single of 1968 and The Beatles biggest hit, period.

My dad loved that song. I remember him singing along to it in the car when I was a kid.

It was (is) a great song and Campbell and underappreciated talent.

I'm not a LInda Ronstadt fan or freak. She's way before my time and her singing is mostly harsh and choppy. But her voice is very pretty and dynamic on Jimmy Webb's The Moon's A Harsh Mistress.

And why the fuck do people keep trying to derail the thread?

To me, this song is an ode to loneliness.

The lineman is in the middle of the Arizona dessert, listening in on the line of a woman he is in love with, but has probably never even seen.

The music is beautiful, Campbell is a great singer, but the song seems to exist in a world of isolation.

It's still depressingly beautiful after all these decades.

Why Arizona R23?

Wouldn't the Witchita lineman be in Kansas?

I agree, R18. It's a perfect match of singer to song.

My favorite cover, by Maria McKee:

Johnny Cash covered it too

R20, Glen had his own tv show and his music was big internationally. I don't think he was too much underappreciated.

That is beautiful R25

Nah. R25 sounds like a bad Tori Amos imitation. Which is redundant. Tori of course murdered the song already.

Stipe and REM did a fairly faithful rendition

Webb and Campbell's best work. Honey is dreck.

I've always like this song. Haunting. Beautiful. Memorable.

Love this song. The arrangement is so beautiful, including the sections with the keyboard playing Morse code.

Guns N Roses, Axl Rose.

This will blow your mind-- instrumental version from an early Kool and the Gang

None of the covers can compare to the original. This song made me cry a little, it was a sad beautiful song about isolation which all of us can relate to. Glen's vocals and the musical arrangement were beautiful and soaring with aching loneliness.

Campbell had a beautiful tenor voice and is one of the all time great guitar players. He was remarkably versatile as a singer. There's a great thread here on him somewhere from when he died. Some wonderful performances.

Wichita Lineman isn't really meant to be bettered. The cover versions are tributes to the beauty of the original. For that Keith Urban does the best job. He sings it in most every concert. Respect.

Tanya Tucker with her small raspy range did a moving version of By The Time I Get To Phoenix. Another Webb/Campbell classic. These songs have such an ache in them....Joe Cocker understood them well too.

Campbell was a rare genius. So talented.

So young. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Back in the 80s, Campbell and Tanya Tucker had a May-December romance. She was crazy about him and said he was the love of her life.

Did you watch the video R39? It more than alludes to their romance.

Heard a radio interview with Jimmy Webb where he talked about his most famous songs, including "Wichita Lineman." He only had the 2 verses written and considered it an unfinished song. But they took it in the studio and recorded ot anyway, using a guitar solo in place of the 3rd verse. They told him and he said, "But it's not finished yet." They replied, "Oh yes it is!" When he heard the recording, he liked the guitar part and agreed that the song sounded complete as recorded. So they released that and it was a hit.

R41 I did not know that, thanks for the history.

Witchita Lineman was the first LP album I bought - I still have it. I skipped school that day, at 10 yrs old, to head downtown to the record store to buy it the day it was released. My parents never found out. But they enjoyed Glen's music too. Good memories, good times...

Lineman get paid a lot I would assume due to the danger.

R43 The song is about a telephone lineman. While high up on the towers, I expect that the voltage was next to nil. Pretty much an extinct profession now with cell phones.

James Taylor covers it in his typical boring-as-fuck style.

[quote]Someone telling me they don't want my ass would trigger me

The lyrics are "I need you more than want you...and I want you for all time."

It's actually that he wants her in an indescribable way, even more than "all time". Untrigger yourself.

The cover of this song that Glen Campbell thought was the best interpretation was by the now dead reggae singer Dennis Brown.

I like R37 's comment about how the covers are more about paying tribute to the song and the original performance than any attempt to come up with some newly 'definitive' version. And it's a testament to Lineman's simple beauty that people from so many different genres have had a crack at it. Of the so-called 'town trilogy' I never much cared for Phoenix despite the clever lyrics but love both Lineman and Galveston. And given Webb's explanation for how he came to write Wichita Lineman, he certainly captured the mood of what had inspired him.

I loved this cover.

[quote]Glen Campbell had such a gorgeous voice.

Gorgeous voice and interpreter of lyrics. Great at the guitar.

One of the most underrated performers of all time.

[R24] Why Arizona [R23]?

Wouldn't the Witchita lineman be in Kansas?

—Anonymous

I lived in Arizona a long time ago. I've always envisioned the lineman in the middle of the dessert 10 miles from Tucson or Phoenix. It's a desolate world. Lol - Your post made me realize I've always ignored the "Wichita" part of the song!

From 1985-- Campbell doing a live version at Austin City Limits

One of the finest pop songs of the late 20th century. The whole Webb-Campbell trilogy is magnificently sad and beautiful.

This is actually a much better live version-- from 2000 on the Craig Kilborn show. Far more bittersweet and closer to the original than the link I posted at R52.

Just Campbell and his guitar, no backup and amazing short solo at the end.

The song starts at 08:50

The quick bass intro at the beginning of the song was written and played by Carol Kaye, who was the only female member of the session musician "Wrecking Crew". She contributed to so many hits through the '60s and '70s that she is considered the most-heard bass player of all time. She's a very interesting lady!

She's another talent who I believe isn't in the RRHoF. I think I read somewhere her bass is on over 1,000 singles.

While he was having those hits with the Webb songs he had a hit with this one too.

I just think it's so beautiful...

Yep, R57, it's a lovely song, but sexist as fuck -- a straight man's infantalizing and condescending thoughts on his wife's interior life. Belongs right alongside Honey and She's Having My Baby.

Works better when a woman sings it.

[quote]it's a lovely song, but sexist as fuck

There's absolutely nothing sexist about the song.

Lang's (pretty awful) version could be interpreted as sexist too... if that's what you're looking for.

R57 You have to consider the lyrics in the context of the times - mid Sixties. Consider that most post-war women were, in fact, housewives, and it wasn't sneered at until the sexual revolution of The Pill which liberated women from unplanned pregnancies (for the most part). That, in turn, opened the doors for women to have a pursue career in the work force, and subsequently housewives were considered as 'less than evolved females' with the surge of feminism in the '70s and beyond.

I think the lyrics of Dreams of the Everyday Housewife are quite empathetic as put forth by a man who contemplates what his wife gave up, or could have been, had she not married him. And he also appreciates that she's confronted with the reality of getting older and her youth is behind her. I doubt many husbands give that much thought at all, even today, whether their wives are career women, homemakers, or both.

Nice!

beautiful song but Glen Campbell's music wasn't really my cup of tea

What a dreary song

I always loved this song. I grew up in the UK and used to think it was about the guys who paint the lines in the roads.

R60, you're right in that the narrator of the song gives at least gives SOME thought to the interior life of his wife, which was an unusual topic for a song at that time (and now), but what does he think she thinks about? He says she "gave up the good life" but what does he think that would have encompassed?

The answer to both questions is, a lineup of interested men, unwrinkled skin (though wrinkles would have come anyway, no matter which path she chose) and wearing a dress that people like. That's the sum total of his idea of his wife's thoughts, and his idea of what "the good life" could have been for her.

I'm not saying '60s housewives didn't think about those things, but it's not exactly an expansive view of anyone's interior life...

[quote]She looks in the mirror and stares at the wrinkles/That weren't there yesterday/And thinks of the young man that she almost married/What would he think if he saw her this way?

That could easily be me. What would my first love of 35 years ago think of me today?

[quote]Slowly starts dancing remembering her girlhood/And all of the boys she had waiting in line..

Just as I might remember my youth, back when I was cute and guys would hit up on me...

[quote]An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me....

I gave up "the good life" to stick with my very sick partner. He'd sometimes feel guilty about it. Id reassure him...

And so on.

The song is very truthful and touching.

The song changes key after the first line. This gives it that dissonance that people hear. Typical Webb trick which works very well.

Love love love this song... Jimmy Webb at his best.

r37 it’s simultaneously appropriate and inappropriate Tanya Tucker would cover Glen Campbell

I would have loved to cover this....

R65, just as R66 noted, the 'good life' can mean very different things and different circumstances.

Perhaps his partner (wife in this case) gave up marrying for money for the sake of marrying for love. The opposite of Eagles Lyin' Eyes.

Or stuck with him in sickness... like R66 , or maybe moved across country with him and left family behind. Who knows? If old enough, we can all reflect on what the 'good life' would have meant for us - imaginary or otherwise.

Poetry and lyrics, although they may be telling a story, are often open to personal interpretation. That's what makes the good ones resonate among so many people. We find our own truths within.

I want to listen to Wichita Lineman, but I don't want to cry. Instead, I will eat 2 cherry turnovers and hate myself later.

It's a beautiful song.

Songs today go like this:

"Fuck da hoes and kill da cops"

[repeat 100 times. that's the song]

Wichita is absolutely in Kansas.

R37 Tanya and Glen dated for years and were engaged. In a nutshell, they broke up, due to a misunderstanding, and Tanya thought it was a temporary tiff. While waiting for him to call, he met Kim, who was husband hunting for a rich guy and snagged him. A tale as old as time....

anyhoo... Tanya never married and never stopped loving Glen. She's best friends with Debby, Glen's daughter from his teenage marriage, who toured with Glen for over 25 years and looked after him on the road. There's plenty more to the story of Kim, suffice to say there's no love lost between Glen's earlier kids, together with Tanya, and Glen's last wife for the usual 'last wife' reasons. Long ago Glen had said he was lucky in his career, but unlucky in love as he married gold-diggers who glommed on to him. True til the end.

Tanya loved him, never stopped, and still does. I saw them in concert when they were an item, and they seemed happy as larks. A shame they didn't work out. I'm glad she's still singing, but she ruined her voice, and face, by chainsmoking for many years.

R73 - yup, today's songs lack beautiful melody, lovely lyrics, and wonderful voices. As far as playing instruments, session musicians are few, and the instrumentation is computer generated. It's harsh, beat heavy and metallic, and far from enjoyable for audiophile listening.

I think that's another reason for a shift back to vinyl, to actually hear good music again. There's nothing like gorgeous vocals and instruments on a decent vinyl sound system - the sound is rich and warm; perfect for pure voices and melodies. And there are still lots of albums on vinyl which have not been released on any other format.

Glen's voice and guitar playing are sensational. I could, and do, listen for hours and it sure can bring me to tears when I'm in a mood.

r75 you left out the tawdry parts.

How old was Glenn. How old was Tanya?

It's one of the saddest songs that I've ever heard.

The Dwight Yoakum version. Nice job.

R78, would you like a cherry turnover?

I love Datalounge.

R77 Yes, I did leave out the tawdry parts.

Glen and Tanya began dating in '79 thru 81. She was 21 when they met - he was 22 years older at 43. Same age & age difference between Glen and last wife Kim. He married Kim 5 months after he broke up with Tanya. Can you say "rebound"???

You want more?

R78 Here - instead of a chubby cherry pie, have some fun with Glen, Tanya & Rita Coolidge singing Johnny B Goode, Blue Bayou, and more, with toe tapping nostalgia.

Never liked Glen Campbell but I always loved this song.

Wichita Lineman

Glen & Jimmy Webb in Session, with opening comments from Jimmy

This version from Glen's 62nd album.

Much as I loved Glen Campbell, I do have to remind you that he beat Tanya Tucker.

They don't make music like they did in the 60's to 90's. This is one of the few songs that chokes me up and brings out a lot of deep emotion. I can't say that about current music nowadays.

The current top 10 hits on Billboard is just junk, mostly rapper stuff singing about sex, drugs, money, getting wasted. The top albums are from rappers. I listened to some Travis Scott music since I wanted to know what's so great about him, it's him mumbling unintelligible, through auto-tune. What a piece of crap.

R85 No question they had a tumultuous relationship fueled by cocaine, and lots of it. (Glen's 3rd wife, Mac Davis' ex, turned him on to coke. Glen met Tanya when that relationship went bust.) Years after Tanya resigned herself to losing Glen, she admitted that he knocked out her front cap accidentally when he elbowed her. She had her kite high moments too where she whacked him so hard she broke his ribs. He wound up in the hospital with double pneumonia, and while in there he suggested they do a line or two, and they did.

Even Alice Cooper said Glen was doing a lot of coke at the time. So yes, their relationship was fucking & fighting & making up or all three at once. Drugs fuel ridiculous and unreasonable behavior. But that's the curse of showbiz, and the main reason he moved away from LA to Phoenix to get clean. It took him over 10 years to kick the habit.

McArthur Park, written by Jimmy Webb, sung by Glen

IMHO, this is by far the best version, with a brilliant guitar solo by Glen, who also played on countless songs with Carol Kaye and the Wrecking Crew. They all said Glen was the most talented of the Crew, though he couldn't read music.

Jimmy is present, and comes up on the stage and Glen calls him a 'genius' to roaring applause. Enjoy.

the song crystallized in that line quoted several times in this discussion--- "and I love you more than want you...and I want you for all time."

one of the simplest and most eloquent summations of the depth of love that one can feel. and YES, of course tears are now welling up in my eyes, I couldn't help but react that way to writing those words and thinking about them.

MARY!

There's also an obscure album out there from circa 1997 called "Lounge-A-Palooza," wherein Campbell does a lovely duet of "Lineman" with DL fave Michelle Shocked. You know, before she went all homophobically apeshit.

Have always loved this song. Even though I was a mere 9-yo pup when this song was released, even then I knew this song was about loneliness -

Here's another Glen Campbell-Jimmy Webb collaboration - By The Time I Get To Phoenix.

Also beautiful and sad. I think it was a bigger hit back than Wichita Lineman back then.

[quote] the song crystallized in that line quoted several times in this discussion--- "and I love you more than want you...and I want you for all time."

Except that’s not the lyric....it’s “I need you more than want you.”

^^ So, what. It's a great song, and I want to marry Op for posting it.

Regarding Wichita Lineman [quote] 2010, Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" ranked "Wichita Lineman" at number 195.[9] It has been referred to as "the first existential country song"

Great doc on Glen

Wichita Lineman is one of my all-time favorite songs. It reminds me of being four years old and riding in the back seat of our '66 Chevy Malibu with KBOX 1480 on the AM radio.

Accidentally elbowed me...LOL! You bitches are hysterical!

He was an asshole.

R99 Right - and that's why she still loves him after all these years. And wrote a love song for him when he got Alzheimer's. Watch her interviews on video and see what she been saying all along. Gossip based accusations and name-calling don't supercede the truth just because someone says so. No one who knew Glen ever though he was anything less than a nice guy who got caught up in addiction.

But hey, never let the truth get in the way of a good story, huh? You should write for the Enquirer.

[quote] “I need you more than want you.”

His voice is beautiful, the song is wonderful, but he doesn't sing, "I need you more than wAnt you." He sings, "I need your more than wOnt you." That's one of the best parts of the song, the way he says that word.

Like r75 mentions, Glen had a very strained relationship with his older children from previous marriages. In many ways he was like Bing Crosby who presented to the world a happy family with his new family while we all knew the history with his other kids.

In fact, in the documentary r97 posted, there is literally one fleeting shot of Debbie. We don't get to know her, hear anything about growing up as Glen Campbell's daughter. It's obvious Kim had influence over that film.

[quote] ^^ So, what.

It’s a good idea, when praising the lyrics of a song, to actually know the lyrics.

In the 90s there was a weekly show on NBC called Hot Country Nights. I went to almost all of the tapings (a friend worked for the production company). One week one of the guests was Tanya Tucker, who in addition to performing was also interviewed as part of the program. One of the questions the host asked her was "if you could give any advice to a young Tanya Tucker just starting out, what advice would that be?" Without missing a beat, she said "I'd tell her to stay away from that Glen Campbell!" The audience roared with laughter. (As did the interviewer, who said something along the lines of "well we won't be able to air that part!")

Campbell family here. Follow the case with how Kim has treated the older children. There are ongoing court cases. The documentary was not done with anyone’s input but hers and the children she had with Glen. They isolated him from the others as well.

Glen had a beautiful voice and a beautiful soul but during times of addiction people do stupid things.

R102 Once the documentary was arranged between James Keach & Kim, she fired Debby on the spot, as well as his lifetime musicians, so she could put her kids in the film. Debby couldn't even get a backstage pass to see her Dad. Kim also sold their home of 30 years in Phoenix, then complained that he couldn't find the bathroom at night at the new house. Since consistency is key with Alzheimer's patients, it had a detrimental affect on Glen and his performances. His youngest kids are amateurs and kept messing up which threw him off. No doubt it accelerated his confused condition. Music was the last thing to go for him. Even when he didn't know where he was, once he started playing, it became automatic, util that slowly disappeared as well.

There are lawsuits pending against Kim by the oldest children. The facts in the case are heartbreaking regarding the way Kim treated an ill Glen. Plenty of info online. But let's focus on the good things he gave us, his music, or we'll get really bogged down in mire.

R104 Of course a young jilted Tanya is going to be hurt and say negative things about her ex. I think most of us have done that. Phil Collins had one of the most expensive and messiest divorces in R & R - and guess what, they got back together and remarried. Human nature is what it is. People see things differently when the heat of fresh emotions cool.

[quote]Of course a young jilted Tanya is going to be hurt and say negative things about her ex. I think most of us have done that.

It was in the 90s when she said it. She wasn't young. If it matters, she was laughing when she said it.

R105 To the Campbell family. Thank you for your comments. I'm R106 and I posted at the same time - yours came up first. I've followed Glen for many years, and quite closely once he got diagnosed. Truly heartbreaking what Glen went through, and what the family's been through, and still going through. I wish you all all the very best.

R108 She would have been in her 30's - for me that's still young! :) I'm glad she was laughing about it - it was a relationship that she's been asked about since it started up to this very day. She'll always be connected to him.

Tanya Tucker was never an ingenue. She had done a lot of hard living by the time she was thirty. And sometime in the 1990s she turned 40. She has one of those small range fast vibrato voices that can grow very tiring but there's something very moving about the quality of her tone and the break in her voice. Would You Lay With Me In A Field of Stone...

I don't think Tanya and Glen were meant to last. She's a hellcat - it took a lot more than chainsmoking to destroy her looks and voice. She worked at it.

Such a gorgeous song. Campbell's rendition is so touching and beautiful and spare. I love it.

I love those early Tanya Tucker songs when she was 13 or so and did Delta Dawn, What's Your Mama's Name, Blood Red and Goin' Down etc. What's not to love about that last one, when the child narrator is dragged around the bars and honky tonks by her dad, who is looking for the mother who abandoned them to run off with some other guy. At the end he finds them and sends the child out of the room 'but scared I looked back through the door / And Daddy left 'em both, soakin' up the sawdust on the floor'. It's no Wichita Lineman, but a good song nonetheless despite clearly approving of a spot of murder.

R111 As a young star by age 14, Tanya grew up living in the showbiz fast lane and had a much different temperament from Glen. But since since she was in her early 20's when they dated, maybe she would have settled down with him - had they not both been addicted at the time. Perhaps unlikely, but who knows. Sometimes you only get one shot at true love, sometimes not even one. Still doesn't necessarily mean happily ever after, especially with an abundance of outside pressures. But at least there was love between the two of them.

No question she geared up fast and furious once he was gone and rode a lot of rough miles. Maybe it was fueled by heartbreak, maybe her personality, or both. At least once she became somewhat older and wiser she acknowledged her love for him, and she called him the love of her life (and still does), even from afar. Maybe that's all it could ever have been with those two. We'll never really know. She's a seemingly kind person with a good heart. And not a chance that Glen's oldest daughter Debby, the same age as Tanya, would be close friends with her if she wasn't genuine.

Relationships are complicated enough without adding the challenges of Glen's superstardom, the perils of LA, and the demands of showbiz to the mix.

The bottom line is Tanya would never have treated Glen, or his older kids, the way Kim did and continues with what she's still doing to his previous children and family. That's an obvious reason Glen's fans, Debby, and likely most of his extended family, like Tanya to this day despite their personal travails. It's not a Bing Crosby situation at all. Glen wasn't estranged from his older children; he was too busy working most of the time, but he loved them all dearly and saw them as much as possible. The negativity towards them was from Kim, who wanted all the focus on her children with Glen. Not a unique story regarding latter wives.

As the Campbell family said, there's plenty of info online about what's transpired and what's still going which has resulted in lawsuits against Kim. It's an unbelievably shocking and tearfully sad eye-opener.

God I loved his TV show when I was a kid "The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour".

Besides being a great singer and musician he was wonderful at hosting his show.

Loved forever and greatly missed.

Creepy song about an old sex pest

[quote]The current top 10 hits on Billboard is just junk, mostly rapper stuff singing about sex, drugs, money, getting wasted.

And the blatant misogyny and sexism in todays music is so much stronger than in the music of the past....by any measure.

It is disgusting.

It's funny to hear people complaining about a sweet pensive song like "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife".

[quote]Glen's 3rd wife, Mac Davis' ex, turned him on to coke.

Well, I can see where he went astray.

LOVE this classic, both Glen Campbell’s version and the one recorded by songwriter Jimmy Webb on his excellent “Ten Easy Pieces”.

I heard this song for the first time in Phoenix while visiting family members who have since died. It always reminds me of being there, and the desert landscape. I had no idea the song had association with Arizona.

It doesn't, R121. That would be By the Time I Get to Phoenix, not Wichita Lineman.

I hate it when these threads about great musicians and great artists get bogged down with gossip about their kids and spouses and shit.

So I will just add that if you haven’t listened to “gentle on my mind” lately, you should. By the way, try to sing that shit. He recorded it as a demo to sell to other artists but ended up releasing it on his own

Glen & Tanya

I love his countrified version of "Both Sides Now" with the lush 1960s orchestration.

I always liked this one from around the time of Rhinestone Cowboy.

What's up

Nice version by Mr Campbell and Stone Temple Pilots

The world is so nuts today. I need this song.

"Honey" is generally considered one of the worst songs of all time. And it is!

Keith and Glen

Magnificent song with perfect instrumentation. Lots of nostalgia every time I listen, and it has always been one of my favorites.

He was as hot af in the picture in R145, I don't blame Tania at all. Damn.

^ R125, (R134).

Did Glen get a Nanette Fabray/Lee Majors nose job? I only see a tip!

@R128 -

Hmmmm . . .

He had good hair!

His vocals are the best