"Wichita Lineman" by Jimmy Webb
Singalong 010: Burning down the one night stands
“I am a lineman for the county and I drive the main road / Searchin' in the sun for another overload”
Allow me to set this song up with a story about a totally different song.
Indulge me: I was early in my artist career, playing around town and starting to get out into other towns. I had a situation on my hands: a guy had shot a video of me playing “Use Me” by Bill Withers as an encore at a small club in Binghamton, and he put it up on YouTube. It was 2005, YouTube was brand new, and the video of me performing this tune on cello racked up 100,000 views over the weekend.
That’s a small number of views these days, but back then people around me were impressed. It seemed like kind of a big deal. I had never done numbers like that, nor have I since.
The video kills. I’d worked hard on my performance, and of course I enjoyed performing “Use Me”. It always brought the house down, but it wasn’t on my album and I had consciously decided not to include “Use Me” in my set at all that year.
Why?
The world of singing cellists being a small one, I’d seen that another emerging cellist/artist was leaning quite heavily on the same tune that year. Lindsay Mac had just released her debut album, and her first single was a bang-up, fully-produced version of “Use Me” which prominently featured her cello playing in the arrangement.
There’s not a lot of room for cellists in the pop world, we are marginal players. And cellists are, by our nature and grooming, a cooperative species. We come up playing in an orchestra section, which is like singing in a choir: our success is determined collectively, by our ability to blend with each other. Sticking out, going for prominence - even with good tone and panache - is frowned upon if done out of turn.
So I decided out of courtesy that I’d leave my little showstopper on the back burner for now so that Lindsay could make her run. There’d be plenty of time for me to use the song up later.
My call may or may not have been the right one, and it might not have mattered at all. It just felt right.
“And if it snows that stretch down south won't ever stand the strain”
It certainly ceased to matter completely after my night in Binghamton. The crowd was clamoring. I’d had a great show, it was cold out, no one was wanting to leave and I’d run out of encores. I decided in the moment to play “Use Me”, just that once.
It was fun, but when I saw the video I definitely felt like I had fucked up. I was trying to stay in my lane but instead had spazzed, played the song anyway, and someone had filmed it. It felt awkward. None of “my people” knew about Lindsay and none of “Lindsay’s people” knew about me, but suddenly I was the dickhead trying to encroach on her spotlight. Oops.
Lindsay Mac is an excellent musician, writer, singer and producer. We work in different ways and have both evolved away from performing primarily on cello. She makes “real” pop, and she and I have never communicated about this. But during the brief window when people were congratulating me on my proto-viral video moment, all I could feel was that I had gotten egg on my face.
Anyway, none of this matters. We all moved on, and the world is actually quite a big place. I only mention it because this was the moment when I started to clearly see one of the biggest deficiencies in my approach to making music.
“I hear you singin' in the wire / I can hear you through the whine”
It’s important to develop a wide-ranging and deep repertoire if you want to work professionally, but I didn’t have a professional attitude yet.
A pro would have worked up at least 20 other jams like “Use Me” and ridden that train quite a long way. But I only had the one.
My version of “Use Me” hit as hard as it did because I enjoyed playing that groove so much. I played it all the time. For years it was my warmup exercise, it helped me unlearn a bunch of toxic, constraining habits I’d picked up in classical music school. I got so good at playing it that when people heard me do it they were like “wow”, and just assumed that I was also a badass on a ton of other tunes. But it was just one.
Once “Use Me” was over, I had to go back to playing my sad little cello ballads.
And I had plenty of those.
“…still on the line”
This experience lit a fire in me to start making lists and build out my set of covers. But I was under-equipped, having mostly ignored the literature and scoffed at “cover tune guys” until that moment. Now my mission was underway and I had to catch up. Boy was I late.
I hit up some folks for suggestions. I knew a couple of baby boomer music bloggers with tiny audiences who wrote passionately about the music they felt was important. They happily gave me some lists, and “Wichita Lineman” was on all of them. I’d never heard of it, and I never learned it. I felt I had bigger fish to fry since it’s a ballad and I was trying to prioritize more “up” stuff. Gotta sell that beer.
Besides, “Wichita Lineman” is a very difficult song to play.
I kept bumping it down the list, but then my friend Peter lent me his copy of Jimmy Webb’s book, “Tunesmith”. Talk about getting your world blown open.
Webb is the composer of a ton of monumental American songs. “Wichita Lineman” might be the most accessible one, but there’s also “Galveston”, “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, “MacArthur Park”, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress”, “Highwayman”, “This Is Your Life”, “Up, Up And Away”…. it goes on. Like, forget about it.
Eventually the right stuff finds its way to you.
From the inside, my musical story from the inside looks like a rowdy landscape littered with coping mechanisms, process addictions and yawning chasms in my essential education. I really shouldn’t be here, but I’ve been unable to quit.
But forget about writing songs if you aren’t hip to Jimmy Webb. The man was generous enough to write “Tunesmith”, collecting all of his tips and stories into a book for us mortals. That book is your way in to “real” songwriting. Or it was mine, anyway. There are others. The road is long, with many a winding turn.
So here’s my table-read of Wichita Lineman: