Glowing words of approval from veteran songwriter Bob Dylan saw one song dubbed the “greatest” ever written.
Dylan did not pick one of his own songs nor one from influences like Woody Guthrie as the best in the world, and instead turned to a track which released just a year before his album, Nashville Skyline. The surprise choice of song saw Dylan endorse it on the front cover of a book written about unfinished songs. Despite it being “unfinished,” Dylan believes the song in question is one of the greatest ever written. The Glen Campbell song Wichita Lineman, was written in a hurry after he requested a song to follow up By the Time I Get to Phoenix. Jimmy Webb wrote the song just hours after the request came through, and left Campbell in tears with the demo.
Campbell recalled: “When I heard it I cried, because I was homesick.” The song itself involves a lineman speaking through a handset to his girlfriend, which is what Webb imagined when writing the song, according to an interview with the songwriter. He said back in 2006: “And as I sat down to write, this poignant image came through my mind. I had just been back to visit my family, and I had been up in the flat country along the panhandle in Oklahoma, drivin’ along, and I had seen these telephone poles along the road. It was kind of a surreal vista and hypnotic, and if you’re not careful, you can, like my dad says, go to sleep and run off in the bar ditch.
“I was drivin’ along there, just blinkin’ and tryin’ to stay awake, and all of a sudden there was somebody on top of one of those telephone poles—out of thousands of telephone poles, there’s one that has a guy on it, and he had one of those little telephones hooked into the wires. I could see him on top of this pole talkin’ or listenin’ or doin’ somethin’ with this telephone. For some reason, the starkness of the image stayed with me like photography. I had never forgotten it.”
A book about Wichita Lineman, Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World’s Greatest Unfinished Song, dubbed the Webb-penned piece one of country music’s first philosophical songs. Dylan called it “the greatest song ever written.”
He added: “And then it happened, that queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn’t written it all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters in the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, ‘maybe I didn’t write you, but I found you’.”
Webb has since confirmed that Campbell had requested the song “right away” after phoning. He added: “They needed it right away—they always do, by the way. So I said, ‘Well, let me see what I can do,’ and my thoughts couldn’t have been any farther away from writing a song at that particular moment.
“So I cleared some of the people out of the room, put out some of the joints and shut some doors. There were 30 people livin’ with me, and I quieted the scene down somewhat and sat down at this green piano and started doodling this melody. You have to understand, by the age of 19 or 20, I was a hardened professional. I knew what follow-ups were, ya know?
“So I said to myself, ‘I know that they’re gonna want something that has a little geography in it, because that’s gonna tie right into “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and that’s gonna make airplay come easier for them.’ So I really sat down to write something that would please them mostly.”
