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On This Day in 1968, Glen Campbell Recorded an Unfinished Song That Became a Huge Crossover Hit
On this day (May 27) in 1968, Glen Campbell stepped into the studio for the first of two sessions for “Wichita Lineman.” He released the song later in the year, and it spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart. It also reached No. 3 on the Hot 100, giving Campbell his biggest hit on the pop chart at the time. Interestingly, the song wasn’t finished when he chose to record it.
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Jimmy Webb wrote several of Campbell’s biggest hits, including “Wichita Lineman.” This song stands out for a couple of reasons, though. First and foremost, he hadn’t finished writing it when Campbell began recording it. Additionally, Webb wrote the song specifically for him.
When he began work on the album that would become Wichita Lineman, Campbell had already had a hit with one of Webb’s songs. “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” reached No. 2 on the country chart and broke into the top 40 on the Hot 100. So, when he couldn’t find a song he wanted to record, Campbell reached out to Webb.
Glen Campbell Requested “Wichita Lineman”
In an interview with Maverick, Jimmy Webb recalled how he came to write “Wichita Lineman” for Glen Campbell.
“He called me up one day and said, ‘I’m down here at Western Records with Al De Lory. We’re going through all these records, and it’s a bunch of crap. Can you write me something geographical?’ I didn’t want to write, but I wanted to help him if I could,” Webb said.
Webb thought back to his childhood, when he used to ride with his father along the Oklahoma panhandle, along the Kansas border. He recalled the telephone poles that dotted the miles upon miles of flat terrain. Once in a while, he would see a lineman on a pole with a phone to his ear, testing the lines. “They’re up there in the worst weather, fixing things after the storms. It was a romantic figure to me,” Webb said.
“Then, I started thinking about how the wires would sing. If you walked up to them, you could hear this pinging, this scintillating echo of something else… This line, ‘I hear you singing through the wires,’ came into my head,” he added. That was the seed that became “Wichita Lineman.”
An Unfinished Demo Becomes a Hit
Jimmy Webb started working on the song that would later become “Wichita Lineman” almost immediately. However, Glen Campbell repeatedly called to ask if he’d finished the song, interrupting the process. He eventually told Campbell that if he kept calling, the song would never be finished. After a few hours of uninterrupted writing, he finally had something. It wasn’t finished, but it was a great start, he believed.
By five o’clock that afternoon, Webb hadn’t finished the song. In fact, he wasn’t sure where he was going to go with it. “I’d written a couple of verses, and I was wondering if I was going to put a bridge into it. I said to hell with it. I took a card, and I wrote on it, ‘Dear Glen, this is not finished. Tell me what you think. –Jimmy.’ I put it in a pouch and had it messengered over to Gold Star Western, where they were, and didn’t hear anything back from them,” he recalled.
After not hearing anything for a couple of days, Webb gave up on the song. He assumed that Campbell and De Lory didn’t like what they heard. About a week later, they ran into one another. “I guess you didn’t like that ‘Wichita Lineman’ thing. I just couldn’t finish it,” he told Campbell.
“We cut that,” Campbell told him. When Webb insisted that it wasn’t finished, Campbell told him, “It is now.”
Glenn Campbell Needed One More Thing
That wasn’t completely true, though. The song wasn’t quite finished. According to Songfacts, Glen Campbell couldn’t quite capture the feeling of Jimmy Webb’s demo, which featured the songwriter accompanying himself on a Hammond organ.
So, when Campbell returned to the studio later in the year to overdub the original recording, he enlisted Webb to play organ on the track. So, in a way, he finally finished the song.
Featured Image by David Redfern/Redferns
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