I believe that all roads lead to the same place, and that is wherever all roads lead to.
WILLIE NELSON
There are hundreds of versions of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, possibly even thousands, and it has become as much of a classic as ‘My Way’, ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Hallelujah’. One of the most disturbing cover versions is by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, which John Peel once said was the best interpretation, by some considerable distance. The most elaborate version, however, is by Isaac Hayes, who turned the song into something of a Brobdingnagian epic. By deliberately fusing soap opera and ghetto chic, in the late sixties and early seventies Hayes created his own highly rhythmic, symphonic environment, and in this way was as influential as Sly Stone. Both men moved away from R&B and into traditionally white areas: Stone into rock, Hayes into the orchestral world of Burt Bacharach, Carole King and Jimmy Webb.
Of course, one wonders why. Cover versions are often redundant, and rarely remembered. Some can be little more than cheap photocopies, with someone hitherto unknown (or, maybe, far too well known) colouring in the original and trying not to go outside the lines. Some can be transformative, but often they are nothing but corruptions of your favourite memories (I would imagine if you had formative experiences with, or fond memories of, New Order’s ‘True Faith’, you would probably think George Michael’s cover is pointless; ditto Robbie Williams’s live version of Blur’s ‘Song 2’ or Simple Minds’ frankly confusing version of Prince’s ‘Sign o’ the Times’). Others are just plain perverse: does anyone really want to hear William Shatner cover Pulp’s ‘Common People’?
Another son of a sharecropper (this time from Memphis), Isaac Hayes joined Stax Records in 1964, aged twenty-two, eventually writing, arranging and producing dozens of hits for Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas and Johnnie Taylor (‘Hold On, I’m Coming’, ‘Soul Man’, ‘B-A-B-Y’, etc.). It was his 1969 solo LP Hot Buttered Soul, though, which really brought him personal acclaim, and at the time it was cited as the most important black album since James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, seven years earlier. Hot included an eighteen-minute version of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ and an elaborate reworking of Bacharach’s ‘Walk On By’, Hayes draping white-bread orchestral arrangements around his seemingly interminable monologues, almost as though he was experimenting with various convoluted seduction techniques. With his lush raps and funereal beats, Hayes gave you the impression he could turn a thirty-second hairspray commercial into a three-hour symphony, complete with several different movements and at least a dozen costume changes. He had a dark-brown crooner’s voice which perfectly suited this type of rich ballad, and all the others which came in its wake: ‘It’s Too Late’, ‘Windows of the World’, ‘The Look of Love’, ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’, etc. He was a remarkable arranger, and the bulk of his 1971 LP Shaft – in which he reached critical mass while winning two Grammys and an Oscar – is almost worthy of Bernard Herrmann. Talking about Hot Buttered Soul, he once said, ‘Like rock groups, I always wanted to present songs as dramas. It was something white artists did so well, but black folks hadn’t got into it. Which was why I picked those, if you like, white songs for that set, because they have the dramatic content.’
Hayes’s version of ‘Phoenix’ is monumental, containing an audacious ten-minute rap that invents a back story around Jimmy Webb’s Phoenix couple. ‘The rap came out of the necessity to communicate. There’s a local club in Memphis, primarily black, called the Tiki Club. One night there I heard “Phoenix” and I thought, “Wow, this song is great, this man must really love this woman.” I ran down to the studio the next day and told them about the song, and they said, “Yeah, yeah.” They didn’t feel what I felt, I thought maybe they weren’t getting it. The Bar-Kays were playing the Tiki Club a few days later, so I told them to learn the song and that I would sit in. I told them to keep cycling the first chord, and I started talking, just telling the story about what could have happened to cause this man to leave. Halfway through the song, conversations started to subside, and by the time I finished the song, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.’
As for the record, he said, ‘To preserve the vibe we cut it live, with no retakes – if you listen hard on the CD you can hear how my vocal mike picked up my fingernails clicking on the organ keys as I played those big swirls. When I played the whole album back to the company bigwigs they sat there in shock. I got worried and said, “Well?” After a while the promotions manager said, “That motherfucker is awesome. Won’t nobody give it airplay, but that ain’t even gonna matter.”’ He was right, as within three months the album had outsold every LP the company had on release, reaching the top of the soul, jazz and pop charts. By the end of 1970, the album was platinum.
Jimmy Webb loved it. ‘The whole talking blues thing at the beginning was like a novel – a major opus. It was to do with the Delta blues tradition, that way of telling a story, although people sometimes forget he did a great job at singing the song too. I’d produced the Supremes, I understood R’n’B and soul artists, so it wasn’t so far-fetched to me. Isaac was a precursor to rap and hip-hop, he was trying to create something new.’
I remember playing Hayes’s widescreen epic in 1977, when the Summer of Hate (©) was officially in full flow, and at a time when even owning a copy of a Who album was suspicious. Back then, owning an Isaac Hayes album was considered contrary rather than damaging to one’s street cred. Over time, liking an unlikely or perennially unfashionable record ceased being socially unacceptable, becoming instead a Guilty Pleasure (©). As it was for many of my generation, 1977 was something of a benchmark. That year, I spent most of the summer bouncing between the Roxy, the Marquee, the Red Cow and the 100 Club, watching the likes of the Clash, the Jam, the Damned, and Adam and the Ants. This was also the summer when I moved up to London, at the age of seventeen, to join a foundation course at Chelsea School of Art. Every day I would walk to college along the King’s Road, and every night I would wander off into Soho, taking the number 11, 22 or 19 bus, destined to end up in a basement listening to extremely loud punk music.
It was, and remains, like it was for many of the others who spent their formative years listening to three-chord leather-jacket rock, one of the happiest times of my life. At the time, I looked like Johnny Ramone (shaggy pudding-bowl haircut, black plastic jacket, drainpipe jeans and dirty white plimsolls) and hadn’t a care in the world. But while it is assumed that when us baby punks made our way back to our homes (in my case, the Ralph West Halls of Residence on Albert Bridge Road, which serviced all the central London art schools) we hastily put imported dub or hardcore industrial albums on our turntables, many of us listened to the music we were now being encouraged by the music press to unceremoniously dump. So while we would certainly listen to Two Sevens Clash by Culture, Horses by Patti Smith, Autobahn by Kraftwerk and various Throbbing Gristle bootlegs (horrible then, and horrible now), we would still wind down (what chilling out was called back in the day) by listening to Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Isaac Hayes, John Martyn or one of the seminal records of 1977 – released in August that year – Steely Dan’s majestic Aja. For while we spent our evenings jumping up and down in sweaty West End venues, we were still dreaming of driving down Sunset Boulevard in a big fancy car listening to super-slick West Coast music. And although the snarky, sarcastic Steely Dan obviously hated anything to do with West Coast culture, they actually made the slickest West Coast music of all. My room may have been covered with Sex Pistols posters, but my heart was elsewhere: in California, the deserts of Arizona, the west coast of Ireland … Notting Hill in the late fifties. On the perimeter of sleep, I would lie there and imagine myself living the lives in those songs, believing my own life to be full of the same possibilities.
Another record that got heavy rotation in my room at Ralph West (although admittedly after most people had sloped off to their own) was Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits, a Capitol album with a tightly cropped photograph of Glen’s head on the cover, poking out of an especially loud orange shirt (an orange that was almost identical to Campbell’s skin tone). As I was studying typography as part of my course, I knew the cover type was Stencil Bold, an especially cheap font that gave the whole thing a patina of naff. At the time, it was, I suppose, a Guilty Pleasure, not that I’ve ever really believed in them.
‘Wichita Lineman’ was never a Guilty Pleasure, though, never had a hint of embarrassment about it. Sure, it was draped in melancholy, and there were vaporous traces of country all over it, but there was nothing boilerplate about it. Designed to be cinematic, writ wide in CinemaScope, it was predetermined to evoke the never-ending plains of the Midwest, something too grand to be cute. Through the fields of wheat and milo and Sudangrass and flax and alfalfa came the strains of a record destined to define itself like no other, a record with a big sky, a horizon and a man attending to a telegraph pole.
You’ll read stats that will tell you that ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ is the third most recorded song of all time, and although ‘Wichita Lineman’ can’t match that, its interpreters have certainly been more idiosyncratic, and over the years, as the song has developed momentum, it has attracted more and more admirers, and more who have wanted to conquer it: (deep breath) R.E.M., Stone Temple Pilots, Patti Smith, Keith Urban, Dwight Yoakam, Billy Joel, Melissa Etheridge, the Dells, José Feliciano, James Taylor, Dennis Brown, Maria McKee, Ray Charles (who gets bonus points for his spoken-word ad-lib near the end – ‘That’s me, baby!’), the jazz pianist Alan Pasqua, O. C. Smith, Ken Berry, the Lettermen, the Fatback Band, Tom Jones, the Scud Mountain Boys, Peter Nero, Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66, Cassandra Wilson, Gomez, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Celtic Thunder, Johnny Cash, the Meters, the White Stripes, Villagers, ‘Tennessee’ Ernie Ford, Urge Overkill and more.
Sammy Davis Jr recorded an extraordinary version on his 1970 Motown album Something for Everyone. Davis was a great dancer, a great mimic, a great comedian and a great singer, but what he really was, was a great performer. And while some marvelled at his range (one critic said his voice always sounded too epic for such a small body), listening to his voice today his emotions sound premeditated. Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett sang from their core, whereas Davis was essentially a song-and-dance man at heart, so his singing was textbook rather than heartfelt. But what a textbook. His version of ‘Wichita’ is almost comically funky, and yet it works. Employing the tropes of the rhinestone ghetto, when he sang it on his TV show Sammy & Company he was wearing a coffee-and-cream gingham jacket, a bright-pink shirt with an aircraft carrier collar, buckets of jewellery and an overgrown pencil moustache.
‘Listen, I’ve had the good fortune of working for the past decade and a half or so,’ he says to the audience, teasingly. ‘And every once in a while, when you have groovy friends and a groovy audience, you get to do something you didn’t like to do. Now, those of you who have seen some of Sammy & Company have occasionally said to me, “You obviously dig country and western.” And I don’t want to say anything real strange, you know, but shucks almighty’ – his voice going all country – ‘I’ve been known to be called Pea-Picker every once in a while … And we do do a couple of toe-tappers. So, we’re gonna do a little country and western for you. Well, let me put it this way, this is about as country and western as I’m gonna get … I am a lineman for the county …’
The most unusual version is by the Dick Slessig Combo, a band who appear to create dreamy instrumental arrangements of songs from the late sixties and early seventies, and who stretched the song from three minutes to forty-three. This is the longest version of any song you’ve ever heard, elongated, expanded and slowed down so that it sounds even more like a lament, with a hyphen of silence between each note. The first time I heard it, it sounded like Chris Isaak performing an especially lazy version of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’, before veering off into the fringes of prog and ending up like something the Durutti Column might have recorded for their famous sandpaper album (or, as one reviewer said, a hybrid of Steve Reich, bluegrass and Jackie-O Motherfucker, or an American backwoods version of Neu! in ‘motorik’ mode). This prolonged version ‘exposes just how good the song’s “bones” are’, said Mark Sullivan from sitdownlistenup.com. ‘Yes, portions of the song repeat, but this is far from jazz interpretation. These repeated phrases are not variations, but more like playing a particularly interesting part of a song over and over to properly appreciate it before moving on to the next part of the song, similar to rewinding a cool scene in a movie before moving on. Or maybe the closed loop just evokes a stuck record. Like film, music is a temporal medium. Although spending more time with a painting or a sculpture often leads to a much deeper relationship with the work as additional detail is absorbed, the detail was all there the whole time. A piece of music, on the other hand, is realized over time, doling out its details in increments. Slowing down a tune forces us to focus more on the moments as they come together. Dick Slessig Combo’s diffuse rendering of “Wichita Lineman” makes us more mindful of each individual note, but enough of the melody drifts in and out that we never entirely lose track of the whole of which the notes are a part.’
When the song eventually finishes you feel as though you’ve just stepped out of a cinema during the day, into a sudden shock of sunshine.
In Cassandra Wilson’s version, from 2002, she slows the song down to nearly six minutes, and her vocals don’t start until she’s half a minute into it. She changes the lyrics, too, turning it into a piece of badly realised journalese, singing a love song to her own Wichita lineman and telling him that she needs him more than she wants him.
The song has been honoured in other ways, too. Homer sang snippets of ‘Wichita’ on The Simpsons, the Boo Radleys recorded a song called ‘Jimmy Webb Is God’, and in 2000 Mark Bowen and Dick Green launched an independent record label called Wichita Recordings (strapline: ‘Still on the line’), whose acts included Bloc Party, the Cribs, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket, and Peter, Bjorn and John. They took its name from ‘Lineman’ simply because it is, they believe, the greatest song ever written, while their logo – a telegraph pole against the sky – was the result of a Dick Green doodle in a bar. It’s even been adopted on the football terraces – ‘I am a lineman for Notts County,’ for instance.
The song makes a cameo in DBC Pierre’s Booker Prizewinning Texan black comedy Vernon God Little (once described as Huckleberry Finn for the Eminem generation, the eponymous hero a ‘Holden Caulfield on amphetamines’), which uses Glen Campbell’s biggest hits instead of a Greek chorus, Pierre peppering the novel with mordant soundtrack choices in much the same way as Bret Easton Ellis does in American Psycho, only this time as power lines and fence posts shoot past on the side of the road. ‘Instead of trying to figure it out, I call some Glen Campbell to mind, to help me lope along, crusty and lonesome, older than my years,’ says our protagonist. ‘“Wichita Lineman” is the song I call up, not “Galveston”. I would’ve conjured Shania Twain or something a little more savvy, but that might boost me up too much. What happens with sassy music is you get floated away from yourself, then snap back to reality too hard. I hate that. The only antidote is to just stay depressed.’ It’s there, too, in Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons, an Everyman song sung by an Everyman as he brings in the laundry; and it crops up in the second series of Ozark.
Of course, one may have thought that a song so fetishised may have become meta over the years, either by a process of accretion or simply because of its popularity. Over time this has happened to ‘My Way’, has happened to ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, has happened to ‘Mamma Mia’, but there is nothing ironic or cute about ‘Wichita Lineman’, and in spite of its iconic status it has somehow remained pure. The other obvious way in which songs have been given a new lease of life is through hip-hop sampling, and in this way various Guilty Pleasures have, over the years, developed a redemptive quality; this has happened to everyone from Spandau Ballet and Phil Collins to Hall & Oates and Steely Dan. ‘Wichita’ has largely escaped this. Ghostface Killah’s ‘Pokerface’, produced by K. Flack a few years ago, used a sample of Sunday’s Child’s 1970 version, while more recently the young Wichita rapper XV and the producer Just Blaze – who is most famous for his work with Jay-Z – assembled the track using samples of the Dells’ version.
‘Wichita Lineman’ is one of the very first examples of what would one day become known as Americana – which, as David Hepworth describes it, is anything written or sung by a white American that mentions a city or a highway, a term intended to reflect the fact that the people who like country music don’t like the idea of country music. Country music can be sentimental and mawkish, but as soon as you step out of the genre, emotions become more abstract, more nuanced, more rounded. The difference between country and Americana is the difference between Happy Days and American Graffiti, between Radio 2 and Radio 6 Music, between a cowboy hat and a beard.
The song also became popular with what I rather facetiously referred to a few years ago as ‘Woodsmen’, those bearded and rather earnest musicians in lumberjack shirts and scowls who talked wistfully of remote cabins in north-western Wisconsin or renovated chicken shacks in the Californian woods, singers of indeterminate age who back in the noughties fronted bands of sullen subordinates who couldn’t quite believe how successful they were. For a while Woodsmen were everywhere. The big one was Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, followed in no particular order by the Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, Arcade Fire, Great Lake Swimmers, Beirut, Band of Horses, Volcano Choir, Iron & Wine, My Morning Jacket, Calexico and all the rest. When the New Yorker published a piece about My Morning Jacket, they said, ‘You know these guys are bearded without seeing a photograph of them.’
Johnny Cash covered ‘Wichita’, too, towards the end of his life. ‘One person can’t save another person, but almost,’ Rosanne Cash once said about her father meeting the producer Rick Rubin. The union between the former hip-hop producer and the veteran country singer in the early nineties resulted in six American Recordings albums (plus a box set of outtakes) that completely revitalised Cash. The records re-established him both because of the material he covered and the way in which he was portrayed – warts and all. ‘Wichita Lineman’ appeared on the fourth album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, with Cash sounding for all the world like a man who had spent his life waiting to sing this song. At this stage in his career it was impossible to capture any hope in Cash’s voice, only experience, but then that’s why the records were so successful.
‘When you listen to the material that he recorded with Rick Rubin, you can hear the life he’s led, how his voice was affected by the drugs he took, especially on “Wichita Lineman”,’ said Peter Lewry, the editor of the Johnny Cash magazine The Man in Black. ‘In the Fifties artists would take pills to stay awake and then go to sleep because of the hectic touring schedule. John turned to pills but unlike most artists, John became dependent on them. Not a day went by when he wasn’t taking pills, and he was arrested for smuggling pills into the country and his life was on a downward spiral by the mid-Sixties to late Sixties. In fact, in a lot of programmes you see he looks so ill that a lot of people are amazed that he ever survived the Sixties. It was a struggle for him at the end. He worked hard on the songs, I mean he was even getting to the point where he couldn’t record a whole song, they’d have to piece it together because he would struggle with breathing. He was in a wheelchair at the end, but he’d go into the studio every day. His voice in the last few years has a raw edge and especially with “Wichita Lineman”, which in my opinion was much better than Glen Campbell’s version, more feeling in it – I think he puts the story over better, and maybe that’s down to John’s life, the hard life that he lived. He just seemed to put an edge on it.’
The Johnny Cash version doesn’t make for much of a karaoke song, although the original has proved to be more robust in this guise than you might imagine. Logically, it shouldn’t be a karaoke song, and certainly not a successful one. As most karaoke interpretations are usually based on the best-known version of the song, and as Glen Campbell is such an accomplished singer, it’s surprising that so many people think they can get away with singing it. ‘My Way’ doesn’t bring the same problems, because all you really need to do is talk your way through it. Neither does ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, which you can basically shout.* The same can be said of any ABBA song, as all you’re really doing is repeating the words in a very loud voice, which isn’t so different from singing a terrace chant at a football match. ‘Wichita Lineman’, though … well, that requires some pipes, requires a person to limber up before running up to it. Seriously, are you ready to attempt the plaintive denouement that is the song’s final line? Yet still they come, these men and women whose need to be associated with the song, whose need to be seen choosing the song supersedes any ability they might have for actually completing the exercise successfully.
The first time I heard a semi-public rendition of the song was in the Groucho Club, in London’s Dean Street, sometime in the early nineties. It was late at night, and a bunch of us had tumbled in there after an awards ceremony either to celebrate a much-deserved win or offset the injustice of losing. Having loitered at the bar, I had missed the rump of our party disappearing into another part of the club, the part where the piano player held court. It was his job to add some sweetness to the night by accessorising the evening with instrumental versions of whatever took his fancy, frankly. Essentially, he was a cocktail pianist, but when you consider the kind of cocktails that are popular in the Groucho – the espresso martini, the Negroni, anything containing at least two shots of absinthe – you understand how inadequate that description might be. Pianists in the Groucho could play you Sinatra’s hits, if they so desired, or a little light Bacharach, although they were happiest when exploring the rather more esoteric tributaries of popular song.
So I was surprised when I heard the rest of my gang suddenly burst into song, hurtling through Jimmy Webb’s convoluted lyrics, as the pianist, who was predictably far less emboldened by strong drink than they were, vamped behind them – half a bar behind them, to be exact.
‘How could this be?’ I thought to myself. Surely I was the only person who knew this song? Surely I was the only one melancholic enough to have memorised the words? Well, apparently not. I repeated this exercise dozens of times – maybe even hundreds of times – over the next few years, often with one of the original culprits (Robin, Simon, Alex, Tris, Oliver, Robert, etc.), and frequently bolstered by a random newspaper editor, politician or boldface name who had made the mistake of turning up that evening. (‘Glen Campbell is an honorary Irishman,’ said my friend Oliver. ‘When I grew up, every show band played it, every pub played it … We all thought it was an Irish song.’) Giving an impassioned, drunken, melodramatic version of Jimmy Webb’s most famous song at an hour when most right-thinking members had already slipped into the night, homeward bound, became something of a rite of passage. Simon, who was always one of the most enthusiastic participants – if not always one of the most accomplished – used to say that one of the rules he lived by was knowing that it was time to go home whenever anyone started singing ‘American Pie’. It didn’t take long to realise that Don McLean’s iconic shopping list of a song had been replaced. If only Simon had listened to his own advice.
After a while, having spontaneously performed it in hotel bars and restaurants all over the world, it became easy to sing, the only line that might cause me to falter being the one about that stretch down south. What I soon learned was that you have to attack that stanza as though it might never end, singing it out in the same way you breathe into one of those machines at the doctor’s that are designed to judge your lung capacity, because to try and add nuance when you don’t know the song very well is only going to cause you heartache, perhaps more than even Jimmy Webb imagined.
According to Alex James, Blur’s redoubtable bass player, the Groucho was ‘a proudly exclusive, sugary cocktail of celebrity, money, frocks and genius’. In the nineties, it was run largely by women, the fiercest of whom was Gordana, who was not only the most feared manageress, but also the staff member who would berate James most often. ‘You can’t keep riding that bicycle down the stairs,’ she would shout. ‘Someone is going to get hurt. What? Well, I’m not surprised you’ve got a sore leg. You’re a bloody idiot! And if you want to pay the pianist five hundred pounds to play “Wichita Lineman” for an hour, get him to come round to your house to do it.’
Somewhat by default, it became my own karaoke song of choice, beating off competition from ‘On Days Like This’ by Matt Monro or Bobby Darin’s ‘Beyond the Sea’. I’d sung ‘True’ by Spandau Ballet, attempted ‘I’m Your Puppet’ by James and Bobby Purify, ‘Hold On, I’m Coming’ by Sam & Dave and ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams, as well as ‘Same Old Saturday Night’ and ‘Learnin’ the Blues’ (both made famous by Sinatra), but it was always ‘Wichita’ I came back to, like a haunting refrain.
Someone who loves the song even more than Alex James is the club’s resident pianist, Rod Melvin. Rod has been playing the piano at the Groucho since 1995, having previously worked at the Zanzibar, Le Pont de la Tour, L’Escargot, the Lexington and various other clubs and restaurants in London. Along with Ian Dury he is a former member of Kilburn and the High Roads, and in his time has played with Brian Eno, Tony Visconti and the Moodies. Hired by the general manager Mary-Lou Sturridge, and encouraged by her then partner, Hamish Stuart from the Average White Band, Melvin started doing the late shift, mixing classics with personal favourites, ‘Didn’t We’ and ‘Wichita Lineman’ included. ‘Mary-Lou started allowing people to sing around the piano, so people would come in, late at night, and join in,’ said Rod. ‘Then one night [the journalist] Simon Kelner came in, started singing “Wichita Lineman”, and a tradition started. Suddenly I was playing it three times a week.’
For Melvin, it is a joy to play. ‘Some tunes you don’t tire of playing over and over again, and in this case it’s the combination of the chords and the melody. Even if I’m not singing, it’s a very visual song. When you start playing those opening chords, and you get that first melody, there’s something about the space. I always get pictures. You know in movies when you get those scenes of roads going through fields for miles? It’s like that, with these telegraph poles, something about that spaciousness, of someone alone in this vast space. It goes into another key, in the middle, which is significant, I think. Because different keys have different feels. So the first half is quite sad, but has beautiful chords. Then it shifts. The song doesn’t start or finish on the root key, which is very unusual. For a simple song it’s incredibly complex, a little like Randy Newman. You can tell that once it starts to become predictable, Jimmy Webb veers off in another direction. “Up, Up and Away” is another complex song. As for “MacArthur Park”, how would you come up with that? It’s crazy. And that line, “I need you more than want you …”, it’s very economical in its use of words to convey what it does. Jimmy Webb said the Beatles influenced him when they did “Penny Lane”, by using place names, and having a cinematic sweep. It’s incredibly sad. God, it just gets you from the first line. And then it keeps getting better.’
He often segues into David Bowie’s ‘Starman’, making a virtue of the Morse code coda, ‘which works brilliantly if you do it properly. Get it wrong and you’ve ruined two songs.’
In 2010, I went to see Glen Campbell perform at London’s Festival Hall. He looked trim, appeared to have all his own hair (he was seventy-four at the time) and could still execute the difficult parts of his songs. His band was more than adequate, and the arrangements of his hits were in accordance with the records. Of course, he left ‘Wichita Lineman’ till last, and what a thing of great beauty it was. The arrangement was identical to the one he had used on Jools Holland’s Later … a few years previously, which made the song sound modern, while being respectful to the original. I was moved, nearly teary, and afterwards decided to go to the Groucho Club for a nightcap. Bizarrely, it was the first night in living memory that Roddy wasn’t playing it on the piano.
‘I met a well-known photographer one night in the Groucho who lives in LA and who knows Jimmy Webb really well,’ said Melvin. ‘He loves his music so much he used to go round to his house and lie under the piano when he played. I don’t know anyone who loves the song more than Alex James, though. Along with “Up, Up and Away” and “California Girls” and “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, he’d be very happy for me never to play anything else.’
Like Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson had the ability to mix euphoria and melancholia in the space of a single song, often in the same melody, and occasionally in the same note. Given his history of personal problems (an aggressive and belligerent father, a dysfunctional family, a fragile mental state, addictions, weight problems and a long-standing overbearing therapist), it’s hardly surprising that Wilson’s best music always had an innate sadness, a tender quality, which can be found in such diverse Beach Boys songs as ‘Our Prayer’, ‘Wind Chimes’, ‘The Lonely Sea’, ‘Melt Away’, ‘Guess I’m Dumb’ (the song he recorded with Glen Campbell), ‘Surf’s Up’, ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ (written in response to the JFK assassination) and his greatest triumph, ‘Till I Die’ (a version of which appears on their 1971 LP Surf’s Up, though a vastly superior extended instrumental version was released on Endless Harmony in 1998). As legendary rock journalist Nick Kent has so eloquently written, Wilson wrote ‘harmonies so complex, so graceful they seemed to have more in common with a Catholic Mass than any cocktail acapella doo-wop’. Wilson called his work ‘rock church music’, while every one of his classic songs contains a ‘money chord’. Mark Rothko, eat your heart out.
The remarkable thing that Wilson achieved was to create a world that wasn’t there before, a world that not only celebrated a Californian dream world, but also invented an inner world where Wilson – and anyone who ever listened to a Wilson record – could go and be comforted. In this case his music acted as medication, therapy or, in Wilson’s case, a piano standing in a box full of sand. The other remarkable thing is the way in which Wilson’s world connected with so many millions of people. The awful irony of his fabulous invention was his complete inability to enjoy it himself, even though it gave so much enjoyment to so many others. In Barney Hoskyns’s gripping book Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes and the Sound of Los Angeles, Jimmy Webb said, ‘I don’t think that the Californian myth, the dream that a few of us touched, would have happened without Brian, but I don’t think Brian would have happened without the dream.’ Wilson fuelled a fantasy, and surf pop was born.
The Californian coast is a celebration of fantasy, a Pacific kingdom of sunshine, sand and surf, a reconstructed world of wonder where plastic palm trees sway beneath artificial moons, and where David Hockney paintings come to life. This post-industrial landscape aspires to be a terrestrial paradise, a near-tropical dreamland where vistas of magnificent natural beauty vie with car parks littered with neo-Mexican shopping malls, where giant redwoods and valleys of golden poppies surround the state’s popular cathedrals of kitsch. This is a life of abundance, where anything is possible and little is real. A lot of California looks like a grandiose campsite, a frontier state where much looks as though it were thrown up overnight. Here, little looks permanent, making the landscape look as untamed as it looks manicured. But there are few things more enjoyable than hurtling down the Pacific Coast Highway in a rented convertible, few things better than the Californian sun hitting your Ermanno Scervino sunglasses, the spray from the surf hitting your windscreen, the wind rushing across your face and the sound of the Beach Boys blasting through the in-car stereo. For California, Brian Wilson always had unlimited praise.
As did Jimmy Webb.
When we describe the way music makes us feel, it’s often got something to do with abandon – feeling completely separate, cut off, falling through the air, walking through the woods, flying way above everyone, standing on the cliffs looking at the midnight ocean, crouching in a cornfield and peering into the valley … Levitating.
One of my least successful book ideas – when I told my agent about it, he told me to go and have a long lie-down – was a music and travel book identifying the best soundtracks to listen to in various places around the world. I thought this was a brilliant wheeze, an encyclopaedia of great road songs, awesome beach ballads, soaring urban anthems (lots of Clash, U2 and, yes, even Billy Idol) and the exact Kraftwerk tunes you’d need for a ten-day skiing holiday in the Alps. Yet there is no record that evokes a landscape more powerfully than ‘Wichita Lineman’. It is not just that the guitar line sounds so nomadic, it is the imagery the song conjures up: the imagery of Ed Ruscha, of electricity cables black against silkscreen cornflower, the imagery of small towns, big towns in the fifties and sixties – a cluttered horizon full of billboards, traffic signs, fast-food neons, gas stations and, yes, telegraph poles.
It’s perhaps not wise to contradict someone like Pablo Picasso, but on this occasion I have no choice. ‘Painting is not done to decorate apartments,’ he said in 1945. ‘It is an instrument of war.’ He was referring, obliquely, to his enormous canvas capturing the agony when the Luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria, at General Franco’s behest, carpet-bombed the Basque town of Guernica. Yet on the subject of painting, Picasso was just about as wrong as a genius can be. Social commentary is a spectrum, and not every work of art has the ambition of Guernica, just as not every song wants to kick-start a revolution. Painting, in common with all of the arts, invariably acts as a second- or third-hand accompaniment or counterpoint to its locale, a way of lifting the spirits in a darkened room or giving a Caribbean sunset extra gravitas. In some cases it’s designed to fit into the service lifts of Upper East Side apartment blocks, and in others it’s designed to sit in the lobbies of large Swiss banks. It’s why we buy prints of famous paintings, why wallpaper was developed and why furniture designers now have egos the size of George Sherlock sofas.
This is particularly true of music. While pop records that aspire to great art could conceivably be listened to anywhere, a lot of very good pop music has the effect of making a landscape look even grander than it does already, making a blue sky appear even richer, painting a suburban landscape in the correct hues of fifties Americana or underscoring the intensity of a Chicago backstreet. Great pop music, whether it was designed to or not, expresses an abnegation of responsibility. And this is especially true if you are on holiday or at leisure – that moment when a searing power-chord shooting across a cloudless sky fills your heart with whatever you want it to or encourages you to lean your foot a little more heavily on the accelerator pedal. If you’ve ever chosen the scenic drive home, then you’ll know the feeling.
Which means, I suppose, that music can also be a decorative art. While many of us buy records because we have a fundamental attachment to the preoccupations of the people who make them – when we’re young, at least, or pretending we still are – at other times we buy them simply because we happen to like the way they sound: they encourage us to engage with our surroundings, but also allow us to distance ourselves from them.
If you’re driving just north of Los Angeles, say, climbing up the Pacific Coast Highway on your way to Santa Barbara, hearing ‘Sleepwalk’ by Santo & Johnny will not only transport you out of California, it might just lift you right into outer space. Music and landscape make perfect bedfellows. John Peel’s perfect dovetail of sound and vision appears on page 153 of his part-autobiography, Margrave of the Marshes. It is 1961, and Peel is driving from New Orleans back to Dallas. ‘The drive gave me one of the greatest musical moments of my life. I had been driving for some time and it must have been two or three in the morning as I started through the richly forested area of East Texas known as Piney Woods.’ There was hardly any traffic on the road, and as the highway rose and fell through the trees, past tiny little towns that were barely shacks and shop fronts, ‘the moon, which shone brilliantly directly in front of me, turned the concrete to silver’. Peel recalls that he was listening, as everyone did in that area at that time, to Wolfman Jack, the maverick DJ who broadcasted from a station called XERB, over the border in Mexico. The Wolfman was just about the most exotic man in pop back then (he is immortalised, for those that care, in George Lucas’s love letter to the period, American Graffiti), and as Peel came over the top of yet another hill ‘to see another tiny town below me, he played Elmore James’s “Stranger Blues” and I knew that I would never forget the perfect conjunction of place, mood and music. Nor have I.’
For music and landscape to co-exist in a perfect state, everything needs to work in 5.1 surround sound, the sort that makes you jump when the drums come in, the sort that sends you careering down a ravine after a particularly notable key change. For me, that notion of perfection is usually embodied by John Barry, Burt Bacharach or the Beach Boys – especially their more maudlin music – and the golden dunes of California. I close my eyes and I could be kicking sand on Malibu beach; clench them a little tighter and I’m transported right into a Rousseau painting, walking between 2D tigers and childlike palm trees.
Like Burt Bacharach’s lyricist Hal David, Jimmy Webb relished images of mobility and movement – cars, highways, trains, even balloons – as well as all the telegraph poles from here to the horizon. Cars would become an obsession for Webb, and central to his songwriting. When he became rich – and he became rich almost as soon as he became famous – one of the first things he did was buy himself some automobiles.
In 2017, as he was being chauffeured by GQ’s motoring editor Jason Barlow in a McLaren 570S Spider to a gig he was about to play at St James’s Church in London’s Piccadilly, Webb waxed lyrical about his vintage AC Cobra – bought directly from legendary racing driver Carroll Shelby, the man who created the Cobra, one of the most genuinely iconic cars ever made.
‘You could actually drive in those days,’ he said. ‘Once you hit the Nevada state line, there was no speed limit, it was like being on the autobahn. I’d run that thing up to 120, 130 mph. It was terrifyingly easy. But then it would start doing a little dance, so I was never that keen to see how fast it would really go. All it would take would be to drop a tyre on that soft shoulder on the freeway and I’d be a firework. It would have ensured my everlasting fame, I guess.’
He was talking about 1968, the year he made it, the year he came into some serious money. He had another Cobra, and he had it on very good authority that it was originally built for Steve McQueen, but he turned it down. He thought it was too dangerous. Shelby sold it to Bill Cosby, who went out for a ride in it with his little daughter one day and said, ‘Take it back.’ It was too fast. Then it was sold to an Englishman who lived in California part of the time. One night, presumably after a few drinks, he drove it off the Pacific Coast Highway.
‘In fact, I watched mine burn one day,’ said Webb. ‘It was a primeval device. The battery sat between the seats, but I was taking nice women out at the time, so I asked the guys in the shop to move it into the boot, in a bracket with safety cables to keep the bracket vertical. Made it into a Californian dragster, basically. I said to my brother, “You ought to feel the acceleration in second gear, man.” So I did that one day to show him, and the car blew up. The battery had detached, and whatever fuel vapour was in there ignited, and it went up. Took out my left eyebrow in the process. We grabbed garden hoses out of the neighbours’ yards. I don’t know what the hell we thought we were doing, it was already an inferno. But I rebuilt it. I put sixty grand into it.’
As a road song, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ doesn’t bear much scrutiny where the timings are concerned, and there are some people who have even produced maps to show how improbable they are, but as Webb said himself, ‘Sometimes as a writer you come to a decision like that and you just flip a coin. You could try “By the Time I Get to Flagstaff”, but does it work as well?’ One such person approached him one night after a concert, ‘And he showed me how it was impossible for me to drive from LA to Phoenix, and then how far it was to Albuquerque. In short, he told me, “This song is impossible.” And so it is. It’s a kind of fantasy about something I wish I would have done, and it sort of takes place in a twilight zone of reality.’
The car would be emblematic of America’s aspirations in the fifties and sixties. Every new Cadillac had to outdo and outgrow the previous model. Each car had acres of chrome and dozens of winking lights, like a mobile jukebox. The 1959 Caddy had lethally sharp-looking tail fins, which had sprouted rocket-shaped tail lights that seemed to be clinging precariously to their sides. The Cadillac, like much music of the time, was a prime example of what the American design critic Thomas Hine defined as ‘populuxe’, a fifties aesthetic that fused populism with luxury. ‘The decade was one of America’s great shopping sprees,’ he said. ‘Never before were so many people able to acquire so many things, and never before was there such a choice.’ It was the era of the newly created world of mass suburbia, where everything family-owned – the house, the car, the furniture, the hi-fi (on which to play your Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra records) – was provisional; even if it didn’t wear out, one always had the hope of being able to move up the ladder to something better. ‘There were so many new things to buy – a power mower, a more modern dinette set, a washing machine with a window through which you could see the wash water turn a disgusting grey, a family room, a two-toned refrigerator, a charcoal grill, and, of course, televisions.’ Or a Jet Age Cadillac, each year, every year.
In America in the fifties, suburbia determined popular culture, and in some part of their being every suburbanite wanted a new car. This was the decade of the automobile, when America took to the roads with a vengeance, exploiting the highways and driving anywhere just for the hell of it. Which is why it’s not at all surprising that the fifties and sixties produced so many songs about cars. Jimmy Webb certainly wrote his fair share: ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ is just one long, convoluted road trip, while ‘Wichita Lineman’ is written completely from the perspective of someone in a car moving slowly along a country backroad.
As David Hepworth once pointed out, many of us have internalised the names of places referenced in the Great American Songbook, at least those concerned with moving from country to city, from city to city, ‘and from the city back to the theoretical peace of rural life’. These migrations, both large and small, are what we expect to hear about in a lot of American music, whether it charts the movement along Route 66, Chuck Berry’s ‘Promised Land’ or even the geographical impossibilities of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’. We can remember them all: Memphis, Tulsa, Pasadena, Chattanooga, Birmingham, Georgia, San Francisco, San Jose, Muscle Shoals, Asbury Park, Rockaway Beach, Highway 61, 53rd and 3rd, (coast to coast) LA to Chicago, Tucson to Tucumcari, and even the New Jersey Turnpike, which is obviously one of the first places one should go to look for America.
‘To any foreigner who grew up hearing “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo”, American towns are the most musical on the planet,’ wrote Mark Steyn.
The Mason–Dixon Line has been responsible for many songs which deal with its figurative significance, not least Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. Written in 1973 as a response to two songs by Neil Young, ‘Southern Man’ and ‘Alabama’, which dealt with racism and slavery in the South, Skynyrd’s almost reactionary retort was both a putdown of Young and a celebration of the band’s heritage. Acknowledged as a chanson de revanche, in a wider and more contemporary context it can be seen as analogous to the espousal of Trumpian politics, or at least the insidious nature of Trumpian beliefs. When Ronnie Van Zant, the band’s lead singer, defiantly says that Watergate doesn’t bother him, he was not only bemoaning the liberal obsession with Nixon, but also speaking for the entire South, asking that they should not to be judged as individuals for the racial problems of southern society in the same way they wouldn’t judge ordinary northerners for the failures of their leaders in Washington.
In some respects, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is a populist anthem, the kind of broadly drawn broadside that should appeal to those who like their ideologies reduced to slogans. But then by definition any successful protest song condenses an argument into a chorus. It is perhaps surprising that there have been so few contemporary populist anthems – are there any? – as well as so few anti-populist songs; after all, a world in which Donald Trump, Brexit and Matteo Salvini have thrived ought to have emboldened those on both sides of the divide. Of course, it is untrue to say that the protest song is no longer a cultural force, as hip hop has been criticising government, shouting (literally) about social injustice and addressing the ubiquity of police brutality in black communities since the late seventies (which is why Public Enemy’s Chuck D famously dubbed hip hop ‘the black CNN’ all those years ago), but hip hop has almost become a protest genre in its own right, and so in many people’s eyes is less influential.
The writers of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ long denied that it was a white supremacist anthem, insisting that the lyrics were more ambivalent; and while this might be true, it remains an unusually powerful invocation.
‘Wichita Lineman’ is anything but.
Los Angeles has always had an abundance of cultural entry points, but for me it’s forever associated with one image: the photograph – taken by Terry O’Neill – of Elton John on the blue-carpeted stage at Dodger Stadium in 1975. Elton, wearing a sequined Dodgers baseball kit, is sitting at his piano, which is also covered in blue carpet, and is about to launch into ‘Benny and the Jets’ in front of the 80,000-strong crowd. The picture is so vivid you almost expect it to start playing the song, like a musical birthday card.
At the time, Elton was the biggest star in the world, and his two shows at the home of the LA Dodgers that year were the pinnacle of his early success. As the DJ Paul Gambaccini once said, no single photograph better demonstrates the hold a rock star can have over the public.
‘Benny and the Jets’ is also the quintessential LA record, and you can guarantee you’ll hear it on the radio whenever you visit the city. You’ll also hear every other great seventies song. Most of the great ‘landscape’ driving music was made in the seventies, so it feels completely natural when the likes of America’s ‘Ventura Highway’, the Doobie Brothers’ ‘Long Train Runnin’’ or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’ come hurtling out of the rental car’s speakers – accompanied, of course, by a flash of neon light, a plume of purple smoke and a wash of dry ice.
Some say that Los Angeles is just New York lying down, although it’s a hell of a lot younger; in fact, in LA, by the time you’re thirty-five you’re older than most of the buildings. You’ll certainly be older than the cars, because LA is the most car-obsessed city in the world. (It was once said that the cars are so cool in Hollywood that children there don’t wear masks on Halloween; instead, they usually dress up as valet parkers.) And if you haven’t got a white Range Rover or a Mercedes S65, then frankly you’re nobody.
There are more cars in California than people in any of the other states of the US, while LA’s freeway system handles over twelve million cars on a daily basis. The lucky residents of LA County spend an estimated four days of each year stuck in traffic. Everything revolves around the car here (why else would someone open an all-night drive-in taxidermist?), and whereas most European films usually involve a small boy and a bicycle, all decent American films involve a car chase.
There are now so many purpose-built digital radio stations that it’s possible to choose what you want to listen to for any journey, whether it’s exclusively music made in the nineties or the thirties. On a recent trip to LA, as I drove through Bel Air, past the mansions and the gate lodges of Beverly Hills, the exotic Chandleresque haciendas, rustling palms, lawn sprinklers and chirruping crickets, and up into the Hollywood Hills (where it’s still possible, if you’re wearing a patchwork denim waistcoat and a pair of purple velvet loon pants, to catch a whiff of 1972 patchouli oil, joss stick and body odour), I found a station pumping out an assortment of Elton John songs, including a few from one of his semi-great forgotten albums of the seventies, Rock of the Westies. This is the great lost Elton record, an alternative Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, an uneven but fascinating album containing half a dozen classic songs: ‘I Feel Like a Bullet (In the Gun of Robert Ford)’, ‘Dan Dare (Pilot of the Future)’, ‘Feed Me’, ‘Street Kids’, ‘Grow Some Funk of Your Own’, etc.
As I listened to the songs in my car, gunning it down Sunset Boulevard with the midday sun and the palms above me, I felt myself being transported back to the LA of the mid-seventies. Suddenly I was driving through a bright blue Hockney dreamscape, surrounded by CinemaScope billboards for Shampoo, Tommy and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All of a sudden my trouser bottoms got a little wider, my lapels turned into aircraft carriers, my cologne became a little more pronounced, my shoes sprouted three-inch stack heels and my denim waistcoat was suddenly made of silver lamé. Oh, and guess what? I was now sporting a pair of tinted spectacles the size of Texas. There was a copy of Rolling Stone on the passenger seat, along with a packet of More cigarettes, a paperback of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and an eight-track cartridge of Supertramp’s Crisis? What Crisis?
The one California song I’ve never particularly cared for is its most famous. In fact, I’ve always found the idea for the song more interesting than the record itself. Written by Don Felder, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, ‘Hotel California’ is ostensibly a song about materialism and excess, written during a decade when California was no longer simply being portrayed as a daydream pleasuredome and was starting to be used as a metaphor for indulgence and ennui. Henley has excused the song hundreds of times, principally describing it as a snapshot of the excesses of American culture and the uneasy balance between art and commerce. ‘Everyone wants to know what this song means,’ he said. ‘I know, it’s so boring. It’s a song about the dark underbelly of the American Dream.’ Like so many songs written about California in the seventies, it was a song about an outsider’s journey from innocence to experience.
Bernie Leadon was the only band member at the time who was from the state (Timothy B. Schmit, who joined in 1977, was also from California). Don Henley was from Texas, Joe Walsh from New Jersey, Randy Meisner from Nebraska, Glenn Frey from Detroit and Don Felder from Florida. Felder said this about the song: ‘As you’re driving in Los Angeles at night, you can see the glow of the energy and the lights of Hollywood and Los Angeles for 100 miles out in the desert. And on the horizon, as you’re driving in, all of these images start coming into your mind of the propaganda and advertisement you’ve experienced about California. In other words, the movie stars, the stars on Hollywood Boulevard, the beaches, bikinis, palm trees, all those images that you see and that people think of when they think of California start running through your mind. You’re anticipating that. That’s all you know of California.’
Don Henley put it another way: ‘We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest. “Hotel California” was our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles.’
The temporality of places such as New York or Miami is what makes them so exciting, so operative, so full of movement. Wichita, in our imagination at least, is always there. When Jimmy Webb writes, ‘And if it snows that stretch down south / won’t ever stand the strain,’ he knows it, and because of that we know it too. This is always going to be the case: that stretch down south is always going to be there. The song immerses itself in the wilderness of the Midwestern imagination, a liberation from all that is not wild.
One wonders how big a city has to be, or how small a town, to have a song written about it. By now, most state capitals must have had a song written about them (with the exception of Juneau and Annapolis, obviously), and even the most inconsequential conurbations have popped up in songs by the kings and queens of Americana and been celebrated by the finest minds in alt.country.
Randy Newman’s ‘Baltimore’ first appeared on his 1977 album Little Criminals, with the narrator being a disaffected citizen of the city bemoaning the hard times that had resulted in a sharp decline in the quality of life there. It’s vague social commentary, a hastily written post-mortem, but it’s beautiful. No, not everyone in Baltimore liked it – online message boards are still full of withering insults, my favourite being, ‘Go sodomise yourself with a chainsaw, Randy Newman’ – yet it very quickly began to be regarded as one of Newman’s very best songs. Melancholy lyrics, a hypnotic piano riff and a plaintive vocal make for one extraordinarily maudlin travelogue, one that could easily be called ‘Chicago’, ‘New Orleans’ or ‘The Bronx’. Or indeed, these days, even neighbourhoods in San Francisco or Santa Barbara. Time magazine got it right when it said that Newman the lyricist is a refreshing irritant. ‘And Newman the composer is a sweet seducer. His music is a lush amalgam of Americana.’ Or chalk and cheese in the same bun.
Just a few years after I eventually learned to drive, I organised a road trip across the US with one of my very best friends, Robin, a journey that would take us all the way from New York, Philadelphia and Washington down through the Blue Ridge Mountains, Nashville and Memphis, before joining Route 66 and continuing on to LA, via Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada. And of course, I made an individual mix tape for every state, starting off on the Eastern Seaboard with lots of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, Southside Johnny and Tom Petty, before moving into the southern states with plenty of Neville Brothers, Dr John and Allen Toussaint, and then joining the dustbowl motorway accompanied by fairly generic seventies FM rock – the Steve Miller Band, the Eagles, Foghat, Boston and some more Tom Petty. Like feathers on a freeway, Petty’s songs are meant to bounce around your car as you cruise down the highway on a journey to the past. Built on a sound based on the Big Jangle, they actively encourage nostalgia, songs you’re meant to play as you’re driving home from work, or out into the desert, or back to the sixties. Some would say he was celebrated for using nostalgia as a survival tool, but I had to have his songs on my tapes.
It seemed imperative to have the Eagles, too. For many of my generation, at a certain point in our development they were the band that we loved to hate more than anyone else. When I was at art school in the late seventies, admitting you liked the Eagles was tantamount to admitting that you not only knew nothing about music, but also that you probably harboured a secret desire to light joss sticks and cover yourself in patchouli oil. Worse, it hinted that you may have been slightly more interested in cruising down Ventura Highway in an open-top Mustang rather than slumming it at the back of some dirty nightclub above a pub on the outskirts of Basildon.
Even so, in preparing for our road trip I had failed to understand that the radio stations in the States are built for long journeys, and that the soundtrack to my journey would be supplied whether I liked it or not. There was no need for me to make a cassette compilation of Steely Dan’s ‘King of the World’, Robert Plant’s ‘Big Log’ or Neil Young’s ‘Powderfinger’, as they – and everything else I’d recorded for the journey – were being played on the radio every half an hour anyway.
‘Good job you recorded this,’ deadpanned Robin as we trundled through New Mexico, after we’d listened to ‘Take It Easy’ by the Eagles, ‘because they’ve only played it six times on the radio today.’
‘Take It Easy’ mentions Winslow, Arizona, and it was just outside Winslow that we found the journey’s own Holy Grail. The sun was falling in the sky, promising a rich, dark sunset as we sped along the highway towards Two Guns. In the distance the Juniper Mountains cut across the horizon like tears of pale-blue tissue paper. As we gunned towards them we looked to our left and saw a deserted drive-in, standing forlorn in the dirt, casting shadows that stretched all the way back to town. Suddenly I felt like an extra in American Graffiti, sitting in the custom-built bench seat of a hot rod, my cap-sleeved right arm around my girl, my ducktail brushing the rear-view mirror and Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’ pouring through the dashboard speaker.
Here was the true spirit of Route 66 in all its faded glory. Like the highway itself, the Tonto Drive-In was a totem of America’s glorious past, a testament to the new frontier, the freedom to travel and the democratised automotive dream of the fifties, when a car was still every American’s birthright. This deserted cathedral, standing stoic and proud in the burnt sienna sunset, was, quite literally, the end of the road. Suddenly California – with all its promises of eternal youth and ‘two girls for every boy’ – seemed a long, long way away.
Of course, my epiphany was ably abetted by the tapes I’d made. We weren’t hearing ‘Wichita Lineman’ every half an hour on the radio, nor were we blessed with ‘Are You There (With Another Girl)?’, ‘On Days Like This’, ‘The Ipcress File’ and all the other loungecore songs I’d recorded just for moments like this. So all my work had not actually been in vain.
A few years later, I was driving down the Californian coast from San Francisco to LA, and I listened to digital radio all the way, moving the dial through ‘stations’ that played music from every decade of the last eighty years. If I’d have driven long enough, I probably would have heard everything that’s ever been recorded, from Louis Armstrong to CeeLo Green, from the Andrews Sisters to Tyler the Creator, from Big Bill Broonzy to Death Cab for Cutie. It was a joyous experience, but it could have been anyone’s.
So the next time I did a Californian road trip, from LA to San Diego via Santa Monica and Palm Springs, the soundtrack was worked out in some detail: I started off with some Erin Bode and Nightmares on Wax, followed swiftly by Example, Midlake and Ed Sheeran, before moving on to Bon Iver, Here We Go Magic and Ducktails. Sure, I could simply have listened to the radio and probably enjoyed myself just as much. That wasn’t the point. This was my journey and I was the one who was going to decide what it sounded like.
It’s hardly surprising that journeys are often best accessorised by film soundtracks. By its very nature, the soundtrack is a supplementary medium. It’s intrusive and indistinct by turns, following its film like a shadow. But if, as Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen says, good music should sabotage expectations, then it would be easy to say that there is very little good music in the movies. Aural clichés are as widespread as visual ones: jazz for the city, narcissistic flutes in the suburbs; Aaron Copland-style orchestration for small-town Americana; scratchy guitars and piping horns for urban thrillers. For pastoral, copy Debussy; for devastation, rework Barber or Albinoni; for a western, hire Morricone (the man who put the opera into horse opera).
Once I even made my own. In the summer of 1990, I was in Carmel, in California, about to have dinner at Clint Eastwood’s restaurant, the Hog’s Head Inn (at the time he was the town’s mayor). As I walked down through the centre of town, I passed one of those generic new-age shops, the ones that sell everything from joss sticks and expensively framed Grateful Dead posters to designer lava lamps and spa creams. It also sold various CDs of ocean sounds – Californian ocean sounds to boot. And as I had been in love with the idea of the Californian ocean from the age of about ten, I had to buy one.
And I bought it with one thing in mind. Almost as soon as I got home to London I put it into the CD player and then played one of my bespoke Beach Boys cassettes over the top, so I could listen to ‘Surf’s Up’, ‘Till I Die’ and ‘California Saga’ with the sound of the Big Sur waves crashing against the rocks in the background. I had replicated almost completely my Californian experience – which was designed primarily so I could listen to a surf soundtrack ad nauseam as I drove along the Pacific Coast Highway in a rented Mustang – which meant that whenever I wanted to, I could take myself back to Route 101 and ‘Cabinessence’ without leaving the confines of west London. The Durutti Column’s ‘Sketch for Summer’ has birdsong on it, as does Virginia Astley’s 1983 mini-masterpiece From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, which comes complete with its own natural soundtrack, in the shape of field recordings of birdsong and sheep. There is a little light piano, some woodwind and some ambient vocals, but mainly this is the sound of the countryside, an instrumental accompaniment to a typical British summer’s day. Some songs are even transfigurative, and whenever I hear ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ by Fairport Convention, I immediately sense I’m walking along a deserted British beach in the middle of winter, surrounded by little but cloud.
With ‘Wichita Lineman’ I’m still in that rented Mustang, bombing for the border.
* If you are ever asked about television’s greatest moment, there obviously can be only one answer: the final two minutes of the final episode of The Sopranos (first shown on 10 June 2007). In this scene, when Tony Soprano glances upwards and the screen falters and turns to black many of us thought our Sky+ facility had decided to implode at the least opportune moment in TV history. Although as the credits began to roll we realised that this was perhaps the only way for David Chase’s epic family saga to extinguish itself. Chase says that the show’s audience was always bifurcated, and that on one sofa you had a small army who only wanted to see the Bada Bing mob whack people, while on the other you had another bunch who were far more interested in the family dynamic.
‘I sort of knew that the people who wanted the big bloodbath at the end were not going to be thrilled with the ending, but what I did not realise was how angry those people would get,’ said Chase. ‘And it was amazing how long it went on. Especially when you figure that we had a rather significant war going on.’
Ultimately, the show’s finale was all about the conflict. The theme of the final episode, no. 86, was ‘Made in America’, as much of a reference to Iraq as it was to the financial discomfort zone many US citizens found themselves in. Chase says he didn’t want to be didactic about it, but all we needed to know about the subtext was there on Tony and Carmela’s faces, when their son AJ tells them he wants to join up. And the final song in the final episode of the greatest television show ever made, the record that will forever be synonymous with closure? Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, the hugely successful single from their 1981 album Escape. Which certainly confused the hell out of me.
‘It didn’t take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact,’ said Chase. ‘I did something I’d never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, “What do you think?” When I said, “‘Don’t Stop Believin’’,” people went, “What? Oh my god!” I said, “I know, I know, just give a listen,” and little by little, people started coming around.’ When the episode was aired, reactions to the denouement were mixed. ‘I hear some people were very angry, and others were not,’ said Chase. ‘Which is what I expected.’
Since then, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ has become a karaoke classic, as popular as any ABBA or Take That song. Journey’s lead singer, Steve Perry, initially refused to let Chase use the song until he knew the fate of the leading characters, and didn’t give final approval until three days before the episode aired. He feared that the song would be remembered as the soundtrack to Tony’s demise, until Chase assured him that this would not be the case. Strangely, he was right. In 2009, it was performed in the pilot episode of the hit US TV series Glee, and for a while was the best-selling digital song not released in the twenty-first century.