Hallelujah. I'm a firm believer that great songs don't always have to be sonic masterpieces crafted by historic bands or artists, nor cutting edge lightning bolts from up and comers at the vanguard of a music scene who haven't (yet) sold out. Sometimes a nice, safe, radio-friendly pop song can be golden, particularly in days past, when more thought was put into the process of writing one. What is the no-less-than-hallowed discography of Motown (for instance), if not essentially just a string of simple pop songs that are so well crafted they never have to try too hard?
I wouldn't call The 5th Dimension 'Motown' (nor compare the two overall), but they're from that same era, when the songwriting process was less reliant on the lazy discipline of finding a rhythmic hook, and they too have a catalog of durable ditties, emphasis on the word 'durable' (and ditties too, I guess, because it sounds funny...)....songs that could only have happened in the late 1960s and early 70s, yet strangely never seem as dated when they play as you'd think they would.
The sweet, crisp melody of Last Night... is always refreshing, never heavy (imagine, if you will, fruit that is canned in its own juice, rather than in syrup), and coupled with the equally clean lines of the arrangement and the vocals, paints the singer's dilemma in an engagingly bittersweet fashion, never allowing for a washout of emotion to make the listener uncomfortable, and always reassuring that things will (probably...) be okay.
Or, if you wish, forget all that blah blah. (Last Night) I Didn't Get to Sleep at All is just pleasing to listen to. It is, simply, a great pop song. Not a great song, necessarily, but a great pop song.
Funny, I never knew singer Marilyn McCoo was in The 5th Dimension. I only remember her, like many Gen Xer's might, as the host of Solid Gold in the early 1980s...
And what I remember of watching the Solid Gold dancers (the female ones, at least) as a newly horny 11-year-old is worthy of its own blog post...;-)
"The sleeping pill I took was just a waste of time..."
#136) "Wichita Lineman" by Glen Campbell - Of course, there's nothing wrong with a brilliant song either, a song that very well might be considered a sonic masterpiece, a song that through innovation and careful attention to detail both in music and in lyrics captures not just a moment in time, but a large chunk of space-time, and gets better with age, to boot.
Wichita Lineman is arguably one of the greatest songs ever written. In country music, especially, it was nothing less than ground-breaking for its time, taking a drastically different tack in its interpretation/representation of the genre: let's not rely only on pathetically empirical evidence of misfortune for once (my wife left me, took the truck, took the kids, took the dog, went back to mama...), let's step into our minds this time, and out of our bodies, and see where we might end up.
Songwriter Jimmy Webb reportedly spotted an actual lineman high atop a pole while driving, and that scene, what he is said to have called the 'picture of loneliness', inspired the song. The resulting assemblage of misty strings and blaring horns stitched together by Campbell's eerily detached vocals would seem a rare and priceless nexus of subject matter and medium.
 |
| "...THAT STRETCH DOWN SOUTH..." - It was reportedly while driving along a west-running road in Oklahoma, where songwriter Jimmy Webb spotted a lineman perched atop a pole, and was inspired to write Wichita Lineman. This photo was actually taken in Kansas (Jan. 2011), but hey, there's enough longing and loneliness in this life to go around...this scene exists everywhere. |
There are few songs that affect me quite like Wichita Lineman, few songs that describe the twilight of my own mind so readily, that mental place we all have where horizon meets sky. There have been many cover versions, but Campbell's is the only one I hear, and for me, 'Wichita' has transcended the mere song, become a kind of state of mind, a condition. It is sometimes - not always, but sometimes - what being 'country' is about: not the non-stop flag waving, good-timing tailgating so prevalent in today's version of country music, but days and nights spent coping with distance and loneliness, a flash point of longing as urgently bright and blinding as any popping off in the city, but dimmed by a thin film of fear...for what you can't ever really say.
Wichita is the first of the long thoughts that arrive as the last of the day's light excuses itself from the room, the moment you can't help wondering if you, and all you see, might be existing only in someone else's imagination.
"And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time..."
