i hear you singing in the wire

Jimmy Webb sent the tape over unfinished. Two verses, no third, no bridge — and a skull and crossbones drawn on the note, so nobody could later claim they hadn’t been warned. Glen Campbell recorded it anyway. When Webb ran into him a few days later and started explaining all over again that the song wasn’t done, Campbell pulled an acetate out of his bag: “Well, it is now.”

What fills the hole where the third verse should be is a borrowed instrument. Campbell wanted the middle section to sound like the Tornados’ “Telstar”, so he picked up Carol Kaye’s six-string Danelectro bass — Kaye was on the date too, and hers is the descending figure that opens the record — and played the melody straight back, note for note, low and trebly and slightly out of tune. Webb has called it an extreme compliment. Around it, arranger Al De Lory hung violins up in the register where wind in a wire lives, plus a small repeating keyboard motif that ticks along like telegraph traffic. Webb’s own contribution came last: two notes held down on a Gulbransen organ, which cycled them up and down the keyboard by themselves. “Shivery, icy, almost like outer space,” is how he described it. Campbell heard it and wanted it on the fade.

Webb had seen the man himself while driving through the Oklahoma panhandle — one figure on one pole, talking into a phone, in a landscape with nothing else standing upright in it — then moved him to Kansas because the word sang better. There is no chorus. The song just keeps climbing through an ordinary working day until it arrives at “And I need you more than want you / And I want you for all time”, which is a stranger and better sentence than pop music usually allows itself, and then it declines to resolve anything at all. He is still up there. He is still on the line. Put it on and wait for the verse that never comes.