School bus songs

Wichita Lineman; Wichita Lineman; Glen Campbell

I didn’t like to sit in the back of the school bus when I was little. I preferred to sit in the front where I could see out of the big window in the front and where I could watch the bus driver turn all of the knobs, push all the buttons and operate the cool-looking handle that opened the door. The show up front held far greater interest than the gossip of the big kids in the back. And I liked to listen to the songs on the radio.

The musical gulf that divides the generations today overwhelmingly dwarfs the musical trench that separated various age groups thirty to forty years ago. The crossover artists back then had a little more common ground that they could cover to reach the differing tastes of all of the listening camps. In the early 1970’s, school bus riders liked to have the radio on and content didn’t matter as much. They simply wanted music. Today, I think young students allow themselves to get caught up in the hierarchical and fashionable subjectivity of the music they listen to. “I’m way too cool to listen to anything like that. Id rather listen to nothing.” But, what kind of credibility do I have on this issue? I left the pack on the music of my own generation long, long ago.

Yet, in the tradition of classical music where the sustainability of many musical works won’t be detected for quite some time, I’m finding now that various and sundry songs from the radio that got caught, processed and uploaded into my mental iPod many years ago have survived the decades, never got erased, and, when I think of them and can download them onto iTunes, can live some type of reincarnation on my real iPod.

My friend, E., has a theory that very few songs can arrive at the pinnacle of popularity on the merits of high quality writing alone. In order to be a hit, most songs need a leg up from a gimmick, just a spark of something that catches the listener’s attention for the smallest fraction of a second. Like in “Movin’ Out”, when Billy Joel sings that “workin’ too hard can give you a heart attack, ack, ack, ack, ack,” and then rhymes it with “Hackensack”. How much more Dr. Seuss can you get? It’s brilliant. The question is: But wasn’t it brilliant before without the “ack, ack” gimmick? Ah, but the wise man sayeth: You will never have to know.

What better setting to listen to “Wichita Lineman” than on the radio in the front seat of a school bus on the flat plains of South Dakota with dozens of telephone poles and electric lines whizzing past, entering and exiting the panorama of that giant window before me? Even at the age of six, it made a huge impression. Gimmick? Yeah, there’s a gimmick. The violins and the Gulbransen Synthesizer in Glen Campbell’s arrangement mimic snatches of Morse Code that a lineman might hear when attaching a telephone earpiece to a long stretch of raw telephone wire. It comes right after Mr. Campbell sings that “the Wichita lineman is still on the line –“. What a haunting effect!

Jimmy Webb wrote this song after seeing a solitary lineman working miles from anywhere in rural northern Oklahoma. In the song, the lonely worker imagines that he can hear his absent lover “singing in the wire”. Rolling Stone magazine includes “Wichita Lineman” in its list of the “500 Greatest Songs Of All Time” at number 192. They call it the first existential country song.

Mr. Webb also wrote the great “MacArthur Park”. In episode fifteen of the seventeenth season of The Simpsons, Homer, in a moment of inspired brilliance, calls the rehab-center and puts the operator there on hold while he sings both “Wichita Lineman” and “MacArthur Park”, practically simultaneously. Listen.

Credits: To school bus drivers, for bringing care to the transportation of children to their halls of learning and back to their home, for standing in the gap to protect the precious lives of our future’s greatest investment. You really do make an impression. And I thank you for it.