Interiority Complexes (Music About Places)

When a 60s musician passes away, I get a chance to re-listen to their music. I've always liked Wichita Lineman because it had an eeriness or sonic 'interiority', that started to show up in recordings in the mid-60s.

Sometimes it is the sound of a particular venue (such as the Fillmore West or the Matrix Club in San Francisco for example), that becomes a 'sonic synecdoche' for San Francisco itself. [1] It's a vibe, that I think the song possessed--produced by bounced tracks and heavy compression for AM radio.

In the 60s, car radios sometimes had optional reverbs. I recall my Uncle's 1963 Galaxie had one. This had a kind of "Fillmore effect", of giving music a sense of place, or interiority--literally in a car interior. Wichita was undoubtedly played a lot over these systems, but in retrospect, the wide-open space was already evoked in the lyric, and could be recalled with a photo like this. (In fact when you Google "Wichita Lineman" you get lots of these.)

 

It is also interesting that many of Glen Campbell's hits were about places: Phoenix, Wichita, and Galveston. Ask someone to write about specific places and you'd probably get something similarly cinematic.

[1]. ""In 1966 some thought San Francisco itself, particularly the Fillmore West, was a catalyst for the sounds being made there: "There is a sound that I identify with San Francisco. I don't know if it's inadvertent or intended reverb. That is what particularly the Fillmore West sounded like. Anyone who played there, regardless of the settings on your instruments, you were going to pull some of that in. This embryonic sound is best heard under the recordings made by the Great Society at the Matrix club during summer 1966."" (Savage, Jon. 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. Faber & Faber, 2016. p. 366)

Place Like Kansas (6-30-2001) by meta4s

 

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8/11/2024: It's interesting to explore the history of something when you're in a historical inflection point in American history, This song is real Americana about the Average Joe, now embodied by Tim Walz, representing a Lineman kind of a guy as a character in a film. America is very much a movie with a soundtrack.

“...I was writing about the common man, the blue-collar hero who gets caught up in the tides of war, as in ‘Galveston,’ or the guy who’s driving back to Oklahoma because he can’t afford a plane ticket (‘Phoenix’). So it was a character that I worked with in my head. And I had seen a lot of panoramas of highways and guys up on telephone wires … I didn’t want to write another song about a town, but something that would be in the ballpark for him.”