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Adalbert is a forum for me, to post ephemera, photography, poetry, occasional travel notes, and various spontaneous motions. Cover photo: Parsonage where my great-grandfather spent his early years. Taken near Liegnitz, Silesia, ca. 1870. The "xothique" portion of the web address is a nod to Clark Ashton Smith's fictional continent of Zothique.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Jimmy Webb and the Cry of Nature

I have seen a couple variant explanations of the inspiration behind the song Wichita Lineman, written by Jimmy Webb, performed by many, most famously Glen Campbell. One version has a prosaic sheen. I'll go with the second:  "All of a sudden there was somebody on top of one of those telephone poles -- out of thousands of telephone poles, there's one that has a guy on it, and he had one of those little telephones hooked into the wire." I see the worker in Webb's ecstatic existentialist vision as the figure as one of Munch's productions of The Cry, or a loner from an Edward Hopper painting. The scream of nature surrounded the Wichita lineman.






2 comments:

  1. Good song + thank you for providing the musical background.

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  2. Glad you liked the song and background info, Rob.

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