The Wrecking Crew (29 page)

Young, ego-driven, and not afraid to speak his mind—especially about something that he believed in so strongly—Post immediately wheeled on a surprised Smothers and said, “Get the fuck out of my studio.”

And Smothers did.

But, within twenty-four hours, something miraculous happened: Tommy Smothers completely changed his mind. And was big enough to admit it. After talking things over with Williams, Smothers had decided that the over-the-top production really was the right way to go. It had just been an initial shock to the system, that's all. He told Post as much, with both men quickly putting the brief flare-up behind them. The important thing now, they all agreed, was to get the song some much-needed exposure.

With the Smothers Brothers graciously allowing Mason Williams to perform “Classical Gas” several times on
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
over the next few months, it finally began to catch on with the public. Just as season two of the increasingly controversial show came to a close in June of '68, the record finally slid into the upper reaches of the Hot 100. Seven weeks later, “Classical Gas” had blown by virtually all comers on its way to number two, held off from the top spot only by the Doors' “Hello, I Love You.”

But the momentum didn't stop there. “Classical Gas” would soon go on to win three Grammy Awards, two for Williams and one for Post. And, because of the massive amount of airplay the song continuously received, even after falling off the charts, it would eventually become nothing less than the most played instrumental in the
history
of American radio. Not bad for a homegrown acoustic guitar riff initially written in humble hopes of attracting some female attention at parties—but recorded with a little help, of course, from the Wrecking Crew.

15

Wichita Lineman

It's not finished yet. There's no middle part.

—J
IMMY
W
EBB

At a little before 9:30
A.M.
on a mid-August day in 1967, as Kerry Chater pulled his well-traveled powder blue Dodge van into Columbia Records' parking lot just off Sunset Boulevard, he couldn't have been any happier. Having recently signed a much-coveted recording contract with the giant label as one of the members of an up-and-coming rock-and-roll band out of San Diego called the Union Gap, Chater and his four fellow musicians had finally hit the big time. After years of scuffling around, playing everything from tiny clubs and parties to a standing weekend residency at the local bowling alley, their hard work had paid off. They now had a major record deal, with a major producer.

With Chater ever the pragmatist, the sheer good fortune of it all made him chuckle for a moment, especially as he and the band got out of the van and took a peek at the vehicle parked next to them.

“Well, somebody's sure hit the jackpot,” Chater commented.

Shining bright in the morning LA sun sat a stunning brand-new cherry red Ferrari 275 GTB, complete with a 300-horsepower engine and mobile telephone—a rare and expensive accessory in the pre–cell phone days of the 1960s.

“It belongs to Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders, in case you're wondering,” a security guard said. “Beautiful, isn't it?”

Chater just smiled. He was never materially oriented; his goal—rather than to own an expensive Italian sports car—was to become the best songwriter and recording artist he could be, to carve out a long-standing successful career. It was the creative challenge of crafting the perfect song that fueled his dreams. And today was the day he planned to start taking it all to the next level.

But within seconds of walking through the control booth door of Columbia's cavernous Studio A, Chater knew something was wrong. Very wrong.

As a skilled musician, he had naturally brought along his favorite '64 Fender Precision Bass and Dual Showman amp, expecting to plug in and play. Just like he always did during the group's live gigs. But a quick glimpse through the double-thick glass that separated the booth from the main tracking room told him something different. In front of Chater's startled eyes sat what he momentarily thought to be someone else's session: a full fifteen-piece orchestra, along with several additional musicians he didn't recognize, including a drummer, a guitarist, a piano player, and some guy with a huge handlebar moustache cradling an electric bass.

Kerry Chater felt sick.

“Who are all those guys?” he asked the band's producer, Jerry Fuller, who was standing nearby.

“That's the orchestra,” Fuller replied.

“But where do
we
set up?”

“Oh, you guys don't need to set up for this session. Just grab a seat and you can do the vocals later.”

As Chater listened in dismay, not quite believing what he was hearing, his mind began to race. This session? You mean
our
band's session? The same band you recently came to see at the Quad Room in San Diego and sweet-talked into signing with you?

“Well,
I
need to set up,” Chater responded.

“Kerry, I said that you guys don't have to set up your equipment today.”

“No,” said Chater, looking the producer square in the eye. “I told you that I
am
.”

Kerry Chater wasn't about to let the first recording date of his major-label career slip away without actually playing on any of the songs. To hell with that. His name was going to be listed on the band's upcoming album cover as the bass player. It was now a matter of principle.

Grabbing his bass in one hand and his amp in the other, Chater instantly knew what he had to do. He was going to play anyway. Let them try to fire me, he thought. I have a contract. I'm already
in
the band, for crying out loud.

With necessity fast becoming the mother of sheer audacity, Chater strode out of the control booth and into Studio A's adjacent tracking room where all the musicians were sitting. Silently sliding onto an empty metal folding chair, the bassist hoped he might somehow just blend in. But it didn't really matter, anyway. He wasn't going anywhere. Most of Fuller's handpicked Wrecking Crew guys looked Chater's way as he sat down but paid him little heed. They were hired to play, nothing more.

There was the other bass player, all right, the one with the distinctive facial hair. Next to him sat a tall, blond, cherubic-looking drummer. And on the other side of the drum kit, the lead guitar player wordlessly waited—a clean-cut guy of about thirty who seemed oblivious to Chater's presence. But then, by this point, with only four months left in yet another frustrating year without a hit record to call his own, Glen Campbell very much had other things on his mind.

At the end of the Union Gap's first recording session that day at Columbia Records, the confident, determined Chater felt a surge of satisfaction. He had managed to play on both songs cut during the three-hour date. True, he had disobeyed the band's producer in doing so, not the best idea for a guy just starting out. And he wasn't really sure if his bass work had actually even made it to tape. Too hard to tell in the huge sound mix swirling inside his headphones. But hey, he
had
played, and that's what mattered most. Chater could hold his head high. And one of the songs they laid down that morning, “Woman, Woman,” took everyone by surprise a few months later by reaching number four on the national pop charts. The Union Gap had arrived.

But for Campbell, who had played guitar on the two Union Gap tracks along with fellow Wrecking Crew chums Jim Gordon on drums (a protégé of Hal Blaine's), Larry Knechtel on piano, and Ray Pohlman on bass, an “arrival” had yet to materialize. To Campbell, the session over at Columbia was just another day at the office. Something to keep the money coming in the door while he focused on what mattered to him more than anything in the world: becoming a major performing star in his own right. He had come too long and too far from his impoverished Arkansas roots to now settle for anything less.

It almost added insult to injury that Campbell had actually found “Woman, Woman” first. While he was listening one day to KGBS, the main country station in Los Angeles, something about the recording (performed by Nashville act Jimmy Payne) caught his ear. Maybe it was the mellifluous melody. Or maybe it was the fresh twist on the oft-told tale of a man's jealousy over a woman's wandering eye. Radio always did seem to have room for another good cheatin' song.

Thinking he might want to cut it for himself, Campbell gave the station a call and asked the disc jockey if he could get a copy of the record.

“Heck, you can have the forty-five right off our turntable. There's no interest in it anyway.”

Campbell came away delighted with his find.

Though he figured “Woman, Woman” had a chance to make some real chart noise, it also presented a significant dilemma for the ambitious singer/guitarist. Campbell had been thinking about another tune he also wanted to put out, one that he almost liked better. And he knew that his good friend the producer Jerry Fuller—a guy who had helped him out plenty over the years—was looking for a strong first release for his new band, the Union Gap. So Campbell, after much deliberation, decided to go with “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” as his next single, giving “Woman, Woman” to Fuller.

Recorded just one day apart, in nearby studios, with several of the same Wrecking Crew musicians on board, the two songs provided strikingly different results. The Union Gap ended up with a career-defining smash; Glen Campbell did not.

To be fair, Campbell's version of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”
did
become a mid-level pop hit—a big step in the right direction. And he was grateful. He knew firsthand how tough it could be getting any song into the Top 40. Plus, the single had done extremely well on the country charts. But it still wasn't good enough to establish him as a headlining act. You needed a Top 10 mainstream hit for that, maybe even a chart topper. Campbell desperately sought a new song, something so powerful, so transcendent, that it would catapult his career right out of session work for good. He wanted another “Phoenix,” only better. And there was just one place to turn: Jimmy Webb.

*   *   *

Sitting behind a funky green baby grand piano, high in the Hollywood Hills inside an old mansion that used to be the Philippine Embassy, Jimmy Webb heard his telephone ring. He had been sequestering himself lately in his recently purchased home in an effort to write some new material, all the while surrounded by a hard-partying group of live-in pals he jokingly referred to as “fifty of my closest friends.”

“Jimmy, hey, it's Glen Campbell.”

“Glen, good to hear from you, man! What's going on?”

“Well, DeLory and I are over here at Capitol cutting a new album and we're short on material. We need something really strong. Do you think you could write us another ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix'?”

Writing a hit song is hard enough, let alone one that is made-to-order. But Jimmy Webb liked a challenge. And he knew with Campbell's singing career on the rise, there might be some good publishing money in the deal.

“Okay,” Webb finally said. “Let me see what I can come up with.”

Despite his reservations about outright copying a previous hit, even his own, Webb thought perhaps that again using a geographical reference in the title might at least be a good place to start. And he had an idea.

Sometime earlier, Webb had been driving through an especially flat and remote area of northern Oklahoma, absorbing the almost surreal nature of its isolation and seemingly endless horizons. As he motored along, he had quite unexpectedly come across a utility worker perched high up on a telephone pole. The curious image of the anonymous, lone figure toiling away in a wilting heat in the middle of nowhere stuck in Webb's mind. What might be the circumstances of this solitary man's life?

Turning back to his piano after the phone call with Campbell, Webb spent the next two hours crafting a song around the mysterious individual he had encountered. Liking the sound and feel of what he had come up with, Webb asked Campbell and DeLory to swing by the house that evening to take a listen.

“It's not finished yet,” Webb warned them as they sat down. “There's no middle part.”

As Webb began playing and singing the basic verses of his new tune, Glen Campbell simply flipped. He immediately knew that this was the song he'd been hoping and praying for. A story of desolation and longing, it spoke to the human condition, the universal need for love. What could be better than that? And it was
real
. The imagery about singing in the wires and searching in the sun for overloads was out of this world. Campbell also felt it perfectly suited his voice and singing style. DeLory, too, agreed that the song was special. He particularly related to the lyrics, since his own uncle had coincidentally climbed poles for a California company.

“What's it called?” Campbell finally asked excitedly.

“‘Wichita Lineman,'” came the reply.

*   *   *

By the time the Union Gap's third single, “Lady Willpower,” began powering its way up the pop charts in the summer of '68 (toward an eventual peak position of number two, just behind Hugh Masekela's jazzy Afropop instrumental version of “Grazing in the Grass”), internal dissension had begun to cripple the band. Producer Jerry Fuller, along with other Columbia execs, clearly now saw lead singer Gary Puckett as the star attraction. His soaring, world-class tenor vocals on a string of lush ballads had come to define the quintet's sound among the record-buying public. Puckett was also handsome, personable, and easy to work with—a marketing department's dream.

To compound matters, the group's name had finally, perhaps almost inevitably, morphed into the grandiloquent Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. Top billing for the top guy. Now even the
pretense
of a five-man democracy, something that had at least somewhat sustained them as a functioning unit over the past year, had dissolved. Kerry Chater, Paul Wheatbread, Dwight Bement, and Gary “Mutha” Withem had been effectively reduced to nothing more than Puckett's sidemen.