Following an ESB repair crew around Cavan on Thursday, as it laboured to reconnect power after last week’s storm, I found myself thinking of Wichita Lineman. Jimmy Webb’s great ballad of 1968, immortalised by Glen Campbell, is in one way a tribute to such noble work.
But in imagining the thoughts of a solitary man up a pole in the middle of American nowhere, the elliptical lyrics are chiefly concerned with loneliness and longing and love. One admirer has called it “the first existential country song”.
Unfortunately for the ESB, the protagonist is not engaged in electrical work. As Webb has explained, it’s a telephone pole the man is up. Hence the imagined conversation he’s having with his girlfriend, on an old handset connected directly to the wire.
Webb was driving through the Oklahoma panhandle at the time the song was conceived, mesmerised by a line of poles stretching through the vast, empty landscape to the horizon:
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“There’s a place where the terrain absolutely flattens out. It’s almost like you could take a [spirit] level . . . and put it on the highway, and that bubble would sit right there on dead center. It goes on that way for about 50 miles. In [. . .] summer, with the heat rising off the road, the telephone poles gradually materialize out of this far distant perspective and rush towards you.”
Then, suddenly, one pole with a man on top of it, talking into a phone, caught his eye. But just as suddenly, the man was gone, leaving Webb with another 25 miles of nothingness in which to reflect on the image:
“I thought, I wonder if I can write something about that? A blue-collar everyman guy we all see everywhere, working on the railroad, or working on the telephone wires or digging holes in the street. I just tried to take an ordinary guy and open him up and say, ‘Look, there’s this great soul and there’s this great aching and this great loneliness inside this person, and we’re all like that’.”
He later relocated the incident across the Kansas border to Wichita, with its crucial three syllables – and the result was acclaimed a masterpiece.
But ironically, given that line maintenance is its central metaphor, the song itself was never finished. In Webb’s opinion, it still needed repairs when recorded.
After their 1967 success with By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Campbell had asked him for another geo-located ballad. Webb responded with a demo tape of something he considered incomplete, still requiring a third verse and a bridge.
Despite which shortcomings, Campbell cried on hearing it and fell in love. He and others then touched it up in studio. Told of their recording, Webb protested: “It wasn’t done!” Campbell replied: “It’s done now!”
Just like Oklahoma, Cavan too has a panhandle, stretching northwestwards from the county town towards the great wilderness of Leitrim.
But Webb could hardly have had his epiphany there. Flat land is scarce among the drumlins: never mind 50 miles, you’d be lucky to get 50 metres of straight road anywhere.
The telephone poles were notoriously crooked once too, not just there but everywhere in rural Ireland.
I recall a controversy in the 1990s, when the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Agency attacked Telecom Éireann for blighting the rural landscape with “staggering drunken poles”.
Telecom responded that this was a “bit of an exaggeration” but nevertheless promised to get their poles off the drink eventually: a goal with which the National Broadband Plan has since helped.
If the Irish landscape lacks the straight lines and epic, flat emptiness that made Webb’s lonely human seem so striking, the repair work of the last week, and after previous storms, is no less heroic.
I think, for example, of the Austrian crew we met in Cavan who, hearing Ireland’s call – the cry for help, that is, not the rugby anthem – last weekend, drove for 27 hours, through the night, to join in.
But has anyone ever composed a musical eulogy, country or otherwise, to Ireland’s electrical repair crews? A power ballad, as it were? I can’t think of an example.
A partial exception is the Carlow-born singer-songwriter Richie Kavanagh, who has written at least two songs about the ESB. Both of those are comic rather than panegyric, however.
And both are mainly concerned, not so much with repair, as with the original rural electrification project and its indirect effects.
The first is entitled “Pulling Their Wire”: an indelicate metaphor that, this being a family newspaper, we will pass gently over. The other, on a related theme, is: “Why did they call me E.S.B.?”.
That’s a love song about a young man, born circa 1955, who is puzzled by his nickname until he meets a woman of similar vintage who has it too. Both, it emerges, were accidental products of a project that pitched love-hungry young men into rural communities where young women with similar interests awaited.
One thing leads to another, of course, and the couple are soon electrified too. As the song concludes: “Now there’s an auld spark between Bridie and me/Who knows, there will soon be an ESB three.”
