‘I don’t give a damn what people think any more!’ Jimmy Webb on his wild days – and writing hits for Dolly, Glen and Frank

From Wichita Lineman to MacArthur Park, he penned masterpieces. As the great hit-maker resurrects his lost songs, he recalls writing for giants – and the night Richard Harris stripped off and disappeared

‘Flat for 50 miles,” recalls Jimmy Webb, remembering the desolate stretch of Oklahoma that inspired his classic song, Wichita Lineman. “Nothing out there except endless railroad tracks and telephone poles. Then suddenly there’s a guy at the top of one of the poles. He’s got his phone, he’s talking to somebody and then … whoosh! He goes by. I never saw him again, but I never forgot him.”

Webb immortalised the unknown telephone worker’s solitude (and imagined conversation with a distant lover) with a 1968 smash hit for Glen Campbell. “But you wouldn’t believe what some people thought it was about,” chuckles the songwriter, now a chatty, self-effacing 80-year-old, video-calling from his kitchen in Long Island. “One guy who wrote to me thought it was about a football lineman, and a woman thought the young man in the song gets electrocuted because ‘the Wichita lineman is still on the line’.”

Webb also wrote By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Galveston and MacArthur Park, all 1960s classics that remain part of the culture. Only this year, Nick Cave and Flea recorded Wichita Lineman, Guns N’ Roses played it live and in February the octogenarian, who has three Grammys, was even involved in the 2026 awards after Kendrick Lamar’s TV Off, which samples a jazz version of MacArthur Park, won best rap song.