A Song Motown Didn’t Want
Before it made Glen Campbell a star, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was a rejection slip. Jimmy Webb, a young staff writer at Jobete Music — Motown’s publishing arm — had written it about the end of his relationship with his high school sweetheart, Susan Horton, the great love of his teenage years in Oklahoma. His bosses at Motown were baffled by it. The song had no conventional chorus, just three verses that unspooled like a film, and, as Webb later recalled, “they liked verses and choruses there.” Legend has it the song was actually written to order for teen idol Paul Petersen — but nothing about its quiet, devastating narrative felt like a teen record, and it sat unrecorded.
Webb met singer and producer Johnny Rivers, who signed him to a publishing deal and cut the song in 1965, releasing it on his 1966 album Changes with the Wrecking Crew behind him and Marty Paich arranging the strings. Rivers’s version was no great hit, but it put the song into the world — and into the car radio of the one man who would know exactly what to do with it.
“I Could Cut That Record and Make a Hit”
To understand what the song meant to Campbell, it helps to know where he stood in 1967. He had been signed to Capitol as a solo artist since 1962 without a major hit, even while his guitar was all over other people’s smashes — he had played on sessions for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, the Beach Boys (even touring with them briefly as Brian Wilson’s stand-in) and Phil Spector. He was the classic nearly-man: the best guitarist in the room, invisible on the marquee. Campbell, then still better known as a session guitarist than as a singer, heard Rivers’s record while driving. As Webb told Songfacts, Campbell thought, “I could cut that record and make a hit out of it.” It proved to be one of the great instincts in pop history. Campbell and Webb had first crossed paths during the production of a General Motors commercial, and Phoenix would be the first single in a partnership — Galveston, Wichita Lineman, Where’s the Playground Susie — that defined both men’s careers.
The construction of the song is deceptively simple. A man leaves in the night while his lover sleeps, pinning a note to her door. Each verse pushes him further down the highway and further into the day: by the time he reaches Phoenix she’ll be rising; by Albuquerque she’ll be working; by Oklahoma she’ll be sleeping, and will turn softly and call his name out low. The twist, worthy of O. Henry, is that he knows she will refuse to believe it. He has left so many times before, and always come back, that she will simply laugh when she reads the note — “and say, ‘Oh, he’s just joking.'” The geography is famously impossible — no driver covers Los Angeles to Phoenix to Albuquerque to Oklahoma in a single day — but Webb never intended literal mileage. The distances are emotional, measuring how far a man has to travel before a woman understands he is really gone.
Three Verses, One Long Morning
Part of the song’s power is its clockwork. The title phrase returns at the head of every verse like the hand of a clock sweeping forward — Phoenix, Albuquerque, Oklahoma — each stop further from her and later in her day, from morning to working hours to sleep. With every verse, the man is freer and sadder at once. Webb has often pointed out that the song contains no chorus at all in the conventional sense; the repetition of the title does the chorus’s work while the story never stops moving. It is closer to a short story than to a pop lyric, and at barely two and a half minutes in Campbell’s hands, it leaves the listener with the strange sensation of having travelled a thousand miles.
Campbell’s recording frames that story in Al De Lory’s plush arrangement — the same producer-arranger partnership that had just made “Gentle on My Mind” a hit — with Campbell’s own guitar woven through the Wrecking Crew’s playing. Where Rivers’s original had been a fine album track, Campbell found the ache in it. He sings the note on the door, the imagined laughter, the turned-down bed, as if he is already homesick for a home he has chosen to leave.
Release and the Grammy Sweep
Campbell’s version was recorded at Capitol Studios in Hollywood — Webb noted the pleasing symmetry that he and Rivers may have cut their versions in the very same room, Western 3 — and released as a single on October 23, 1967, as the title track of Campbell’s seventh studio album. It climbed to number two on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart, crossed over to number 26 on the Hot 100 to give Campbell his first pop Top 40 hit, and topped the Canadian RPM country chart.
At the 10th Annual Grammy Awards in 1968, the record won Campbell two awards — Best Vocal Performance, Male, and Best Contemporary Male Solo Vocal Performance — part of a remarkable night on which he also collected two Grammys for “Gentle on My Mind”. The following year, the By the Time I Get to Phoenix album itself won the Grammy for Album of the Year, the first country album ever to take that honour. Frank Sinatra, no easy judge, called the song “the greatest torch song ever written.”
For Webb, then just twenty-one, the season was almost absurd: between “Up, Up and Away”, which he had written for the 5th Dimension, and Phoenix, his songs collected eight Grammy Awards. Rivers, the man who had first taken a chance on the rejected Motown writer, watched his judgement vindicated on an industrial scale — his own 1967 album Rewind had been built around seven Webb songs, a one-man songbook that now reads like a preview of coming attractions.
A Standard Almost Immediately
The song’s afterlife was nearly as swift as its success. BMI would eventually name it the third most performed song of the entire period from 1940 to 1990, and rank it number 20 on its list of the Top 100 Songs of the Century — an extraordinary statistic for a song that begins with a man tiptoeing out of a house before dawn. Rolling Stone placed it at number 450 on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, and Campbell’s recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004.
Covers multiplied across every genre. Sinatra recorded it himself. Bobby Goldsboro, the Lettermen, Anne Murray and dozens of others followed. Most audacious of all, Isaac Hayes transformed it on his 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul, stretching it to eighteen minutes and forty seconds, most of it a spoken “rap” in which Hayes invents the entire backstory — the years of hurt and humiliation that drove the man out onto that highway. That a song less than three minutes long could sustain an eighteen-minute epic is a measure of how much narrative Webb had compressed into those three verses.
The Partnership It Built
Phoenix was not a one-off. It established the composer-singer axis around which Campbell’s peak years turned: Webb wrote, Campbell embodied. “Wichita Lineman” and “Galveston” followed within eighteen months, both recorded at Campbell’s urgent request, and the two men remained close for the rest of Campbell’s life, performing together in later years in songwriter showcases where Webb, at the piano, would introduce the songs with the stories behind them and Campbell would still sing them as if the ink were wet. When Campbell’s farewell tour reached its final stretch, Webb’s songs formed its emotional spine.
The album that carried Phoenix deserves its own footnote in Grammy history. When By the Time I Get to Phoenix was named Album of the Year at the 1969 ceremony, it was the first time a country album had won the Recording Academy’s most prestigious prize — a quiet coronation for the country-pop sound Campbell and De Lory had refined, and proof that a record built around understatement could beat the loudest productions of the psychedelic era.
Why It Endures
“By the Time I Get to Phoenix” endures because it inverted the grammar of the leaving song. The leaver is usually the confident one; here he spends the entire song imagining her day, her reactions, her disbelief — which means, of course, that he has not really left at all. Campbell, singing in that clear Arkansas tenor with just a tremor of guilt on the edges, understood the paradox perfectly. It was the record that announced him as a solo star after years of anonymous session work, and the record that turned Jimmy Webb, at twenty-one, into the most talked-about songwriter in America. Every great partnership has a first hello. This one was, fittingly, a goodbye.