by Dylan Jones
Like Burt Bacharach, another composer who wanted to sing, Jimmy Webb didn’t want to be just the architect, he wanted to be the building, too; and while, in the early seventies, he was starting to work with some of the finest vocalists in the business, Webb insisted on interpreting his songs himself. His voice, as someone once put it, couldn’t always call on the colours his challenging material required, and yet he was determined to make it as a solo performer.
Webb had an all-access pass to those at both ends of the culture, working with Sinatra in Vegas one minute and Joni Mitchell in Laurel Canyon the next. Increasingly popular with the mainstream, he was nevertheless smitten by the new breed of singer-songwriters, people like Mitchell, James Taylor, Randy Newman and Jackson Browne. ‘What they were doing was almost conversational. People like Joni were fishing beneath the thermal clime, and so I began to reach very deep into the soul for my songs.’ He wasn’t always welcomed with open arms, though. He came into the studio one night when Mitchell was recording, and a voice behind him said, ‘Oh, it’s Mr Balloons.’ For a lot of people, Webb’s songs felt too conservative, too showbiz. ‘They felt packaged for a middle-of-the-road, older crowd,’ said Tom Petty. ‘At first, you go, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” But it was such pure, good stuff that you had to put off your prejudices and learn to love it. It taught me not to have those prejudices.’
Apart from Harry Nilsson (who was as much of a drinking buddy as anything else), the singer/songwriter he was closest to was Mitchell. ‘She sang backgrounds on my albums – was a joy to be around – and was a great teacher because she’s really one of the finest song constructors that’s ever lived. And very open, she wasn’t biased, she wasn’t like, “Oh, this guy writes songs for Glen Campbell, I can’t hang out with him.” People in the early seventies were extremely sensitive to what was politically correct. To the point of bigotry. As guilty of bigotry as any group of people who’ve ever lived.’
To some, he epitomised mainstream culture, and not in a good way. He was one of those named in Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, in which Scott-Heron says that the theme song won’t be sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Engelbert Humperdinck or the Rare Earth, nor written by Webb.
Webb certainly adopted the lifestyle of a rock star, and having acquired the Encino estate of former screen goddess Alice Faye, blew his considerable wealth on cocaine and cars, crashing a Shelby 427 Cobra five times and raising hell with the likes of Harry Nilsson.
The eighteen-month period between early 1968 and late 1969 was an extraordinary one for Webb, when his entire being was reimagined, and when he went from being a Nobody to a Somebody. After the success of ‘Up, Up and Away’, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ and ‘Wichita Lineman’, he was afforded so many opportunities, some of which he grabbed and some of which he squandered (he still regrets not returning a call from Paul McCartney in the summer of 1968). However, in 1969, he managed to find the time to produce Thelma Houston’s debut album, Sunshower. Unsuccessful at the time – it reached no. 50 on the Billboard R&B charts – it has since become recognised as something of a lost classic. Made by the former lead vocalist of a group called the Art Reynolds Singers, much was expected of the record. Webb was hot, she was new, and Dunhill Records thought the stars, and the public, would look kindly on the collaboration. It was not to be. One reviewer said the album was one of those perfect records that let the singer and producer complement one another without either stealing the show. But the public weren’t interested.
In 1970, Webb talked briefly to David Geffen about being managed by him, but Geffen, the playmakers’ playmaker, could see this wouldn’t be an easy gig. Like everyone else in the industry, he could see that Webb was caught between two stools, frozen between two buses going in different directions – one going uptown to where all the fancy supper-club people went, the other moving downtown, where supper club meant something else entirely. Webb explained to Geffen that he had turned down a ton of money to play a residency in Vegas (performing an instrumental version of ‘MacArthur Park’ every night, in costume, in front of a full orchestra), told him his favourite singer was Joni Mitchell, told him he probably smoked more grass than everyone else Geffen managed, combined. But even with Geffen’s help, Webb was stranded, neither fish nor fowl.
As he told Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times in 1971, ‘By the time I was twenty-one, I had accomplished all the goals I had set up for myself for a lifetime. That’s destructive in a way. You have all this energy left and you don’t know exactly what to do with it. You find yourself sitting down and saying: “Well, that’s fine for today; now, what am I going to do tomorrow?” From what I’ve seen of this business, there is a tendency for songwriters, once they have become successful, to stick to a formula. They drift along in the formula that established them, playing the same kind of songs until they die, I suppose. Maybe I’ll learn in my lifetime that it has to be that way, but I hope it isn’t true.
‘I decided that I wanted to keep writing, that I wanted to evolve. I wanted to break out of the formula. I wanted to improve as a writer and to interpret the songs myself rather than just keep producing records and writing songs for other artists.’
But the songs kept coming, exquisite little gems such as ‘P. F. Sloan’, ‘One Lady’, ‘Met Her on a Plane’, ‘When Can Brown Begin?’, ‘Crying in My Sleep’, ‘Scissors Cut’, ‘Christiaan, No’, ‘Gauguin’, ‘Skywriter’, ‘Time Flies’, etc. – songs that showed real depth, real meaning, songs delivered with plenty of grace and a minimum of fuss. Everything Webb did in the early seventies was designed to single him out as a performer as much as a writer, everything a defiant act of self-ownership.
‘I made my share of mistakes, probably more than my share, but I gained an understanding of what fame was like,’ he told me. ‘I had way too much money for a twenty-year-old kid, let me tell you. I also became acquainted with the phenomenon of when you are a celebrity, you’re always right. There’s always a group of willing participants, of enablers. You drive by a dealership in Beverly Hills and you see a beautiful sedan and you remark to your assistant, “Wow, I’d really like to have one of those, that’s nice,” and then the next morning it’s sitting in your driveway – that kind of stuff. For a while I was convinced that I could write a hit any time I wanted to. And an experience like the “Wichita Lineman” story will make you think that that’s actually true. Then you start coming up against it and you realise it isn’t that easy, and that all is not what it seems. I can remember sitting at a fancy dinner with a radio-programme director back in the Midwest somewhere, maybe Chicago. I’m sitting there and I’m talking, being cordial, and the programme director’s wife put her hands down in her lap, as women do, and she looked at me as though to say enough of this nonsense, and said, “So, when are you going to write a ‘MacArthur Park’?” And I realised that what she meant was, when was I going to write another hit?’
In 1973, he would overdose on PCP – ‘enough to kill an elephant’ – having taken it believing it was cocaine, and temporarily lose his ability to play the piano. Like Glen Campbell, he would later eschew drugs, although without exchanging them for God. His final seventies album, El Mirage, was produced in LA by George Martin, but despite containing such orch-pop nuggets as ‘The Highwayman’, ‘Where the Universes Are’ and ‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’, its commercial failure was something of a blow to Webb, who didn’t release another record for five years. He would continue collaborating with Campbell, though, continue having hits. In 1975, they collaborated on ‘It’s a Sin When You Love Somebody’, and in 1987 developed another classic song, ‘Still Within the Sound of My Voice’, written by Webb and sung by Campbell, which reached no. 5 on the Billboard Country charts. It was covered brilliantly by Linda Ronstadt two years later.
So where did they come from, these words, these conflicts and trials, these battle-weary vignettes and musical pictures? Where do they come from now? Webb wrote an enti
re book about songwriting (and a very brilliant one at that, maybe the very best – Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting (1999)), and when pushed will admit to getting his ideas from the same place every other songwriter does, from anywhere and everywhere, using his own particular brand of symbolism and spiritualism. He tells a fascinating story about the inspiration for his song ‘The Highwayman’.
He’d been staying at the Inn on the Park in London, ‘hanging out with Harry Nilsson and behaving badly. And I had this room with a piano in it and one night I had this Dick Turpinesque nightmare about being chased by these grenadiers on horseback. And I was fairly certain if they caught me they’d hang me. It was one of those night terrors where the sheets are soaked. And I woke up and I could feel this character. I could see him and feel him and I rolled out of bed to the piano and in an hour I had the first verse. The idea was that he’d been caught and hung and then I decided to drop him into another body.’
‘And this magical lyric about reincarnation rolls out that seems to span four hundred years,’ said Mark Ellen, who thinks it’s one of the greatest lyrics ever written. ‘It starts in the eighteenth century with the image of the highwayman with his sword and pistol relieving young maidens of their baubles. He’s killed and reborn as a sailor in the nineteenth century aboard a schooner (Webb once told me he was writing about “the age of the clipper ships”, which was around 1850). And he’s drowned in an accident and gets reborn as a dam-builder in the twentieth century, who dies when he falls into the wet concrete of the Hoover Dam. And the dam-builder’s reborn in a distant twenty-first-century future as a space pilot flying “a starship across the universe divide”. And the pilot may return as a highwayman, so the whole four-century jumble of creation is about to reboot. Or, he adds as an afterthought, he may return “as a single drop of rain”, the most powerful and head-spinning lyric about space and time I’ve ever heard. I can’t think of another song as huge and encompassing. And it’s circular, so it seems eternal. It has an immaculate, giddying symmetry, so much compressed into so few lines, and all carried by a gorgeous melody. It’s a masterpiece. It’s perfect.’
Webb is justly proud of ‘Wichita Lineman’ and has often said that it’s his own favourite, and praises its perfection (seen through a prism of imperfections, obviously). However, he has also been exasperated by its seemingly random popularity.
‘I’m just telling you from a songwriter’s point of view that sometimes I am absolutely amazed at the take someone will have for one song and how oblivious they are to another one that I’ve laboured over and burnt the midnight oil over and suffered over, and it goes by with no notice whatsoever,’ he said, not with any anger but with something approaching incredulity. ‘I’m somewhat bewildered by it. I would like to be as grateful as I could possibly be. It’s just another song to me. I’ve written a thousand of them, and it’s really just another one.’
Supportive of his friend as ever, Campbell was convinced Webb’s songs would last for ever, confident enough to proclaim that they were as good as anything that had been written, that would be written. Campbell grew up in an age when some songs were deemed to be standards, and he was sure enough of his own opinion and such a devotee of the work that he knew these songs would stand the test of time. Because they were modern standards, that’s why.
‘I don’t think of me as a country writer,’ Webb told GQ’s Jason Barlow, ‘but Glen cherished me as a writer. There was no way in the world he was going to say anything to alienate me enough where I’d say to him, “Fuck you and your cowboy shit!!” And I’d go off and write songs for Bette Midler, or something.’
Webb is the only artist ever to have received Grammy Awards for music, lyrics and orchestration. He’s been given the Ivor Novello International Award and the Academy of Country Music’s Poet Award, and was the youngest person ever inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In May 2012, at the Ivor Novello Awards in London, he received the songwriting equivalent of an endorsement from the Almighty. As he was presented with the Special International Award, a vintage quote flashed on the screen, in which Sammy Cahn, the legendary lyricist and contributor to the Great American Songbook, the co-writer of dozens of timeless ballads such as ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’, ‘Come Fly with Me’, ‘All the Way’, ‘Call Me Irresponsible’ and ‘My Kind of Town’, described Webb as ‘one of the real, real geniuses’. Increasingly inclined to call himself a romanticist, Webb continued to use the kind of vivid imagery his contemporaries had long abandoned. ‘I like words,’ he said. ‘I like the way they clash around together and bang up against each other, especially in songs.’
John Updike had a famous line about trying to give ‘the mundane its beautiful due’ in his writing, and you could say that Webb has devoted a large part of his songwriting career to doing precisely that. ‘My style is novelistic, detailed,’ he said. ‘I draw the audience into my problem or my world and hope that they feel like “I’ve felt that before, I just didn’t know how to say it.” A songwriter’s job is to articulate these feelings. When you do that well, then quite often you find out you have a hit song.’
Mark Ellen once asked Webb why so many songwriters are drawn to melancholic songs. ‘Well, there’s a lot of happy songs, but they’re not very good. You can dash off four in an afternoon. The territory I tend to inhabit is that sort of “crushed lonely hearts” thing. The first part of a relationship is usually that white-hot centre when all the happy songs come. When that’s gone it can be devastating, and that’s when the sorrowful songs come.’
Webb continues to be an influence on modern writers, and you only have to study the reviews of the Arctic Monkeys’ Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino to see that some think Webb has made as much of an impact on Alex Turner’s writing as David Bowie. It’s also rare to read anything about Josh Tillman or his alter ego Father John Misty without seeing a reference to Webb or Glen Campbell.
The one missed opportunity in Webb’s career was the chance to record with Elvis, although it wasn’t for lack of trying. ‘It was certainly nothing that I did that prevented me from working with him,’ Webb said, pointing the blame squarely at Elvis’s notoriously controlling manager Colonel Tom Parker. ‘I have bootleg recordings of Elvis doing “MacArthur Park” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”. We talked about recording together, but Colonel Tom Parker insisted on one hundred per cent of the publishing. I was being recorded by Mr Sinatra and Tony Bennett and Glen Campbell and I just didn’t feel that I was in a position where I had to make that kind of a sacrifice. In retrospect I would have loved to have had a record with him, but I guess I stood on principle and it wouldn’t be the first time or the last time in life that I would cut off my nose to spite my face.’
If you study Elvis’s records from the late sixties onwards, after he’d finally finished with the movies, they are all strikingly similar – maudlin, melodramatic, almost as if everything in life was something of a fait accompli. You can almost hear him shrugging his shoulders, giving up, feeling blue for you, on stage, on record, where everyone can see and hear. There would be the occasional tacky rocker, a schmaltzy R&B number that would allow him to swing his hips again and ‘rock out’ a little, but the bulk of his material was sad and fatalistic.
Webb was fascinated by Elvis’s work, and not just the early stuff. ‘I listened to Elvis Presley a lot,’ he said. ‘And as a teenager, I was enchanted and hypnotized by Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s songs, so I followed them and what they did with Dionne Warwick. I listened to Tony Hatch and, also, to Teddy Randazzo, who wrote “Hurt So Bad” and “Goin’ Out of My Head” for Little Anthony. That was always the thing for me – the big orchestral ballad – my weak spot. So I would imitate those guys when I could and I always had dreams of using an orchestra on my records. And as fate would have it, I was able to do that. I was eventually able to teach myself orchestration on the job, so to speak.’
He also saw Elvis perform his first-ever show in Vegas, in what would become the King’s nat
ural habitat. ‘Vegas was great for all of us, because you could get up close to the animal. You know, you could practically get Sinatra’s sweat on you. It was very visceral. You should have seen the kind of money that was changing hands, just to get closer to the stage. Anything to get closer to the stage. I saw Elvis when he came back and opened at the International Hotel [what became the Hilton International]. A lot of people from LA went up, thinking no one really knew what Elvis was gonna do, as it had been a long time since he had played a live show. Even Elvis didn’t know what was going to happen. He was very nervous about it. I think a lot of cynics went up, kind of hoping, “Yeah, I hope he falls on his ass …”, that kind of thing. I kind of went up dispassionately, you know, thinking I just want to check this out. I walked into this gorgeous showroom, brand new, probably two thousand people. I think they served two thousand dinners at each performance. That first night, I was sitting right next to the stage, and about six seats down this guy was glowering at me, giving me a bad face. I was closer than anyone. But Elvis came out and did the whole Elvis thing, and I just became an Elvis fan to the core. There was no doubting that there was this magic, a magnetism that just permeated the room, just got inside you. James Burton playing guitar, great drumming, he was very solid in the rhythm section and he knew what he was doing there. And he was a rocker, he really was the king of rock and roll. After the show he walked right down to the front of the stage and was giving out silk scarves to all the girls, as by now there were hundreds of girls around the stage, and he was kissing them. He gets down on the stage, bends over me, and I’m thinking, “Oh, God, he’s going to kiss me.” I had really long hair at the time. But he dropped a note, a piece of paper on the table, and the note said, “Jimmy, come back stage. Elvis.” And after the show these two burly highway patrol-type guys half carried me through the crowd, back through the kitchen and through all these double doors, and finally came up to this drab-looking dressing room, and they pushed open the door and Colonel Tom Parker was there …’
