The Wichita Lineman Page 5
* Gold Star was also where Brian Wilson would record his infamous ‘Fire’ instrumental for the abortive Smile album. At the session, in November 1966, Wilson asked one of the Beach Boys roadies to go to a local toy store and buy several dozen fire helmets so that everyone in the studio could wear them during its recording. Wilson also had the studio janitor bring in a bucket with burning wood so that the studio would be filled with the smell of smoke. ‘I’m going to call this “Mrs. O’Leary’s Fire” and I think it might just scare a whole lot of people,’ Wilson said. A few days after the record was finished, a building across the street from Gold Star burned down and, afraid his music had tapped into a dark force, Wilson shelved the tracks, as he did with most of Smile.
2: BECOMING JIMMY WEBB
I remember writing a letter to my father that said, ‘Dad, you were wrong, I’m making money!’
JIMMY WEBB
In 1961, like most fourteen-year-old boys Jimmy Webb was obsessed with three things: music, cars and girls. In an effort to curb these distractions, his Baptist minister father had arranged a part-time job for his son: working for a local farmer near Laverne, Oklahoma, ploughing wheat fields. One day, while listening to music on the green plastic transistor radio that hung from the tractor’s wing mirror, the young Jimmy Webb heard a song called ‘Turn Around, Look at Me’, sung by a new artist called Glen Campbell.
Webb loved that record, really loved it, not just because of the tune, but mainly for the voice, which he thought was sweet and true. Rather old-fashioned.
‘I had just heard the most beautiful record I ever heard in my young life: song, singer and arrangement in perfect balance,’ Webb said. So moved was he that he lost control of the tractor, crashing it into the flower beds planted by the farmer’s wife. That night, he kneeled by his bedside in his parents’ home in Elk City, Oklahoma, and prayed that one day he would write a song half as good as the one he’d heard earlier. Cheekily, he added an extra prayer, asking to have Glen Campbell, the man whom he’d just heard on the radio, record one of his songs. ‘The chances of that happening were astronomical, or rather the chances against that happening were astronomical,’ said Webb. ‘But somehow or another, that prayer was heard.’ That day would come in 1967, when Campbell released his version of Webb’s song ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’.
‘I’d say there was a profound connection between us very early on that he was not aware of, but I was,’ said Webb. ‘Because I had heard his first record, that beautiful song, and I’d deliberately set out to create things like that. So perhaps it’s not all that strange that, years later, he should run across my songs and sense that they were perfect for him.’
A columnist from the New Yorker once accused Webb of writing songs that sounded like hymns, and when Webb was asked if he thought this was true, he said that he would be surprised if it weren’t. ‘My mother’s dream was for me to become a church pianist,’ he said. ‘My father was a minister, and I used to go with him to evangelical meetings. It was my first look at show business. I don’t mean that disrespectfully. I mean it was a performance, and you didn’t want to make a mistake.’
Webb was born in 1946 in Elk City, Oklahoma, and raised in Wichita Falls, Texas, where his father was enrolled in J. Frank Norris’s Bible Baptist Seminary. Like Glen Campbell, the family business was sharecropping, and Webb’s grandfather had been a tenant farmer near the Cimarron River. Oklahoma was Big Country, as was Texas, and Webb suited it well. ‘I’m almost claustrophobic,’ he said once. ‘I start feeling hemmed in very quickly. To me, the ocean strikes the same chord in my mind as the high plains of Oklahoma, which are basically flat. The old timers up there say, “You stand up on this little hill right here. You can see for fifty miles over into New Mexico.” Well, it’s probably true. You can see a hell of a long way out there. That feeling of boundlessness, I get chills a little bit thinking about it.’ Coincidentally, Campbell would often complain about suffering from claustrophobia, too, hating being contained within small places and increasingly thinking about home. Logically, this made no sense, as he needed to go west in order to make his fortune, which was kick-started by hundreds of hours cooped up in tiny recording studios; but towards the end of his career Campbell longed for the Big Country, and his interviews would be full of references to being trapped.
The Webb clan lived in a trailer the size of a rowboat, situated at the end of the runway at Sheppard Air Force Base. ‘When the B-36 Peacemakers would rotate and climb reluctantly skyward with all six pusher props and four jets screaming, the noise would rearrange the knives and forks in the flatware drawer. I remember the plane’s primeval throb somewhere deep in my chest even though I was only four years old.’
His mother sweated out the hot, humid nights in that sausage can of a trailer, with little Jimmy and his younger sister Janice ‘wondering where we were going, what we were doing. But Dad’s answer was that God always knew where we were going even if we didn’t, and she was enough in love with him to go along.’
Again, like Glen Campbell, Webb was a protégé. He started playing piano when he was six, and for the first few years played exclusively by ear. ‘I guess you could say that it was a form of show business, as I’d go on the road with my dad and play piano for him, so that aspect of it, getting out in front of the public, that all came from church,’ he said. ‘In terms of the lyrics, and what I started writing about, I guess I was heavily influenced by country music, Hank Williams, and all the fine country writers that my dad used to listen to. I couldn’t listen to Elvis Presley in my dad’s car as he was always listening to country.’
In Elk City, he began playing in rudimentary rock and roll bands, getting together with school friends to dress up, invent doo-wop songs and grease their quiffs. In 1958, when he was twelve, he wrote his first real song, ‘Someone Else’ (which would eventually be recorded, many decades later, by Art Garfunkel). As a budding songwriter he was influenced by his exposure to hymns in the church, but also by classical music, and of course by the pop on the radio. He tried to emulate the Brill Building songs of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. He loved Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the Beach Boys and the work of Teddy Randazzo.
Webb senior was almost pathologically peripatetic, moving the family first to Pampa (bang in the middle of the Texas Panhandle), Eldorado (not the fabled city of gold but yet another town in Oklahoma), Oklahoma City itself and then the teeniest of small towns, Laverne, a nothing hitching post in Harper County (to find any place in Harper County, you just stopped at the one traffic light and looked in all four directions). For Webb’s father, it was almost as though the quest would one day reinforce his belief.
In 1962, the family moved yet again, to San Bernardino, California, in the heart of the Inland Empire, imagining a world of exotic flora, green grass, swimming pools, and acres and acres of palms. As it was, the Webbs’ home was somewhat more prosaic, while any ideas of a domestic routine were tragically short-lived. As Webb was graduating from high school, barely two years later, his mother suddenly died, aged only thirty-six, of complications resulting from an inoperable brain tumour. It was, said Webb, ‘like a nuclear explosion going off in a very close-knit, very religious family’. As the fallout spread, his father started drinking and then returned to Oklahoma, and Webb, just seventeen, shy and bespectacled, found himself alone in California, devalued and forlorn, with not much ahead of him except a few scrappy tunes he’d written. According to Webb, his father said, ‘This songwriting thing is going to break your heart.’ When he went back to Oklahoma, he gave Webb $40, saying, ‘It’s not much, but it’s all I have.’
For the budding songwriter, the future was hardly brimming over with possibilities but, inspired by the likes of the Shirelles’ ‘Baby It’s You’, ‘Baby I Need Your Loving’ by the Four Tops, and the Righteous Brothers in particular, he continued writing songs, intent on trying to make a living as a writer. The move to California had focused his mind, not least because he was
now in an environment where the shift from nobody to somebody no longer seemed so abstract and fanciful. Plus, the radio was full of artists singing songs that seemed to be stretching the art form, as the likes of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson – the very same people with whom Glen Campbell was currently playing – appeared to be reinventing the art of songwriting every day on AM radio. ‘I remember the first time I heard “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’”, I was driving and had to pull over because I couldn’t see. If you can listen to that song and drive at the same time you need to go and buy yourself a heart.’
Left on his own in California, he began to flirt with the idea of taking some of his songs to record companies, just to see if he could do anything with them. He was already enrolled at the San Bernardino Valley College, but at weekends he started driving regularly to LA to pitch his songs to publishers and agents. He had enough rejection letters to paper a wall in his bedroom, but he refused to get the message. He was a professional songwriter by the age of seventeen largely because his songs were the only commodity he had.
Again, like Campbell, Webb had been drawn to LA because it looked like the future, wanting a taste of what had been filtered through to the rest of the country via surfboards and hot rods, David Hockney paintings, the Beach Boys and the Madison Avenue vision of the Californian good life. There was a commonality here, one that Campbell and Webb would eventually share.
Webb was hungry, and ambitious beyond his years. While at college, in an act of supreme precociousness he actually wrote a musical called Dancing Girl, which contained his soon-to-be classic song ‘Didn’t We’, an incredibly sophisticated song that expressed emotions the young songwriter had yet to experience himself. (It took him six days and six nights to write it, ‘and on the seventh day I rested’, although the bulk of the song had been written in a car on the way to Newport Beach to see some of his friends.) Not only was it sophisticated lyrically, ‘Didn’t We’ was sophisticated musically, too – complex, confident, and with a tune so leisurely you could practically shave between the beats (not that the nineteen-year-old boy-man who wrote it had been shaving for very long). The songs he was writing at the time were incredibly intricate, the kind of things very few of his contemporaries were attempting. He was inspired by what he heard on the radio, but his own songs owed as much to Broadway as they did to the hit parade. There was an old-school quality to them, almost as though he were writing for Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin. They weren’t your classic pop songs, but they were classic.
He’d follow any lead, return every call. One day in 1965, an ex-Motown acquaintance called him and asked if he wanted an all-expenses-paid trip to Vegas. Apparently, the one-time Motown artist Tony Martin (and husband of Cyd Charisse) was looking for new material and wanted to hear what ‘the kid’ had. He was appearing at the Riviera Hotel and wanted Webb to come and pitch to him directly.
So Webb flew to Vegas and was escorted to Martin’s green room at the Riviera. He sat in this little, badly lit anteroom in his tatty chinos and thick, black-framed glasses, quietly, nervously waiting for Martin to appear. Sometimes Webb took on a gangling aspect, like a bashful young boy not yet comfortable in public, and today he wasn’t comfortable. After a while he noticed a figure sitting even more quietly in a corner of the room. The man was Louis Armstrong, sitting in the semi-darkness, playing with the valves on his trumpet. He looked at the young songwriter, noticed the pile of sheet music in his lap and said, ‘What you got there? Let me have a look at those.’
Armstrong read the lyrics to ‘Didn’t We’, nodded and said – he had a reputation for being encouraging – ‘You keep at it, boy. You’re gonna be something.’
It was a very quick encounter, which to Webb still feels like a dream, but it was a huge moment for him. ‘I stood there with a warm golden glow suffusing my whole body,’ Webb would later say.
He continued trying to pitch his songs, exchanging publishing rights for studio time and playing his tunes for anyone in the industry who would listen. The more urgent our needs, the less discriminating we tend to be about them, and in Webb’s case he would work for anyone who was interested. He was lucky that he was only a so-so singer. ‘I used to joke around with other songwriters that they had to be very careful and not sing a demo too well. Great singers loved to have a terrible demo that needed their particular brand of refinement.’ Finally, he landed a staff job at Jobete, the publishing division of Motown, even though he was still moonlighting as a cleaner at a studio on Melrose Avenue.
Motown was good for him, as it taught him what he needed to know in terms of studio diplomacy, how to make demos and how to arrange a song. He was with them for nine months, and in that time wrote songs for the likes of Billy Eckstine, while the first commercial recording of a Jimmy Webb song was ‘My Christmas Tree’, an unremarkable song which appeared on the Supremes’ 1965 album Merry Christmas, and which earned him $400.
‘Motown was college for me,’ he said.
One day at Jobete, he was asked if he could come up with a song for the TV star Paul Peterson, who had become famous through his appearances on the popular white-bread sitcom The Donna Reed Show, and who was now trying to make it as a singer. What Webb came up with was ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, which, as it was an incredibly sad and complicated song, was anathema to Peterson’s clean-cut image. It was considered too odd, and so unsurprisingly his bosses at Motown rejected it. He was told to put a big chorus after each verse, but after half-heartedly toying with the suggestion, Webb gave up. ‘I don’t believe in writing songs by committee,’ he said.
‘They didn’t like it for Peterson, they didn’t like it for anybody. They liked verses and choruses there. Verses and big choruses. And “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” is three verses, very simple, a very direct storyline. The Motown guys said, “Where is the chorus?” And I said, “There isn’t going to be a chorus,” and we had a pretty lively discussion over that. They ended up cutting it with a couple of different people and not really being happy with it. And when I left the company they said, “You can take this one with you.”’
As a songwriter, Webb was an odd fish from the off, and while he had been inspired by mavericks such as Phil Spector and Burt Bacharach, there was something altogether more conflicted about the way in which he wrote his songs. On the one hand he had the ability to write and arrange grandiose orchestral pop (like Spector and Bacharach), while on the other he harboured ambitions of writing great show tunes, the kind that could be performed nightly on Broadway; and on the other – hey, three hands! – he also had the ability to write highly personalised torch songs, many of which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on country radio. In a word, Webb was versatile, which is probably one of the reasons he never really clicked at Motown: he wasn’t generic enough. To the casual listener or the seasoned professional, it seemed unlikely – and therefore unusual – that the person who wrote ‘Up, Up and Away’ was also responsible for ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’. Right from the start, Webb was a particularly singular talent, and not someone whom it was easy to either control or condition.
He had been hired at Motown by a man called Mark Gordon, who also managed the pop-soul harmony group the 5th Dimension. Gordon was in the process of signing them to Soul City, the label owned by Johnny Rivers, who had had several chart hits in the late fifties and early sixties, and who had recently been the hottest singer on the Sunset Strip due to some incendiary performances at Gazzarri’s and the Whisky a Go Go. He encouraged Rivers to sign Webb, who brought ‘Up, Up and Away’, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘The Worst That Could Happen’ and a handful of other potential hits with him from Motown. Rivers paired the 5th Dimension with ‘Up, Up and Away’, and then suggested ‘Phoenix’ to a producer who was working with the young Glen Campbell. Webb says there was a lot of discussion about ‘Up, Up and Away’ before it was given a chance. The naysayers at the record company said it was a Broadway tune and belonged in a musical, not on a radio station. There were
too many strings, too much schmaltz. If the record hit, thought Webb, it would change his life for ever, and if it bombed, his life would ‘take a random off-ramp into a small town somewhere, where I would burn out in the role of an embittered band director with a plain wife and kids with bad skin’.
Well, it hit, and then his world turned upside down. ‘Up, Up and Away’ reached no. 7 on the Billboard charts, went Top 5 all over the world and would go on to win five Grammys. Suddenly Webb was seen as the salvation of the music industry, and in the space of a few months had gone from being an unknown jobbing songwriter to a highly rated talent. This was extraordinary not just because of how quickly Webb became famous – and if his fame might seem exaggerated from the distance of half a century, the only evidence you need is that on 29 February 1968, at the tenth annual Grammy Awards, eight of the awards were generated by two of his songs – but also because he wasn’t a performer. Webb was a songwriter, plain and simple, smack bang in the middle of a decade – and at the centre of an industry – that at the time was increasingly celebrating performers who wrote their own material. Before the Beatles, no one was expected to write their own songs; after they arrived, everyone was meant to write their own songs, as well as perform them (even if, in many cases, various members of the Wrecking Crew were on hand to add polish and virtuosity). Now, suddenly, Webb was properly famous himself, and as he said, ‘the pulse of Hollywood was vigorous and rapid and it throbbed through my home’. Overnight he was lauded as the Cole Porter of the sixties and pop music’s Mozart. He recalls reading a description of himself as a ‘wunderkind’ and having to consult a dictionary to discover what it meant. TWA even bought the rights to use ‘Up, Up and Away’ for a TV commercial for their airline, paying him $25,000 for the privilege – ‘T-double-u-A, up, up and away!’ He was not yet twenty-four, and life beyond the age of thirty was unimaginable.