Jimmy Webb

“... my music was being played in outer space! ... it’s wonderful, but also kind of crazy at the same time!”

Oklahoma-born Jimmy Webb holds a curious position within the pantheon of music. On one hand, the now 75 year old songwriter is one of the most celebrated, still being the only artist to have ever received Grammy Awards for music, lyrics and orchestration, but on the other, he is one of the most vastly under-appreciated. One could not possibly imagine never having heard such greats as ‘Witchita Lineman’; ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’; ‘Galveston’; ‘MacArthur Park’ or ‘Up, Up and Away’ and nobody could fail to acknowledge the importance of such songs in the evolution of popular music, but the fact that Webb’s stories of everyday life and unrequited love, all rich in imagery and hidden depths, have more often than not been popularised by other artists working in all manner of genres, including Country, Soul, Pop and Disco, ranging from The 5th Dimension, Glen Campbell, Richard Harris and Frank Sinatra to Art Garfunkel, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Donna Summer and Barbra Steisand, has made Webb something of a cult figure; the man behind the hits, but far less often at centre-stage.

Having secured chart hits for other artists across the world many a time ever since his achieving his first commercial recording in 1965, when at the age of nineteen, working as a songwriter for Jobete Music, the publishing arm of Motown Records, his song ‘My Christmas Tree’ was featured on that year’s Supremes festive album ‘Merry Christmas from The Supremes’, Webb first struck out as a singer-songwriter in his own right in the late-’60s, going on to release thirteen studios and one live album between 1968 and 2019. He has also written a guide for songwriters entitled ‘Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting’ (1998) and one of the greatest autobiographies you are ever likely to read, ‘The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir’ (2017).

These days, Webb is a more prolific live performer than ever before and 27th May this year sees him bringing his latest tour, ‘An Evening with Jimmy Webb’ over to the UK for ten dates. When he joined us via Zoom video chat a few weeks ago, he was already enjoying being back out on the road stateside and began the following interview by excitedly telling us: “Yeah, I’ve been having a lot of fun. I went down South to my ... you know, I was partly raised in Texas and partly raised in Oklahoma, so I did two gigs in Texas and two in Oklahoma and they both went really good. You know, it’s my first time out since COVID two years ago. I came off the road in March of 2020, so I’m back!”

After a little technological tweakery by Webb’s assistant Pete and a bit more chatting with the pair, we began our deeper look into the life, career and genius of a gentleman who’s service to music across nearly seven decades are second to none. Firstly, hello Jimmy and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. Could we start by going right back to the beginning and asking how you first found you had a gift for songwriting and became interested making it your career, which has now spanned an incredible fifty-seven years?

Well, you know, my mother put me on the piano bench when I was six years old and she was quite insistent that I practiced every day. I was very bored by that, I didn’t care for it at all, but I worked on it for a while. Her dream was for me to become the church pianist. My father was the minister. I worked very hard for my mother, I loved her, and when I was twelve years old [in 1958], I became the church pianist and eventually I was kind of like the musical director in it. I transitioned to organ. It was a Hammond B3, but I learned to play that. I also played cornet and I still play cornet. I have a horn. I don’t practice enough, but I still play. So, around age twelve, I began to realise

Jimmy with The Supremes, 1965

that I could get a lot of attention from the members of the opposite sex by sitting down and playing some of the songs that I heard on the radio. I found that I had this gift where I could just listen to something and play it. And so, it was while I was doing it, I would make up my own arrangements at church for ‘Amazing Grace’ and things and I’m using different chords and I’m really being very adventurous, you know, and trying different things and it was somehow or another that I realised that I was easily capable of making up my own music, which I started doing about age twelve. And then I began to imitate songs that I heard on the radio and then eventually, I started, in Oklahoma City, when I was twelve or thirteen, I wrote a song called ‘It’s Someone Else’ and believe it or not, about twenty years later, it was recorded by Arty [Art] Garfunkel [as ‘Someone Else [1958]’ for the 1977 album ‘Watermark’]. So, I was writing songs that were decent. I mean, I don’t know how great they were, but they were passable, when I was about twelve.

After a stint transcribing other people’s music for a small music publisher in Hollywood, your first job as a songwriter was with Jobete Music, the publishing arm of Motown Records and the first commercial recording of one of your songs was ‘My Christmas Tree’ by The Supremes, which was featured on their 1965 festive album (and seventh album overall) ‘Merry Christmas from The Supremes’. What did you learn from those early days working as a songwriter for Jobete Music and can you remember how it felt to have a song that you had written released on record for the first time?

Well, yeah, my first real job was at Motown and Motown on the West coast, not to be confused with Detroit, but this is Los Angeles and I worked for Motown there as a contract writer there for a while and I fell in love with the people there and they treated me like a sort of a mascot, I guess. I was the only white kid in the building, Alice, and I learned a lot about human

Jimmy whilst working for Jobete Music

beings, about race, about how we should treat others and, at the same time, I had my first song placed on a real recording, which was a Christmas album by The Supremes called ‘Merry Christmas from The Supremes’ [1965]. I wrote a little song called ‘My Christmas Tree’, which I thought was a brilliant title! Don’t you? [Laughs]. So, at any rate, I remember that was the first cheque I ever got, for $350! I called my father, ‘the minister’, back in Oklahoma and I said, ‘Dad, you were wrong!’ [laughs], because he thought I was never going to make any money!

One of the things I have always felt about your songwriting is that it is very often steers clear of the average verse-chorus-verse-chorus formula. I seem to recall hearing that when you presented ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ (first recorded by Johnny Rivers for his 1966 album ‘Changes’ and later recorded in what is regarded as its definitive form by Glen Campbell as the title track of his 1967 seventh album and released as a single in the same year, reaching number two on the US Billboard Hot Country Chart) for example, it was suggested that you added a chorus, but you refused. As a songwriter, how much do you listen to advice from others and how often is it actually acted upon?

Well, the staff at Motown ... actually, their publishing arm was called Jobete. So, the staff there, they weren’t crazy about ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ because it was three verses. There was no chorus and they kept saying to me, ‘It needs a chorus, It needs to go [sings in a very showy manner] ‘By the time I get to Phoenix, oh yeah!’’ And they were very sort of upset and I said, ‘No’. I sort of put my foot down. Because I had been very much the student, but I really put my foot down and I said, ‘No, I’m not going to put a chorus in ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’’. I said, ‘It’s a story and it’s just the three verses. That’s the way it is’. And they said, ‘Okay, well, you can take it because we don’t want it!’ So, I put it in my knapsack and I kept that one until it was recorded by, first Johnny

Rivers [‘Changes’, 1966] and then Glen Campbell [‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, 1967]. But, I’ve written a book called ‘Tunesmith’ [‘Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting’, 1998] and it talks a lot about how there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different ways to write a song. It doesn’t have to be just a verse and a chorus, there are a lot of different permutations and I’ve tried to give a name to all those things and create a system for young writers so that they can identify the different parts of the song. Like, for instance, you could have an intro, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, right? Well, I’ve sort of charted that all out and it’s just as an aid to young songwriters, to show them that there are a lot of different ways to write a song.

I also remember noticing that when you delivered ‘Witchita Lineman’ (recorded by Glen Campbell for his 1968 album of the same name and released as a single, reaching number 3 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and number 7 on the UK top 40), you regarded it as an incomplete song due to it not having a third verse or middle eight. Is it right that you were actually surprised when you learned that Campbell had recorded it?

Well, it was a couple of weeks later and I had run into him in the studio and we were quite friendly. You know, I have never got upset when someone said they didn’t want to record a song, because that just comes with being a songwriter, but I hadn’t heard from him and I was at Armin Steiner Sound Recorders in LA and I walked in and he was there and I said ‘Hello’, of course and I said ‘I guess you guys didn’t care for ‘Witchita Lineman’, I never heard from you! You know, I had written a note and said ‘This is not finished, but if you like it, I’ll finish it’, or whatever and he said, ‘You mean ‘Witchita Lineman’?’ I said, ‘Yeah!’ He said, ‘We cut that!’ And I said, ‘But Glen, I wrote you a note and said the song wasn’t finished!’ And he said, ‘Well, it is now!’ [Laughs]. So, and he was absolutely right. It didn’t need any more work, it didn’t need any more

words, it just needed that beautiful guitar solo that he played and then, you know, it was perfect and he had it exactly right.

Your first big hit came in 1967 when ‘Up, Up and Away’ was recorded by The Fifth Dimension and reached number 16 on the US Billboard Hot 100. That song was featured on their 1967 album of the same name, which included four of your other songs (‘Which Way to Nowhere’; ‘Never Gonna Be the Same’; ‘Pattern People’ and ‘Rosecrans Blvd’). Two years later, is it right that ‘Up, Up and Away’ and ‘Galveston’ (recorded by Glen Campbell for his 1969 album of same name and released as a single, reaching number four on the US Billboard Hot 100) were both featured on a cassette listened to by the astronauts aboard Apollo 11 (July 16-24th 1969)? Can you how it felt to know that the astronauts’ listening for the mission had included your music?

Ah-huh. Well, I’ve heard that story. I know that ‘Up, Up and Away’ was played on Apollo 10 [May 18-26th 1969], I remember that. And the commander of that mission was Tom Stafford, who was also from Oklahoma and I know that it was played as a wake up song for the astronauts on their way to the moon. So, my music was being played in outer space! [Laughs]. You know, which is absolutely ... you know, it’s wonderful, but also kind of crazy at the same time! But, and so, I do believe that one of my songs [‘Galveston’] was played on the Moon mission [Apollo 11]. I think it was Buzz Aldrin who had a bunch of Country songs on a ... you know, it was a tape. It was his sort of mixtape that he took with him. It was very gratifying. I don’t know what it means in the larger scheme of things, but I got a kick out of it! [Laughs].

Another song that I wanted to ask you about is ‘MacArthur Park’, originally recorded by Richard Harris for his 1968 album ‘A Tramp Shining’. That single became one of the biggest hits of that year, reaching

number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 and number four on the UK singles chart. Even with people having heard The Beatles 1967 output with songs such as ‘I Am the Walrus’; ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and the ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ album, ‘MacArthur Park’ must have still sounded really audacious for 1968, with it featuring four separate sections and being seven minutes and twenty-one seconds long, but it was played by radio stations all over the world in its entirety. Exactly a decade later, Donna Summer took ‘MacArthur Park’ to number five in the UK and number one in the US and featured it on the US chart-topping album ‘Live and More’. Where did the idea for a classically-influenced song that could be played on radio come from and what are your memories of writing that song?

Well, it was actually ordered. It was a request from a very famous Hollywood record producer named Bones Howe, who also produced The 5th Dimension, and his other group was The Association and he said, ‘Can you write me a kind of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Classical thing’, but he said, ‘I want to have movements, like an actual Classical piece’, and he says, ‘I want there to be fast bits and slow bits’, and he said, ‘But I want it to be very Classical’. And I said, ‘That’s going to be hard to do in three minutes’ and he said, ‘Make it as long as you want!’ So, he was really the instigator of that and after I’d written it, there’s all kinds of stories about it, but the truth is that The Association didn’t have enough room on their album to put it on there. In the old days, there was a limit to how much music you could put on an album. So, it was too long for them to put on their current album, so it kind of went up on the shelf until I was working with Richard Harris on it and I played it in his apartment at 37 Chesham Place in Belgravia and he slapped his hand down on top of the piano and said, [impersonating Harris] ‘I’ll have that!’ And, you know, that was sort of the end of it. He became a mad man about it! Again, he was the primary instigator

and insisted that it would be, as he used to say, [impersonating Harris] ‘It’ll be a huge hit! And I’ll be a Pop star with Jimmy Webb!’ But, he had no lack of confidence, Richard and so, he didn’t know that you couldn’t do anything. He was a wonderful character and inspired me greatly in my life, because he didn’t know the meaning of impossible! And so, the thing came out and I think the two most surprised people in the world were Richard Harris and Jimmy Webb when it became a hit! It was too long, it was absolutely too long to be a hit, but everybody played it anyway, Alice, you know!

All of your songs are so packed with imagery, but the story in ‘MacArthur Park’ particularly continues to mesmerise listeners all these years later. We are sure you have been asked this many times but who exactly “left the cake out in the rain” and did everything that is mentioned in the song actually happen?

Well, there is nothing that is mentioned in the song that didn’t happen. It’s not LSD, it’s not ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ [The Beatles, ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, 1967], everything that I wrote about actually happened in ‘MacArthur Park’, including the cake in the rain and the young lady who I was in love with [Susie Horton], who wore the yellow cotton dress. The old men playing checkers by the trees were always there. Everyday, they were always there playing checkers. And I was living in Silver Lake [Los Angeles] and I could walk to MacArthur Park and I could meet my girlfriend and she was the love of my life, so when I lost her ... she didn’t die or anything, but I lost her and I was just writing about the time that we spent together in the park when life was beautiful. So, really, that’s all. There nothing mysterious and it’s not meant to offend anyone or send anyone up, or make anyone angry, even though it did! It did make a lot of people angry, for reasons that I have yet to understand [laughs] to tell you the truth!

How strange! I don’t quite understand that either, but ...

[Webb laughs].

Anyway, I will make this the last question and let you get off, although I could chat to you all day! Starting at Cadogan Hall in London on May 27th, you are about to bring your show ‘An Evening with Jimmy Webb’ over to the UK for ten dates. You have actually been touring the show in the US since the 5th of March this year, so what can UK audiences expect from ‘An Evening with Jimmy Webb’ when you arrive over here?

Well, UK audiences know me pretty well and I’m going to play some hits, I’m going to play some new material, I’m going to tell some stories that are hopefully going to make them laugh, because I like to do that. So, it’s just an evening ... I like to think of it as entertainment. I’m not out there to play political football, I’m just out there to enjoy my audience and hopefully they enjoy me and we’ll have an evening where you can bring your children if you want and everyone will be happy at the end. And I must thank you for helping me.

Oh, you are so welcome and can I just say what an honour it has been to speak to you, thank you! We wish you all the best for all the remaining dates on the ‘An Evening with Jimmy Webb’ tour and for the future.

Alright, well, you should come see me! I would love for you to come see me Alice, okay? Love you, bye bye.

The ten-date UK leg of the An Evening with Jimmy Webb’ tour begins at Cadogan Hall in London on 27th May. For all upcoming dates and tickets, visit the links below:

JIMMYWEBB.COM

WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/ JIMMYWEBBMUSIC