Jimmy Webb

This Legendary Songwriter Has Your Heart in a Sling

Whether or Not You’ve Heard of Him

by Jeff Wing

Jimmy Webb was a 14-year-old working the family farm when he heard a Glen Campbell song on the radio. It brought him to his knees. “I was driving a tractor in the middle of a wheat field in the Oklahoma Panhandle – which is a pretty remote area – listening to my transistor radio. They played a song by Glen called ‘Turn Around, Look at Me,’ written by Jerry Capehart” – Webb is punctilious about songwriting credit, understandably – “and I said to myself, ‘That’s the guy I want to work with! I want to write songs for Glen Campbell!’” Picture, if you will, a teen stick figure in overalls astride a tractor and hollering at a field of wheat. “That night I actually took it to my knees,” Webb said. “‘Dear Lord, please let me meet Glen Campbell – and Lord? Make it possible for us to make a record together.’” Webb chuckled. “Yeah. I spelled it out.”

The kid’s prayer worked. On July 13, legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb plays the historic Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara. Webb’s absolutely inimitable songs have been performed by Frank Sinatra, Nick Cave, and a host of other wildly varied songbirds one is surprised to see flocking together; the common thread – Webb’s gemlike songs. If you’re not sure of the name, you know his work, which is quietly omnipresent in the culture and has become hallowed: “Galveston,” “All I Know,” “Up, Up, and Away,” “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” the seven-minute pop suite “MacArthur Park” (whose cryptic lament about a cake in the rain got the Donna Summer treatment for the ‘70s dance floor dervishes)… and two songs that explosively launched Webb in the late ‘sixties, allying him in the public mind, and in fact, with the great, late Glen Campbell.

“Where Glen and I are concerned, that prayer was definitely answered,” Webb says with muted awe nearly 60 years later. “I don’t know what power on Earth could have brought us together.” In 1967, Webb’s song “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” earned Campbell two Grammys, establishing the 21-year-old Webb as a songwriter to be reckoned with and lofting Glen Campbell – the idol haunting Webb’s transistor radio that day – into a pop stratosphere that would thereafter host him with some regularity. That year, vocal group The 5th Dimension also snagged four Grammys for Webb’s song “Up, Up, and Away,” Webb himself taking home the pint-sized Victrola for Song of the Year. It was a good evening for Jimmy.

But the next year, 1968, Webb penned a tune – “Wichita Lineman” – that would inextricably link him and Campbell in artistic perpetuity, ushering them both into the vaunted cathedral of beloved American song. “That’s what this performance is about in many regards,” Webb says of his Lobero show. “I have to trace my success in the business back to Glen — and a couple of early records.” Right out of the gate “Wichita” stunned with its confluence of songcraft, Campbell’s measured, emotive singing, and an orchestral arrangement by Al De Lory that tastefully tears the heart out. Like the rest of us, Webb becomes more enamored of the song as time passes. “I love listening to ‘Wichita Lineman.’ It’s such a classic record. Yeah it still absolutely

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