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From The Times:
Jimmy Webb once lent Harry Nilsson his car. Two vastly successful songwriters, one fancying a spin around Los Angeles, the other tossing him the keys. A big mistake.
“It was a brand new burgundy-coloured Jaguar XJ6,” Webb says. “He was gone for a month. Eventually he called me up and said, ‘Hey, Jim, I’m sending your car back.’ I went to this monstrous rail yard and eventually found it, covered with every imaginable organic substance. Big crack in the windshield. This is a new car, right? He’d gone to Las Vegas and taken a load of acid and absolutely wrecked it. It was just his idea of fun, wanting to picture my look of dismay. But he had it rebuilt. Even put a better stereo in.”
Webb’s father never imagined his son would be in the market for an XJ6, advising that “this songwriting thing is going to break your heart”. But Webb became an American great, revered in the same breath as Randy Newman and the car-wrecking Nilsson.
He works a rich middle ground between pop, country, the sparkling melodic reach of the Broadway musical and the poetry of Bob Dylan, spanning every inch of the emotional spectrum from the euphoric hits such as Up, Up And Away that he wrote for the 5th Dimension to the timeless longing in the antiwar song Galveston.
The list of those covering Webb’s work includes REM, who followed the country singer Glen Campbell in recording Wichita Lineman (Homer also trilled a few bars in The Simpsons), Isaac Hayes (By the Time I Get to Phoenix), Donna Summer and Richard Harris (MacArthur Park) and Rumer, who had a hit in 2012 with PF Sloan.
The man is nowhere near as familiar as his back catalogue; a soft-voiced, charming soul who has just turned 70. Webb, who is pushing salad around a plate at a friend’s house in west London, is over from Long Island, where he lives with his second wife, Laura Savini. He had previously been married for 22 years to Patsy Sullivan, a model. They had a daughter and five sons, three of whom formed a band, the Webb Brothers.
Webb is in the UK for a multimedia tour of his songs made famous by Campbell, his great hero. Growing up in Oklahoma, the son of a Baptist minister, Webb was mesmerised by Campbell’s vibrant tenor and the singles of Elvis Presley. He began composing at a relentless pace in his teens, scoring an entire musical in six days, in the process forgetting to take his college finals in California.
Offered a contract by Motown, Webb knocked out 45 songs, including his first hit, My Christmas Tree, for the Supremes in 1965. He then started writing about his own life and love affairs. Campbell released a breathtaking version of By The Time I Get To Phoenix in 1967, its lyric rolling like tumbleweed through the embers of a dying relationship. A year later Campbell recorded the definitive version of Wichita Lineman, the song that sealed Webb’s reputation.
“I wrote it in three hours,” Webb says of the song, a widescreen epic that could only have been composed in the vast reaches of the US. “Glen wanted another geographical song to follow up Phoenix.
“I grew up in this flat country where you could literally see for 50 miles and it was featureless, like being on Mars. Except for the telephone wires draping out towards the horizon. The men who worked on them were the only things to look at. I saw one guy with a phone in his hand and he’d tapped into the wire and was talking to someone. My imagination ran wild. Who was he talking to? Being a very romantic teenager I thought he must be talking to his girl, so I imagined their conversation.”
Why are songwriters 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.”
Arguably his finest hour came with Highwayman, another hit for Campbell in 1979. It opens with a robber who is killed and reincarnated as a sailor, who falls to his death and returns as a worker on the Hoover Dam, who dies in an accident and reappears as the pilot of a spacecraft in some distant future.
“I was in London making this album with George Martin, hanging out with Harry Nilsson and generally behaving badly,” Webb says. “And I had this Dick Turpinesque nightmare about being chased by grenadiers, who were about to hang me, one of those night terrors where you wake and find the sheets soaked. So I rolled out of bed to the piano and wrote the song.”
Johnny Cash recorded Highwayman with Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, all of whom declared their love for Webb’s songwriting. And Frank Sinatra was an early champion.
“I went to see Frank at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas when I was about 19,” Webb says. “He said, ‘I want to do the greatest saloon song ever written. It’s called Didn’t We? and it’s by a young kid named Jimmy Webb.’ A big spotlight like off a battleship picked me out. I just wanted to crawl under the table! But he was very kind to songwriters. The reason you’re here is that he took some interest in me.”
Webb in turn is championing Campbell, who can’t appear on stage any more because he has Alzheimer’s. In his current tour Webb performs with footage of Campbell on a screen, accompanying him and even talking to him. “There’s nothing morbid about it,” he says. “I’m trying to reinforce that image of Glen as the power behind the powers, who affected so many bands, including the Velvet Underground.”
Webb has a touching fondness for the man who immortalised so many of his songs. He talks about Campbell getting confused by his illness and singing Wichita Lineman twice. There was riotous applause, then respectful silence. At which point the audience couldn’t resist shouting: “Again!”
Jimmy Webb plays the Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, on September 16; and Apex, Bury St Edmunds, on September 20
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