A STORY OF SONG
Memoir details rise of songwriter Webb
If you loved the late Glen Campbell’s city-named country-pop crossover hits — “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” — much of the credit goes to Jimmy Webb, who wrote all of those songs in the mid-to-late 1960s when he was barely out of his teens.
The son of a Baptist minister who grew up mostly in Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle, Webb moved with his family to Southern California just before his senior year in high school, then stayed there to pursue a career in songwriting after his father moved the family back to Oklahoma.
Webb’s adventures over the next few years would leave an indelible mark on American popular music. “Up, Up and Away” came first, winning Grammys via the Fifth Dimension’s recording of the song. Next were the Campbell hits, and renditions of Webb tunes recorded by everyone from Isaac Hayes to Waylon Jennings to Frank Sinatra.
“The Cake and the Rain,” published earlier this year by St. Martin’s Press, is Webb’s memoir of those magnificent-yet-tumultuous years. And, yes, it tells the story of “MacArthur Park,” perhaps Webb’s best-known song. The oftmaligned chorus gives the book its title. “MacArthur Park” may have been a seven-minute slice of melodrama when actor Richard Harris sang it in 1968 — and a decade later via disco queen Donna Summer’s remake. But it arose from a very humble and sincere place.
“I began to keep a notebook on one side of the keyboard and filled it with vignettes” from the days he used to meet a teenage love interest at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, Webb writes in the book. The old men playing
checkers? The yellow cotton dress? The cake, and the rain? “Events and conversations, all real,” Webb writes. “I wasn’t creating a sucker punch for unwary listeners. I was pouring my soul out on a surreal canvas.”
Much of “The Cake and the Rain” is highly personal and emotional, following the manner in which Webb always approached lyrics as a songwriter. His first book, 1998’s “Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting,” focused more on his extraordinary gift as a musical composer.
In the new memoir, he gets a lot more personal, digging deeply into the experiences that shaped both his life and his songs. “There are times when I emphasized my fragility as a human being,” he says, “because I think that’s part of the story.”
We spoke to Webb at length in advance of his two Austin appearances coming up. He’ll play many of his best-known songs in a solo-piano performance on Thursday, Oct. 26, at One World Theatre, after visiting Waterloo Records on Wednesday, Oct. 25, for a conversation about the book with yours truly.
“The Cake and the Rain” has an unusual nonchronological structure, bouncing back-and-forth between your circa-1970 heyday as a songwriter in Los Angeles and the formative years of your family growing up in Oklahoma and Texas. How did you come up with that?
I read a lot of memoirs, and I guess my problem is that most of them are very linear and they can get to have a kind of drone-y quality to them. I also was very interested in delving into my family’s history, particularly my grandfather’s, and my father’s kind of sudden departure for the South Pacific in the Second World War.
So somehow I came up with the idea that I would carry two storylines forward: One would begin in 1969 and one would begin before the war, with my mother and father living on opposite sides of the creek, and the kind of dynamics that created my father and then created me. I was juxtapositioning these two stories and bringing them forward. I set out in a very chaotic way, because I wasn’t sure it would work. But as I brought it forward, I could see that actually the timeline was going to work out just about right.
Some of those early years involve spending time in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, where your dad worked as a minister. What was that like?
My father had performing aspirations. I think that’s the real secret reason he became a Baptist minister, is he enjoyed being in front of a crowd. He was an imposing figure. He was quite the orator. He began to devise an upwardly mobile path through post-war America, which was very difficult. Money was hard to come by in these small towns in West Texas.
That’s where I first went on the road with my father, and I became a performer. I wouldn’t exactly say I was a prodigy, but I was fairly clever with the piano by the time I was 10 or 11 years old. And he took great pleasure in having me perform. I noticed there was a direct correlation between the quality of the performance and the amount of money in the offering plate!
The book stops right around 1973, about the time you started raising a family. What was the reason for ending there?
Well, I’ve always envisioned a Volume 2. That may not happen, but if it doesn’t, then I’m pleased with the ending of the first memoir. I sort of came to the conscious decision not to deal with my family life in the first book. I’m not, as has been suggested, avoiding writing about my family. But that’s another subject; it’s a whole reshuffling of ideas and priorities. I think it reflects my whole generation, in a way, because I think we all began to realize, hey, here comes real life. We’re going to have to cut our hair and we’re going to have to get jobs. So there were lots of very good reasons to stop where I stopped.
There’s an innocence in the early chapters, with your childhood and your first breaks into the music business, that gradually gives away to some rather dark episodes toward the end of the book. Was it hard to look back on some of those memories?
Well, my relatives won’t read it! (laughs) But, yeah, we lost some incredible people because of drugs. What I tried to stress in the book was that we thought so much that these drugs were good things, they were expanding our consciousness, and all these things that are now clichés. But back then, they were things that we attached ourselves to. I can actually remember a psychiatrist from Beverly Hills telling me that I should really try free-basing cocaine because it was really good for you.
But that’s where I drew the line. I’m clinging to the shreds of my dignity here, but I never got into heroin. I was always scared of that; it was just an internal alarm system that went off every time I was around it. I could smell it; there was something deadly about that scene. I was intelligent enough to know that my behavior was questionable. They call it the drug culture now, but it was unbelievably pervasive. It went from the board room at the record company to the control room in the recording studio to the social life to the parties. This was an atmosphere where people openly wore coke spoons around their necks, and everybody knew what they were for. I mean, it was kind of insane. I try to convey that in the book.
For all the million-selling hits you had in the late ’60s, the records you started putting out as a recording artist in the early ’70s were rather ambitious and adventurous. Do you touch on that aspect of your career in your concerts?
I’m trying to do some songs from my records, because I think it gives a better picture of who I am, what I do, and how songwriting was always a sacred thing to me. It was never anything that I got into deliberately. I never even thought about the commercial aspect of hit records until I started getting hit records. Then I had to deal with it, and I found it difficult to deal with. The sudden influx of wealth was really kind of embarrassing, and I wanted to stay with my friends and I wanted to bring them along on the trip.
I guess there was a certain amount of guilt involved, because I hadn’t done anything extra special that I hadn’t already done practically since I was 14 years old. There was a certain destiny working in my life, because I had dreamed of meeting Glen Campbell. My father thought I was crazy! He said, “You’ll never meet Glen Campbell.” My dad was a good guy, but he thought I was nuts. (laughs) We’re living in the panhandle of Oklahoma, and he’s got this kid who writes songs all day long. Finally he puts a piano out in the garage, and I can remember putting up the garage door on warm summer nights, writing songs till I fell asleep on the piano keyboard.
When I got to Hollywood, I was writing three songs a week, and I just loved it, I wasn’t a packaged product; I wasn’t working for “The Man.” A lot of the book is about my struggle with being pigeonholed as a middle-of-the-road commercial writer. I was offered some pretty big money to play Las Vegas, and I turned it down. I made a lot of decisions in my life to publicly demonstrate my sincerity in terms of my political beliefs, and that my long hair wasn’t just for show.
There is one anecdote early in the book where you talk about going to Las Vegas in 1965 to pitch your song “Didn’t We” to actor/singer Tony Martin at his hotel gig, and you end up meeting an American music icon, just by chance. Can you tell us about that?
I’m sitting in the break room and there’s an old fellow stretched out under a lamp. He was asleep, and he was holding a horn across his chest. I guess I was rustling my papers and he kind of roused up and he said, “Whatchoo got there?” Scared me to death! I said, “Oh, nothing, just some songs,” you know. And he says, “Let me see.” And he leaned over and he looked at it, and he played like three notes or so, that’s all. And then his face suddenly was fully illuminated by the lamp, and I realized that it was Louis Armstrong.
He looked at it for a while, and he said to me, “You know something? You need to stick with it.” He said, “You can do this, but you need to stick with it.” I said, “OK, yes sir, Mr. Armstrong!” Trying to find my tongue, trying to find my music, trying to get back in my chair. I didn’t know whether to stand up or sit down. He got up to go back out to play, and he smiled at me, he walked out the door. I thought he was gone — and all of a sudden, his stuck his head back into the doorway, and he said, “You stick with it” again. And he was gone.
There were many, many nights when I was laying on an air mattress in a onebedroom apartment in Los Angeles, when I had walked the streets all day long trying to get somebody to listen to one of my songs. And I’d lay there and I could still see his face; I could still hear him saying, “Stick with it, stick with it.”