JIMMY WEBB
Where the songwriting maestro shares his Self-Portrait, and says it loud on the subject of fast motors, south London bowling and feeling like Henry Miller.
The songwriting mage in his own words and by his own hand.
I describe myself as… independent – I shy away from other people’s footsteps and find myself sometimes in difficult creative poses trying not to borrow from other creators.
Music changed me… playing piano in the Baptist church furnished some of the earliest, deepest emotional journeys of my life. Music is a way to learn to feel and my background in church music affected me my whole life. While in London in 1967, a vice president of EMI presented me with his entire classical record collection – an asteroid of pure musical knowledge had fallen into my lap. I was ripped off my foundations by early 20th century composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams, Samuel Barber, Igor Stravinsky, Ravel, Erik Satie, Fauré, and the like. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was another epiphany, it felt like the new classical music. Even Leonard Bernstein was swayed by much of the music of the ’60s.
When I’m not making music… I am a toy freak, big, little, just as long as they are brightly coloured, have lots of bells and whistles and go fast. I love driving. My current passion is a 2002 Ford Thunderbird convertible in mint condition; I will have no use for a car that drives itself. My favourite sled of all time was my 427 Shelby Cobra that I bought from Carroll [Shelby, designer] personally. I’m also a big fan of gliding and I was once a member of the London Gliding Club. I’m not all about driving fast and flying high – I am also into bowling, the lawn variety: I am the only overseas lifetime member of the Barnes Bowling Club. Another passion is Concorde memorabilia: I have so many models, actual instruments and flying yolks and serving trolleys, that I think I am going to be forced to buy some sort of warehouse if I continue these childish pastimes.
My biggest vice is… culpability and unfounded enthusiasm.
The last time I was embarrassed was… a couple of years ago – I wrote a vitriolic e-mail for no good reason. My formal qualifications are… two-year drop-out education from a junior college in California. An honorary degree from Oklahoma City University and Five Towns College, and 50 years of on the job training. The last time I cried was… I never cry. Vinyl, CD or MP3? …vinyl is my favourite which I collect, but CDs are the only way to have semi-permanent copies of the bulk of catalogued music. My most treasured possession is… an unpublished manuscript by Henry Miller. He writes candidly about his struggles to establish an identity in what we’d call junior high school, [and] his excruciating attempts to woo a certain Flossie Martin with his piano playing while his “buds” jeered from the sidelines. This is me pure and simple. The best book I’ve read is… The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. There is something that haunts me about Bowles’ prescient vision of a totally out of control universe which he called the “horror” waiting just beyond that alluring blue glow of the atmosphere. Is the glass half-full or half-empty… the Heisenberg uncertainty principle dictates that it’s half full and half empty. My greatest regret is… that I did not surround myself with great producers and sidemen when I was making my earlier albums. When we die… having once endured the whole death experience during a glider crash it seems to me that nothing much happens. I would like to be remembered… as someone who was not afraid to apologise for a mistake.