Mixmaster 

Larry Schwartz   

You’d think he’d have a bust of Mozart propped on the piano. Instead, in his New York office, Jimmy Webb has a photo of one of Barcelona’s best-known buildings. “That’s my musical muse,” he says of the decorative Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia, designed by Catalan architect,
Antonio Gaudi.

It helps him focus on his own artistic endeavor: “That’s my symbol for inspiration.”

He mentions the ornate church after a remark about a comment by his good friend and regular tennis rival, Art Garfunkel, who has recorded an album of his songs and collaborated on a cantata. “Jimmy and me are stonecutters/building a structure to God,” Garfunkel once wrote. Webb
notes that a new book, in which he outlines his approach, “pursues rather relentlessly this architectural metaphor that songwriting is building a structure”. (The book, Tunesmith, is soon to be published by Penguin.)

Webb is known less as a performer than as a creator of songs made famous by others. This is the man who gave Glen Campbell By The Time I Get To Phoenix and Wichita Lineman; The Fifth Dimension Up Up And Away; Richard Harris and Donna Summer MacArthur Park. His songs have
been performed by players from Frank Sinatra (who reckoned Phoenix was “the greatest torch song ever written”) to Linda Ronstadt (who has said his songs “have 17-layer emotions and sophisticated chord changes that are absolutely dazzling”).

Thirty or more years since he enjoyed his first hits, Webb is all the more aware of the need for rigor in his craft. Though the great Sammy Cahn once compared MacArthur Park “in size and scope” to Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, its composer is all too aware of its shortcomings. He quotes
lines of confused lyric to illustrate the danger of mixing metaphors.

“The first line was, ‘Spring was never waiting for us, girl/ It ran one step ahead as we followed in the dance,’ which is kind of flirting.

“Now here we’re going straight into the mouth of the beast: ‘Between the parted pages and were pressed/In love’s hot fevered iron like a striped pair of pants …’

“Now there, we’re not just mixing metaphors. We just don’t know what we’re talking about.”

He’s weary of inevitable questioning on that famous line from MacArthur Park: “Someone left the cake out in the rain …”

“I just can’t address that,” he sighs. “It’s something they’ve asked me for 30 years. If you feel like writing about it, you could say it’s a metaphor and, my God, I just don’t feel like explaining it any more. Carl Sandburg said, ‘Whatever is art need not be explained.'”

Not that he’s reluctant where he considers it appropriate. “I think it’s important to admit when you’ve made mistakes so that youngsters, when they make a mistake, they don’t go out and shoot themselves,” he says.

“We have a terrible record of survival in our business. People are held to such high standards sometimes that suddenly they feel, Oh my God, I’ve been found out. Everyone knows what a phoney bastard I am and I really don’t know what I’m doing.”

Still, you wonder if he’s not worried about revealing too much of the

sleight-of-hand that makes his songs distinctive.

“I don’t feel at all self-conscious about letting the cat out of the bag,” he says.

“I feel like I wrote this (book) for no other reason than for my sons. I have a 26-year-old, 24-year-old, 20-year-old, a 16-year-old, all either in the music business or headed that way. And there’s no one to help them. There’s no one to give them any advice. There’s no course of study. They can’t
learn it at school and it’s silly of us not to pass along what we know. I’m 52 years old. How much longer am I going to be writing songs, period? In the best possible world, another 18 years maybe.”

The son of a Baptist preacher, Webb grew up in Oklahoma and California. “My first creative impulses came about in church,” he says. “Because it takes so damn long to pass the plate during the offertories, I would get bored playing Amazing Grace over and over and I would try and find out
how to make it interesting for me.

“So I would substitute chords and I would arpeggiate and I would begin to use different techniques.”

Not everyone was enchanted. “Blue-haired little old ladies would come up to my father and say, ‘Mr Webb, what is your son doing to the hymns?'”

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, recorded by Judy Collins in 1975, was “definitely a church song”. Among the hymns that have inspired Webb, one is called I Will Arise, another Firmer Foundation. “All of these songs are really descended from the Scots-Irish-English ballads of the south eastern
United States. And when I went over to Ireland with Richard Harris when I was in my 20s, I first really heard Irish music – not the Irish Eyes Are Smiling kind but the real Irish music.”

It was so powerful, he felt that it was “like having decaf all your life and suddenly someone slips you a real cup of coffee… It was like, Well, I’ve never had real music before. These Irish songs began to just tear me apart.”

When he played in Ireland last year, he told audiences that a track called No Signs Of Age was “my best Irish song”.

“You’ll have to be the judge of whether I can write an Irish song,” he says. “It went over well. It really did.”

He has recorded several albums, but failed to make an impact even though he emerged in an era when singer-songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Carole King were feted.

With a few exceptions – Los Angeles Times writer Robert Hilburn, he says, “tore me to pieces” – he even enjoyed good press, but it didn’t translate into sales. “I have always failed at the broadcast level,” he says. “And I feel that my true nemesi, if that is the plural of nemesis, have been the
programmers. The people who decide what to play.”

Not that he resents others’ success with his material. “I always was very excited to hear a new Glen Campbell record because I felt that he was my voice. He was my Dionne Warwick, if you will …”

He was, however, resentful of the amount of airplay enjoyed by artists who had released records he considered inferior to his own. But part of the problem may have been that he avoided covering his own biggest hits until he did some of the best of them on Ten Easy Pieces in 1996.

“I never really wanted to do that album as an exploitative move,” Webb says. “But certainly I held back from recording those songs for a long time because I was I think afraid someone would say, Look at what he’s done now!”

Odd to think he might be accused of exploiting his own material. “Well we certainly live in a crazy world from a media viewpoint,” he says.

Galveston. Highwayman. Wichita Lineman. The Moon’s A Harsh Mistress. By The Time I Get To Phoenix. Didn’t We. Worst That Could Happen. All I Know. MacArthur Park. He gives each a modest treatment on Ten, his piano the only accompaniment his voice needs.

Had his situation changed much since Ten? “As far as I’m concerned the war is over,” he says. “It’s like the old adage or the old axiom about what if they had a war and nobody came? To me the war is over. I don’t think that any of us are a threat to the charts. By us I mean anybody over 50
certainly is not a threat to the charts any more.

“I really feel it’s moved on to the Internet and I feel a lot of my energy is going to go into my website. I’ve been thinking very seriously about starting my own label. I know quite a few writers who would like to throw in with me and sell their records on the Internet. I think it’s very exciting.”

He says he has stuck to his guns, insisted on being taken seriously as an artist, despite the commercial consequences, and, “at this time in my life, it’s really starting to pay off in a really rich vein of precious metal to me.”

The Sunday Age, 21st of March 1999