For the Sake of the Song

Tunesmith extraordinaire Jimmy Webb shares his thoughts on the writing process, the state of country music, and old friends

by Peter Blackstock

In retrospect, it seems surprising that American Express never tapped Jimmy Webb to do one of those "unknown celebrity" commercials they used to do. The catch-phrase would have practically been an encapsulated summation of his career: "You may not know me, but you know my songs…"

Indeed, Jimmy Webb is a household name in a rather bass-ackward sense. Ask the average Joe and Jane on the street if they’ve ever heard of him, and probably eight or nine times out of 10 you’d get a blank or vaguely reaching stare. But all 10 will nod in knowing affirmation when you start reeling off the songs. "Wichita Lineman". "By The Time I Get To Phoenix". "Galveston". "MacArthur Park". "Up, Up & Away".

Those tunes are the most grandly auspicious tip of an iceberg that runs hundreds more titles deep. And that iceberg floats amid a veritable ocean of artists who have recorded Webb’s songs. Take, for instance: Glen Campbell, Johnny Rivers, Linda Ronstadt, Waylon Jennings, Isaac Hayes, Johnny Mathis, Nick Cave, Henry Mancini, Cher, Art Garfunkel, Jackie Gleason, Zumpano, Ray Price, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Urge Overkill, Amy Grant, Lowell George, Barry Manilow, Mantovani, Barbra Streisand, Wanda Jackson, Benny Goodman, Tennessee Ernie Ford, R.E.M., Perry Como, Larry Coryell, Thelma Houston, B.J. Thomas, Jim Nabors, Oscar Peterson, Scud Mountain Boys, Donna Summer, Marty Robbins, Vic Damone, Arthur Fiedler, Maria McKee, Nina Simone, Three Degrees, Four Tops, Fifth Dimension, Freedy Johnston, Lynn Anderson, Stephane Grappelli, Andy Williams, Bobbie Gentry, Smokey Robinson, Chet Atkins, Liberace, Dionne Warwick, Eddy Arnold, Roberta Flack, Kate Smith, Englebert Humperdinck, and Goober & The Peas.

Uh, sorry, guess I got a little carried away (although, to be honest, that’s not even a third of the artists who occupy the "Jimmy Webb shelf" of my record collection). And, in all seriousness, there’s a meaning to the madness of such namedropping overload. Take a good look over that last paragraph, and it’s hard not to be dumbfounded by the diversity of the performers who have found an occasion to record at least one Webb song (several in many cases) at some point in their career. Webb’s catalog is a testament to the ultimate futility of genre categorization. Venture into a used vinyl record store to comb the racks for albums that might contain Webb cuts, and you’ll soon discover you have to search through every section: rock, jazz, country, folk, soul, gospel – they’re everywhere.

In the early days, however, one might have guessed Webb’s inside track was in country. Though he had his first chart success with the Fifth Dimension’s rendition of "Up, Up And Away" in 1967, the trio of Glen Campbell hits in 1967, ’68 and ’69 – "By The Time I Get To Phoenix", "Wichita Lineman" and "Galveston" – was perhaps an even greater calling card for his rising career. All three songs rose to the high end of the country charts ("Phoenix" to No. 3, "Wichita" and "Galveston" to No. 1); perhaps more importantly, they crossed over to become pop smashes as well.

That crossover accomplishment is something Webb remains proud of, and it symbolizes some of his own feelings about what country music has become over the past three decades, as opposed to what he believes it should be. " ‘Wichita Lineman’ is country, make no mistake about it," Webb said in a January phone interview from his office in New York. "It’s not country like this new ‘twangy guys in black hats’ country, but it was country then. So was ‘Galveston’.…That was all country, at that particular time. Even though it wasn’t Ernest Tubb, which was my father’s favorite recording artist. And I know country; I grew up on it. My fingers were right there on the dial. But I don’t think that country is twang, and I don’t think that country is three chords. I think it’s more than that. I think it’s a lot more subtle than that."

To be sure, Webb’s contributions to the country landscape, or to popular music in general, rarely have been of the three-chord variety. His natural gift as a composer and arranger is nearly unparalleled among his contemporaries in the latter half of the 20th century. Like the Beatles’ irresistibly catchy pop classics, the songs sound so simple, until you sit down and try to figure out some of the progressions behind those melodies and discover this guy is often using chords you’ve never played before, working in and out of standard keys all the while. That’s the foundation of his success as a pop songwriter – and, in fact, it’s a talent that likely could have taken him into the classical realm had he chosen that avenue. Check out the 10-minute suite "Land’s End/Asleep On The Wind" from his 1974 album Land’s End for proof.

Ah yes, his own albums – the most oft-overlooked aspect of Webb’s career, even though there have been 10 of them (counting a best-of import collection on Warner in Europe). Though Webb has largely occupied himself with other projects (composing Broadway musicals, writing a book about songwriting, raising a family) in the ’80s and ’90s, he was in fact an active solo artist during the ’70s, albeit never a commercially successful one. His early-’70s albums such as Words And Music and And So: On are hidden wonders of the music world, full of uniquely adventurous material both melodically and lyrically.

But they aren’t full of hits – not even his own hits. Indeed, for all the chart successes he had in the late 1960s, the single most remarkable thing about Webb’s solo career was that he never recorded his biggest songs. Only "Galveston" – in a startlingly revealing, slowed-down version on 1972’s Letters – appeared on any of the ’70s records. No "Wichita Lineman". No "MacArthur Park". No "By The Time I Get To Phoenix". No "Worst That Could Happen". No "Didn’t We". No "All I Know".

At long last, Webb finally remedied that situation last fall by releasing Ten Easy Pieces, a mostly piano-and-vocals-only affair that includes all the aforementioned songs plus a couple other classics from his catalog. Perhaps definitively, Ten Easy Pieces showed these selections to be simply songs at heart, stripped down to the basics of a writer’s voice and instrument, before any embellishments or bells and whistles were added to shift them more toward this genre or that genre, this radio format or that one, this section of the record store or that one.

While Webb has been rewarded (both artistically and financially) by having his songs end up in nearly every section of the store, he still doesn’t quite cotton to the limitations brought on by genre classification. "From the country point of view, what I’d have to say is, you don’t hear a lot of experimental songs in country music. You just kind of hear, ‘This is what we do down here, folks.’ And really, that’s one of my objections to it," he says. "Country sometimes cuts off its nose to spite its face. Linda Ronstadt calls it the guys in the hats. What is it about country singers – why do they have to wear hats? Because they’re not cowboys. My family, I’m descended from cowboys, and I know these guys aren’t cowboys. I mean, I doubt if they even change a tire!"

Furthermore, the Nashville modus operandi of songwriters tailoring their work to suit top-of-the-chart artists doesn’t really fit Webb’s much more singular writing style. As often as Webb’s songs have been cut by others, he rarely writes with a specific performer in mind. "I’ve tried, but I’m really not very good at it," he claims. "I can explain it this way: I wrote ‘If These Walls Could Speak’ for Waylon Jennings – and Amy Grant ended up recording it. So I don’t even worry about it anymore. I just write songs, and if somebody does it, fine.

"But I understand that there are rookeries of songwriters in Nashville just sitting around trying to crank out a song for Reba. I can’t imagine doing that! First of all, I wouldn’t be very good at it. Secondly, I couldn’t stand it. That would drive me crazy. If that’s what somebody wants to do, that’s all right with me, but I couldn’t possibly do that. I would go crazy. I would rather die. I think that you’ve gotta sit down and write a good song. I cannot see going out and cutting a demo and saying, ‘This is for Reba, let’s get a girl who sounds like Reba, let’s make it sound like her last hit,’ and all that."

While Waylon never did record "If These Walls Could Speak" (though Glen Campbell, Shawn Colvin and Nanci Griffith did, after Grant’s version), Jennings has in fact had a long association with Webb’s material. In fact, though Richard Harris’ 1968 recording of "MacArthur Park" is probably the most recognized version of that song, and most people also recall Donna Summer’s chart-topping disco remake in 1978, it was actually Jennings who won a Grammy with the song, in 1969. (He cut a different version of it, under the title "MacArthur Park (Revisited)" on an album in the 1970s.) Jennings also recorded Webb’s "If You See Me Getting Smaller" and, with Willie Nelson on their WWII record, "Mr. Shuck ’n’ Jive".

In 1985, Jennings teamed up with Nelson, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, who dubbed themselves the Highwaymen in reference to the Webb tune "Highwayman", which was also the title track to the album they released together. The song (which Glen Campbell had recorded previously, and which also appears on Webb’s new record as well as his 1977 George Martin-produced album El Mirage) went to No. 1 on the country charts and remains one of the artist associations Webb is most fond of, even though he says he’s never really been good buddies with the four country outlaws. "To me, they’re kind of like the most unavailable people in show business. I don’t ever see them," he says. "I would really like to hang out with them, and I wish they’d invite me over – ‘Hey Jimmy, come over to the house, and let’s play some songs!’

"But I love them dearly. Waylon still has a really nice piece of turquoise that I gave him when I met him backstage at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe about 15, maybe 20 years ago. And they’re nice guys. I had a ball one time, when I was invited out to Farm Aid [at Texas Stadium in Dallas, in March 1992]. I got out there and the Highwaymen were there, and apparently Johnny Cash was sick.…And I’m standing around backstage and all of a sudden, Willie walks up to me and he says ‘Jimmy, Cash is sick, why don’t you come out and sing his part on "Highwayman"?’ And I said, ‘Man, I couldn’t do that, there’s 50,000 people out there!’ There was one of those big screens, like 50 feet tall. And he looked at me, and, it just happened that that day I’d worn kind of a New York uniform which was all black; I mean, I usually wear black in New York, like most people do in New York, for whatever reason. And so Willie says, ‘Well hell, Jimmy, you’re wearin’ all black, just go out there and they’ll think you’re Johnny Cash!’ So I did – I went out there, and I was one of the Highwaymen. It was one of the great moments of my life. I remember looking up at this 50-foot billboard and seeing my picture up there with Willie. Me and Willie up on the 50-foot screen; this cannot be real. And I restrained myself, I didn’t go, "[rumbling] I-I-I-I was a Highwayman-a-a-n" – I didn’t do my Johnny Cash impression! Which is not very good anyway."

In a sense, playing Texas Stadium was a homecoming of sorts for Webb, who spent his formative years in Texas and Oklahoma before moving to Southern California when he was 17 (and then to New York another 17 years later). "I was raised in West Texas; my dad [a Baptist minister] went to seminary in Fort Worth, and pastored churches in places like Pampa and Amarillo. So I was kind of raised in Buddy Holly territory.…I remember the first time I ever got picked up by a school bus was in Wellington, Texas [pop. 2.456]."

His birthplace was about 50 miles east of there, just across the state line in the Oklahoma town of Elk City [pop. 10.428]. I asked Webb if, growing up, he had felt any special kinship with a fellow Okie who was also one of the great American songwriters of the 20th Century – Woody Guthrie. Of course, the songwriting methods and approaches of Webb and Guthrie are a definitive case of apples vs. oranges.

"He was a much less contrived person than I am in a lot of ways," Webb observes. "He was in the trenches; he was a trench-warfare kind of a guy. He was a real power for social change. I’ve written a lot of songs about politics, and I’ve written a lot of songs about ecological matters and all kinds of things that are socially conscientious, though they haven’t been my most famous songs. You know, people don’t necessarily like to hear about those things. That’s why, when Woody Guthrie and those guys were out organizing unions and kinda creating a code for all these causes, they seemed to create really good, ‘Well, I’ve gotta hammer, I’ll hammer in the morning, I’ll hammer in the evening’ – really jolly songs.

"Of course, what was going on wasn’t jolly at all. People were getting the shit kicked outta them. They were starving to death. In a lot of cases, their world was coming to an end. It was the Dust Bowl, people were moving out of my part of the world, never to return. So the world is crashing down around their shoulders, but the songs are like, ‘Hammer all the morning, ba doom ba doom’ – very jolly. And I think that’s what you have to do when you’re changing the world, is you have to have a jolly tune, you have to have something to march to. And that’s not necessarily my job. I’m more the guy who comes by after the battle and writes about the leftovers; what was accomplished, or what wasn’t accomplished."

One thing that hasn’t been accomplished, amazingly enough, is getting Woody Guthrie in Oklahoma’s Hall of Fame. "Dale Robertson is in it, and James Garner is in it, and some of these big stars from Oklahoma. So, I talked to them one time, I said, ‘Hey, you guys, how come you don’t have Woody Guthrie in the Oklahoma Hall of Fame?’ That seems like a remarkable oversight. But you know, it’s one of these things: ‘Well, you know, he was a Communist.’ Oh, is that right? I didn’t know that. I thought he was a patriot and an American. OK, he was a Communist. So Woody Guthrie ain’t in the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. So, you know, I don’t want to be in the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, until they put in Woody Guthrie."

There’s one other dearly departed Okie songwriter who meant a lot to Webb over the decades. "I was born in Elk City; 12 miles up the road was Erick, and Roger Miller was from Erick." Though the two didn’t know each other as kids, they became good pals as their career paths continuously crossed in later years. "I remember when I was inducted into the Nashville songwriters Hall of Fame, Roger was there. And that’s really the last time I saw him, " Webb recalls. (Miller died of throat cancer in October 1992.) "I walked up to him and I said, ‘Roger, goddamn you, I’ve been in New York for 15 years trying to get a musical on Broadway, and you come in there and take all the Tonys. Damn your ass!’ I told him. Because I loved Roger.

"And then about two years later, he was gone. And, if the things we value in this country are, like, Mark Twain, then we’ve got to love Roger Miller. But he was gone without a great deal of fanfare. I noticed, because I knew him. I had been with him at many a New Year’s party, and hanging out with Glen, and laughing at the crazy bastard, he was just so funny. He was one of the funniest guys that ever came down the pike. And all of a sudden he was gone, and man, it was small column three page six.

"And I tried for five or six months to find out what they did with him [where he was buried]. I mean, I called everybody I knew, and I said, where’d they take Roger? Where did they take him? I don’t know where he is. I don’t know whether anybody knows where he is!

"Because I just wanna go out there and see him. I don’t know whether they took him back to Oklahoma, whether they took him out to Erick, where my grandmother’s buried out there. But I could never find out what they did with him. It was kind of like kind of a hiccup after, in my mind, one of the most significant careers in the history of country. I mean, he was like Mark Twain."

As it happens, the reason Webb never could track down the location of Miller’s grave is simple: There isn’t one. Nashville country music journalist/historian Robert K. Oermann tells us that Miller was cremated and his ashes scattered – though Oermann isn’t sure exactly where that scattering took place. So a certain degree of mystery remains. All that can be said for certain, it seems, is that, true to the title of one of Jimmy Webb’s most moving songs, Rober Miller is Asleep On The Wind.

Peter Blackstock, co-editor of No Depression, occasionally performs Jimmy Webb’s "Christiaan No" at open mikes and has sung "Wichita Lineman" at bars in both hemispheres.