The Art of Songwriting with the Legendary Jimmy Webb: Behind the music of an American treasure.

Buzz Knight:

I’m Buzz Knight, the host of Takin’ a Walk – Music History on Foot. Follow us at Apple Podcast, Spotify, TuneIn, iHeart, Castbox or wherever you get your podcast. And you can also head to takinawalk.com and you can listen to all episodes. You can check out transcripts, you can leave us suggestions, comments as well. Maybe you could even suggest someone you think should be on Takin’ a Walk. Today our special guest is singer-songwriter extraordinaire, Jimmy Webb. So much of Jimmy’s work is music history. The list of Jimmy Webb’s accomplishments is the stuff legends are made of.

Rolling Stone Magazine listed him as one of the top 50 songwriters of all time. Hits like Wichita Lineman, recorded certainly by Glen Campbell, but even recorded by Guns N’ Roses. The work that Jimmy did with the 5th Dimension, Up, Up and Away. And we can go on and on and we will go on and on with Jimmy Webb, who’s playing at the City Winery in Boston on April 6th, 2023. Well, Jimmy Webb, it is so great to have you on Takin’ a Walk, even though it’s virtual, so we can sort of imagine walking along the beach or something, but thanks for being on.

Jimmy Webb:

Oh yeah, it would be a beautiful day for a walk and we could go right down here to this beach not far from my house. I can pretend that.

Buzz Knight:

Perfect. So take us back to that moment of your first public appearance as a performer playing in your father’s Baptist church.

Jimmy Webb:

Oh my goodness. Well, my mother had given me piano lessons since age six and her goal for me, her dream really was for me to be the pianist at the First Baptist Church in Eldorado, Oklahoma, where my father was a Baptist minister, full on Southern Baptist, ordained minister. And I think I finally, after a lot of cajoling and a lot of push and pull between mother and son, I finally made it to the church piano bench. And then I think I would’ve been about 11. 10 or 11. And then I remember also they had an organ there, so I began to play a little bit of organ. I also accompanied my father on these evangelical journeys in the summertime, revival meetings and what have you. I played weddings, I played funerals, I played parties for Christian non dancing parties because we weren’t allowed to dance in the Baptist Church. Which reminds me of a Glen Campbell story I have to tell you just quickly, okay.

Buzz Knight:

Sure.

Jimmy Webb:

He said to me one time, he said, “Jimmy,” he said, “Do you know why Baptist don’t make love standing up?” And I said, no, Glen, I don’t. And he said, “It’s because they’re afraid people will think they’re dancing.” Dancing was a real big no-no and a theme that, a thread we could follow because I was never comfortable with confining myself to church music.

Buzz Knight:

So you discovered songwriting really as a teenager, is that correct?

Jimmy Webb:

I wrote a song called Someone Else when I was 12 years old and we had moved it to Oklahoma City, which was a very disturbing time in my life because I had an agrarian childhood. I was always on the farm, always around animals working in the fields. We did hard, hard manual labor. We weren’t slaves, but in a way we were because my grandfather was very stern. And I remember my first cotton picking adventure. My grandma made me a sack. When I was eight years old I was picking cotton. So I would sneak out when I was 12, 13, 14. I would go to the sock hop at school where I was definitely not supposed to be, okay. I wrote a song called It’s Someone Else.

And believe it or not, took some 25 years later, Art Garfunkel recorded that song that I wrote when I was 12 years old. So I had a grip on it from a very early age. I sort of knew what the mechanics of songwriting were about, just instinctively and I had a great teacher in Oklahoma City named Susan Goddard, who really helped me work out improvisational stuff, which is what jazz musicians do all the time. They just improvise. And in a way, improvisation is the bridge to creativity. That’s a tool that you use to create your own melodies and your own chord patterns.

Buzz Knight:

So you took off to LA and your first job was transcribing other people’s songs, right?

Jimmy Webb:

Well, people say, “Oh, can you write music?” And I always say, well, if you can read music, you can write music. That’s the end of that argument. Once I realized that I could pick up five or 10 bucks to have sit down and transcribe, that is to listen to someone else’s song and write it down in musical language, which I was fallen off a log for me at that point. I was 16, 17 years old. My ears have always been my guide and so I was using my ears to make, not a lot of money, but to get by. And I was on my own. I had no visual means of support. I was outside my family and if someone asked me what I was doing or what’s your work or what’s your… Have you got a job or something? I just said, yeah, I’m a professional songwriter. I can’t explain to you why I thought of myself that way. I just knew that’s what I wanted to do and I was doing it and I was writing songs every day.

Buzz Knight:

And this little song, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, pops out of your head and that really opened a few doors in your career, didn’t it?

Jimmy Webb:

Well, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, I wrote my first real gig in LA was I was a contract writer at Motown Records. And actually they’re publishing artist called Joe Bet. So I was signed to Joe Bet and they used to pay me on a piecemeal basis. I would bring in a song and if they liked it they would give me 50 bucks. It was during that period that I wrote By The Time I Get To Phoenix. I actually wrote it for Paul Peterson, who you may recall was on the Donna Reed Show. He was a Motown artist and I was the only white writer in the office. And so the white, I don’t want to get off in a cultural thing here, and this is not cultural at all. They were so wonderful to me, Motown and without Motown you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.

They were just so fantastic me. But I would get all the crossovers. I would get in a, to put it plainly, they would have me write for all the white artists. There were Tony Martin they had signed who used to be a huge musical star with MJM. Tony Martin I wrote for, and Paul Peterson I wrote By The Time I Get To Phoenix for, and he didn’t like it. And so it ended up on the shelf somewhere, now, because this is a pretty good story. You cut to about two years later and I’m moving, I’m leaving Motown and I’m going over to Johnny River’s Music and when I left Motown, they said, “Oh, all these songs, you can have all these songs back because we’re never going to cut them. We don’t think that they’re appropriate for Motown.” And it was a wonderful thing for them to do.

They let me walk with my publishing and one of the songs they gave me was, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, another one was Up, Up and Away and another one was, Didn’t We, which is almost considered to be a great American song number. So they gave me a whole bunch of hit songs and I went over to Johnny River’s Music and that’s where I met the 5th Dimension and sort of became their pianist, but kind of their musical director and of course eventually they cut Up, Up and Away. Well, all those songs that Motown gave me, they were all hits, every single one of them. And I had written them at a very young age. I was in a very, very fertile period. I’d write maybe two or three songs a week just without even trying. I wish I could do that now, but I can’t.

Buzz Knight:

It blows me away the amount of work that was being churned out and the brilliance of it and the fact that you were so young, but yet what you were writing about seemed like you had lived a longer life.

Jimmy Webb:

Well, that is not really a paradox in my view because, and I stated this very clearly in my first book which I wrote about songwriting called Tunesmith. It’s my belief that when you’re in your teens and early twenties, that’s when you’re like unexposed film. You’re like completely blank canvas that has not been utilized at all and particularly your emotional reactions, they’re all fresh. You’re never going to be as in love at 35 or 40 years of age as you were at 17. Love is this huge, it preempts everything in your life. I go back and I read my lyrics then, and they’re all about how I would rather die. I would rather die than lose this. I’m even embarrassed, some of those lyrics really embarrass me to death because I was so absolutely gobsmacked by some, well, one or two girls in particular that I wrote a lot of songs for. Romance was a great vehicle for me and it provided me with a lot of raw material because I wasn’t very successful at it.

Buzz Knight:

Do you remember the first time you heard one of your songs on the radio?

Jimmy Webb:

Yes, I do. I remember one day I didn’t know that Johnny Rivers, who I owe a great deal to, he was my boss at Soul City at Johnny River’s Music, and he was an old friend of Glen Campbell’s. They had made a record called The Long Black Veil at Mercury Records some years before and Johnny had said this guy, he ought to be a star because he can play, he can sing, he can do everything. I heard Glen one time play Bonaparte’s Retreat through his nose, okay. So he really was a talented guy. And so Johnny had recorded By The Time I Get To Phoenix, and he had Glen come over and he played it for him and he said, I haven’t put this out as a single to you and Al, speaking of Al [inaudible 00:11:59], do you guys want to put this out? They were both sitting there and they both said, “I don’t get it.

Why are you giving us this song? This is probably a hit.” And he said, “It’s a great line.” He said, “Well guys,” he said, “you can only have one number one record at a time.” And at the time he had a number one record with a song he had written called Poor Side of Town, which I still think is one of the best songs I ever heard. So he was an inspiration to me and he was a conduit to Glen. Now, one day I’m driving down Santa Ana freeway and the radio comes on. I knew nothing about any of this. I didn’t know anything about Glen Campbell except that I had, since age 14, since I heard his first record and I said, I want to write songs for that guy. So I always in the back of my mind was one of these days I’m going to get a song to Glen Campbell.

So now I’m driving down the road and all of a sudden I hear Glen Campbell singing By The Time I Get To Phoenix, which is kind of an epiphany that almost caused like an 80 car smash up because I was trying to get off of the road and park my car and control myself because the first time that happens to you, it’s indelible. It’s this wild moment. Literally all your dreams come true and it’s a very prosaic afternoon. You’re driving an old Volkswagen and you’re going down to Newport Beach to see some fraternity boys and drink some beer and all of a sudden there’s your song on the radio and it seems unreal. It seems like you’re outside your body watching yourself listening to your song on the radio. That’s the only way I can describe it. Now, I felt the same way when I heard Mr. Sinatra sing one of my songs on the ride. I heard that voice singing my song.

And luckily I was on a back road that day and I just pulled over and I listened to this wonderful Don Costa arrangement and I go, what a lucky, lucky guy I am. All those prayers out in the middle of the field, out in the middle of the cotton patch, praying that one day I would be able to have my music sung by real recording artists. It all became real. I can’t explain how that feels. Even as I’m sitting here today it was such a powerful fantasy and to actually watch it come true when I was 18, 19 years old and Art Garfunkel was recording one of my songs and Tony Bennett, Barbara Streisand cut a song of mine called Little Tin Soldier, which was a very, very early war protest song. And to hear these voices that I had known all my life chiming in with my lyrics, I think that words fail me.

And that’s a very unusual thing for me to say because I can’t quite get that one into words. It’s a transcendent feeling. And I hope this doesn’t sound egotistical, but when you hear those voices, that caliber of artist, when you hear those people singing your songs you know somewhere deep down inside there’s a little self-satisfied corner of your soul, no matter how modest you may be or think you are, there’s a part of you that says, now I’m a part of history. This is history forever.

Buzz Knight:

For sure.

Jimmy Webb:

It’s hard to explain. It’s complicated, but wonderful.

Buzz Knight:

So on this podcast we had many months ago, gentleman by the name of Bill Payne from this band called Little Feat.

Jimmy Webb:

Yes.

Buzz Knight:

And he told me that due to the connection with Fred Tackett, that the first paying gig that Little Feat ever did was a birthday party of yours. Is that correct?

Jimmy Webb:

Yeah, it was my 30th birth birthday party and they set up in my front yard and Freddy’s like a brother to me or Arkansas boy that I heard playing in the nightclub one night and brought him home with me and said, you’re with me now. But he had struck up a really good friendship with Lowell George and I got to know Lowell and I was fascinated by his writing. I love other writers. Just this morning I was listening to Warren Zevon and this line poked out at me and said, hell is only half full. And I loved Warren, I loved him and I loved Lowell. He had this wonderful slide lap guitar kind of style.

He used to wear a big socket wrench on this middle finger on his left hand and he used that, it was a perfect slide. And he sung, he sung better than most of the singers around him in that day and age. He eventually, he actually taught Bonnie Raitt. He taught Linda Ronstadt and he taught a lot of pretty girls. I don’t know, I can’t figure that one out. But he taught a lot of pretty girls how to sing and or how to sing better. His phrasing was great. He’s a wonderful writer and he died sadly. And just as things were breaking for Little Feat at Warner Brothers records, he died sadly of a heroin overdose. I loved that band and my favorite album is Dixie Chicken. I don’t know whether you’ve heard that one, but-

Buzz Knight:

I have.

Jimmy Webb:

Yeah. I love that song and then one night in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel, a chance to meet a bartender who said he knew her well. All the boys along the bar, they began to sing along and all the guys in the bar knew the song that she had taught him. Yeah, I’m surprised that you bring them up, but still very much in love with that band and brings back a lot, a lot of memories. I remember that day very clearly. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t know it was their first gig, but I found out later. It’s nice. It’s nice that he would mention that.

Buzz Knight:

So how important in our life is music? Can you express that in any form to me?

Jimmy Webb:

Well, we get married to it. We get buried to it. We dine to it, we jog to it, we meditate to it. We entertain our children with it. One of the earliest things we do is we teach our children songs and they sing them back to us. We worship to it. We make love to it. There are very few things that we do in life that if there are any that aren’t accompanied by music. And unfortunately because America has a rich treasury of music and has a huge bench, a huge depth and a lot of great songwriters stretching back, unfortunately, the role of the songwriter has always been somewhat minimalized. But songs and music are actually what make all the wheels go round in the world of entertainment. It’s the secret ingredient. Try to make a movie without it, try to have a Broadway show without it. Try to have a wedding without it. I mean, try to do anything without it and you’ll find that something’s missing.

And because there is so much of it and it’s so readily available, and frankly now because it’s so cheap, we tend to, I think as society undervalue it. But I believe that music making and the job of creators, and this isn’t because I’ve been on the ASCAP board for 25 years, but I have been. It’s been a struggle from day one to make sure that songwriters get paid something approximating a fair amount of money for the use of their music. It’s a struggle that has gone on year after year after year. I thought I might be on the board for two or three years, 25 years later I’m saying, I can’t leave the board because we’re on the wall. We’re on the wall. We’re watching for the next technological advancement that’s going to disadvantage songwriters, which seemingly they all get around to disadvantaging songwriters in one way or another. And I don’t want to go into all the technical details behind that, but streaming has kind of been a disaster for songwriters and streaming is the only way, just about the only way we get paid anymore.

So we’re having to do with, I can’t even remember what it is, but last time I checked what we got was 0.078% per stream, which means that you could have a million selling record and your publisher would send you a check for $2,500. In the old days we had a million selling single, that put the bacon on the table. That kept the family going for another year. That paid for the big house and a couple of cars, a middle class, a decent middle class lifestyle for a songwriter. And unfortunately, those days are over. So it’s kind of hard to encourage people today when young writers come in and say, “What should I do?” I usually say, quit. Go do something else. Go be an actor. Actors get paid. Songwriters don’t get paid. Ultimately, your question was how important music is. Well, it has to be important to you to do it because there’s ups, there’s downs, there’s hits, there’s misses, there’s long dry spells. There’s times when you feel like you can’t write.

The whole condition of the writer is one of being completely open emotionally, which makes a writer a songwriter, but also offers any kind of a writer. It makes them vulnerable to so many emotional problems that I can’t even describe it, but all those sad songs that break your heart, they were written by people whose hearts were breaking. So yeah, I think it’s important. I think it’s a calling. I think it’ll come back. I think right now that songwriting is in trouble because of rap. Rap is preempting, is sucking up a tremendous amount of the oxygen in the room without contributing a whole lot to songwriting per se. And I’m not knocking, I don’t want anybody writing you letters and saying I’m a racist or anything like that. Remember, my first job was at Motown, but I learned to write songs at Motown and I am worried about songs. I think that we have to take care of songs as an art form.

Buzz Knight:

Well, folks who are going to see you at the City Winery, April 6th in Boston can look forward to stories of songs and your music. And I’m so grateful for all that you have given us, that you continue to give us and that you were on our virtual edition here of Takin’ a Walk. I’m so appreciative.

Jimmy Webb:

It was a nice walk. Very, very nice walk on a wonderful, wonderful afternoon. I appreciate it.

Buzz Knight:

Thank you very much.

Jimmy Webb:

Thank you.

Speaker 3:

Takin’ a Walk with Buzz Night is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.