{"id":13197,"date":"2017-09-05T05:30:14","date_gmt":"2017-09-05T09:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=13197"},"modified":"2017-09-06T11:09:05","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T15:09:05","slug":"jimmy-webb-a-consummate-tale-spinner-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2017\/09\/05\/jimmy-webb-a-consummate-tale-spinner-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Webb: A Consummate Tale-spinner (Part One)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Jimmy Webb is a pop music treasure. Viewed in terms of numbers and statistics, he’s among the most successful songwriters of all time. His songs have been recorded by more than 850 artists (more than 80 recorded covers of his 1967 composition \u201cMacArthur Park\u201d). His songs have hit the American Top 100 more than 30 times; his tunes have shown up many times on the Country, Adult Contemporary and R&B charts; \u201cMacArthur Park\u201d even hit #1 on the Dance charts in 1978 in the form of a cover by disco diva Donna Summer.<\/p>\n

Webb has won scores of awards as well, from a 1967 Grammy Award (\u201cUp, Up and Away\u201d) to induction into multiple music Halls of Fame (National Academy of Popular Music Songwriters Hall of Fame, 1986; Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, 1990; Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000 and again in 2004; Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame, 2013; Great American Songbook Hall of Fame, 2013; and at least two dozen others). Two honorary Doctorates have been bestowed upon him, and in 2015 Rolling Stone<\/i> named him as #44 among the \u201cGreatest Songwriters of All Time.\u201d<\/p>\n

He’s written more than 650 pieces of music \u2013 songs, themes, film scores, incidental music \u2013 and recorded twelve albums of his own. But because he has often worked behind the scenes, he is perhaps not as well known as many lesser-successful songwriters. And though he’s a lifelong fan of rock ‘n’ roll \u2013 and was part of the out-of-control coterie of music celebrities that terrorized the mid 1970s L.A. scene, a loose aggregation that included John Lennon, Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon \u2013 he’s most often thought of as a MOR (\u201cmiddle of the road\u201d) artist.<\/p>\n

Perhaps balancing out some of the prestige Webb has earned over the course of his half century in music, \u201cMacArthur Park\u201d regularly shows up on worst-song-ever lists. Critics enjoy poking fun at its lyrics (example: \u201cSomeone left the cake out in the rain \/ I don’t think that I can take it \/ ‘Cause it took so long to bake it \/ And I’ll never have that recipe again\u201d).<\/p>\n

Jimmy Webb takes it all in stride. Today at age 70, he can afford \u2013 both creatively and commercially \u2013 to rest upon his achievements, but his restless, ambitious nature means that he stays busy. Though his most recent album, Still Within the Sound of My Voice<\/i>, came out nearly four years ago, Webb tours regularly. These days those tours often take the form of a one-man show packed with as much storytelling \u2013 for Webb is a consummate and natural tale-spinner \u2013 as music. 2017 shows fall under the banner of the career-spanning \u201cEvening With Jimmy Webb\u201d and a more focused set, \u201cThe Glen Campbell Years.\u201d The latter covers the Jimmy Webb songs popularized by the popular country\/crossover artist, including \u201cBy the Time I Get to Phoenix,\u201d \u201cGalveston\u201d and others.<\/p>\n

And if all that weren’t enough, in April, Webb published his first book, a highly readable memoir titled The Cake and the Rain<\/i>. That phrase is a nod to the most memorable lyrics from \u201cMacArthur Park,\u201d and the book’s narrative shifts between 1969 and Webb’s life up to that point. The Cake and the Rain<\/i> is idiosyncratic in many ways, but it’s a well-written and unflinching look at the ups and downs \u2013 mostly ups, it should be noted \u2013 of the first 25 years of Webb’s life.<\/p>\n

One of the most enduring characteristics of Webb’s songwriting is the universal nature of his songs; they can be effectively interpreted in a wide array of styles. While he admits that in the earlier phase of his career, he’d write with a specific genre or musical style in mind, he gave that up long ago. \u201cI don’t mean to take anything away from today’s writers,\u201d he says, \u201cbut there are not as many genres as there used to be.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s one kind of pop music today,\u201d Webb says, expanding on his comment. \u201cAnd it’s somewhere between Beyonc\u00e9 and Kanye West.\u201d To his knowledge, neither of those artists has yet covered a Jimmy Webb song, though West used a Webb tune \u2013 without permission \u2013 as a foundation for his anti-Taylor Swift screed, \u201cFamous.\u201d (Webb and no less than 16 other songwriters would eventually receive credit on the track.)<\/p>\n

Webb admits that back when he started writing music, he sometimes did put more thought into how a song might be interpreted by another artist. \u201cWhen I would write a song, I might say, ‘Well, this is clearly country.’ When it comes out and sounds like country, you could go there with it.\u201d But one never knows for sure, as Webb would quickly discover. \u201cI wrote a song once called ‘Do What You Gotta Do,’ which I thought was kind of a country song,\u201d he recalls. \u201cNina Simone recorded it, then Roberta Flack recorded it, and then Linda Ronstadt recorded it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But increasingly in the late 1960s, artists would approach him, asking for a song to fit a particular need. \u201cI’d have Glen Campbell saying, ‘I need a follow-up for ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix.’ And can you make it geographical?\u201d Webb obliged, writing \u201cWichita Lineman.\u201d When Webb recounts that exchange, he affects a spot-on imitation of Campbell’s down-home American accent; it’s clear how much he enjoys telling that story and countless others like it.<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jimmy Webb is a pop music treasure. Viewed in terms of numbers and statistics, he’s among the most successful songwriters of all time. His songs have been recorded by more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13198,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,51],"tags":[3150],"class_list":["post-13197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-pop","tag-jimmy-webb","cat-41-id","cat-51-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13197"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13223,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13197\/revisions\/13223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}