By Richie Unterberger
While many of the songs that Jimmy Webb wrote in his early twenties proved to be commercial goldmines for the artists who covered them in the late 1960s, he proved unable to translate that magic touch to his own career as a singer-songwriter in the 1970s. Three albums he recorded for Reprise in the early 1970s, Words and Music (1970), And So: On (1971), and Letters (1972), had failed to sell. A switch to Asylum for 1974's Land's End had fared no better, though like the others, it received its share of critical accolades. (All four of the albums have been reissued on CD by Collectors' Choice Music.)
To observers, it
might have
seemed that Webb was retreating to a behind-the-scenes role as a
songwriter and producer in the mid-1970s. He worked with an artist
who'd been one of the performers most responsible for exposing Webb's
songs to a wide audience in the late 1960s, Glen Campbell, when he
arranged and wrote for Campbell's 1974 LP Reunion: The Songs of Jimmy Webb.
He produced albums for the Fifth Dimension, who'd scored the first big
Webb hit with "Up, Up and Away," and Cher. He also produced a record
for his sister Susan, who had sung backup on Jimmy's albums. Other
artists were still covering Webb's compositions, including Art
Garfunkel, who had a Top Ten hit with Jimmy's "All I Know" in 1973, and
Joe Cocker, who put a couple Webb tunes on his 1974 hit album I Can Stand a Little Rain.
Webb returned to the studio to cut another LP on his
own after meeting famed producer George Martin via his clients America,
then still near the peak of their soft-rock stardom. Martin was, of
course, most known for having produced most of the Beatles' work, as
well as overseeing some other British Invasion hitmakers. He'd adapted
to the climate of the mid-'70s, however, producing hit albums by
America and Jeff Beck, as well as getting into other laidback sounds
with the lesser-known American Flyer. He was familiar with, and an
admirer of, Webb's work. The pair, with a new contract from Atlantic,
would construct Jimmy's most mainstream, commerically-oriented album of
the decade. "Jimmy Webb is, of course, a major talent," wrote Atlantic
executive Ahmet Ertegun in "What'd I
Say": The Atlantic Story: 50 Years of Music. "We were very
fortunate to make the El Mirage
album with him, which George Martin produced. I think it will always
stand as a great record."
Such was Webb's respect for the producer that he let
Martin handle the arrangements and conducting, duties he normally
shouldered himself. "When I was working with George," Webb told Peter
Doggett in a 1994 feature in Record
Collector, "we came down to the point where we felt we were
going to do some string overdubs. Well, I wanted him to do the
arrangements. I'm no fool -- I'm sitting there with George Martin! I
wanted to hear what George was going to do more than what I was going
to do."
What Martin did was help concoct a slicker sound
than Webb had employed on his previous LPs. Some of the players who
helped him out in the past were also on board for this go-round,
including guitarist Fred Tackett (who also wrote one of the tracks,
"Dance to the Radio"); bassist Dee Murray and drummer Nigel Olsson (who
played in Elton John's band); and Susan Webb, who did some of the
backing vocals. Also on hand were country-rock vet Herb Pedersen (who
contributed banjo and 12-string guitar, and had been in the Dillards,
as well as playing on sessions by Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, and
Emmylou Harris); top L.A. session men Jim Gordon (drums) and Larry
Knechtel (keyboards); and Lowell George, who added some electric slide
guitar. Martin himself played some keyboards, and Webb's sailplane was
tapped for some sound effects on "If You See Me Getting Smaller."
Webb's solo albums had not been populated by many
songs that were heavily covered by other artists, but El Mirage did include two of his
most famous compositions of the 1970s. "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress"
had already been recorded by Joe Cocker, Glen Campbell, and Judy
Collins, and would also be done by Linda Ronstadt, Joan Baez, and even
jazz great Charlie Haden. "The title is from a short story written by
Robert A. Heinlein from an anthology called A Man Who Sold the Moon," commented
Webb to Paul Zollo in SongTalk.
"And I liked the title and it stayed with me for years and years and
years and years. It haunted
me. And I finally wrote the song. I've hardly ever done that. That's a special case.
Taking a title from someone else's work. But I'm very straightforward
about it; that's what I did. But it was because it was so hauntingly
beautiful."
Judy Collins responded strongly to the song's
downbeat qualities, telling Corby Kummer in an interview included in
the booklet to her 1981 Book-of-the-Month Club box set, "In 'The Moon
Is a Harsh Mistress' I want you to feel devastated, totally wiped out
by the end of a love affair. It's a song to jump out the window by."
When asked by SongTalk which
version the composer preferred, Webb demurred, remarking, "They're all
so good. I know that sounds like a cop-out. Judy's has one of the most
beautiful little string arrangements, it's just gorgeous. Linda
probably sings it the best. You know, her pipes are just so beautiful.
Each version has its own attributes. Not the least of which is Joe
Cocker's. It's a totally different message from him; it's more of an
angry cry."
"The Highwayman," meanwhile, found a warm reception
among country superstars. Glen Campbell made it the title track of a
1979 LP, and it was a big hit in 1985, logically enough, for the
Highwaymen, the country supergroup with Johnny Cash, Kris
Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson. "I play an acoustic
picking style on the piano which I sort of learned to do years ago,"
observed Webb in SongTalk.
"Which is why 'Highwayman' sounds like a guitar song, I think. What
really sugggested the song is a very vivid dream I had in London. And
it was the only one I ever had like that. And in essnece, it's the
first verse of the song. It was a wild pursuit of me by guys with...It
was just terrying and I woke up and I had sweat pouring off of me. I
had a piano in my suite and I went right to the piano."
Continued Jimmy, "The last three verses are kind of
suggested by the first. I just put another layer on and then another
layer on and worked on the original idea. It is not meant to be a
personal account of channeling
or anything like that. It has, for me, a lot of symbolism. It's about
the kind of people who built this country up. The first verse is the
rogue, the outlaw nation, the highwayman nation. The second verse is
the seafaring nation; the trading and the growth of a nation, and its
subsequent generations adding to that. And then the dam builder is a
generation of construction and science and technology. And then the
last verse is a spacefarer; he's gonna fly a starship. And so, it's an American allegory. It's Everyman,
in a way...You know, I like that song so
much that on the inner sleeve
of my album, El Mirage, is a
photo of Hoover Dam. That picture just terrifies me for some reason.
It's so solemn, it's so...magnificent. It has such power, that image.
The mass of that dam. And the
truth is that guys were trapped in it."
Another cut on El
Mirage, oddly, was not nearly as freshly minted. "P.F. Sloan," a
tribute to the pop-rock songwriter of the mid-'60s who'd disappeared
from the music business after penning or co-penning a flurry of hits
for Barry McGuire, the Turtles, Johnny Rivers, the Grass Roots,
Herman's Hermits, and others, had first appeared on Webb's 1970 album Words and Music. The remake here
was Martin's idea, though it should be noted it wasn't the first time
Webb had re-recorded one of his compositions, putting "Songseller" (aka
"Song Seller") on both Words and
Music and his third album, 1972's Letters. As a lesser-known homage,
Webb has said that "Where the Universes Are" was written for friend
Ringo Starr, who had played on Jimmy's 1974 album Land's End.
El Mirage,
incidentally, was dedicated to folk musician Ramblin' Jack Elliott,
author Kurt Vonnegut, and mystic-of-sorts Timothy Leary. "I did a late
night TV show in Toronto with the three of them," disclosed Webb in Record Collector, "and it was the
group discussion that inspired the dedication. Leary was very inspiring
that night. He was talking about something I believe in passionately --
Eugene O'Neill's idea that the future of mankind lies in colonizing
space, that we must get over the idea we're trapped on this planet,
because there is life out there. Man is stalled, waiting for the next
thing -- and that is the
next thing! Then Kurt Vonnegut said to Leary, 'If you want to
colonize something, colonize the South Bronx!'"
El Mirage,
however, was not the next big thing, missing the charts as his previous
LPs had, despite a Rolling Stone review which judged the record his
"finest album" and called Webb "truly the knight-errant of
singer/songwriters." While promoting the record in Britain, Webb told New Music Express that "if El Mirage doesn't make it, there
may never be another one." It was his last album of the 1970s, but
fortunately for his fans, not his final one. He's continued to record
and tour intermittently ever since, as well as write for film,
television and the theater. And should you want more information about
how he writes his music, consult his 1998 book Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting.
-- Richie Unterberger
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