By Richie Unterberger
By the time he released his first Reprise album in late 1970, Jimmy Webb was already one of the most successful songwriters of his era. He was barely into his twenties when the Fifth Dimension's recording of "Up, Up and Away" became the first of his songs to be made into a Top Ten hit. Huge smash covers of Webb tunes followed in 1968 and 1969 with Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" and Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman" and "Galveston." His compositions were cut by scores of artists, from Johnny Rivers and Dusty Springfield to Frank Sinatra, the Four Tops, and Jackie DeShannon. At a time when the art of crafting songs for others was being overtaken by groups and solo performers who wrote material for themselves, Webb was viewed as something of a torchbearer for the Tin Pan Alley way of doing things, where the behind-the-scenes writer was considered at least as important as the singer.
Yet at a time
when Webb
could have been expected to coast on his laurels and continue to churn
out hit pop songs for others, the songwriter himself had other ideas.
Even before recording for Reprise, he was started to explore other
directions, writing for films and working on an autobiographical
Broadway musical that never got produced. Too, his composing was
starting to take a less commercial turn, away from the
middle-of-the-road pop with which he'd been so successful in his
initial splash. And Webb was already starting to perform on his own,
and thinking about both writing and
singing his songs.
As he explained to Peter Doggett for a 1994 article
in Record Collector, "There
was always the temptation of money, the idea that I didn't have to do
anything that didn't come easy, that my life had already been decided,
that I'd accomplished everything I ever needed to by the age of 23. All
I had to do was cruise and make this fabulous money. What happened was
that I played a gig at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, with Connie
Stevens. It just seemed like a nice thing to do, and the money was
good. But when I came back, I realized that my integrity was on the
line. I didn't want to play Vegas. I could almost sense, like a vague
sound in the distance, an approaching storm, that I wasn't being taken
seriously as an artist. If I wanted to have a true career, I was going
to have to write and perform my own music. Even if I didn't sound like
the Fifth Dimension or Glen Campbell, whatever I did sound like would have to
suffice."
Added Webb, "The kind of music I was starting to
write then wasn't going to be recorded by those artists, anyway. I was
getting very politicized in my writing, very controversial; I was
writing about drugs, about the war, about pollution. Frank Sinatra was
not going to sing a song about the environment being polluted. So who
was going to do these songs? The Stones and Crosby, Stills & Nash
wouldn't, because they wrote their own. It was almost inevitable: it
had to be me. I don't know how else it could have turned out. I only
know that I could have made a lot more money if I'd done something
else."
Words and Music
would actually not be Webb's first venture as a recording artist. He'd
been on a Johnny Rivers-produced single as part of the Strawberry
Children, and a collection of mid-'60s demos that had been overdubbed
without his permission (Jim Webb
Sings Jim Webb) appeared on a 1968 Epic LP. Words and Music would be his first
proper solo album, however. It was done at a time when several
composers who'd first gained notice for composing material for others
were starting to focus on their own careers as singer-songwriters, such
as Carole King and Randy Newman. It was natural that Webb would find a
home for such efforts on the Reprise label, which (along with its
parent company Warner Brothers) at the end of the late 1960s and early
1970s was signing up singer-songwriters left and right, including
Newman, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, James Taylor, Arlo Guthrie, Gordon
Lightfoot, Van Dyke Parks, and John Sebastian.
Unusually for an era in which Hollywood session
players would take a heavy part in singer-songwriter albums, most of
the instrumentation on Words and
Music was recorded by just two men, Webb and Fred Tackett.
Tackett had played guitar and other instruments on previous recordings
by several artists Webb had written for and been associated with,
including Johnny Rivers, the Fifth Dimension, Richard Harris, and
Thelma Houston. There was just a little assistance from Darrell Birch
on percussion, Tom Scott on sax, and Webb's sister Susan on backup
vocals. Webb also acted as producer, making this something of a
DIY album before this approach had become more common, though Paul
McCartney and Emitt Rhodes released LPs on which they'd handled
virtually everything themselves shortly before Words and Music came out.
"Fred Tackett played the drums, the guitars and the
bass," Webb told Record Collector,
"and I did the keyboards, the arrangements and the words. The
components were brilliant, and we did some quite bizarre things -- I
remember playing crystal glasses and tuning them with different amounts
of water, and taking some big wooden boards and sawing them up with an
electric saw in front of the microphone. We worked very hard on getting
individual things right, but when I listen to the record now, it sounds
as if it was cut in a garage. It's such a small record; the bass drum
sounds like a cardboard box. I would listen all night long to the way
the acoustic guitar sounded, and never really hear the way it all
sounded together. It was obvious that when I went from 'MacArthur Park'
to Words and Music, I was
trying to create some change of direction in my life. I wanted to scale
things down, to find a role for myself outside the pre-conceived notion
of the Jimmy Webb sound, whatever that
was."
Those expecting to hear something like "MacArthur
Park" extended into a progressive rock suite, or even catchy pop tunes
along the lines of what he'd written for the likes of Glen Campbell,
may have been taken aback by Webb's new approach. Not only was it less
pop-oriented than his late-'60s hits, but it was more personal and
idiosyncratic in both its composition and lyrical focus. "Sleepin' in
the Daytime," arguably the highlight of the record (if not his entire
solo career), was a downbeat take on the pollution fouling Los Angeles,
albeit with funky nearly psychedelic guitar work. Cynicism about the
music business reared its head in "Song Seller"; Los Angeles took some
more bashing in "Jerusalem"; music critics took a beating in "Dorothy
Chandler Blues"; and religious supplication paced the gospel-tinged
rocker "Psalm One-Five-O." Yet the romantic pop tone more prevalent in
Webb's '60s work hadn't vanished, emerging to some extent in "Love
Song" (from the rejected score Webb had done for the hit movie Love Story) and "Once Before I
Die." Categorization of the album was made yet more elusive with the
inclusion of a medley of three pop-rock covers: the Everly Brothers'
"Let It Be Me," the Association's "Never My Love," and the Monkees' 'I
Wanna Be Free." The gothic funereal sounds you hear at the beginning of
"Song Seller," incidentally, are actually overdubbed tracks of car
horns made to sound like an organ, and originally intended for use in
the Love Story soundtrack.
The most renowned song on Words and Music, however, is
probably "P.F. Sloan," a tribute to a Los Angeles songwriter who'd been
virtually forgotten by the beginning of the 1970s. Most famous for
writing "Eve of Destruction," Sloan wrote or co-wrote a number of
excellent pop-folk-rock covered for hits by the likes of the Turtles
and the Searchers in the mid-1960s, as well as cutting some highly
underrated albums of his own. By 1970, however, he'd virtually vanished
from the industry, and it was unusual for a major songwriter to pay
such direct homage to a peer on record.
"P.F. Sloan is the heroic figure of the songwriter
who goes on and keeps writing no matter what," explained Jimmy Webb to
Paul Zollo of SongTalk
magazine. "You know, he's a great songwriter. 'Eve of Destruction' is
one of the best political statements, or any other kind of statements,
ever made in a song. And you can go home and play it right now. And
everything that he was talking about is still going on right now...The
guy was hot. He was one of the first songwriters to want to be a singer
and to really try to do that. And it was tough then to do that. There
was definitely pressure for me just to stay a songwriter. Just to
behave myself and be a songwriter and everything would be fine. He was
one of the first guys to go up against all that and I look up to him, I
admire him."
The Association covered the song on an early 1971
single, and though it got some regional action, it didn't make the
national charts. Oddly, though, the subject of the song did hear it at the time. "I first
heard it at a hot dog stand on Sunset Boulevard," remarked P.F. Sloan
on an America On Line chat session in 1997. "The Association were
singing it. It was 1971. I had borrowed some coins for coffee...I was
away from music and living on someone's couch. I thought to myself,
'God is still alive, and remembers and loves me." To SongTalk, he added, "The first time
I ever heard the song on the air was a divine moment for me. I had had
all my royalties suspended. I had absolutely no money. I had no place
to live. I was at this hot dog stand on Vine Street, and trying to
scrape up 50 cents for a hot dog, and out of the speakers from the hot
dog place was that song. And I was thinking, 'Is this a divine play or
what?'"
Like the Association's "P.F. Sloan," however, Words and Music would not make the
charts, despite good reviews in CREEM,
Cash Box, and Rolling Stone, whose Jon Landau
called it "one of the truly underrated works of the '70s." It set the
pattern all of Webb's 1970s solo albums would follow, gaining critical
praise while failing to attract airplay or sales. It didn't keep him
from continuing to record regularly throughout the decade, however,
following Words and Music
just half a year later with And So:
On, also reissued by Collectors' Choice Music. -- Richie
Unterberger
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