Episode 4 - Jimmy Webb

Before we do that, a little bit of housekeeping. Um head on over to our website which is so the jerker dot com. There's a whole range of songs over there and you can download them and share them with your friends, much like little post-Christmas gifts if you wish. And uh you can also connect with us on Twitter and Facebook. We like to have conversations in the social media space.

So uh I've always had a car. I I love I love the road. Uh when I'm not playing a concert every night, I love to drive. It's it's a it's part of the American DNA, this you know, love affair with the asphalt and the rubber and uh and we have this magical system of roads. We can go outside our house, get on a highway and go anywhere else in the United States, except for of course Alaska and uh Hawaii.

And so Whelan had done that once and had been sort of reprimanded from above the voice, you know, the voice from above saying, Mr. Jennings, could you please stay on your marks and then He had sort of the second time it was a I think He said it was something wrong with his equipment. He walked back to look at his amplifier just without thinking and oh my God, you know, the performance had been interrupted again and

You know, mister Jennings, could you please remember to stay on your marks? And for some reason it ended up being interrupted a third time. And the third time Weyland just stopped and looked at the up at the booth and um the director said, uh, Mr. Jennings, I wonder if we could And Whelan said, Well let me tell you something, mister Director, he said If you see me getting smaller, I'm leaving.

And I I truly hope that somebody will compile them before everyone forgets because there are a lot of Whelan Jennings stories. Uh so I decided to that this one story would not be forgotten and I sat down and I wrote what actually turned out to be a rather serious song about a completely silly episode. But um that's one way that uh that a song title will evolve i you know, out of personal experience and uh the song became a kind of a gift for me to Wayland and we became very, very close and

Um so tha I mean that's one example. I can't remember the the other title that you mentioned.

at the time it was uh quite cutting edge to do something like that. And so far from being a juvenile writer, I thought he was quite advanced for the time and read his novels from the time I was eight years old. It was actually the only education I really got because I paid no attention to any of the rest of it.

And uh he taught politics and stars and starship troopers. He taught that you couldn't be a citizen, you couldn't vote unless you'd fought in a war. He's he th he he was kind of a far, far right, you know, beyond Republican uh politically and th and then later on in his life, of course, he became a very naughty old man and wrote these these elaborate fantasies where he was having sex with his genetically cloned daughters and things like this.

And uh so I didn't want any trouble with him, so I contacted his attorneys and s and through mine and with the message that mister Webb intends to write a song about this using this Title. of one of Mr. Heinlein's books Is there any objection? And the response was absolute cold silence.

That's another example. I think it's a completely different example of where a song idea, you know, germinates and or is just maybe the very skeletal beginnings of the embr embryonic beginnings of the thing are just are are just borrowed. I wouldn't say stolen. In this case it was a kind of a homage that I was paying to the guy. So uh there are lots of versions of those two stories. songs come from different places. Sometimes they just spring into being fully formed, like Zeus.

you know, before you know it, they're done. And it was like, Oh, what happened? You know, like s a wind a storm blew through the room and left a song on the piano. Those are wonderful. 'Cause they don't seem like a lot of work.

And he and he went to these these transformational techniques which involve uh define your expectations in terms of what chord may come next and then he went into some detail about uh alternate basis, which is something that I also write about extensively in my book. you uh again it's a variation on defined expectation.

or denying expectation because you give someone a base note that they can't live with and then they sort of have to have to live with it and in that tension uh and in that dissonance Yeah, I prefer to call my my dissonance benign dissonance. It's not it's not the kind of dissidents that sets your teeth on edge or breaks glasses or or anything of it. L uh Linda Ronsett used to call it the buzz. Um

But without it music means would mean nothing to me. I suspect strongly that there are certain that there are some people born without the ability to hear chords. I just don't I just don't see them. I look deeply into their eyes. I play I play the music and I see no reaction to the to the inner voicings, to the drama and tension of what is going on just beneath the surface of the melody.

which the uh the chord structure of a song has so much to do with. And I started at a very early age in my father's church uh bored to death with hymns like uh Amazing Grace, which by the way is one of the great pieces of music ever written. But you would never know it if you just played it out of the hymn book. Because you'd have a one, you'd have a four, you'd have a five.

the the bass note of the chord if it was a C would always be a C. If it was an F it would always be an F. If it was a G it would always so you'd have no you'd have no alternate bases. you wouldn't be able to drop a third out of the right hand and put the third in the base. and then maybe subtly move that third up a half step and then have a C with with a sus four and an F in the base.

Uh you won't find that in the hymnal, but I had a wonderful teacher who taught me to improvise and um substitute chords. to arpeggiate, to play in octaves, to use different bases, to use what she called her runs and octaves.

Uh and then I began to run with this once I got the bit between my teeth. And I I went over to London one of my first trips over to visit Richard Harris, somebody from Polygram uh actually EMI. Oh was it no, it was it was polygram. It was It was both.

And um I discovered uh Ray Fon Williams I mean, uh I know that sounds pathetic. I mean w you mean you never heard Ray Vaughn Williams before. I didn't come from that world where those kind of records were played. And all of a sudden twenti uh early twentieth century music just exploded in my head. And I thought, this is what I've been trying to do all my life. I understand this. This is all this is at the same time it's very new.

And it's ancient. It's as ancient as the oldest Irish song you can think of. But it's as new as Benjamin Britten and Ray Vaughn Williams and Stravinsky and some of our American composers, Aaron Cop Copeland. and a late comer but very much entitled to be in that j uh club, John Corleano and um then Ravel Debusy to some degree, but Ravel is is is quintessential.

Um and then made a run into the serial music and twelve uh not so much twelve tone which is not is not a dead end, but serial music seemed to me to be quite a dead end emotionally and tired very quickly came back to early twentieth century music and uh foire and uh and and others, you know, and uh I spend most of my time in that world. where there's this benign dissonance. That's why my songs have classical flavors, even my country song. Keith Urban was he made the bon mo.

And um at the C M A awards we were all backstage, me and him and Brad Paisley and Vince Gill were hanging around in the same dressing room and Key said, Jim Webb, you said, twelve chords and the truth.

Uh The the length of my mus of my songs, uh for and f if you listen to something like Uh Paul Gogan in the South Seas, uh, which is on Judy Collins' new record. It's also on my uh Twilight of the Renegades album. Um you might think, my God, he's going to write about every single moment in Paul Gogan's life. Um because my songs actually in the late seventies and eighties began to of their own free will expand

and um become by and large four minutes long. By the time I had included what satisfied me in terms of the uh the musical setting that felt complete and satisfying to me and the requisite lyric that would tell the story and accomplish what I intended to accomplish. without ever consciously saying, Oh, I'm gonna write longer songs, I wrote longer songs.

And um I have no excuse, sir, as Van Dyke Parks once said. Um But um I do have an e explanation and I I think that it's that one has to understand that the length of the popular song Which I'm sure you uh understand uh uh very well. Uh I don't mean to condescend. But the the length of the popular song was very much dictated by the technological equipment that was available.

So the original records were really quite short. Some of them were only a minute, a minute and a half, because the wax records were quite limited in their ability to retain songs or performances of any duration. Um and then you went to progressively more advanced technologies, but still the world of the needle and groove was a very dangerous world.

for uh duplicating sound of any length. Um three minutes was it was about the limit until the fifties when the long player came in and we actually had these uh um LPs, thirty three and a third RPMs. we had a h much higher grade of of vinyl and we had beautiful German made lathe with tolerances that could have could have sent m man to the moon, uh undreamed of precision, they were still able only to squeeze perhaps four or five songs of any of any duration.

on the side of this disc. And and the album came into being, not because it was an artistic state, but because that's what the technology dictated. But as we you know, as we came into the eighties And now as as we've, you know, well and truly cracked the the the twenty first century, um, there's not any real reason why a song has to be three minutes long.

The the only reason is a a kind of artificial one that's been imposed by the economic interests which is well that's all the time we have for music, now we want to run a commercial. But there's no artistic reason why we couldn't have longer songs. And mine mine don't go seven minutes. Oh my God, Jimmy Webb, he wants every song to be seven minutes long. Uh I don't want every song to be seven minutes long, but I think some songs should be able to go three thirty.

And I think some songs should be able to go four minutes. If you're writing about somebody like Gogan, if you're writing about something other than I wanna get in your pants tonight, you know I mean I wanna get in your pants tonight, that's a three minute song. I um two and a half.

But I just very naturally by the time I I've gone through my exposition of my musical theme and And if I feel that it needs a bridge, as sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, sometimes they're just these long verse choruses. by the time I I write three verse choruses, I've got a four minute song and there's not a damn thing that I wanna chop up and throw away because I haven't gotten Paul Gogin to Tahiti yet.

um that along with that should come the opportunity for musical craftsmen, songwriters at least have a little uh wiggle room when it comes to the length of their song.

And there was some of that going on in this in in the sixties and seventies where it was like, Oh, let's do a long song And if we don't have anything to say, we'll just I mean, in my case, I could have been a little guilty of that. I had a I had a whole section in the middle that was instrumental. Um but as a mature writer I can't think of any other reason other than that we sometimes do need a little bit more room to say what we want to say. It's very simple.

It's it's a very, very confined medium at three minutes. And I think that in a way it it it sort of keeps pop music in a in a very trivial intellectual corner of the attic. Where it it can't it's never gonna be oh, you write songs, I see. Uh well you're never gonna be on the same footing with someone who writes novels. or even someone who writes movies or there's the a trivialization that goes on to the whole process because it is this

I call it Swiss watchmaking. It's the Swiss watchmaking of literature. It's very difficult. somewhat underrated, though I don't have a chip on my shoulder about it. I've received plenty of publicity, lots of pats on the back, lots of attaboy gym. So lots of great reviews, lots of fame and some fortune. uh, writing three minute songs and I I'm not bitter in any way about it. I'm just talking about it in a scientific way. That's all.

It had not done what I what I expected. And so I was kind of floating a bit and he finally got me up to Toronto and I started working I started listening to a lot of Mark Knopfler'cause I I knew that I was getting drawn into this this orbit of this project. And even though I d I hadn't said I was gonna do it, I was I was suddenly I was at the piano and I was I was beginning to work on by the time I get to Phoenix. So I thought, I guess I'm doing this project somehow. He's gotten me to do this.

And I really had to find I think my own voice as well. And I maybe that's something that I had never done. I'd always been trying to do an Elton John record or a Billy Joel record and and really putting my voice through some sometimes gruesome gymnastics trying to to imitate these these pop figures who could, you know, do these these triple back flops with a half twist and land on their feet, you know.

Um and they uh so effortlessly, especially Elton and Billy, I just and and ha and my good friend Harry Nielsen they just Who's a vocal freak who

proficient for their own good, basically. Guys who are just frighteningly good. And uh we found some of them in Toronto. They're there. And um so in many ways it was kind of a start over for me. It was great. It was like, okay, so now I'm gonna sing these these hits, which I'd said I never would do. Uh I was gonna make it on my own terms as a singer songwriter and blah blah blah. Little did I know because no one had sent the memo to me.

that the whole singer songwriter movement was in decline by by the mid eighties. Uh, of course I would always be the last to know because I'd be pounding my head against the wall trying to do that. Um there was something about me relaxing and um not trying to do so much with my voice and getting off of the real slick production wagon with the spectacular hooks and intros and solos and certainly no no disrespect intended because uh I uh uh had done a whole album with Elton's band.

and I had done a whole album with George Martin producing and I had done a whole album with Steven Lukather and Todo, David Page. And Jeffrey Pacero on drums. And I had done a whole album with Russ Kunkel on drums, Dean Parks on guitar, and Leland Sklar on bass, which pretty well covers LA musicianship. So I had all of this I had this backlog of like, Well Jesus, what do I try now?

I mean, shall I you know, maybe I'll switch instruments, I'll I'll learn the banjo uh you know, and I'll paint myself blue. and I'll I'll be a street performer and I'll sell my albums door to door and I'll get on sixty minutes. I mean I I didn't know where to go with And so here I am in Toronto and just kind of quietly with this wonderful guy, very gentle, very very persuasive in his way, I begin to get back into these songs that I had written in my teens.

and in a way not redefine them, which is a word I hate, or reinvent them, which is the word I I hate even more. Um I I think reclaim them would be not too corn ball for me, uh you know, of a concept because I had sort of said, Oh no, no, those aren't mine, those are Glenn's, those are Mr Sinatra's, those are those are the Fifth Dimension songs, those are the Ritre Harris songs.

Um and so really had put an artificial barrier between me and frankly did not want anybody to think that I was trading on my past glories in order to somehow or another force feed an album onto the charts. And the strangest thing happened is that I really began to enjoy and I began to realize it was it was highly emotional. So I began to reacquaint myself with this young man. that had come to Oklahoma with this dream of writing song.

And as I as I reacquainted myself with his work and with his So sometimes with his mistakes and the his silliness and his naivete in many cases, and it was like but that's all right because He was a kid. That's who he was. And that's who I was. And so it was it was almost uh well it wasn't almost, it was ther i w it was therapy. It was it was therapy that I needed'cause I was drinking entirely too much and I I was I was weary from from trying to slay this beast.

And um at the end of it out popped, you know, this beautiful baby.

But the the next proper album that I made was Just Across the River and I made it with the same guy, Fred Mollin. And uh I made it down in Nashville with his new team of quote assassins.

And the y it it it w it went t it was top fifty in the United States and now we have two hundred albums on our charts, so it's not so bad to be top fifty. And sold a lot of records. from the record company standpoint, it was a good deal. They came back and said, Would Jimmy do volume two? And I'm thinking, I don't know whether I can get anybody else to sing with

It's not unknown to people. There will be an an element of familiarity. It's like, oh yeah, I've heard that. And that's all you really need is to get your foot in the door to to establish a relationship with the listener and say, Oh no, no, it's okay for Jimmy Webb to sing that, you know? And that's really what I I think Freddie and I've been trying to do since ten easy pieces, you know, is saying it's okay for Jimmy to sing his own stuff.

Uh uh SammyCon. It's it's uh John a Johnny Mercer, Sammy Con, Hal David, who was ninety three years old when he called me up and asked me would I do it. So there have been four. in the history of the organization. So Um So I'm doing that and I still I serve on the board of directors of ASCAF. We're still involved in this eleven year battle over intellectual property still. combating the idea that music wants to be free among other, you know, inane things that have been Forward.

Um the anthropom I I think that the anthropomorphizing of music and and attributing human attributes to music itself as though it were a person is is kind of a new um I guess low in uh in uh in propaganda, um, because music doesn't know what it wants to do. It it wants to it certainly if it w if it wants to do anything, it wants to benefit its creators and the people who care about it. More than it does some

cheap website that just uses content for free and doesn't pay royalties to any of the musicians or any of the writers. The the whole concept that uh ass cap or uh Uh what is it in England? It's um

who maybe make a living, but most of them at this point, particularly because they've hit us so hard. uh probably have other jobs as well. And it's becoming increasingly difficult to carve out a c as you I don't probably don't have to tell you this, increasingly difficult to carve out a career in music that's self sustaining. Mm-hmm. So this is not good news. And damn it you can't even find a good song, you know what I mean?

is uh is very invigorating. You know, what I do is I try to come up with some kind of a project that that is inspiring to me. Uh it looks as though we've found possibly this week anyway that We may be on the trail of a of a uh potential songwriter's Hall of Fame that that always keeps me going. um the search for a songwriter's hall of fame. It's exciting, even if it's the if it's s uh the you know, somewhere over the rainbow.

But um a new project, uh these these albums that I've made, the one I'm making now in Nashville and the uh contact with some of these living legends like the ones that were on my last album. um is always invigorating and and inspirational. For instance, Keith Urban, you know, looks looks you in the eye and says, Yeah, as soon as I get my as soon as I'm have my voice operated on I wanna sing on your record.

And there's always a thrill and there's a punch of energy that comes with something like that. It's like that acceptance, that pat on the back that we all need. Uh y because one can only go so many years. Whether the perception is accurate or not, we often perceive that we are in this l no matter what our line of work that we're in this one man s or one woman struggle against this array of antagonists. And um you can't bear that burden long by yourself. You need people around you of like mind.

who say, No, no, Jim, you're doing good, Jim you know? Give us a tune, Jim, like Paul McCartney used to say to me. I I think what Paul was saying was, Hey Jimmy, forget about all this crap and write a song, you know? Because you do get caught up in it. And all of a sudden you realize, hey, you know, I've been fighting for intellectual property for eleven years now and I haven't really written a very good song.

Uh you can spread yourself too thin. But if you can get back to the tune, like I'm writing a song right now for my wife. Uh, and I'm not gonna tell you the title because I it would be terrible bad luck.

'Cause I mean sometimes you're writing something and you go, I don't know what this is. I can't figure out whether it's a Randy Newman song or a Paul Simon song. I think it may be Radiohead. Fuck it, you know?

Uh I don't know whether anyone's ever told you that before, but being on the road is a tremendous distraction. And you can almost create a an an equation and say times however many years you are old because it doesn't it gets a little more difficult as you get older to travel.

tattered Richard Harris album, Tramp Shine. He said, Would you please sign this for me? I've had this since nineteen seventy one or whenever. I love to spend a lot of time with the fans at the shows. They give me tremendous energy, tremendous uh that there's still a reason to be doing this.

uh that it still matters and that somehow in God's plan there's a universe where the music business may not be the same as it used to be, but it will still be a place where songwriters can dream a career and find some someone to nurture them, someone to help them take the difficult first step. and then somehow create a sustainable lifestyle around creating music. that's all I want for myself and for

a and for everyone else. I just want it to be possible. I don't want any corporate entities slamming su a giant door somewhere and say, Okay, you guys can't do this anymore. You see what I mean?