The legendary writer of "Wichita Lineman," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "MacArthur Park" and many more discusses his hits, his history and his tenure on the ASCAP board!
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My guest today is but one and only Jimmy Webb. Jimmy, you've been playing live. Someone who comes to your show, what might they expect?
Well, they shouldn't expect an orchestra, because it's just me and my you know, trustee piano. But I think they will get a sort of a lightly polished show, not not a not a slick show at all. It's anecdotal. It's quite quite a lot of it is funny, and then it's interspersed with some hit songs, some that are not quite so well known, and it's just kind of a you know, my father was a Baptist preacher. It's just kind of my version of a revival meeting. And occasionally I go off on a diatribe about uh, streaming and all that political stuff, but I'm not going there today.
Well we could go there. When you say streaming and political stuff if you're talking about music business, are also political stuff in the naty.
Oh no no no, not not the presidential race. I'm really talking about the kind of shoddy treatment that I feel that songwriters are still getting after decades and decades and decades of sort of being on the bottom of the totem pole where we I think some of us had anticipated that the whole digital revolution would end up being well, let me tell you a small anecdote. Doug would and I, who sit on the ASCAT board before this whole thing started, there was a small company here in New York that claimed that they had a program that would recognize any song. It would recognize any song in any record within x seconds. And I said, Doug, that sounds great. You know, if we had that every we could really follow every performance out there, so we would be getting rich. And I said, so this is a good thing. Let's go tell the board if it works right. If it works well, the damn thing worked, it could tell you. It would pop up and say Evergreen by Andy Williams, and so it could hear the music and identify it, which I saw as a pretty good long run, because we as songwriters always felt maybe the count wasn't right, maybe something was amiss somewhere along the way in getting paid, and this would cure all. But when the deals were made, a lot of them were made without us being at the table, and sadly, you know, we end up The only statistic I have that I know, at least once it was accurate, is that we were making point zero or zero seven to eight cents per stream. And that's when Adele did her famous kind of publicisty shot where she came out and said she had had the largest selling album in history, and she got a check for twenty thousand make that single the largest selling single in history. And I think she got about twenty thousand dollars, so that that is not even on a par with what I was getting in nineteen sixty seven when I was a journeyman beginning songwriter. So in that realm, I'm kind of an activist. I get a little angry about it sometimes that the song, which is really the basic building block of all entertainment enterprise, depends on these songs, and yet we're sort of taken for granted a lot of times. Specifically, now we're being sampled a lot without our permission. There's something that we have to watch every day. I mean, I could tell that's what I mean. That's where I didn't want to go.
No no, no, no no. People are definitely interested in this. So pre internet, post Internet, how has that affected your songwriting royalties.
Well, they're down a little bit, for sure. They haven't. It hasn't been the bonanza that you know, Doug and I were fantasizing about, Oh wow, now all our problems are solved. You know, it's streaming doesn't pay us, pay us enough. And I think that you would see most people in my position, young or old, agreeing with the fact that we've in terms of the way it's affected us. The sort of fallout has been that I feel like I have to play live to augment my income and make sure that, you know, the big house gets built and that I can take care of my children. I have five boys and a girl, and they're spread all over the world, so I never know when I get the midnight phone call, you know that. So there's some dire thing that needs to be addressed. We really are depending on live performance, and that's one of the reasons I'm out there and I'm embarking on this. This is kind of a you know, there's a colorful expression I could use, but let's just say this is going to be a really tough tour. I'm seventy seven. I'll be seventy eight on August fifteenth, and I don't know how much longer I can tour the way I'm touring, So I think it's affected us all that way.
Okay, this brings up a lot of issues. Ay, who owns your songs?
Well, I I own first of all. You know that the ownership of a copyright is split in two, so it's the publishing half and it's the songwriter half. So on a lot of my songs in my company Jimmy Webb Music, or the newer songs, I own them outright. A lot of my songs are being returned as a result of this copyright window that was provided by the Copyright Office for US. Teenagers basically were then who signed contracts without a lawyer present, which I was doing all the time. I was always I'd sign anything to get into a studio for an hour. I'd sign my life away because studios. It's hard to explain the zeitgeist of all of this, really, but the studio used to be the holy of holies. It was like a temple where you sort of wanted to have the password to gain entry, the aberkadab or to get into that room and record, because they were special rooms and not everybody had one. So I ended up trading a lot of publishing for studio time. That sort of an arrangement.
You have this incredible catalog. I'm sure you've been approached by the third party company's primary wave hypnosis about purchasing your catalog. Would you ever do that?
Do it? I? You know, I'm aware that it looks like easy money, so why not let's get, you know, on the money train. On the other hand, I sort of come from the the the the well the methodist side of the record business, where holding up onto your public publishing as a kin to a religion. It's it's been drummed into me to hold on in my publishing. And the only publishing I relinquish I was was because of events beyond my control. But for now I'm happy to hang on to it. I I don't need the money, so I yeah, I don't know. I can. You know, there are some publishers out there who are offering some very interesting deals where they're coming in and saying, well, what we'll do is we'll advance X dollars to you the you know, the this is the bait that's wiggling on the hook, and maybe we'd do this, and maybe we'll do that and you know, maybe I'll give you my rare Southsea shell collection. They're offering a lot of different things to different people and really trying to appeal to individuals on that basis. And the deal would be that you become partners with the publisher and now you're both owners of the publishing company, and the theory behind that being that the publishing company has a vested interest then in promoting your catalog and seeking out sync rights and what have you, and that their heart is more in the game, their dog is more in the fight if they have a partnership with you as opposed to an administration deal. Now, you know, I can see that, I can see that in theory that ought of work. But things are changing so fast I cannot believe. In the twenty for twenty three years that I've been on the ASCAT board, we went from Napster to Spotify, and there was all kinds of there were there were little there were little conflicts ongoing throughout. Some of them were pretty strange where we had I know that one of them was that I'm a major I'm not talking, I'm talking a giant company was sitting on the board and taking the position that Napster was illegal, and at the same time they were investing in Napster, and so that at one point they ended up in court suing themselves. So it's been so fused that I'm wary. I'm I'm standing off. I want to see where this is going and what's happening. I have an obligation to my family and uh, I believe in the copyrights. I believe there's special there's a special catalog, and I would, you know, want special treatment for that for those songs.
Let's go back to the ASCAP board. In ASCAP, With the Internet, satellite radio, other means of distribution, there are more ways for performing rights organizations to collect. Have you seen your performing rights royalties go up down steady?
Well, uh, I think that. Uh without revealing information that I'm just that I'm not permitted to reveal. But uh, I can say that, I can say that ASCAP's never been doing any better than they are. So it hasn't effected. It hasn't effected the gross it's in a negative way. It's been It's the volume is so tremendous that the overall effect is positive. If you look at the at the end of the year, and the money that's left to distribute. So the overfall all effect is positive, positive, But for guys like me who had their biggest hits years ago and are not like, you know, a red hot Rapper act or something, clearly the the line share is going to the to the top, uh to the top artists, the artists of the week. Uh So, And that's internal stuff that you know, I'm not really at liberty to discuss, but yeah, it's ironic. Overall, I think that we're doing better, but it's not trickling down to the to the what I would call the standards.
Okay, so nineteen ninety eight, nineteen ninety nine, prior to Napster, your publishing income today, what percent is your published income to that? Leaving out just we're talking mechanicals. Let's not talk performing rights, which is its own thing unto itself.
Well, mechanicals are they've been through a particularly critical period because there are no more or mechanicals. By definition, there aren't any records, There aren't any CDs. Sheet music is not a big deal anymore. Folios, things of that nature. Any physical objects are like out there, they're you know, if you're holding a CD in your hand, that's the last physical object you're ever going to have that has music on it for sale. We're I. I had envisioned at world where there would be an intermediary between the CD and the and the cloud. But it looks like that we skipped over that one, and there's an acceleration in work here. I don't know that, frankly makes me nervous, But could we go back to the gist of that question.
Okay, let let me let me put it a different way.
Okay.
In the old days of physical there were acts that were not hit, acts that were selling product generating royalties. What many people forget is a lot of those acts were in upside down positions with their labels in it, so they never got royalties beyond the advance. And today anybody can make music and put it up on Spotify. So we have a number of people on the losing end of Spotify and the other streaming outlets. We have people who were propped up by the record industry of your and now they're competing with all these wannabes that they didn't used to have to compete with. A lot of these acts sold x number of physical records, generating income, etc. Now we are in the streaming world. The streaming world is one of consumption as opposed to sale.
What do we know?
The song writers got screwed on streaming in terms of the overall percentage they get. If there's one hundred pennies in let's just you know, there literally is no per stream rate. It's a division, etc. Changes And of course there are different rates for on demand as opposed to radio, but approximately sixty cents on the dollar goes to the recording, and the song should get more. But the records were needed by Spotify at all, and they ended up making deals where the songwriters did not get as much.
They made their deals with the artists first. It was a very shrewd tactical move on their part. Is that the songwriter deals were already in place, and in my mind I feel that those were And again these aren't figures, but I believe that the song that the the actual artists who and by the way, who only recently in cosmic time recently gained the right of royalty over the performance on the record, and they slipped in there and negotiated their deal, their streaming deal with Spotify. Specifically, before we we were kind of left. We didn't have a seat at that table. So they're roughly where they were before. They're in the seven seven to eight territory of the of the gross and we we ended up I think a little worse than we were before.
I agree with that, but let me get to my ultimate point. Okay, in streaming, it's winners and losers. Yes, the Taylor swifts the weekends, there's a ton of money generated there. A lot of people who used to rely on physical sale income are not doing well on streaming. However, you are not like many people in that. You know, there are a lot of people saying, well, I had an album, there weren't really hits on it. You have written standards, household name standards. So at this late date, ten odd years into streaming, do those standards to what degree do they generate income for you as opposed to the physical era.
You know, look, I think we've all taken a hit. We've all taken a hit, and you know, I feel a little self conscious about revealing, you know, exact figures, but I think I may as well say it. And I'll say I'll say it because regardless of any regardless of the way it may affect the way people perceive me, or my or my my standing in the ranks, my level of success. I'm disregarding that for a moment. I would say that it's I'm getting about half of what I used to get on my standards.
Okay, that's what I wanted to know before we leave ASCAP. Well, do let one other thing. You said you're going on the road to pay your bills. Is that a figure a speech or economically do you literally have to go on the road.
Well, you know, if I if I want to retire right now and button everything up and and and have no expenses, you know, the road is expensive. Devote myself to you know, maybe some other musical projects that uh with with less chance of success. Uh and and sort of work out of my house. And and I have a very nice house. Uh, I drive a very nice automobile in my lifestyle. I'm sure it would be the envy but a lot of people. So I'm not gonna I'm not gonna equivocate about that. And I and I can maintain that. But I can't dream. I can't I can't dream of of having a ranch in Montana, or I can't dream of building a recording studio in in Mexico, and and in other words, I'm the road to advancement in terms of the money I can make is now pretty much dictated by what I can make on the road. That's the money that I would use to invest in a recording studio, or invest in a label, or or in a maybe select a young artist and say this is this kid is going to be tremendous. I'm gonna invest some money here. So it's about it's about it's a it's not just about a comfort level. It's it's about, uh, in a world where you know, I mean, it's silly how much money there is. And I would like to have some of that because I think I could use it in a very positive way. I I'm not know, I'm not so desperate that I have to go out on the road and play. I play because I enjoy the audience. I get a lot of energy. It's making me live longer, I'm sure of it. Uh I. It's a very joyful experience for me. Even though I've never really, you know, quote made it big as a performer. I have a following. I have people who will show up every damn time. I you know, every time I go to that venue, they're there, uh, and I'm doing I'm doing very very well at it. And so suddenly to be doing well at performing is really ironic at this point after cutting ten albums that you know haven't been well let's see, not top of the pops.
But.
Yeah, I mean there's a mixed emotions. I uh, it's it's ready cash and it's tempting to go out there and get it. You know. I think that the people that are that have been really hardest hit, sadly enough, are the are the people who are who are older or have physical impediments. Sudden, sudden things occur. Let's say, just for instance, Parkinson's sets in and you lose your voice and you can't perform anymore. Now you're now you really have to depend on those royalties. You can't you can't augment who doesn't want to augment their income? Bob, you know in some way.
Okay, you say that your live business is on the upswing without a hit album in the past. What do you think is driving that upsling?
I don't know. Maybe there's a bit, maybe there's a healthy curiosity, or maybe there's a I don't know, maybe there's there maybe I have achieved that, I don't know, elevator music status, where you know, it's a name that people finally, after all these years, they recognize and they they say, this guy can't be he can't be doing a very good show. Let's go see. The first time I went to see Elvis, I was a cynic. I was like twenty years old, and I went up to Vegas to see Elvis, and it was like sort of shown. I was shown for it. I sort of wanted to see him paul on his butt, and instead I became like number one Elvis fan in the world. So I think maybe some people come out of curiosity and they say, you know what, this guy seems pretty good. He's been improving, and I give them insight into the workings of the song and the meaning of the song and the way the craft of songwriting works, which is something that I'm really concerned about because I don't think that that's being passed down, it's not being mentored down sufficiently to this coming generation or these generations now that are on our heels. I think that a lot of these young writers don't pay much attention to, for instance, the Great American Songbook and the classic methodology of songwriting. So that's why we have We have like a monotonous, almost dreary like repetition of the same little melodic phrases over and over again, and almost everything is the same tempo. Forget dynamics. There's no loud, there's no soft. It's not you've lost that loving feeling, which is majestic masterpiece of the sixties Barry Man, isn't the a while and there doesn't. I don't know. I think we may have failed in not taking more of these young people under our wing and saying, you know, here's here's how to write it, here's how to write a verse, here's a verse, here's the chorus, here's a bridge, you know, here's a lead in, here's a you know, on the fade. You want to work on the fade. You know. We used to work harder on the fade than we did on any part of the record. That's out the window. We don't we don't really have fades anymore. You just go to the next record like this.
So it's.
It's a big it's it's there is going to be a tremendous change in the next ten years, and I hope that I'm around just because I want to see what happens. I really want to see if the digital promise is fulfilled, which is that it would benefit all of us, that we would all benefit from this technology, and I would like to see if that dream comes true. I'm very, very curious, and in the meantime, I'm sitting on my standards, and it may be my children that make the final decision on what happens to the catalog.
Well, one thing I want to say, you've all progressed their losses. It used to be prior to the lead six these little later than that every car didn't come with air conditioning, had a vent window. Vent windows were great. Now all cars come with air conditioning, which is even better, but there are no more vent windows. But you mentioned a ton of stuff I want to get into. How do you feel, being on the ASCAP board, that these other performing rights agencies have changed into for profit models?
Well, certainly I think that when this idea first sort of surfaced, you know, like a from the murky depths of the South. When this being my thing hit the news, I had a moment of panic because I thought, well, it's over, this is it. We're going to be taken it's all going to be like this, But ASCAP is never going to be that. In fact, I think you're probably aware of the fact that we've we've we've consolidated, consolidated our position really on supporting human songwriters, uh and protecting legacy catalogs and and things of that nature. I know that a lot of B and my writers are very very nervous, uh, that that situation is still teetering. In my opinion, I don't think that that all the shoes have hit the floor over there, and I don't think that there's ever been a I might be wrong, and and you know, I don't mind being called out if I'm wrong, but I think that this is the first time that a p r O has been being has been owned by moneymen, I'll just put it that way, by hedge funds, by banks, by cartels investors. We know at ASCAP that we don't want those people sitting on our board because they don't know anything about music, and they don't we don't know that they love songs the way we love songs. You know. This is this is the part of it that is so hard to express because it's not in our modern vernacular to talk in a romantic way or a sentimental way about anything. You know, we're so hard nosed, but I think that ASCAP we're still rather sentimental about our songs. They mean a lot to us. The songs of Harold Arland mean a lot of Richard Rodgers and Larry Hart. I mean, when I hear the name David Rason, my head reverberates with Laura.
Now.
I remember the little story that David told me about how he wrote it, and I'm not going to tell the story. But we are much more personally at ASCAP, which is a fraternal organization, We are much more concerned with the actual preservation of the music and the dignity of the music, which just as maybe as a slight digression, you know. The use of these standards now in these rap records is something that everybody's watching very keenly, and I have had unbelievable requests come in to use. Well, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna name the song because I don't want to identify any particular individuals. But if I was approached, let's say, by a rapper who wants to just play the first verse of Up Up in a way, just the way it was in nineteen sixty seven, and then except speed it up a little bit because it's not in the tempo that he wants it, so you have to speed it up, and it kind of makes the fifty minutes mention sound like chipmunks. But you put a whole verse of that before his record starts. Now that's a substantial that's a substantial use of a cop be right. That's that's akin to making it a closing titles in a film. It's it's really on the same basis. So the uses we're only beginning to see how they they And I don't want to say how we are going to use these standards and what links we're going to go to to exploit something that is so much a part of the American psyche that we automatically respond to it because it's buried so deeply in us that the advertisers now and it's clear, it's as clear as the nose on your face, have explored the idea of not using pop hits from the sixties, seventies and even before, and they've they've tried doing commercials without those songs and they don't work. So now they're going back to the sixties. They're going back and they love to get their hands on a Jackson Brown song. Uh, some of them are are just they're out of reach. Sometimes they don't bother to ask for your permission, by the way, and the use they they put, they put let's say, a two or three bar phrase in a record and put a lot of echo in it, and it's just an orchestral thing, and it goes on and on and on and on. So essentially, about three or four bars of one of my songs is being repeated in deep echo over and over and over and over again, and that and and and the gentleman wraps on top of that. So I'm his, I'm his, I'm his rhythm track, you know, like piece of something that I've done. Yet they don't want to list us as creative contributors to that. We're not eligible for Song of the Year over NARS because we because in my song do what you Gotta Do, which Kanye West did called it famous, but musicologists said sixty percent of it was do what you Gotta Do. And we came to an agreement because they had already put it out. It was number one, and when it went to Nares. It was nominated for Song of the Year, and they listed thirteen writers as eligible for Grammy Award for Song of the Year. There were thirteen writers nominated for Song of the Year, and I was omitted they're going to use our music. I think they should give us credit. I mean, that's just to just say, you know, look, songs aren't like it's not like doing a collage out of a bunch of old people magazines with a pair of scissors. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be that way. And so I think we're waiting. Wait. You know, look, a lot of people are really depending on sync rights and sampling rights. That is the hot sector right now in publishing is to get these old songs rehabilitated somehow. And one way that you can do that is to put them in a commercial or put them on a wrap record. So it's really strange because that's become the way we promote our music is by sort of allowing it to be infringed on.
Now you talk about all these opportunities, you talk about ripoffs. Who is managing this? Do you have a manager? Do you have an attorney? Or is your phone ringing off the hook or is your email coming in? Who's on top of.
This for you? Well, I have a guy, uh and I'll mention him because he's a lovely guy, John Leno, who's handled all my returns, my returns on my copyrights, which is a byzantine process. It is so complicated and you have to be so determined to stay the course and fill out the forms and make the windows. If you miss your window too bad, you don't get your you don't you don't get your publishing back. So you do need someone at the controls. And we we we have a good a good guy there. Uh. My wife Laura is ex officio, you know, manages me because nobody else could take nobody else can stand me. Uh, but yeah, I have the phone is ringing. In fact, yesterday we had two requests for I don't know what it calls these sampling, sampling or sync because one of the requests was to use a complete verse of a record, I mean just cold a verse of another record and then the rap song starts, so this standard becomes the intro to this rap. I don't know how I feel about that. Is that devaluing my copyright or is that promoting my copyright?
And and.
Do I know? Do I know the answer to the question. No, I don't, so I'm kind of like standing there with my sucking on my thumb, going h I wonder you know is that is it? Will? Will I one day regret not taking advantage of more of these opportunities to let these songs be heard, even in sometimes not the most flattering surroundings, but at least the melodies are getting out there and a sense of what the record was. And does that over time inspire some sort of curiosity about the song that lies deeply buried behind all of that rapping, And I'm not sure that it does. I think there's an argument that it could devalue that sync rites could in the long run, devalue a song, except when they're used in movies. When they're used in movies, I see that as a clear when when some of the sampling stuff, it still worries me. I'm not sure what role it plays in the future of the copyright.
You talk about younger generations in their ability or lack thereof, to write songs. When you do live shows, do younger generations come and to what degree are you approached or interact with younger generations about songwriting.
Well, I have an intern wonderful young guy named Pete Mancini who's one of the best songwriters, young songwriters I've ever heard. And he's he's he's under my wing. I can't take care of the whole world, but this kid is talented, and I take him out with me and I let him open for me, do his songs, which are good. He always the audience always laps it up. He's very good looking, which I'm not. He he's young. He loves the old music. He loves the old tracks. You know, did you ever hear you know, like Royal Scam? You know, you know, we talk about it and it's like, yeah, now, yeah, I knew Jeff Carroll, Oh you knew Jeff Pi, Carol oh Man.
You know.
So there's a group out there who are all over this. I mean it's a small it's right now, it's a small group. But I believe it's growing. I believe the interest in the sixties and seventies catalogs to some degree is growing. I think less there's less less growth in the in the Great American Songbook. I see the Great American Songbook to me fading from public memory now I've lived long enough to see these things, which scares me. It scares me to death that I have actually seen these things happen. But I know that if I went outside here and I had a remote unit of some kind, and I stopped a fifteen year old girl outside and I said, I'm going to sing this song and tell you, tell me you have a song, my funny Valentine, sweet comic Valentine. What does that mean you? I don't know. You know, it doesn't mean anything to her. And so we're I think that when the boomers go down, and we're going down making no mistake and very swiftly, there's a change of scenery and cast members on the entertainment stage is taking place. Even as we speak. Each day, one of our brethren, one of our colleagues, most of them beloved and irreplaceable in our mind, passes the bar, and I feel that maybe some of the respect and love that we have for the Great American Songbook may go with us. So I don't know what sort of I would love to have a peek into the future if I had, like if I could go like Boom fifty years fifty years in the future. I just want to listen to the radio. Just take me somewhere and let me listen to the radio. Well, we don't have radio anymore. It's all implanted in your skull, and we sort of play what we play, what we want you to hear. You know. Sometimes I kind of feel like that's what they're doing. They're playing what they want us to hear at, you know. And I think that record it shook it. It's really shaken up record promotion. I'm very, very very concerned that this great American art form has been our number one export for decades, American music. I've traveled all over the world. They are listening to American music in Copenhagen and Hamburg. In Santiago and Waynas areas they're listening to American music. And Moscow right now in China they're listening. They're watching without paying royalties. Of course, they're watching American movies and listening to our music. It's still so profoundly influential that it ranks as one of our more significant exports, and I think, much more significant than our missiles and our howitzers and our grenades. I sort of feel like Billy Joel when he went over and toured the Union. I think he kind of brought up, brought last knows, you know, to its full majority there. And some people say that Levi's won the Cold War because the Russians wanted Levi's so badly. But American music is a treasure, that's being that's not being careful, carefully husband husband did or cultivated right now, right now, in this particular moment, with the exception of a few major artists at the very top who have the influence, like a Taylor Swift, for instance, when she was fourteen years old. Fifteen years old, I heard her and I heard her songs, and I said, you know, she's going to be successful. She knows how to do all the parts. She knows like the intro, she knows the verses, she knows the bridge that Nashville training. You know, in Nashville is the citadel of songwriting. It's the last you know, It's Ford Apache, It's you know, It's where you make your last stand. I guess as a songwriter. But it's been disturbing recently to see people like Don Schlitz, who wrote The Gambler, which is in my view, a veritable perfect song. People are always talking about the perfect song. Well, there are a lot of perfect songs, but certainly the Gambler and the way that story is told, and that o Henry has twist at the end, and just the brilliance of that chorus. You got to know when to hold them, no, when to fold them, no, when to walk away, no one to run And the fact that this is happening on a darkened train. There's such drama in this. And the man who wrote that, who I Knew is kind of a good time. You're out there down you know, I love you, you know, as a guy who had entirely too much fun all the time. He last time I met him face to face that I'm done. He said, I don't see any point in writing anymore.
Let's go back to Taylor Swift, since you seem to pay attention to the scene. The country albums were co written with Liz Rose. Then she moved into a pop sphere, tends to work with the a level town in the pops sphere. Do you have any thoughts about her modern.
Work, You know only that it's you know, extremely well produced, and and there's there's a there's there. There are there are a few songs that I that I that I like, I, I still haven't heard you've lost that love and feeling. I you know, I think that might be a forlorn hope at this point. But I you know, I I thought I think that Adele, Lady Gaga, Taylor. I think they're trying. I really think they're trying to write songs, and that's encouraging. That's encouraging, whether anyone would I I've actually heard melody creeping back into some of this hip hop music. H And I remember Paul Simon saying to me. We were talking one day and I said, you know, Paul, it's just really disturbing, like chords are disappearing. You know, there's I don't and I love. I love chords. You know, chords are anyway, that's that's life to me, that's life, that's that nurtures my soul. So I said, Paul, I think we're losing chords. He said, Jimmy, he said, we're going to lose melody. I said, Paul, I said, you must be wrong. You can't be right about that. He said, he says we're going to lose it. We're going to lose it all. And this is ten, this is ten or twelve years ago.
Well that way, he was very pressured because a lot of modern songs don't have melody. Let's go back to the beginning to Oklahoma. You know, we used to talk about flyover country in the sixties and seventies. There is no flyover country. Everybody has the Internet, everybody has mobile phones, cable TV. What was it like growing up in Oklahoma in the forties and fifties.
It was pretty stark. I lived in western Texas and western Oklahoma, which you know, you don't you don't to see any difference when you cross that sign it says welcome to Texas. Texas doesn't look any different than Oklahoma. It's all the same. It's flat. And they had little hills out there in the old timers, and say, you know, if you go out there and stand on top of that hill, you could see New Mexico from here fifty miles and I tried it, and by golly, they were pretty close to the truth. And that's kind of the landscape that I grew up in. My father was a Baptist minister. He was also an ex marine. It was a strict Protestant upbringing that put us as children. That were five of us. My siblings, my brother Tommy, and my three sisters, Janice, Susan, and Sylvia, and it put us constantly in the public eye. So I grew up knowing that I was being watched, that every action was going to be reported back to my dad. And my dad hated rock and roll. He had the crazy idea somewhere along the way that rock and roll was about sex. I mean, I don't know who gave him that idea, but he got his stuck in his head and I couldn't get it out, and so I was climbing out the rear window and sneaking out to go to dances, and dancing is not allowed in the in the Southern Baptist religion. And I used to look at my sisters with this deep sense of pity as they would sit on the front porch and listen to the music coming from teen Town and imagine what's going through their heads because they can't go there and fraternize and be with So I think that that Southern Baptist made a tremendous mistake when they disallowed when we went to camp, we had to swim separately from the from the girls. There was this sort of just non proportional response to the sexual question that emphasized the difference that sort of I think titillated the whole idea of maybe being naughty, whereas the Methodists, who I always envied, could go to dances and they had a much more relaxed And I think later in life that it affects relationships. I really do. I know it for fact, it sets up some psychological barriers that are never going to be taken down. So anyway, get off of that subject. But I was church pianist, and I learned pretty early to improvise on Hymn's one Suitisan Goddard was a wonderful teacher in Oklahoma City, and she would teach me well what Leonard Bernstein called transformational elements, and she just called piano arranging. But it would be like playing playing amazing grace like this, Let me try that again, you know something in that vein. So I learned like a lot of improvisation. Dad played a little guitar, my mom played a little accordion. We would do our family thing at church on Sunday, sing parts. I grew up singing three parts. Dad always wanted me to sing tenor, and I really ended up being a baritone, but eventually I made it to church pianist, which my mother thought was the pinnacle of show business. You couldn't like get me higher than that. And then alas we lost her and it was my senior year in high school. I was sixteen, she was thirty six, and that sort of dropped a nuclear bomb on us as a family. I don't think my father ever got over it. It affected his relationship whatever that was, with God, which is a very weighty subject. But you have to believe in what you're preaching. You can't, just like you have to believe in what you're performing. It has to be coming from somewhere because people know when it's not. They know they they can detect that thin nasal wine of the of the not completely sure of himself performer, just as they can a Baptist preacher who he told me one night, he says, Jimmy, I don't believe anything that's coming out of my mouth. So I put him to work in the record business and he did very well. Discovered a group called Five Man Electrical Band and had a hit record and went to work for Mike Curve for a while. So it all turned out it all turned out in the end. But I lived in an agrarian environment. I got these hands dirty picking cotton, poe and cotton doing essentially it's you know, look, I don't want to get into anything cultural here, but my grandfather did not use migrant labor. There were enough cousins and uncles and aunts in our family that we could go out like a swarm of locusts and clear up, you know, forty acres of cotton in a couple of days, three days. I remember one day, my father pulled five hundred pounds of cotton that day. And uh, that's uh, that's a lot of cotton. Because cotton doesn't weigh very much, so five hundred pounds of it would probably fill this this room pretty much. Uh. I always admired him. He was a he was a magnetic tall, very handsome. As an orator, he was you know, he was persuasive. Uh, he was difficult. He believed in corporal punishment. We got whacked around a lot with good cause. With good cause, you know, I mean it wasn't nice to turn the heat off in the babistery so that the back water in the babistery was ice cold, so that when the When the portly lady started coming down the steps into the babistry, She's going, oh my God, oh Jesus, oh oh. Everybody thought she's having a transcendental experience. But the water in the babbisty is below zero, you know, so fun in games. The the thing I remember most about growing up was always feeling as though I was on the outside looking in. I was not sports minded, particularly even though I went out. I played football because my dad wanted me to the violence I didn't like. But I played and played hard. But I was a second stringer. I was in the band, so I grew, so I got a little bit of experience on other instruments, and I floated on the outside edge of every party I ever was ever attended. I would be I would be in a corner somewhere, leaned up, hopefully where I couldn't be seen, just watching, just watching and feeling clumsy. And at one point my act and he was out of control, and I just I just had that awful teenage, teenage angst that you go through when you're just ugly. You just there's just a time in your life when you're ugly. You look in the mirror and you go, I'm ugly, you know, and you get through it. You get through it. And then I got through it by writing songs, by h doing my own therapy and exercising my demons, you know, at the piano, and particularly when I when I finally got the podium and I was writing, and I I wrote, Uh, I wrote, I wrote a song called good Evening, mister critic. And it was for some reason I had it in. I had it in for critics. It turns out that critics have been my best friends in this life. They have literally literally been my best friends. Stephen Holden was one of my best friends.
Uh.
But my very first concert at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I went out and I sung about the critics, you know, and it was a very very taunting you know, how many how many shows did you close all by yourself, mister critic? Uh? It castigated the critics, it really uh. And this is what I chose to open my first concert with. So one can only imagine what followed. Leonard Feather, who was an eloquent writer, music critic for the La Times and well known in the jazz world, wrote mister Webb's theory that songs are best heard when performed by the writer. Was definitively unproven. Last night, that's a Dorothy cha in pavilion. And for years, for years, he raked me over the colds. But the truth is that by and large, if you look at the critical response to my albums, my second album all I Know, excuse me. Second second album.
Was and so on.
Was selected by Stereo Review magazine, which in those days was a pretty big deal. Stereo Review that was for the high fid nuts. They gave me Album of the Year. You know, I probably sold like for forty five fifty records, and they gave me their Album of the Year award for outstanding recording achievement, and they printed the full color cover inside magazine. It was a very prestigious, but could never It's interesting because now I can look at it and I can say I spent my whole life pounding my head up against that wall. Maybe it's time to stop. But I think I'm going to do one more album. I think I have a few songs that I would like to leave before I leave the room. I'd like to play a few more songs. And I've had fantastic luck with other artists covering my songs on my albums. For instance, Judy Collins picking up the Moon as a Harsh Mistress in my minor standard recorded by a lot of people. Highwayman was on one of my albums. It was actually the album that I did with George Martin. I've done an album with everybody.
I was on all.
All the Warner Late I was all the time Warner Labels, I was on them, I was on Reprise, I was on Warner Brothers, and then they kicked me over to Asylum and then I made an album. Linda Ronstat produced me and we made an album with Jack Holtzman at Elektra and uh I'm at Ergon used to come to well not every every studio, but every every session. He would come to sessions quite often. He would come in with his with his gold tip cane, and he come in with the dapper little goatee, and he was a wonderful cat. And he walked in and and he listened to me and he'd go, you know, kid, he said, it's part. He said, you've got the heart, you know, and so I that's I don't know when you've got that kind of backing and you can't somehow pull up, pull up, you know, some kind of a record out of it. I don't. I don't know what kind of a curse is on you. But I did pray at one point when I was young, and I prayed to God, please let me grow up, and please let me write a song for Glenn Campbell, because I loved Glenn Campbell. He had a record because turn around, look at me, turn it around, looking at me. Oh, I've wait, but I'll wait for uh. And it was a it was a regional hit, and I heard this beautiful voice, and I just want to write songs for him. So when I met him, finally I met him in the flesh, I actually had a bunch of songs that i'd written form Uh. It's it's like a cinderellative story. Really, a lot of it is so fantastic that people don't believe me when I tell them what happened to me. I mean, all my dreams came true.
Man.
You know, Okay, you talk about being in Oklahoma but being a teenager feeling like you're outside. Did you continue to feel that in your life to this day that you were outside observing or alienated or did that change?
No? I'm exactly the same kid, I'm exactly the same guy, and I just transferred, you know, the alienation that I felt in the classroom, I transferred it to Hollywood because I couldn't. I felt like I was being banished from rock and roll and put with the old people, old people who were like forty, people like mister Sinatra, Tony Bennett. You know, I actually wrote a song for Rosemary Clooney. So in the middle of the road, the middle of the road, which was Glenn in the fifth dimension and Richard Harris. People could not comprehend Richard Harris at all, and so there was a lot of confusion about where the pigeon, where my pigeon hole was. And I already knew that there wasn't a hole for me. I learned that in school, so I knew there wasn't already made slot for me to slip into because I know I'm too egocentric and eccentric and eclectic, if you will, if you could put all those in one word, that would be me. And I know there's no real home for me in this business. But I yearn I yearned to be, you know, to have dinner with Paul Simon, and Ardie Garfunkland eventually already asked me for a song, which was all I know and answer, oh oh, anyway, uh. When I after I worked with Artie and we that was his first record coming back from the split with Paul Simon, which I'm not going to go into that drama because I think people know a lot about that, and if you don't know, you can find out easily. But you know, they were in the first grade together, and it's been a rough relationship all the way for them. I've seen a lot of it because I've known already now since nineteen seventy one, and I've been through several ups and downs between him and Paul. But I did eventually, you know, sit down and have dinner with him, and then I was invited to kind of hang out with Crosby, Dave Crosby and Graham Nash. We got to be pretty good friends. And then a very good friend of mine was Joni Mitchell, and she changed the way I write songs. I would say she was one of the she was one of the epiphanes that I when I When I was I was cruising along there, I was making pretty good money and I thought, damn I know everything there is to know about this. I can write one of these anytime. And I ran across Joni's work saw actually saw live at the Troubadour one night, sent her a letter and said I want to take you out for tea and I said, you were you know, you're a golden child. And I loved what she did and everything. She found the letter like fifteen seventeen years later, it was behind her couch. She never opened it. It's true story. But she and I became pretty really pretty close friends, and I watched her a lot, and she would I loved her voicings on the guitar. I love these kind of just kind of to me, that's that's her world. It's kind of a it's a D tuning or you know these used to call it a lot of times, called it the Joni Mitchell tooning. And I played on guitar for a while. I wrote a couple of songs on that, and but her conversational style all really changed my riding. There was no more Witch Tall Lineman. There was no more I was riding. You know, I was writing put it down here right. It's kind of early for vocalizability.
See her how she flopped old and sail across this guy lose enough to tell about that airful if future, Oh ship looks as warm as go.
Uh it just it became I think deeper and more uh uh Joan. She was the first to open her chest up completely and say, okay, look, this is really what's going on here? I am not happy sometimes and and she would expose things that entertainment has always been. Yet aren't we all happy? And they we're gonna go home now? Yeah? And here here, suddenly is is a voice that is profound up in the sterilized room where they let you be lazy. You know, stories about Freudian with Freudian overtones, and some of them so inspirational that I would cry listening to them.
Like m.
Just before you, just before our love got lost, you said, my love is constant.
You told me it was constant. Is I love was constant? Is a northern star?
Yeah? Where's that at?
I'll meet you in the bar.
Yeah, if you want me, I'll be in the bar. Well. She had me there, She had me. It was like, I don't know how to write like that. She's I call it conversational tone. And another guy who does it and does it in a very humorous ways, randing him. The lines aren't so formalized as Moon, June and Spoon. You know, there are things that people might actually say. So I thought, well, this is the wave of the future, and my songs became more elaborate. I wrote a song called Paul Gogan in the South Seas that was almost impossible to form. It was like the Surf's Up. You know, nobody could cover Surfs Up because nobody could play it.
But let's go back. You talk about being feeling separate, feeling alienated. You talk about opening your concert with the critic songs of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. To what degree are you angry? I think he's got a bad connotation, but you know, a frustration of feeling that you're not a member of the group, You're not part of the center. There's somewhere you want to be.
Was that an element, Well, it would have been until recently. But I'm at peace with where I am, who I am, what I am. When I step back and look at it, it's an unbelievable story. I mean, in anybody's book, it's a fantastic Horatio Alger story. If you will rags for riches. On the surface, it's that simple, but in a more profound sense, it was a journey into into the art of songwriting and to come to be influenced by this wonderful group of people who eventually really did embrace me. The rock and roll crowd. You know, Guns and Roses are playing which tall Lineman every night on the show. So and I think I got when I got invited to play MacArthur Park at the Rainforest, Well, when James Taylor cut which tall Linman? He covered which Tall Liman, and I thought, I think I'm going to put some of this to bed. I don't think there's a conspiracy. I don't think they're out to get me anymore. You know, there may may have been a time when there were when when I was looked on with some degree of suspicion, But frankly I laugh at that now because I shouldn't have cared about that. I should have been here on the piano doing doing what God, exercising the gift that he gave me, uh and not not being so self conscious. But again I go back to being the bat babbitist, the Baptist preacher's kid, and being watched all the time, and having and being rejected a lot, uh, being called four eyes, being called preach, having four or five kids just jump on me and beat the crap out of me after school. You know, because I work glasses and I it has it has. Yes, I have an anger in me. My anger is is for the bullies of this world. It's it's it's for the the unfair, the unfairly treated. Uh majority of people in the world who lived in some abject poverty and terror. Sometimes while another segment of society lives on Mount Olympus and wear golden crowns and float around in togas making decisions that affect the lives of that cause cause or do not cause wars and things of that nature to occur in other people's country. That kind of stuff makes me angry. I was incredibly angry about Vietnam. I knew in my gut that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a false flag. I knew it. I knew we need I knew I knew that. I just feel it, and I think that they're gonna have it's going to become harder and harder for administrations to put through these mil to go on these military adventures after after our generation and after Vietnam. Uh. Now it hasn't dissuaded them because they've been now wherever they've been to the Gulf War uh uh they've went, They've been to they've gone over and erecked Iraq, and they've wrecked Afghanistan. I mean, what, what are what actually are we doing as a country to make life better on this world for more people, for our own people when we don't have elder care for even a half of the of the people who need it in this country. So, you know, yeah, those things. I'm I'm an activist. I'm a leftist if you want, you want to all me that. I've always been aligned politically with with with a liberal society. And I don't see anything wrong with national health. They have it in Australia, they have it in England, and it takes care of a lot of people who would normally if they only if they only had to depend on money, they wouldn't get medical care. And I think when you keep seriously injured people sitting in the waiting room while people with the money are like going past them and going to get care. So you know what, I'm saying I think there's a lot of injustice. I'm angry about that. I'm angry about people causing other people's deaths, uh, needlessly spending human lives in pursuit of some I don't know, some reactionary, borderline fascist like dream of a society. Well, in our case, I'm very nervous because I was raised and rigorous religious framework, where if you got outside across the laser beam, a buzzer sounded, and you got an electric shop. I'm afraid of religion being too close to government. I think that the founding fathers knew exactly what they were doing when they separated church in state, and the idea that well, no, I was a long time ago, and now we need to we need to get them closer together, you know, to get America back on its path. I'm not persuaded that religion ever did anything to help government.
Let's go back to Oklahoma, your Baptist minister's son. How do you hear rock and roll? How do you hear Elvis? To what degree does it change you? To what degree does it affect you?
Well, my father made a critical mistake at one point because he was also kind of left minded, believe it or not. And during the Civil rights movement, he would have black congregations come to our church. And when they came, they brought their drums and their electric guitars, and they, you know, sang the gospel. And Elvis was up to his neck in the gospel music.
So he was.
And so my father was really I was proud of his stand. He let he he was inclusive. He he knew perfectly well there were two gay guys who came to service, and they were there every Sunday, and he never said a word about it until his deacons came in and said, you've got to stop those guys from coming, because you know that's not in the Bibles. And he said, well, he said, I'm not going to say anything to them, but you're no longer my deacons. So he fired the deacons. His stand was impeccable. And I don't know, I don't know, I honestly, Bob, I don't know where I was leading with that.
But well, tell me about hearing rock music curing Elvis.
Well, when these when these black congregations would come in and play service, we the gospel was like a rock and roll. There was drums, they had drums up there, you know, in the front of the church. I would as I as I said, I would sometimes absent myself from the house to go to various functions where people work dancing. You know. Glenn Campbell said, you know why Southern Baptists don't make love standing up? And I said, no, Glenn, why not? He said, because people will think they're dancing.
Uh.
He used to control the radio, and you know, so we would like try to get on a station where we could hear Elvis or you know, Buddy Holly or somebody else, and he would like slap our hands, you know, he'd get back on that. All those preachers who used to preach out of Del Rio, Texas. I don't know. I found my when my mother passed. As I said, I was a senior in high school, so I was out from under the family umbrella very early on my own in Los Angeles, sleeping on an air mattress with some girls I knew who had like they let me use their dining room. And I had a little portfolio of songs. And I was an independent human being and I've never been so happy in my life. And I had nothing. I had nothing, and I walked around Hollywood with my songs, and if somebody asked me what I did, I'd say, I'm a songwriter and I was proud of it. And I got a couple of everly brother cuts. Everly brothers always worship.
Well, l wait, wait, wait, let's slow down a little bit. At what point and how and why do you side I'm going to be a songwriter as a profession.
Well, I'm at sam Bernardino of Ali College, and I'm wait, wait, wait.
Before you go there? How did the family end up moving from Oklahoma to California?
That was always my father's dream.
He was.
He was always going to go there. It was just a matter of times. So when he got a call from this church in Colton, which is famous mostly for Wyatt, for roy Erp. Wyatt's brother was buried there. So that's that was one of the That was the tourist attraction. It was roy ERP's gravestone, it was he you know. So we're in California, which was a complete makeover for me in terms of one of the first thing I heard that summer that we moved in u there was a there was a consciousness, a consciousness changing event, and it was the Beach Boys singing on the radio station The Look. I came in, k me in and they were they were singing in my room. And I was moving into my new bedroom in California, and all the windows were up, and I hear the same song on all the radios, all two or three different houses. They're all tuned in to. Came in and they're listening to the Beach Boys. And all this bogun villa's dripping down and it's warm and everything is green. And I see this kid in his backyard abutting our property and he's got on a Volkswagen bus and he's got a surfboard up on top of it and he's washing it all down. He's come back, he just got back from the beach. He's washing his rig down. I looked over there and I said, what's that? He said, what's what? I said, That is thing on top of your car. He says, that's my surfboard. Man, Hey dude, you know. I said, well, what's that music you're playing? You know in my room? He said, hey, dude, he said, you don't know who the Beach Boys are. I said, well, I sort of like I know. I heard Jan and Dean record about Surf City, but I don't know much about it. He said, come in here, and I went into his room and he played me everything the beach boys had done up until then. And I walked that and I felt like a changed person that I can't explain the vibration of it was so strong that I was that I was now in a different environment, uh, emotionally. And it was shortly after that my mother passed. She she uh, she tripped over a piece of furniture in the living room one afternoon, and five weeks later she died of a brain tumor.
Uh.
So I was, I was free, I was I was broken, and my father was destroyed. So all the rules we had no rules now. All my whole life had been about rules, and now all of a sudden, there's no rules. And walking into the house at one or two in the morning, drunk as a skunk and stepping over my father who's already passed out on the living room floor. That's when I found out that Native American blood is susceptible to alcohol. Because I'm a sixteenth and my father was an eighth. And once he stopped preaching and started drinking, he he sort of proved that he was you know, he could, he could, he could, uh, he could drink with the best of them, and he had a lot of girlfriends. The whole temperature changed there pretty soon. He was he was he was fed up and wanted to go back to Oklahoma. So they went and I stayed, and I was trying to go to sam Rindino Valley College and I'm not a very good student, and I'm skipping classes and I'm going. In the den of music was a guy named Russell C. Baldwin, you know, fantastic, a concert pianist who had damaged one of his hands in a car wreck and it had cost him his career. So now he's teaching. He wasn't bitter, but my favorite parts of the class would be when he would say, I think today I'm just going to play some Beethoven piano sonatus for your kids. And he would sit there and he would play Beethoven, just spellbinding, and then he would say, okay, now for your semester final we're going to do We're gonna set He said, you each pick a poem, and you and you write a choral arrangement and a piano accompaniment. And he said that'll be your final grade. So I went in, and I'd been to class about three times. I wrote this arrangement for choir, and I think the text was when I am old and gray, and when you were old and gray and full of sleep and sitting by the fire, take down this book, slowly read and dream, John Keats. I think that's what it was. And he called me into his office that afternoon and I went, uh, oh, you know Russell, the dean of music. And I walked in and he said, sit down, mister Webb, and he said, I see this morning that you were late for class. You were recalcitrant. Again. I didn't even know what recalcitrant meant, but he said I was recalcitrant. And he said, you know, he said, I know that you spend most of your time down in the practice rooms writing. I don't know how he knew that, but he said, you know something, He said, we here at the college, we don't enjoy having you here any more than you enjoy being here. So he said, if you want to be a songwriter, why don't you go to Los Angeles and be a goddamn songwriter And kicked me out of his office. And it was like an epiphody. It was like God spoke to me through my you know, through my dean of music. And when I think back on it, that was probably the thing that propelled me out of that mindset that I had to somehow get this musical education. He said, you know everything he handed He handed me my my test score, and I had an A plus on my original composition and my arranging. And I had an F for the class because of incomplete assignments and absenteeism. So I had an eight plus in the music, but I failed the mechanical demands of being a student. So I was out of there, and I borrowed some money from friends in Newport Beach who had a little extra, bought a Volkswagen and went up to Hollywood and started walking around with a battered portfolio of these songs that I've been writing since age twelve, certainly since I heard that wonderful Jerry k Parts song around look at Me with Glenn Campbell, And I'm looking at Hollywood, and I'm thinking, somewhere in Hollywood Glenn Campbell is right now. I could probably see him. I just knew which building he's in. I could go to it and I could walk in and I would see Glenn Campbell and there was a magic to that. And so I went everywhere, and like I said, I went over to Warner Brothers Music and actually got a couple of cuts with the Everly Brothers through a guy named Dick Blasser. And I thought, well, I'm I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, tear this place to pieces. Man, I'm on my way. And then it was weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks where nothing happened. And finally a friend of mine, Jimmy Stotler, who was a drummer, he said, you know, he said, his label in America. I said, what he says, it's Motown. He said, why don't you go over to Motown? I said, well, Motown is it's he says.
I know.
I know, he said, but you've done everything else. He said, try it. So I went over there. I went over to Motown, went into the office, these two big doors opened, very fancy office. I sat down with this kind of ratty sort of it was almost like a paper bag full of songs, and talked to the receptionist for a while, and I said, I'd really like to have somebody to get listen to one of my songs. And she's just having lunch, and it was Vicky. She and I got to be really close, and she said, why you poor little sprawling things. She said, We're gonna have to fatten you up. Said, are you going to fade away? She talked to me for a while, and then she said listen. She said, you got a song you really like. I said, yeah, I had one call this time last summer and I said, this one right here, and I had it on a cassette. I actually I had it on a rough reel to reel. We used to have real to reel then. And she went into the office, this big door. She went the inner office. She came right back out and closed the door. A few beats passed, and I hear.
This this time less ceremony you need bet the sky would events blue.
And I hear my song coming through the door. And then there's a pause, and then the door opens and I see this angelic face. It was a guy, Frank Wilson, and people who are familiar with the town will know who he is. He had a very soft voice and he said which I said, what he said, Well, you come in here please, and I said, I said I'm sorry. He said, would you come in here please? And I said okay, And that was it. The door opened and I walked in and life. Life was never the same after that. I worked there. I was under contract for two years. I got a cut on a Supremes album. It was a Christmas album called Merry Christmas from the Supremes. I worked with Brenda Holloway, I worked with Tony Martin. They had signed they would they would send all the white artists to me, and I have to tell you, they treated me like a prince. They really gave me the keys to the kingdom there. They gave me the education that I really needed. I got it motown. I learned to work a board, I learned the parts of the song that were important, the hook, and they were endlessly patient with me. And I wrote a lot of songs there. I walked out. When I left two years later, they said, listen, you've tried hard here, but we don't think we're ever going to be able to use these songs. And I said, here, take this song up, up and away. We're not going to use that. They said, take this. By the time we get to Phoenix. I'd written for Paul Peterson, who's like a kid who appeared on the Donner Egio, but apparently he didn't like it, so they gave me Up, Up and Away. By the time I get to Phoenix Galveston, didn't we all the early songs, not Wichita because I wrote that for Glant. So I walked out of there with four or five hit records in my knapsack, didn't know it at the time, and went to work for Johnny Rivers Music.
How'd you meet Johnny Rivers.
Through Mark Gordon who was the president of Motown at that time, and he knew I was looking for a gig and he bought out my contract. You know, it's crazy they he bought those songs. I was just telling you about all those hits. He bought those songs. There were about ten of them, and he bought my contract for fifteen thousand dollars. And the fifteenth thousand dollars I had to pay back out of my royalties, and the first, the first hit I ever had, was Up, Up and Away, and my royalties paid back. I paid back my fifteen thousand dollars and I bought a grand piano and that was my furniture. I had a little house in Laurel Canyon. Now there's a lot of to do about Laurel Canyon, and this one was there, and this one lived there, and I lived there too. I mean quietly. I'm not in the documentary, I'm not in the book. I'm not the thing. But I used to walk down to the country store, get my groceries and walk back up there, wrote things like I wrote MacArthur Park there and the only furniture I had was a bunch of mind you we were hippies. But I had a bunch of cushions, different sized cushions pushed up underneath the piano, and I slept under there. So I was sleeping under my piano. And I just roll out in the morning, sometimes take a shower, and sit down and start writing music.
And I was.
I was probably writing at least I'm gonna say I would say three songs a week, but I'll say two to three. At least two or three songs a week I would write. And they weren't written for anybody. They had no destination. They were just it was just pouring out my feelings for this girl or that girl. I had all these tragic romances, that whole row of them. And it was a very very you know, like a difficult relationship or a disappointing relationship is a gold mine for a songwriter. They'll all tell you, you know, you don't you're not gonna make it until some chick really busts you up, man, and then then you're gonna then you're gonna be fine, you know. But you know, you got some you gotta do some living. So Johnny and I I moved into his house and stayed in the back room, and we used to get on his motorcycle and go down to the Whiskey of Go Go and, uh, listen to John Lee Hooker listened to Smoky Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Can you imagine that in the Whiskey of Go Go, it's probably about as big as this studio. And uh, there they were, you know, and with all the moves and the you know, all the motown stuff and the and the outfits and and uh the go go go girls in the Cages, which were really originated at Whisky at the Whiskey, That's where that came from. The Girls in the Cages and psychedelic light shows all over the wall and stuff, and uh, we we've got we've got to be good friends. And uh he had me working with this group, Fifth Dimension, And Johnny Rivers remembered a relationship he had with Glenn Campbell. They had done an album called The Long Black Veil for Mercury Records, and he remembered that Glenn was such a great guy, such beautiful person, and such an accomplished musician. He said, you should have a hit record, and Glenn said, I just can't find the right song. And Johnny, after he signed me, one of the first things he did is cut by the time I get to Phoenix. And he called Glenn, and Glenn and Al Delorie came over to his house and heard his that they used to call it. It was a it was a rough master, is what it was.
It was.
It was a it was a record. It was a record. You know, you put it. So he put it on there, Uh, test pressing, and he put it on the thing and he and third song image like by the time we get to Phoenix. He lined it up and played it and that both of them just sat there with their mouths open. And this is the way the story was told me that Al de Laurie said, I don't get it. He says, you know you've got a hit. You know, Johnny had this. Can you tell me how much you missed me? Beautiful, beautiful thing, poor side of Town? And I think it was number one? And Ali said, I don't get it. He said, you know this is a hit. He said, this is a hit, isn't it?
You know?
And Glenn said yeah. He said, it feels pretty good. But why are you giving it to us? And he said, guys, He said, you can only have one number one record at a time. He said, but what he was really doing was doing something for me. He was doing doing it well. Of course he's helping himself as well, but he did care about me, and he put me in charge of the fifth dimension. He put me in charge of kind of their day to day rehearsing. And it turned out that they recorded up up in a week. Glenn recorded by the time we get to Phoenix, all of this happened really fast. And so in nineteen sixty seven, that's all you heard. And we went to the Monterey Pop Festival and we played up there. I played up there with a wrecking crew. Hal Blaine, Larry Necktel Joe Osborne, and there was very little. It's not you know, Johnny wasn't even in the film, and he put up twenty five percent of the money and he kind of got screwed on that deal. But I was I was just coming back from the Monterey Pop Festival and hearing two of my songs on the radio at you know, in constant rotation all the time. They were both nominated for Song of the Year by the NARIS Board, and I thought, well, that's unbelievable. First of all, is heart stopping. I mean, I was moving so fast that I was, I was out in front of my airstream. I felt I was like lightheaded, like I could couldn't breathe because I was moving. My career was moving faster than I was, and so I didn't fully grasp what was going on. But I thought, if I'm nominated twice the same category for Song of the Year, I'm gonna lose because the competition was general on my mind by Glenn Campbell that John Hartford song, which is a poem, which is an absolute masterpiece. I would have stole that song a second so and owed to Billy Joe, which was the Jimmy Haskell Spooky String Arrangement and what did Billy Joe McAllister throw off the Tallahassee Bridge, Remember that? And so Bobby was pretty hot. I thought she was that that was a very original record, and I think he got a Grammy for that arrangement. He should have. So I figured one of those songs will win. Half of my people are going to vote for a up in a way, half of my people are going to vote for Glenn. It's clearly two different groups of people, and so I won't win, but I'm going to go to the ceremony anyway because all my friends are going. And I put on my blue Knahru jacket with a silk with a Irish lace shirt underneath and went down there like I was gonna win a Grammy Award, but really didn't think I was. And I kind of leaned up on the back of the auditorium that's where you'll usually find me, like on the fringe, leaned up on the back wall, and just watch things going around, watch what people were doing, and all of a sudden, the Fifth Dimension starts winning Grammy Awards. They won a Grammy Award for Best New Artist Record of the Year Album of the Year, Best Album Cover, Best Choral Arrangement for a Group, on and on and on, and I thought, well, God, bless them, you know, I mean we worked there, I mean we worked hard together to get that, to get that album done. And then also Glenn won a Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance for By the time we get to Phoenix and I'm going, wow, this is shit going to be a pretty good night, even if. But now I'm starting to feel a little left out because everybody has a Grammy except me. And the woman lady stepped up to the microphone and said, and now she said for Song of the Year, which was one of the big awards. She said, Jimmy Webb for Up, Up and Away, And the place just went crazy and I was drunk and Larry nectl hal Blaine both had a hold of me and they escorted me up to the stage, thank god. And I got up there and I got worded, I'm looking around and the flash bulbs are popping it. I mean, I finally got off and on my way back to my ideo, I passed Glenn's table quite by accident. He reached up and grabbed my hand. That was the first time that i'd ever seen him face to face. It was like the Panhandle of Oklahoma, like like just passed before my eyes, you know, the tractor I was driving that day when I heard that Glenn Campbell's song, and it was like, how could this be happening? How could this actually be happening, because it's something that I only imagined could. I thought maybe I would get a couple of songs recorded, you know, I thought some of them were pretty good, But all of a sudden they were They were giving me the keys to Hollywood, and it was it was heady, overpowering experience, and and I lost over the fun. In the following months and years for a while, I think I may have lost some of my equilibrium. I I remember being just outraged that I wasn't sort of recognized as a California songwriter like Jerry Beckley and Dewy Ban all in America, like the Eagles, like like all those guys who you know live we all lived in the same place. That's that's that's that's where the anger came from that I was talking about earlier. But I certainly wasn't ashamed of my association with Glenn or the Fifth Dimension still hold him in the highest regard of probably the top one percent performers that I ever worked with. But I almost immediately had access to mister Satra, and you know, country boy makes good. I moved into the Philippine Embassy, which was temporarily vacant. It was on a street called Comino Paul Merrow, and it's a huge mansion. I never even seen a mansion like this, but it was for rent and I rented it, and I had a bunch of people, a bunch of friends, and so there were a lot of rooms in there, and I think I had about twenty twenty five people living with me because I embraced the whole hippie the whole ideology of love is all we need. All we need is love, as proposed by mister Lennan McCartney. It turned out that we didn't need a few other things besides love. But at that time I was spreading the wealth and I had a lot of friends. I've gone to college, I'd been to choir and inquire with and some resolved set in that I was gonna and I wasn't going to leave any of these people behind. I was going to bring them along. I didn't know where I was going, but wherever I was going, I was going to bring them with me. So I had them all in this big mansion and I'm doing my best to get them record deals, get them signed. I signed some of them to my own label. I actually put out a Christmas record with the choir, but the San Bernino Valley College Choir, and I just had this feeling that I should bring everyone else along, like the closest thing to it is we all live in the yellow submarine and yellows submarine submarine, all my friend friends will be aboard. And it didn't work. I couldn't. I couldn't do it. I was able to do get some records out for people. I got a couple of people signed, and I maintained some of the friendships that that I made there.
I was.
I was instrumental in getting Freddie Tackett started in LA who eventually joined Little Feet, still still in a little fat. I was able to do some things, but at some point I began to feel I suppose, well, I don't suppose, I know, I know that I felt guilty about my success. I felt there's a lot of people out there who, you know, really did go ahead and get their degrees and music, and there's people who can play piano better than me and can sing better than me, and there's people who write songs better than me. And it was just my turn. It was just somehow or other money. My number came up, and I think I'm I think I'm all. I had enough adversity in my life that I think I'm over the feeling guilty about it part.
Okay, you have this incredible success.
What about writing thereafter? You inhibited? Well, not particularly. I wrote to MacArthur Park afterwards, and I wrote it at the behest of Bones, how who was a legend and as the best tape cutter in Hollywood. That's why they call him Bones. He's a really good producer as well, and he was producing the Association. They were on my list of favorite bands because of they were they they like chords. I have this thing about chords, he said, Do you think called me? He said, do you think that you could do like something like with a classical bent?
You know?
He said, I want it to be rock and roll. I want it to be contemporary, but I wanted to have movements like a symphony, you know, like slow fast, slow, He says, and I really wanted to build like a like a symphony again. And I just laughed and I said, doctor, you came to the right place. I said, I'm the guy who can do this. And I wrote it on that on that piano that I bought with with the up up and away royalties, and I still have it, by the way. It's in storage right now, but I have that act and I uh. I sat there for about two or three days working on MacArthur Park.
I was.
I was really kind of proud of it.
Mm hm.
And I took it down at the studio to play it for the association and I go and I spread it out and it looks like it's it looks like an albatross. This music is like all over this big sheet with wings and they're going, oh who and I and I sat down to start playing this thing. When I did, my clothes were wretched, the clothes I had. When I sat down, I ripped the bottom out of my jeans and you could hear it. It was like Douglas Fairbanks sticking a dagger into a sail and then sliding down the sail. It was this long, ripping, embarrassing sound. And they all cracked it up and laughed and then I started playing it and I sang, I recall the yellow cotton dress. It was phoning like a way on the ground round and they turned me down. They turned it down. One reason they turned me down is I think it was just too much for them to grasp as to learn it in one bite, that it was going to take. They were at the end of an album, not the beginning. They were at the end. They just needed a song to nail down the end of this album. And Boone's house said that you guys ought to cut it. He said, well, you don't think so, and they did something else. And the story, which this is a true story, he told them. He said, the day that MacArthur Park goes into the top ten, he said, I'm resigning as your producer. Now, this is not a made up story. This is what he told the band. And months went by and somehow there's you know, stories endless. But I hooked up with this crazy Irish actor and Richard Eiris who taught me Olympic class professional drinking, and invited me over to London and said.
Oh, I'll make a record. We'll make a record and it'll be a hit and I'll be a rock star, you.
Know, And I'm going, yeah, right, But I don't care. I love the guy. He's a he's a blast to be around. We're always in a Phantom five that he bought from Princess Margaret. And he's still got the emblems on the Royal of the Royal Household on the radiator. So every gate opens everywhere we go. They just opened the gate, you know, it's and so it was hysterical fun for a long time. We went to Ireland to kill Key Limerick, which is his own hometown, and meanwhile, as a hobby, were working on this record. And I remember. The interesting thing about Richard was that when we first started out, we'd bring Roughs in from the studio and we'd be listening and he'd say, haw.
Tom, see, I think the voice is too loud. It's too loud. We need to turn up the orchestra.
And this was because he was insecure about his voice. Obviously, even though you just start in Camelot, that Alan J. Lerner score, he got through that pretty well, I thought. And then as the record progressed, his personality became to change, and finally towards the end he was saying.
Ah, Jimmy Webb, he said, you've done it again. You've got the orchestra too loud. He said, you're covering up my voice. He said, why are you covering up my voice? Said, I'm not I'm not covering up your voice. I'm just mixing the record. He said, well, my voice, you know, my mighty voice. It needs to be louder, you know, if I'm going to be a pop star.
So he went from no confidence to way too much confidence. And I'm doing the record kind of tongue in cheek and thinking, well, this is going to be a fun thing to do, and then I'll get back to Hollywood and I'll get back to the real, to the real thing that I do. And I'm telling you, when that thing came out, it was like a UFO, nobody doing what to think about it. But we back in those days, we had and I'm sure you'll remember what we called underground radio or FM radio sometimes and they would play anything. They didn't care. I mean they the disc jockeys actually could play what they wanted. This was before the playlist became iron bound, you know, law that you couldn't break, you couldn't put any you couldn't you know how it came to be that disc jockeys could no longer play the records they wanted to play. They had to play the list. Well, that's what they were doing. They were playing the list and they weren't going to play MacArthur Park. But underground they were playing it because they were playing the Long Doors version of Light My Fire, and they were playing the long Bob Dylan version of All Along the watch Tower. And there were several records out there that were six and it's sixties touching seven, and so they decide they'll play MacArthur Park. And some somewhere up somewhere in heaven, somebody punched a button and a station in the Midwest went on it in the in the afternoon and played a played the whole record in the switchboard lit up. People said, what was that? Play that again? And the next thing, you know, you have you know we used to call a breakout where you have it goes viral, like stations are picking it up. They're beginning to pick it up. It's fine, it's not it's not a sure thing, but it's like, well this is interesting. We've got like five top forty stations in the Midwest on MacArthur park the whole version, and they're altering their commercial schedule and they're changing all kinds of stuff that these stations don't do this. They don't they don't change their whole way of playing records. But it was seven minutes twenty one seconds long the original. Now you could not predict what was going to happen next because I'll just jump to the day that Ron Jacobs, who used to be a director, came in in sam Rendino, where I went to college. When Ron Jacobs called me at home instead, Hey, Jimmy, he said, we've got this MacArthur Parker record over here, and he said we'd like to go on it. And I said, well, have you got cag J was the hottest top forty radio station in the country, and the real Don Steele was their top jock over there. And they said, the only thing is we want you to edit it because we can't play seven minutes twenty We can't play seven minutes and twenty one seconds on cage J. We can't do it. You know, they won't let us do it. Bill Drake won't let us do it. Bill Drake was like doing all the playlist and Bill Drake was was programming fifteen hundred radio stations. The fifteen hundred radio stations were playing his list, and so I said, well, I'll have to think about it. Ron, and I talked to my partner in crime, his fellow name William F. Williams, and I said, what do you think I ought to do? And he said a four letter expletive. Expedit them. They can like play it like it is or piss off. Right. So when Ron called back, I said, Ron, I've thought about it, and for artistic reasons, and I said, it would be nice to have the record on cag J, but I can't. I'm not going to edit it. I said, I don't think it makes any sense when you edit it. It doesn't. It only sounds like something when it's all put together the way it's supposed to be put together. Otherwise it's just it's fragmentary and you don't know what you're listening. He said, okay, okay, okay, he said all right, He said, I'll get back to you. The next day. Case J went on MacArthur Park the full length version, and from then on d it was it was a stone cold hit. It went to number two in America, went to number one in the United Kingdom twice. In other words, it went up to number one, came down, then went back up to number one, and roughly ten years later was number one in the United States with Donna Summers disco version, and so the the you know, this little, this unlikely project with this eye, and he had a big career off of that. He played everywhere, He made several albums, he he did Okay behind it.
Tell us the story of wichital alignment.
Well, which till i'mann came fairly fairly in close proximity to the other events that I've been describing. But like I said, it was all happening so fast. Glenn called me one day at home and said, you know, I need to follow up for by the time I get to Phoenix. Now, I don't know, there may be people out there who don't know what a follow up is, but I think you know what one is, and uh, just in case there are there are those out there who don't realize the way the record business used to be is if you had a hit record, you would put out another one that had a similar orchestration, similar characteristics, same artist, and it wasn't supposed to be the same song, but it was supposed to evoke the first song, so that you were borrowing from the popularity of the first record, and some of it was supposed to rub off on the second record, but it had to be a different thing. Uh, but similarities built in, and that's what a follow up was.
And uh.
In fact, when I was learning to write songs, so that's all I listened to was follow ups because I was comparing my follow ups to theirs, And at one point I decided my follow ups were as good as theirs are better, and so I really, they don't do that anymore. I don't think. I don't think it per se that they do that anymore. But then they they did. And Glenn said, I really need this follow up. He said, can you write me something about a town? And I'm thinking, oh, Lord, and I and I and I said, Glenn, I said, I think I think I'm just about finishing with my rand McNally phase. I'm you know, drowning in towns over here. And I he said, oh, well, that's too bad. He said, well, he said, how about could you make it geographical? And I said, well, I guess yeah. Let me think about that for a minute, hung up the phone, sat there, and all of a sudden, I know you'll think I'm making this up, But West Texas and Oklahoma, Panana drifts in front of my eyes, that big flat slab of prairie, and the fact that you could drive for fifty miles over into Mexico, New Mexico and not see anything. Maybe a pig farm here, pig farm there, but nothing, not a business. Some old, maybe ramshackle farmhouses that were already laying down, very in a way desolate. But I loved it. I loved it. I love it still, especially the at night the stars. But I'm driving along in my mind and I see the man up on the telephone pole on the phone, and I thought that guy there was always a guy up there talking on the phone. Who was he talking to? And I remember our dad. You stopped the car and say now, because it was real quiet out there, there was nobody else out there. And Dad would say, okay, now, but he still he says, we're going to walk up on these telephone wires and I want you to listen. And we'd walk up close to the to the pole and just being really quiet and listening and you could hear the wire, you could hear the wires. You could hear them like you could hear them doing that. Hence the line, I hear you singing in the wires. So I thought, I'm going to write it about the man on the pole because I wanted to write her out blue collar heroes. They were my heroes, like in Galveston. He's why is he from Galveston? Well, he's from Galveston because it's a damn hard town to grow up in. It was no Riviera, and I wanted an ordinary guy. And so here's an ordinary guy up on a telephone pole and what is he thinking. He's thinking that he's in love with this girl, and it just began to unroll. I got the melody and a few chords. I start off on this, you know, journey. Every song is a journey. It's taking you somewhere. Sometimes it takes you to the end of the road where all the burnout cars aren't. You got a bummer. But this one wanted to be written. So when a song wants to be written, it will help you. It will help you. It will write with you and not against you. And that's that's what I call being connected. And for those unbelievers out there, you know, who feel sorry for me, I feel just as sorry for you. But I know that there is this connection. I know it because I've used it in many, many, many times in my life when I was in trouble, when I needed help, when I was unhappy. When I was writing a song and I said, please God, you know, give me a give me an idea, he give me a line, give me something I gotta So I wrote these two verses, and he was calling me like every five minutes from western three and saying is it done yet? Is it done yet? And what I wanted to say was that go on, you know, if you guys would stop calling me up here, you know I got this thing done, you know. So from like eleven in the morning to like about five five point thirty took me to like bang out a couple of verses pretty much what you know when you when you think of the song. But I was wondering at the time, is this enough? See where getting to the it's the first verse, I'm gonta do it again. Okay, so two verses. Now I'm as a songwriter and a professional songwriter, I'm sitting I'm going to Okay, now do I need to now do? And I need to go? You know I need to go. Why don't you come along with me? So I'm gonna bridge and go back into that melody or or do I And then I'm gonna have to write a last verse, you know. I exhausted. I put it in a Manila envelope and I put my cassette in there, and I wrote a note, dear Glenn, this song isn't finished. But I thought I would run it past you guys, and if you want me to keep right and all right, if you don't want it, let me know, and put a smiley face on it, and called a messenger and sent it down to Western Three. Didn't hear anything about it for a long time. It was probably three weeks later. I'd say that I walked into Armnsteiner's sound recorders and Glenn was there with the boys with the with the gang and working. Apparently he was because he was still sitting in with the recon crew, even though he was becoming a star. He was sitting in with the record group. And I walked in and I said, so, how you doing. Go ahead, I'm doing fine, said well, I said, you know, listen, I don't want you to feel bad about that tune I wrote. I said, you know, I wrote it in kind of a hurry, and I realized it's it's kind of outside and I said, you know, don't worry about it, because I'm really used to rejection, you know, because writing songs is ninety percent rejection. So we get unless unless if you don't, if you can't digest rejection and judgment, sometimes a false judgment, but a harsh judgment from somebody else, you should get in another line of work because you're going to have a steady diet of disappointment and rejection. So I was hardened by then. I'd been to my town, I'd done my thing, and I said, you know, I'll write another one. He says, you're talking about which to lineman and I said yeah, and he said we cut that And I said, well, didn't you see the note. Didn't you see where it said this is not finished. Call me in let me know what you think. He said. I said, because Glenn, it really wasn't finished. And he said it is now, and they played it for me and it was beautiful. It was beautiful, and I ended up overdubbing an Oregon on it. I had a church organ in my house, gul Branson Series seven hundred, and we didn't have synthesizers, but church organs had a lot of bells and whistles on them. They had a lot of different kind of sounds ethereal angelic kind of things on them. And if you listen to the very beginning of the records, you can hear it clearly. I'm playing these little forests and fist going, but it's in heavy sustain and the organ's going. It's tremologus and it sounds like a satellite. You sort of hear it on the beginning, then you hear it prominently on the fade. So that was my contribution to the record.
So how did you feel when the hits dried up?
Well, I don't know. I knew that it was inevitable in a sense, but there was I was always being covered, even when, even when I didn't have hit songs per se on the charts. Was I was getting covers off my own albums of different things. And like I said, in seventy eight, Donna Summer had a number one with MacArthur Park again, and in eighty six ten years later I had Highwaymen with Willie Neilson Whale and Jenny's christ Consasson, Chris Christofferson Johnny Cash, which went to number one, which was a country music video of the Year, and then they named the group The Highwayman, the Highwayman, and they went on the road, and that song is still being covered. The last time it was covered was with Amanda McBride and her the ladies that call themselves the high Women, who I told them just to go write their own words for it. But in that sense, I never I never felt that I wasn't getting things done or that good things weren't happening for me. And I don't know. I I think that you look at everybody in this business, and not only that, but the business that I'm in, and in the business that Cole Porter was in, and then before him, the business that Jerome Kern was in, and you realize that it happens to everybody. It happens to everybody. There's a there's an arc, it goes up, it levels off for a while, and inevitably it begins to client. Unless you do something about that, Unless you do something to change that trajectory. The only thing I could think of doing was cutting a hit album as a singer songwriter. I thought that would change. I thought that would that would be back on the charts, back back at the very center of things. And uh and and that's when I began butting my head against that brick wall. And I made an album. The first one I produced by myself. The second one I cut at my home studio, which is out Ensino. And I stress that I I didn't stop making money because I didn't have records on the charts. I was still you know, my my annual income was pretty much the same, you know it was. It was steady, so there. So there was still a lot of play in those tunes, and there were a lot of sync riots and different things going on. Tried my hand at scoring a couple of films. I didn't really feel like, I I don't know, it didn't click. I made an album with George Martin. I thought that might cure me. We made a lovely album. Not much happened. The album, probably the best album that I ever cut a solo artist, was Suspending Disbelief that I did with Linda Ronstatt and George Messenberg. And another little album called ten Easy Pieces, which is a cult hit that I cut in a basement up in Toronto. Was the first time I ever sung any of those hit songs. And people can call me right now. As soon as and when I get home, there'll be messages for people call me and saying can I get that album? And the fact is that it's not being manufactured anymore, so I'm gonna have to It's a different world. I'm gonna have to trade. I'm gonna have to find that those masters and either get permission from those people to get them to press some records for me to sell. Because we make a lot of money on merchandise as well. I mean, that's where we are today, recording all recording artists, everybody. It's merchandise and live gigs and that's real money that you can and it's substantial if you. I mean this tour I'm doing just to give you, give you some idea. This isn't all of it that I'm I'm starting in except September through December. I'm doing what twenty shows. I'm doing Paramount Hudson Valley. I'm doing the Old Town School of Folk in Chicago. I'm doing the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, which I said last time I was there, I sold it out. They wanted to do two nights. I'm doing Yoshi's in Oakland. I think I sold that place out. The Vogel many An Apple, Minneapolis. My concerts are always full of there, Kansas City, Saint Louis, same thing, Austin. Austin's a little bit more difficult for me, but that's a few of the places that I'm going to be playing. Just at the end of this year. And before COVID, I was doing like fifty a year, and I was making some decent money, and I thought, well, this is real money, and I'm making the money by doing something that I love to do, and I'm exposing my music to the public. And that's an avenue that's been close to me. By this digital machine thing that they've set up here. They don't, you know, I'm not going to be I don't think breaking a record on Spotify, so you know, I I wish some things could have gone better for me, But by and large, it's just been a great life surrounded by wonderful friends, helpers all along the way, and great personalities and friends for life everywhere and I don't think that my life has been too different from that of the average songwriter. I think that most songwriters will have a red hot moment like a Paul Anka, and then styles change, and and and and the spotlight the spotlight, the spotlight goes, some focuses somewhere else. I watched the same thing happen to film stars, and I see like one of my old favorite actors like doing some cheap movie that I mean really cheap. You can tell that it's it's it's being shot you know on it's you know, it's it's being shot with with the home home cameras and mh. I realized that it must be very disappointing for them not to be commanding the kind of salaries that commanded the kind of respect when they walk into a room. I understand all that, but I cling to the idea that I am one of the best people that do what I do, that I could be better, that all I need is a Broadway show. All I need that anything can happen, and it always has happened for me, and I expect it.
Well again, Okay, you know, I don't mean to cut you short, but we've been going on a long time. Maybe we'll come back and visit again. But I think you've been a good case for people to go to see you live. There's a lot of stuff I want to know more like the Linda Ronstad easy for you to say and the lyrics. But I think for now this is a good stopping point.
Okay. I mean, I hope I've given you something. Oh you're giving me. You're giving me a lot.
I mean there's a lot. You know. Listen, when you start telling about your personality and when you start telling about the tales of your I eat that stuff up.
Well, you know, listen, Robert, it's tough. It's not a life that I would recommend to anybody, but but it's mine, and I would if I had to do it again, I would do it again. Would I not work with Frank Sinatra because he wasn't because he was a Republican and because you know, the hippies didn't like him, you know, would I?
No?
I don't think.
So.
I was privileged to walk with them, to know Lewis Armstrong, to to know rosem Rosemy. It gives me a perspective. It's very unique because I so new intimately, well, I don't want to say antimately, because that that's an inference that I don't want to put on that. But I had fantastic relationship with Share and with with the Supremes and with Linda Ronstadt and and uh Graham Nash and David h who were always like good, good pals of mine. It's enough already, well I could always get more.
But Jimmy, I want to thank you for taking this time with my audience.
Well, thank you. It's an honor to be on this show. It's it's well known hot spot on the internet, and I congratulate you on that. And I haven't I hope I haven't misled anyone. And if I've made an error, h please the public is invited to point out my shortcomings and honor respond on jimmyweb dot com.
Okay, you can reach out to Jimmy there. Until next time. This is Bob left Sis