Jimmy Webb on a life in music and working with ‘otherworldly’ Glen Campbell

From Glen Campbell’s Galveston, By The Time I Get To Phoenix and Wichita Lineman, to Richard Harris’s MacArthur Park and numerous hits for the likes of Art Garfunkel, The Supremes, Michael Feinstein and many others, Jimmy Webb has written some of the most beloved entries to the Great American Songbook. Now, as he prepares to tour for the first time since the pandemic, he sits down for a chat with Headliner about his journey from local church pianist to becoming one of the greatest songwriters of the past century…

“Any day above ground is a good day,” Jimmy Webb chuckles as we greet him over Zoom at his home in Long Island. The legendary songwriter is in good spirits and clearly looking forward to performing again, with numerous dates confirmed on both sides of the pond. 

“America is my home but I still get homesick for England,” he says, “I’m an unashamed Anglophile and have always thought of it as my second home.”

With an arsenal of hits at his disposal that would take most hit songwriters several lifetimes over to amass, it’s little wonder he’s looking forward to getting back in the saddle. Name any iconic American rock or pop act from the past 60-plus years and Webb has likely had some involvement in their oeuvre. He could perform a different set every night of the tour and every single one would still be a cast iron crowd-pleaser.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, his prodigious musical talents began to reveal themselves at a very young age, becoming the pianist for his local church at the age of 12, where his dad was a Baptist minister, before quickly having his head turned by the allure of Elvis Presley and rock ‘n’ roll. This collision of worlds was pivotal in inspiring the young Webb not just to write songs, but to pursue the craft as a calling.

“Around that time I wrote a song called It’s Someone Else, and a couple of decades later that song was recorded by Art Garfunkel – I was already on my game by the time I was 12 years old,” he says. “But that was also inspired by feelings of social inadequacy and that rush of hormones that usually hits us all around that age. All of a sudden girls begin to mean something; we’re not quite sure what it is but we know it’s big! I found I could get a bit of attention – they did not laugh when I sat down to play the piano. I wasn’t much at football – my brother was a star athlete – but I could manage to work my way through most of the songs I heard on the radio. 

"I had this diabolically clever ear; I could seize these tunes out of thin air, and I was quite popular at school, playing the current hits. In the summer I’d go out with my father on the evangelical tours that we took and that’s a kind of show business – I don’t want to shock anyone [laughs] – but it really was. It was like, have a good sermon, a good song, then everybody is happy and you’re doing it for Jesus. But it was show business in its purest form.”

Despite his obvious musical skill, Webb’s dreams of ‘making it’ didn’t materialise quite as readily as he had anticipated.

“By the time I was 17 I was on my own in Hollywood and I was a self-proclaimed songwriter,” he elaborates. “I had a little contract at Motown Records, and I was working with The Supremes a little bit. I thought I was on top of the world, but I was making less than $100 a week, and it was a little bit rough. Finding accommodation and three meals a day was out of the question. 

"I had a lot of songs though - about 50 pretty damn good ones. I knew Dick Glasser who had produced the Everly Brothers, so I worked on a few things that went on one of their records. They were still a big deal, but absolutely nothing happened afterwards. The phone didn’t ring. That’s kind of a tough thing to wake up to in the morning when you’ve staked your whole existence on the idea you are going to do this for a living.”

Webb’s big break would come in the form of a partnership that would in many ways define his career. While working with singer songwriter Johnny Rivers, a song that he had written wound up in the hands of one of America’s most revered musicians and country music stars. The song was By The Time I Get To Phoenix and the artist was a certain Glen Campbell.

“That’s when the phone started ringing,” Webb laughs. “Once you’ve tasted that you’re not going back to playing the piano at the church on a Sunday. “It was a transformation. One year, I didn’t turn in any tax – if you made less than $600 a year you didn’t have to pay any - then a year later… well, it would be in poor taste to talk about how much I was making, but it was almost disgraceful. 

"I remember filing my first tax return, and I phoned my father and said ‘dad, you were wrong’! And it was really quiet at the other end of the phone because he had never seen that much money before in his life. To him it was a revelation. I think he was sincerely trying to keep me away from something he thought might hurt me really badly. It was like he'd been slapped in the face with a big cod. He couldn’t believe this straight C student, a loser, had actually done this.”

According to Webb, the origins of his relationship with Campbell reach beyond the landing of By the Time I Get To Phoenix in his lap and extend almost into the realm of the mystical.

“I could tell you the straight version of our connection but I’m going to tell you the uncanny version, which is absolutely true,” says Webb, smiling and evidently revelling in recounting tales of his late friend. 

“I was out in Oklahoma ploughing the fields, listening to my transistor radio and one of the records that came on was this beautiful ballad called Turn Around, Look At Me and the guy singing the song had the purest voice. I was 14 or so and he would have been 24-25. He was always exactly 10 years older than I was, and to me that seemed very old at that age! And I said to myself ‘that’s the guy I want to be writing for’. Then his name was announced, and it was one of his early recordings. It was the first record I ever bought. I borrowed a dollar from my dad, and I bought this 45” and I wore it out…[pauses] I was writing songs for Glen Campbell from then on.

“Now, I had nothing to base that on. Astronomically, the odds of me meeting Glen Campbell at that time in my life was a zillion to nothing. It wasn’t going to happen, but somehow it did happen. And I found out my songs had a wonderful fit with his voice. Part of the reason for that was because I’d been writing songs for him for years. I know that sounds insane, it’s like a fairy tale. 

"We couldn’t have been further apart politically – I was way over on the left, he was way over on the right – and I almost didn’t want to be associated with him because it was hurting what I wanted to do, but there was no getting away. It was just record, after record, after record. And we came to be really close friends, and musically we were kindred souls. I loved being on stage with him and he’d put a little idea out there on the guitar, I’d pick it up on piano. 

"It was like talking a private language. He can do something that few guitar players can do – he can stand behind me and look at my hands on the keyboard and play the chords I was playing on the piano. He was an extraordinarily gifted guy. He played pretty good bagpipes. I heard him once play Bonaparte’s Retreat through his nose and it was clear as a bell,” he laughs out loud. “He was an innately musical character – maybe one of the best we ever had.”

Webb also points out that there was a spiky side to Campbell’s personality that would emerge from time to time, particularly in the early days of their partnership.

“He could be a Tyrannosaurus Rex to the band if they did something wrong,” he states. 

“He would dress them down and I hated to see that going on in front of an audience. I’ve been guilty a couple of times, but I can tell you it’s something you don’t want to do. The band remembers. They never forget. He could be temperamental about the performance. He would change my songs; he’d suggest something and often it would sound a little bit better. 

"His instincts were almost otherworldly when it came to what he thought would be successful with the public. He was always right. He had the gift of arranging for the public. Galveston, he did it twice as fast as I did it. For me it was a sad song, but he made it a happy one.”

One of the best loved songs Webb ever wrote for Campbell was the 1968 classic Wichita Lineman. The song would go on to be, as he puts it, one of the most important he would ever write.

“That’s a song I wrote for Glen and one of the few I ever wrote for an artist,” says Webb, explaining the song’s inception. “He was looking for a follow up for By The Time I Get To Phoenix. He wanted to make a geographical song – I’d had MacArthur Park, Galveston, so I said ‘let me see what I can do’. I had an image of the prairie, which is where I was born and raised, and when I was a kid there was very little to see. 

"I’d drive along with my father and watch the telephone poles go by, and every now and again there would be a man working on a telephone pole. Sometimes you’d look up and see they had a little phone they were speaking on, and I’d wonder who he was talking to. There was a mystery about these guys and the fact they were always out there in the wind and the storms, they were always out there taking the brunt of the weather in that part of the country. I thought this could be a character that would work with Glen. It’s about this blue-collar guy who kind of became my hero. Nobody paid much attention to them and here was a song that was about them, about a guy doing a job.

“When we were kids, we would go up to these telephone wires and they actually sang,” he continues. “The sound was like a pinging noise. It was an electronic sound, and it was singing - if you walked up to the wires, you could hear it. So, the line ‘I hear you singing in the wires’, is a reference to that. Glen was calling me every hour from the studio saying ‘is it finished yet’? I got tired of it about 5pm that afternoon and I sent it to him with a note saying ‘it isn’t finished but let me know what you think’. And they recorded it right then and there. I thought, Oh my God, it’s not finished. I thought there would be a third verse, but he took the third verse and put that big fat bass guitar solo in there. It seemed born to be that way. That was Glen and I working together and the end result is more than the sum of its parts. It turned out to be one of the most important records I was ever associated with. There’s nothing out of place, it’s just magic.”

Before we know it, our time with Webb is almost at an end. Indeed, we could spend days in conversation with him and still struggle to scratch the surface of the tales his storied career has to tell. But as we say our goodbyes he quickly refers us to another collaborator he holds close to his heart.

“I had a very special relationship with Richard Harris,” he says. “He was an extremely strong, domineering personality and in his shadow I was really a kid. He was in his 40s, I was just in my 20s and innocent as a lamb, believe it or not! He set about correcting that immediately! I had my first black velvet with Richard Harris – but for him, his Guinness would be half Guinness, half champagne. 

"After a few of these we would go down to the recording studio and he would take a pitcher of Pimms with him, and we’d start recording vocals, and we weren’t finished until the Pimms was finished. We would go rollicking back to his apartment at 2am. Then he’d start on the brandy and start taking off his clothes, and pretty soon he’s just sitting there in his underwear telling me stories. Absolutely outrageously funny.

“I remember one night I went upstairs because it looked like he’d fallen asleep, so I went to go to sleep and was awakened by the doorbell and I can hear the birds singing. I go down to the front door and there is a cabbie who has him by the shoulders and he says ‘is this where Mr Harris lives’? I said yeah, and tells me he just found him in the middle of the King’s Road in his underwear and was giving a concert! It was one mad thing after another. Years and years of fun and we managed to somehow knock off this unbelievable record MacArthur Park.”

Jimmy Webb is touring the UK and Ireland in May and June 2022. See dates and book tickets here.