Platinum songwriter Jimmy Webb

This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. MacArthur's pop is melting in the dark. All the sweet green icing flowing down. Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don't think that I can take it, cause it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again. That's MacArthur Park, with some of the most baffling song lyrics in music. Even so, it became a huge hit for Richard Harris in 1968. It was written by Jimmy Webb, who wrote quite a few hit songs in the 60s and 70s. They include By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, and Galveston by Glen Campbell. Webb's other songs include Didn't We, recorded by Barbara Streisand, Up, Up and Away, and The Worst That Could Happen by The Fifth Dimension, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Linda Ronstadt. At one point, he had five top ten songs in less than two years. Webb turned 80 years old in August, and there's a new album of his unreleased songs, titled Yours for the Taking. This weekend, Webb appears at the Grand Ole Opry, and later this month, he'll be featured in a PBS Great Performances special. Webb has a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He got his start in the business as a staff songwriter for Motown. We're going to listen to Terry's 2004 interview with Jimmy Webb. She began by asking him about his song By the Time I Get to Phoenix. The long and varied list of singers who've recorded it besides Glen Campbell include Isaac Hayes, Marty Robbins, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, Nick Cave, Dean Martin, William Bell, James Brown, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Four Tops, Solomon Burke, Ray Price, Sarah Vaughan, Harry Belafonte, and Peggy Lee. Let's talk about one of your best-known songs, and that is By the Time I Get to Phoenix. Mm-hmm. I was reading this is the third most-performed song in the last 50 years, according to BMI, who should know. Wow. How did you write the song? Well, it's more of a song about something I wish I had done than something I really did, in that I did not get in my car and drive back to Oklahoma to punish this young woman for not reciprocating my love and affection. And in fact, a guy approached me one night after a concert and he had a map and he had all the times and he had a stopwatch and he showed me how it was impossible for me to drive from L.A. to Phoenix and then how far it was to Albuquerque. And then in short, he told me, this song is impossible. And so it is. It's a kind of fantasy about something I wish I would have done and it sort of takes place in a twilight zone of reality. I hasten to add that I think that the appeal of the song lies in its sort of succinct tale, its beginning, middle, and end. And the fact that it sort of has an O. Henry-esque twist at the end, which consists merely of the guy saying, she didn't really think that I would go, but he did. And in fact, I didn't. I didn't go. I stayed for more punishment. Does the woman or girl, I don't know how old you were, that you wrote this for know that it was about her? Oh, yes, she does. And she's still, thankfully, she's very much alive and she's actually married into the Ronstadt clan. Her name is Susan Ronstadt now. And she and I are very, very close friends. And there were many, many, many songs that were inspired by her and came about as a result of our, of our, well, very young relationship. High school. She was a high school sweetheart. Well, I think this would be a good time to hear the Glen Campbell version of By the Time I Get to Phoenix, written by my guest, Jimmy Webb. ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶ By the time I get to Phoenix ¶ She'll be rising ¶ She'll find the note I left hanging ¶ On her door ¶ She'll laugh when she reads the part ¶ That says I'm leaving Cause I've left that girl so many times before By the time I make Albuquerque She'll be working She'll probably stop at lunch And give me a call But she'll just hear that phone Keep on ringing Off the wall That's all By the time I make Oklahoma She'll be sleeping She'll turn softly By the time I got to Phoenix I started a short series of place songs Galveston, Wichita, Lineman Did you start to think that if you put a place name in the song That it would hit? No, it wasn't so much It wasn't so much My doing As it was As it was Deliberate manipulation On the part of A&R And the labels And In their attempts to engineer What we called in those days A follow-up record But I remember particularly The day that they called me About Wichita And said Glenn's looking for a follow-up For by the time I get to Phoenix But it's gotta be a place And I thought Well, okay I didn't particularly like that idea I'm not someone who thinks that way Or creates that way But I'm a young songwriter And I think I've got the chops to do it And I sit down And I spend Maybe an hour and 45 minutes Or two hours Working on a song I come up with a concept Based on some memories I have Of some blue-collar guys Working on telephone lines Around liberal Kansas And the panhandle of Oklahoma Out there in that great Kind of Land of no horizon And I called them up And I said I've got a song over here I said But I don't really think it's finished And they said Well, send it over anyway And I said I sent it over And they called me back In a state of exaltation Over what I had written And they put it out And it became this huge hit And This song has Had an People still tell me And it bothers me a little bit Because when I was writing my book On songwriting Tunesmith I actually for the first time Analyzed some of my songs And I was really happy about it And I was really happy about it And I was really happy about it And I was really shocked And appalled At what I found And one of the things That I found was That in Wichita Lineman There's a line That goes like this And I need you more than want you And I want you for all time And the Wichita Lineman Is still on the line And the first thing I thought of When I read it Is false rhyme That's a false rhyme Line in time That's the biggest That's the most biggest Awfulest Dumbest Most obvious False rhyme In history And night after night At performance after performance Person after person Comes up to me Until now I'm talking about A hundred thousand people Have walked up to me And said You know the greatest line You ever wrote I need you more than want you And I want you for all time You know And so I don't know how to explain that I wouldn't have Had I known what I was doing I wouldn't have written that line I would have found a way To make it rhyme It was only years later That I became aware Of what a songwriter Was even supposed to do I was really just a kid Who was kind of Writing from the hip And the heart Why don't we hear Freedy Johnson's version of that You familiar with the version? I've heard it And I like it Good, me too Let's hear it I am a lineman For the county And I ride the main road Searching in the sun for another overload I hear you singing in the wires I hear you through the wind And the Wichita lineman Is still on the line You know I need a short vacation I need a short vacation But it don't look like rain And if it snows that stretch down south We'll never take the strain And I need you more than I want to And I want you for all time That's Freedy. We'll hear more of Terry's interview with Jimmy Webb after a break. This is Fresh Air. You grew up in Oklahoma. Your father was a Baptist minister. How did the church figure into your daily life and into your musical life as a child? It was a totally all-encompassing influence in that when you're the son of a Southern Baptist minister, you are informed at a very early age that you are a Christian. You are a Christian. You are a part and parcel of his ministry and that your behavior reflects on his image in the community and therefore your every movement, your every word, everything that you do is monitored. And that includes the music that you play, the music that you listen to. And my mother's dream from the very beginning when she started me on piano at six years of age, was that I would be church pianist. And I was. By the time I was 12 years old, I was playing. I was the church pianist. And I was, I had also moved over to Oregon and was a large part of the musical program in the church. And we did specials. We sang three-part. My father played guitar. My mother played accordion. I can just remember the top of my mother's head sticking over this big honer accordion. She was singing. It was short. And the accordion was taller than she was. Well, that sounds very hip, guitar, accordion, and piano. Oh, it was pretty cool. And we learned some very, very useful things. I mean, to improvise three-part harmony on the fly. I mean, that's a pretty cool thing to learn when you're a kid. And it also got us up in front of people and got us, and I say us because I had siblings. I had a brother and three sisters. And we all sang. Now, your family moved to Southern California to San Bernardino in 1964. Did your father get a church there? Yes, he was pastoring in Colton. And I finished my high school in Colton. I graduated as a senior from Colton High School. It was the year that JFK was assassinated. And it was also the year that my mother died. And so it was really cool because it was quite an eye-opener for me. And it's interesting to note that my mother, after expending these huge reserves of energy, sort of lashing me into a somewhat formidable young musician, that she died before I ever did anything. She never heard me. She never heard one of my songs on the radio. She never saw me get one award. She never saw one piece of sheet music on the piano with my name on it. I have regrets about that because had she lived just a little bit longer, I think she would have been really proud of me, you know? Sure, sure. So all of a sudden, I was exposed to the Beach Boys, which was like, it was like a fish to water. I mean, I loved Southern California. I loved the lifestyle. I loved the Beach Boys. I loved the Righteous Brothers. And I just wanted to get into it. I wanted to get into the record business. Did your father love you doing that? No, he didn't. And because one of the precepts of the Baptist Church, Terry, is that we do not believe in dancing. The Southern Baptist Church does not believe in dancing. In fact, Glenn Campbell told me a story. He said, Jimmy, he says, you know why Baptists don't make love standing up, don't you? And I said, no, how come? He says, because they're afraid people will think they're dancing. That's kind of a typical Glenn Campbell story. I think it's a pretty good one. But, you know, I had to sort of sneak out of the house to play dances, which I did, because, hey, you could pick up 15 or 20 bucks. And I had three or four guys I played with. When the Beatles came along, I was playing Dave Brubeck. Dave Brubeck had a brother named Howard, and Howard laboriously transcribed every note that Dave Brubeck ever played, including all of Paul Desmond's solos and everything else. It was all in ink, pen and ink. And we, with equal fervor, digested all of these transcriptions and learned to play Dave Brubeck. And we could cough it up. We could play Blue Rondo a la Turk, just like Howard had written. The year your mother died, your father moved back to Oklahoma. You didn't. You stayed in California. Did your father want you to go with him? He sure did. I remember we were standing in San Bernardino, California, in the parking lot of the Paradise Palm Motel. And my dad had the car packed, and he and my sisters, my brothers, was in the car. And I was standing. And I said, "Dad, I'm not going." I said, "There's no way in the world that I'm going back to Oklahoma after coming all this way and being this close to Hollywood. I just have to try it. I have to try it." He said, "Son," he said, "this songwriting thing," he says, "it's just going to break your heart." And P.S., he was right about that more than once. But he said, "But," and he dug down in his pocket, and he came up with $40. And he said, "Son," he says, "this is all I've got." But he says, "It's yours." And he gave me 40 bucks, and he got in his caravan, his little trailer truck thing, and off he went. And that was a lonely, very isolated moment in time, standing there in a parking lot with these neon lights blinking. These kind of electronic palm trees blinking on and off over my head going, "Now what have I done? How am I going to handle this?" How long was it between that moment and getting your contract working for Motown Publishing? Well, it was not much longer than a year. I borrowed $1,000 from some friends of mine in Newport Beach. I bought a VW. It cost me $600. I started -- I was going to junior college. I was a music major and not doing very well because my mind was on something else, and just eking by on whatever money I could make on gigs. But about a year later, I had -- after exhausting every other opportunity, I walked into the offices at JoBet, and Vicki, this big woman who sat behind the reception desk, says, "You must be lost." And she had a good laugh, and I sat down and talked to her for a while. And she ended up taking one of my tapes into the inner sanctum of the office at JoBet and playing it. And I could hear it playing through the door. And after the song, the door opened, and a young man, black man named Frank Wilson, stuck his head out the door and cocked his head at me and said very, very softly, said, "Would you come in here, please?" And that was literally the moment. It was like the allegorical moment, if you will, when the door opened for me. You started writing hit songs at an interesting time in the history of radio. You know, we're talking the latter part of the 1960s, so it's a time when you still have pop music on AM, and you have the beginnings of, you know, progressive rock on the FM. Underground, we used to call it. Underground, yeah. So, your songs were falling-- a bit on both, weren't they? I was very fortunate that way. If it hadn't been for FM, quote, underground, unquote, radio, MacArthur Park would have never been broken as a single because Top 40 was not going to play MacArthur Park. It was seven minutes and 20 seconds long, parentheses, and Hey Jude is seven minutes, 21 seconds long. I'm sure that's just a coincidence. But MacArthur Park would never have broken on Top 40. In fact, I remember Ron Jacobs calling me from KHJ in Los Angeles and saying, well, go on MacArthur Park, but you have to edit it for us. And I just said, no, I'm not going to do that. And they said, well, you realize what you're doing. I mean, you're throwing away a hit record. And I said, well, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to edit it because that's what it is. And a week later, they were on it. And as soon as stations like KHJ started playing MacArthur Park in its entirety, forget it. It rolled across the country. It was inescapable. And I felt terrible for people like Herbert Saul at Newsweek Magazine, who lamented in a whole page of Newsweek that he had spent his entire summer trying to escape. And I said, well, I'm not going to do that. And they said, well, I'm not going to do that. It's your fault. Well, MacArthur Park and Stairway to Heaven are two of the most like baffling lyrics in the history of pop songs. So let's go over the lyric a little bit. Let's don't. Oh, no, no, no, no. We have to. We have to. Anyway, go ahead. I know we have to do this. We have to do this. So, you know, with my apologies here, you know, here we go. MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark. All the sweet green icing melting down. Flowing down. Flowing down. Excuse me. I don't think that I can make it, but it took so long to bake it and I'll never have the recipe again. I don't think that I can take it because it took so long to bake it. Sorry. You know, you rewrite it in your mind and that's the way you sing it to yourself. Anyway, you can freely substitute. I don't really think it matters that much. What were you thinking about when you wrote this? What is it? Well, I was I was thinking about the end of a love affair and, you know, in a very lurid sort of melodramatic terms because I this whole love affair had taken place in in and about the environs of of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, which in those days was this kind of lovely little park with ducks and things. Now it's it's like I don't I don't know what it is. I think it's even smaller. I think they've they've chopped it down into a smaller piece of real estate. But there were a lot of people who were like, well, I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is. But there were boats there and it passed for a romantic place when when one was a teenager. And so really. I make no defense of the lyrics of MacArthur Park. They were they were they were written in a in a hallucinogenic era when actually such lyrics are quite common and most of them don't need to be defended. It was an era of that kind of thing. See, you're using the psychedelic defense. Well, it's not even a defense. I think it's I again, I stand by MacArthur Park. I and it is a very viable attempt to coalesce rock and classical music and sort of format something for the radio that has movements that has a kind of grandiose symphonic feeling to it. I'm really not. I did the arrangement myself. I won a Grammy for it. So, I mean, I don't think there's anything to defend, really. It was just part of a lot of kind of careless lyric writing. Songwriter Jimmy Webb speaking with Terry Gross. We'll hear more after a break. This is Fresh Air. It's interesting, you know, it does have this kind of like trippy lyric about the cake melting in the rain and everything. And, you know, Richard Harris had the hit. And he, you know, I don't think he struck anybody as being particularly of, you know, like the groovy psychedelic era. So it was kind of odd matching in a way. He thought he was. Well, judging from I'm looking at the album jacket of the CD reissue, and I don't know if this is the same thing that was on the album, but there's a picture of him in a park. I don't know if it's the park. Wearing like a black robe. Looking very sullen. Yes. He's sitting in this kind of throne. With a red headband tied around his forehead. Yeah. He saw himself that way, too. He always saw himself on a throne. In fact, he ended his career playing kings. He played Caesar. And then in Harry Potter, he sort of he was playing sort of the king of the magicians. But he was a king. And I just want to tell you that before we say too much about him, that I just attended a memorial. Service for him in in London and Patty Maloney and Liam Neeson and and and all the all the Celtic crowd came out to say goodbye to Richard, who was one of the great colorful figures of our age. And I to me, even though I think I could say without fear of contradiction that this this much maligned the music of the song, I think it was probably two or three hundred times by everybody from the four tops to Frank Sinatra. But my favorite version of it is still Richard Harris's. Did he want to ask you anything about the song before he actually recorded it? No. You know what he said? He said, I'll have that. He's talking about striped pants in the lyrics and he says striped. Did you want him to say striped? Actually, I can give you something much better than that. He said the name of the song is MacArthur Park. All the way through, he sung MacArthur's Park. MacArthur's Park is melting. He sung MacArthur's Park. And he couldn't be dissuaded from that. And, you know, and I've I've had artists change my lyrics throughout my whole career in that way. And sometimes they get something in their head and you can't get it out. Well, let's hear Richard Harris's version of your song, MacArthur Park. Oh, let's do. Pages and repressed in love's hot fevered iron like a striped pair of pants. I don't think that I can. I can't take it because it took so long to bake it. And I'll never have that recipe again. Oh, no. I recall the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave. That's Richard Harris's recording of MacArthur Park, a song written by my guest, Jimmy Webb. What did you think? When Donna Summer had her hit disco version of MacArthur Park? Well, first of all, I I'm not a I was not a great disco fan, but I but I am a great Donna Summer fan. And I think she's she's got these great pipes and she really sang the song. It was it was also just just from a purely from a purely financial point of view, it was. And this is this is probably one of those those asterisk quotes at the bottom of my career somewhere. It was the only number one record I've ever had in the United States. Really? And I remember, yes, because everything else, you know, through that through my heyday, I was battling the Beatles and the Beatles quite often held down the top. the top three spots, sometimes the top five. um MacArthur Park was kept out of number one by a Beatles record I don't remember which one it was but they just sat there they just sat there for 16 weeks and kept us out of number one so MacArthur Park was never higher than two with a bullet with Richard Harris uh and a lot of those records were were stuck either in the top 10 or in the in the high uh the low uh teens or the high teens uh because the Beatles held down so many slots and um here it was finally uh my my first number one record and I remember the day it went number one and I I remember what I did I I hired a limousine and I drove around Hollywood all day long saying to myself I have the number one record I'm number one I'm number one I'd roll down the window and I the guy next to me I'd say I'm number one and they're going who is that guy is he nuts I'm number one hey I said I don't think that I can take it cause it took so long to make it and I'll never have that recipe again oh no do you see yourself as straddling different eras you know of having like one foot in the rock era and one foot in the popular song era oh I think it's inescapable I think it's absolutely true and uh and in in in many ways I've been fortunate because of that because I've had a breadth of experience I'm and the art the artist that I was conversant with the fact that that um Johnny Mercer would call me up and ask me and uh if I was interested in writing a song with him uh is is quite incredible when you place it alongside uh for instance the fact that Lowell George who is a great composer and a great composer and a great composer and a great composer and a great composer and a great composer and a great composer and a great composer who founded Little Feet recorded one of my songs on his solo album and uh that I played piano on Jumping to the Fire on Nielsen Schmielsen and uh that I uh that my first song was recorded by the Supremes it was a it was a Christmas song called My Christmas Tree um and so I've been almost extraordinarily fortunate to have been able to live in those two worlds and to intimately embrace those two worlds to have been uh at the recording session in London when the Beatles recorded um Honey Pie to have been sitting there watching them play um so it is it's really if if variety is the spice of life then you know my life has been well seasoned Jimmy Webb I want to thank you so much for talking with us it's it's been a long time dream of mine to talk to you Terry Jimmy Webb spoke to Terry Gross in 2004 he turned 80 in August he has a new album of unreleased songs titled Yours for the Taking this weekend he appears at the Grand Old Opry and on October 30th he has a PBS Great Performances special here's a track from the album Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb in session it begins with Webb talking about his song Galveston When Glenn first recorded Galveston, he kind of did it in a medium march. It was a little faster than I had intended for it to be. But then I wasn't complaining either because it was top ten. As the years have gone by, the tempo seems to have settled back to where it was originally meant to be. And it's almost as though songs know where they want to be sung. They know how fast they want to be sung. And if you try to sing them any faster, they creak and they protest and they complain until finally you get them back to where they should have been maybe in the beginning. Galveston, oh Galveston I still hear your sea winds blowing And I still see Her dark eyes glowing She was twenty-one When I left Galveston Galveston, oh Galveston Galveston, oh Galveston I still hear your sea winds blowing I still hear your sea winds blowing I still hear your sea waves crashing While I watch the cannons flashing I clean my gun Then dream of Galveston I still see your sea winds blowing She was standing by the water Standing there looking out to sea And is she waiting there for me On the beach where we used to go Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film Possible. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Possible Love, South Korea's official Oscar submission for Best International Feature. This is Fresh Air. The award-winning South Korean drama Possible Love tells the story of two very different couples who meet during the shooting of a documentary. It's the latest work directed by Lee Chang-dong, known for films like Burning and Poetry. And it's South Korea's official Oscar submission for Best International Feature. Possible Love opens in select theaters this week and begins streaming November 6th. On Netflix, our film critic Justin Chang has this review. The writer-director Lee Chang-dong, known more commonly outside Korea as Lee Chang-dong, belongs to a rare breed of filmmakers who have never made anything less than a great movie. Not surprisingly, there's sometimes a long wait between those movies. It's been eight years since his previous work, the chilly psychological thriller Burning. It's wonderful to have him back with a new film, Possible Love. Possible Love, which tells a story that's been weighing on him for some time. It was inspired by an incident from 2009, when a car factory in Korea laid off one-third of its workforce. The metal workers' union organized a strike, which was brutally shut down by police. Many of the workers subsequently took their own lives. The film, which director Lee co-wrote with Oh Jung-mi, follows a married couple two years after a similar accident. play like a treatise on documentary ethics. But while Yeji's methods certainly warrant critique, director Yi sharply implicates himself as well. His gently handheld camera work sometimes blurs into Yeji's footage, making it hard to tell whose perspective we're seeing. Yi seems to be acknowledging that fictional and non-fictional storytelling both have their manipulations, and he's determined to do right by the real events and real issues that he draws on. Possible Love itself is opening the same month that its distributor, Netflix, laid off a staggering 6% of its global workforce. There's a documentary-like quality to some of the film's most moving moments, which take place at a group counseling session for laid-off workers and their spouses. We hear them speak about the joyous early days of the strike, the sense of solidarity that they experienced before it was shut down. Yi's earlier films, like Oasis and Peppermint Candy, have often portrayed misfits and outcasts. In Possible Love, he explores a different kind of alienation, the kind that results from the rupture of a once great community. Since its premiere at festivals earlier this fall, Possible Love has sparked a lot of comparisons to Parasite, another classic film that's been around for a long time. It's a film that's been around for a long time, and it's a film that's been around for a long time. It's a film that's been around for a long time. Another class-conscious Korean drama about two families. Cho Yo-jong, who played the rich wife in Parasite, is equally terrific as Yeji, the rich wife in this film. Yet the two movies are more different than they are similar. Where Parasite was a virtuoso Hitchcockian thriller, Possible Love has an almost novelistic richness and depth of character. It also has four of the year's best performances. As Yeji's husband, he's a man of his word. He's a man of his word. He's a man of his husband. Cho In-sung is such a smooth mix of condescension and charm that you might not recognize him from the recent down-and-dirty monster movie, Hope. And then there are the leads, Seol Kyung-gu and Chan Do-yeon, both of whom have done some of their best work in Director Yi's previous films, and who do some of their best work again here. As the depressed and drunken Hoseok, Seol gives a quietly implosive, deeply mysterious performance. He keeps revealing layers of himself through the final moments. As for his wife, Mi-ok, she's simply one of the most memorably complex characters you'll see in a movie this year. Remarkably, she hasn't given in to despair. She meets every challenge with a playful sense of mischief. And though she often gets exasperated with her husband, even the way she chides him makes clear the depths of their connection. The title of Possible Love asks whether the character is a man of his word, and whether love can survive life's difficulties. For all their deeply human foibles, Hoseok and Mi-ok, answer that question with a resounding yes. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed the new South Korean film Possible Love, now in select theaters and streaming on Netflix beginning November 6th. On Monday's show, New Yorker cartoonists Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein confess to the horrors lurking behind their kitchen cabinets. Their new book is The Two Saddest Kitchens. And Katzenstein will talk about his graphic memoir about living with OCD. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Julian Hertzfeld. Her interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Our social media video producer. is Hilary Kissinger. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.