The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir

by Jimmy Webb

  One spring morning I ate my breakfast quickly, not forgetting to scrape the plate and drop it into the sink, grabbed my books, and jumped off the porch from the top step, landing in one great bound singing: “Oh, what a beautiful morning,” and it was! Oh, it was so fresh and clean! “Oh, what a beautiful day!” I sang as I ran across the grass toward the school playground. “I’ve got a beautiful feeling…”

  They jumped me from behind a utility shed. Four or five of them. They beat on me yelling, “Damn preacher’s kid! Go to Hell, preacher’s kid!” They shoved me facedown into the asphalt, grinding the gravel deep into my face and left me there, books spread to the four winds, my lip busted.

  1969

  The next day a couple of plainclothes cops came up to our suite with a cardboard box full of cassettes, lead sheets, and other crap, and put them down on the coffee table in front of the couch.

  “These are the materials the maestro requested through the air mail,” one of them said, and smiled as wide and avaricious as a jailhouse door.

  “Let us know if we can be of any further assistance to the maestro,” the other one said in a dead tone, eyes as cold and hard as a mass grave.

  They had broken into the package and the bogus audiocassettes had been dismantled. All the pieces were left in disarray and handfuls of curly recording tape decorated the warning.

  They had been gone for all of five minutes when Fred and Patricia came through the door looking for Ritchie. He had disappeared. “I think something’s wrong, man,” Freddy said. “I think something’s happened to Ritchie. He hasn’t answered his phone since last night.”

  Big D put his finger to pursed lips, went over to the window, and lifted the heavy sash. We both knelt and put our heads outside in the roar of afternoon traffic punctuated by two-cycle engines and snorting diesel buses.

  “That’s better,” the Devil said. He looked at me with bland simile. “We’re made,” he said. “They’ve got our dope. They could nail us right now. The way I see it the only thing between us and the Brazilian big house is ‘Evie.’”

  My stomach turned wrong side out. “What about Ritchie?” I asked.

  “He’s either in jail or maybe trying to get over the border somewhere. Of course there is the unspeakable third possibility.”

  We strained to close the ancient stiff sash and pulled our heads in, giving Fred and Patricia the “no talking” sign and tried to play it casual.

  That night was the final round of the Canção Popular. Ritchie was still missing. We lived all day with the tension and worry of it. No polite attempt to locate him through channels elicited any response. He seemed to have passed through a doorway into the land of the “the missing ones,” as they called them down there.

  The contest teetered toward its climax. But for some of us there was a burgeoning dread of what would happen at its conclusion. Were they just going to let us go home without repercussions? We prepared for the concert in a somber mood. All the giddiness that comes with flaunting authority was gone and forgotten, replaced by a sickness in the gut. The novelty of being stoned and yelled at, like the “capitalist pigs” we supposedly represented, had fled. We rode down to the arena in silence, the close escort of a dozen police taking on a more sinister aspect.

  In the arena that night there were some preliminaries. Then our nemesis Malcolm Roberts hit the boards and the crowd shook the house, clapping in time, singing the whole song with him, flinging bravura cheers to the heights of the dome and generally behaving as though Corky himself had come down in a white sport coat and a pink carnation. He did the fake ending. They bought in. They pretty much crowned him right there.

  After what seemed like a long period of agitation and excitement, the crowd had quieted enough for our lot to be introduced. I went straight to the piano and sat down. Freddy smiled tightly at me from behind his big acoustic guitar. I smiled back; what the hell! Just one more time. “Bisha! Bisha! Bisha!” echoed as always, still a mystery. Bill’s female adherents shrieked as usual. We had that going for us. Bill bent slightly as he took the weight of the song:

  “There ain’t no future in it, Evie

  We never should begin it, Evie.”

  There was tumultuous racket going on from the very first note. It was not the sound of singing or clapping but a grousing rumble of ill will that seemed to gain momentum as Bill moved through the second verse:

  “If time was half a nice guy, Evie

  We might have had a nice try, Evie, oh, Evie…”

  Bill was giving his best performance ever, but even as he stood tall and began the ending couplet, the most bittersweet of all the lyrics, there was a roar of real anger from the crowd. The ending of the song could not be heard over the screams of thousands of people bent on ending the performance early. Bill tried to finish and never stopped singing. They were screaming, weeping, stamping in one prolonged howl of outrage and Bill Medley stood there completely disarmed. What had he done to provoke this?

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, came white-coated Malcolm Roberts dragging a Union Jack as big as an outdoor billboard onto the stage. Broad-shouldered Malcolm manhandled the great hulking mass of red, white, and blue stripes out into the middle of the stage. Gamely, we ventured the closing lines:

  “Though it’s doomed and damned and dying

  Something in me won’t stop trying…”

  Malcolm chose this moment to throw the giant British flag over Bill’s shoulder in a protective gesture, a move that almost brought the tall, thin Californian to his knees. The flag’s weight was immense. Bill shifted his center of gravity underneath the great awkward bundle to hold it up. For one nightmarish second I thought Bill was going to shrug the Union Jack off and drop it onto the stage. I said, “No!” He never heard or saw me.

  “Evie…”

  It’s a long note and Medley used it to hitch up the burden of the flag.

  “It’s up to you…”

  He finished like a gentleman, standing straight and tall under the flag of our mother country. If a bomb had hit the place it couldn’t have caused more furor, uproar, or consternation than Malcolm’s split-second decision to save the American. We came backstage, exhausted from the withering reception. Not anxious to hear “Lucinda” again, as only Brazil remained to perform, we retreated to the hotel.

  The next day we got the results, and just as the punters told us from day one, Brazil won first prize. Unbelievably the United States was second. Malcolm Roberts, selfless gesture and all, had come third for the U.K. Any analysis of this baffling outcome is unsatisfactory.

  The ride to the airport took a thousand years. There was nothing encouraging about the military Jeeps in front and behind our single car. The motorcycle cops no longer showed interest in trying to view us through the tinted windows; their formality was unnerving.

  We were met at the airport by police and customs officials who took hours to go through our luggage, searching every shaving kit and medicine bottle. Our passports, our declarations, the minutiae of bureaucracy, took hours. At intervals, there were unexplained delays that kept us waiting alone or in small groups. They were sweating us.

  When we were finally on the aircraft I looked out the small window to see military Jeeps and police cars in a cordon around the plane, blue lights flashing. Officials glared at us from behind aviator shades with no attempt to disguise their deep unhappiness at our departure.

  As we taxied down the strip, every moment a small eternity, vehicles followed on both wingtips as though hoping for one last slipup, anything that would put us back in their hands. I breathed a silent prayer to the God of Engines and looked over at Mr. Satan. He smiled benignly.

  “They could still arrest us anytime, you know!” he assured me.

  “Thanks, pal.”

  “Also, I have to tell you, buddy,” he added with a grin, “‘bisha’ means ‘homo’!”

  I looked across the cabin at Fred and Patricia. They were leaning back against the headrests with their eyes closed. Mi
les was sleeping peacefully on Patricia’s lap. I figured they were praying like me.

  Outside, the waiting police, the suffering city in the distance, and a memory of a guy named Ritchie were still in frame. The throttles opened, the bird rolled, and just like that we were out of it. In the first-class cabin there was a massive synchronized exhale from everyone, including the innocent, and then an involuntary laugh and a guilty round of applause. A relief washed over me that tasted like all the rest of life, tempered by regret as to what could have become of our good friend and guide Ritchie. To date there has been no contact.

  1956

  Dad raised chickens out in the back of the parsonage. It was fun at first, lots of tiny balls of peeping yellow fuzz running around in cardboard boxes warmed by sixty-watt lightbulbs like wonderful Easter presents. When they got older, gawky and teenage looking, he went out back wearing old jeans, shirtsleeves rolled up, and wrung their necks in a bloody massacre, while we watched in stunned disbelief. They flapped and convulsed around the yard in a macabre corps de ballet of death. Then, gathered around an oil drum full of boiling water, my brother, sister, and I were forced to dip and soak the decapitated bodies until they were waterlogged, at which time we pulled the sodden feathers from their bodies, every single quill, until they were naked and still. Feet were lopped off. The rest of the carnage was rough surgery. By any measure it was a bloodbath and even the memory of the smell was nauseating.

  There was an old man in Eldorado, who lived across the alley from us. His grandchildren visited from time to time. I thought nothing of it that my little brother and sister played with them along the alley between the houses, hiding in abandoned henhouses and acting out Cowboys and Indians. One day the eccentric neighbor came across the alley yelling at the kids and told my dad that Tommy and Janice were trying to “play doctor” with his grandkids. This was an unlikely allegation.

  Without asking my siblings for an explanation, Dad marched them into the front bedroom downstairs. Pressing them facedown on the bed he took his belt to them. Seeing my sister Janice flogged within an inch when I knew she was perfectly innocent knocked the breath out of me. I figured a guy like me just had to take his chances with my dad, but a little girl? I felt in that moment that I hated and feared him, I just didn’t know in what order.

  Jimmy Webb in London. (Courtesy of Penthouse)

  CHAPTER THREE

  The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,

  Francis Scott Key nor sung by Glen Campbell,

  Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Engelbert Humperdinck or the Rare Earth.

  The revolution will not be televised.

  —Gil Scott-Heron,

  “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” 1970

  I never got Jimmy Webb. —Gene Pitney

  1969

  For all practical purposes I had been commuting to London since 1967. There had been trips for various projects and vacations, but for the most part I went there to see Richard Harris and to work on our albums. The 1968 follow-up to Tramp Shining and the stunning performance of “MacArthur Park” had been an album called The Yard Went On Forever, a critic’s darling that did not produce a single.

  There were other overtones of dissonance between the physically imposing and irrepressible Harris and myself. I needed to know if he had any problems with his share of the proceeds from our records, even though I would rather have put both hands in a sausage grinder than take a wayward penny. There were rumors, however, that he thought I was giving him the short end of the stick. It was painful. Still, I sincerely wanted to do a third album with him.

  We feuded in a polite sort of way over a promise he made me during the creation of Tramp Shining, his debut solo album—containing my songs and arrangements—after his singing movie role in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot. In the backseat of his Phantom V, a car I understood to have been purchased from the Royal Household, in a fever of excitement and after a pitcher of Pimm’s, he had clasped me around the shoulders and said, “Ah, Jimmywebb! This album’s goin’ to be a huge hit! We’re going to fool ’em all, Jimmywebb! And when this fucking album is a hit…” He paused dramatically in his Shakespearean-flavored Irish brogue. “I’m going to give you this Phantom V!”

  I demurred and told him I was sure he didn’t really mean that. He continued to insist in the strongest possible invective that he fucking well did mean it and I should clear a space in the driveway. We had been so close in those days. He was a tough guy, a human monument and someone I openly revered. Richard had a strong temper and after a couple of Black Velvets it was better to avoid talking about religion or politics or even his beloved Ireland, except perhaps to say that the bloody British should get out. “Up the Rebels!” he would shout, and smash an empty glass into the wall.

  So this was the loving, mercurial, adopted older brother I was flying over to visit with some trepidation. He would no doubt have a half-dozen photographs of Rolls-Royce limousines to show me, some of them quite impressive. I would politely decline and look at him, shaking my head and saying, “I don’t believe that’s the car I ordered.” I was devastated that he didn’t want to give me his Phantom V. I didn’t need anyone to give me a car. I had cars. Nor did I want just any old Phantom V. More than anything in the world I wanted Richard’s Phantom V. And, though this may have been too much to ask: I wanted him to give it to me with joy in his heart.

  There was something uneasy in the wind. The Irish can silently bury a grudge deeper and hold it longer than any other creatures under Heaven. I was sure there was something festering deep and agitating Richard that he had not told me about.

  1958

  Not to be tethered in one place—even a nice one—too long, it was hey up and throw me over yet again, when my father moved us out of the agrarian prosperity of Eldorado and into an urban and almost alien landscape, the Boom Town, the Oil Town, the Cattle Town, the Capital, and the storied center of the state: Oklahoma City. We settled in a dilapidated suburb on the four-lane Grand Boulevard. Dad pastored a cinder block Baptist church called Rockwood, right next to Rockwood Elementary School, a small urban prison for kids. Backhoes were digging huge openings in Grand Boulevard, probably in the faint hope of making it grander, and large piles of red clay clods were piled willy-nilly, marking our route to school.

  The bullies would materialize from behind these tall mounds, flinging clods at my little brother Tommy and me. They would pepper us with a stinging barrage and then move in for a kidney punch or a slap to the forehead. “He yah, Four Eyes!” “It’s Preach! C’mon, Preach, eat this clod. Eat it or I’ll kill you, you little son of a bitch!” I peered back through my thick eyeglasses, congenitally myopic. They were bigger, older, and mad-dog-mean oil field trash. The biggest one of those bastards I really wanted to hurt. I patiently explained military strategy to my little brother: I would open with a machine-gun burst to the face, and at this point I would “hit him high” and Tommy would “hit him low.” Tommy, a brave little soul, nodded in sage comprehension. “Then,” I said, “when we’ve got him down, we’ll pound him in the face and balls with our fists.” He nodded. We rehearsed the tactics a few times and prepared for our attack the next morning.

  The rangy redneck came over the top of one of the dirt piles in a surprise frontal assault, almost as though he was privy to our plans. I emptied two handfuls of small rocks at his head and jumped off my feet to meet him head and shoulders. I started swinging. Tommy stood and watched the bully pin me to the ground and tenderize me from stomach to forehead with impunity. When he got tired of jackhammering me he stuck a handful of red dirt in my mouth and went on his way. I picked up my soiled and torn schoolbooks, found my glasses, spit, cast one reproachful glance at my kid brother, and we walked silently on to school.

  In fairness to the bullies and baboons, I was a fairly odd kid. I had one friend, a grown-up named Bob, who had no proper job but hours to burn building and crashing engine-powered model airplanes. He was a nerd before they invented the word, always cov
ered in glue, oil, and glow fuel. But he had a cheerful, feckless soul, as well as my admiration, though I was witness to many a shouting match between him and his young wife, who supported his plane habit and a couple of diaper-clad babies.

  Bob especially loved Sterling Ringmasters, a stunt plane of the day with a forty-inch wingspan. He’d crank the plane’s .35 engine with a wooden prop until its tremulous wail echoed around the neighborhood. The whining bird would leap up and into an endless circle, Bob whirling in the middle like a dervish.

  Dad referred to Bob as “The Model Bum,” and whether he realized it or not, he began to feel a little jealous of all the time I spent with my new friend.

  With a handsome, fiery young minister in the pulpit, Rockwood Baptist flourished. I tended the piano bench. As the only musician at the new church, I felt pressure to provide as massive an accompaniment as possible for the choir and congregation. I started seeing a new piano teacher, Susan Goddard, who was unique in my experience, as she specialized in improvisation, the catalyst for a logarithmic leap in my musical comprehension. This training consisted of exercises with the Baptist Hymnal; arranging and harmonizing familiar tunes by using what Leonard Bernstein would later call “transformational elements.” She taught me to play in octaves and “fill in” the third and fifth tones in order to make a more massive chord. She taught me chord “substitution,” which is the alchemy of substituting exotic and unfamiliar chords for more prosaic ones. Arpeggiation, dissonance, alternate basses—all of these techniques enriched my playing in a way that helped me create richer, more classically textured arrangements.