by Jimmy Webb
We settled in and I started freshman year. Same old nauseating feeling of being dropped off a cliff into a sea of new faces. Some of them friendly, many hostile, most downright indifferent.
I would be playing the organ at First Baptist Laverne. It was a Hammond B-3 with an elaborate start-up cycle akin to firing up a jet plane, and the preset black keys to the far left on the manuals. A clever system of bars of different colors allowed these stops to be preprogrammed with sounds of one’s own devising; an elemental synthesizer. A system of tiny veined turbines spun at high speed by a motor to produce the actual pitches. A cable as thick as my wrist led from the keyboard to a Leslie speaker, which was also motorized so as to create a slow majestic chorus sound or at faster speed a less-impressive skating rink effect. It was a gadget. A big, heavy electric gadget that could only ever have been built in America and indeed was destined to achieve its greatest fame in the hands of Jimmy Smith, James Booker, Booker T., and other American jazz artists.
My room on the second floor in the two-story parsonage was the first private area I had ever known. Though a little cramped, I had my own sink and bathtub. In that little bathroom I would learn to shave. I can still remember the smell of my first bottle of Aqua Velva reeking in the close quarters.
From my sister’s room next door came the sounds of Ricky Nelson singing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” (w. Eddie DeLange and Louis Alter), warm and comforting on the other side of the wall. Janice had a record player, an RCA 45 changer, but I had no records and therefore no need of it. My musical solace was “Another Saturday Night” (w. Sam Cooke) on the radio. I was enthralled when that track suffused the balmy summer nights from the concealed radio under my bed.
The old house had a root cellar and a stout shed for the car. Dad had done right; it was the best thing we had ever seen.
1970
David Geffen called and asked me to come over to his place in the Hollywood Hills. Harry Nilsson was over there and he wanted to talk to me. He was pissed. I drove up to Van Nuys, made a right, and went up over the hill, following his directions, yet realizing the closer I got to the house the more familiar the neighborhood seemed. When I finally pulled up to the gate with the little push-button phone box it was anticlimactic. This was once Johnny Rivers’s house. While a contract writer at Johnny Rivers Music I had sheltered there for a year.
Once inside the gate every detail was familiar. Terra-cotta roof, long front porch in the Spanish style with supports every few feet. It had gotten a paint job along the way but this was the place where it had all started.
Geffen greeted me on the porch. He was skinny, with very curly black hair. His Hollywood smile was all-purpose, which is to pay no disrespect. He was quite well adapted to his environment. His eyes glowed as though he knew exactly what you were about to say, considering your mental capacity.
I was impressed. He handled Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro. That was enough for me.
“Harry’s down at the pool waiting for you,” he said. And his smile said, Man, are you in for it.
“Oh, great,” I said as casually as I could muster. “I’ve always wanted to meet him.”
David laughed and I knew I was definitely in some kind of trouble, though I couldn’t imagine what it was. I started thinking as I strolled down to the pool area that it might have something to do with the “B.N.” (Before Nilsson) I had attached to a lyric on the Richard Harris album cover of The Yard Went On Forever.
Briefly, this was the bone of contention: My line was “skipping like a stone through the garden” (“Gayla” w. JLW). The line I had reference to was Fred Neil’s “skipping over the ocean like a stone” from “Everybody’s Talkin’.” My original intent was merely to say, “Beg pardon, Mr. Nilsson, wasn’t copying from your huge hit as my lyric was written first and wasn’t a deliberate rip-off.”
When I arrived at the pool Nilsson was shooting a small basketball into a poolside goal. He put three right through the net before he said a word. He turned around, a beanpole with tousled blond hair, a nose going to red, and a scowl on his hawkish features.
“What’s with the B.N.?” he demanded. “Or should I say B.S.?”
I choked, knowing exactly why I had been summoned.
“Hey, no offense intended…” I was chopped off at the knees.
“Listen, I didn’t even write the song! Fred Neil wrote the song!” he complained while his face reddened.
“Hey, I just meant, in deference to your song, that I was not deliberately cribbing a great line like that!” I protested.
“I just think you were being a prick!” He slammed a shot off the backboard and through the net.
“Hey, stop shooting! Listen, let’s say I was being a prick and I was just trying to get your attention because I’m such a huge fan.”
“Are you sure about your motivations on that?” he challenged again.
We stood there face-to-face for thirty seconds before signs of amusement began to break on his face. I smiled back. He tossed me the ball and I put a jump shot through the hoop.
“Hey, you’re pretty good, you know that?” Harry grinned and a lifetime friendship began.
We talked by the pool for a bit. He was of a philosophical bent, more so than your average pothead. As we walked back up to the house and traded phone numbers he said to me, “Don’t be afraid of death; it’s only the first moment in your life that takes place without you.” That sort of whipped my head around.
Mission accomplished, he departed in an oddly shaped German army vehicle. I walked, slightly dazed from the encounter, from the driveway up to the front door, where David answered. His eyebrows asked me an unspoken question.
“We’re cool,” I said as I walked into the large living room with the cathedral ceiling and the familiar rough stone fireplace. A grand piano sat in the corner. It was eerie; it sat in exactly the same spot as Johnny Rivers’s grand piano had done. The colors had changed a little, but it could almost be the same room where Rivers and I had taken acid and listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
A young man sat cross-legged on the floor cradling an acoustic guitar. “I want you to meet someone,” David invited, and we sat down on the rug. “This is Jackson Browne.”
Jackson looked up from the guitar and met my gaze with brown eyes that were like large pools of emotion. He was finely made with long fingers, longer straight hair, and a lean frame. The chords he toyed with under his fingers were well crafted as well, displaying a flair for dissonance and alternate basses.
“Jackson, play ‘Opening Farewell,’” suggested David.
Jackson sang and played the elegiac, beautifully constructed song about impending and seemingly inevitable separation. To my mind it conjured up an unmistakable portrait of a woman, and yet she wasn’t mentioned, only summoned. After this unforgettable moment Jackson took me back through the kitchen and showed me his room.
“I know this is going to be hard for you to believe, Jackson, but this used to be my room!” I laughed as we walked in. The whole day had taken on a surreal character.
I sat with David out on the porch and we finally got down to the reason for my visit. He had a different smile, a business smile that was closer held and higher on the right side of his face.
“So what do you want?” he asked me. I reeled for a second under the implications of that question. Even in his infancy as an executive and manager, David was famous as a man who could make careers. I thought carefully before answering.
“I want to be an artist,” I said fervently.
He smiled blandly. “I thought you were just some guy who liked to play Las Vegas and hang out with Connie Stevens.”
So here it was. The bias against traditional venues and artists and presentation.
“You can’t play Vegas,” he continued.
“Hey, she’s a friend of mine and a hell of a nice girl!” I protested.
“Jimmy, it’s business. I can do some things for you, maybe turn things around a little,
but most of it is up to you.”
I explained to him that I had just turned down a lot of money in Vegas. I told him my favorite contemporary writer was Joni Mitchell. I told him I was being typecast by the artists who recorded my music and I wanted to sing certain songs for myself. Even today this seems crazy to me. Should I have been unhappy when Liza Minnelli or Tony Bennett recorded one of my songs? But there it was. I was squarely in the generation gap, musically, and I hadn’t done much to help myself. Though when I’d appeared on Liza’s network special, there was Randy Newman (alternative music’s crown prince) playing piano right beside me in a singer/songwriter segment. In the show’s finale, “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof, Randy and I stood side by side for the inevitable curtain bow. The whole cast was supposed to hold hands and raise our arms overhead singing “Tradition! Tradition! Tradition!” Randy refused to raise his arms or sing “Tradition!” I’d raised one arm.
David agreed, in essence, to act as my manager for an undetermined period, and felt he could get me on track for an album release and—dare I write these horrific words—an “image change.” He encouraged me to take voice lessons and to take a band on the road in order to introduce “the real me” to a rightfully bewildered public. He would become a friend and advisor. He would introduce me to Joni Mitchell. He would do everything in his considerable power to create a consumable out of me. Someone who could be welcomed to the ranks of rock ’n’ rollers and socially sensitive artists everywhere. I drove away, head spinning with the options that had been so suddenly laid on my table. The confrontation with Harry almost served to underscore David’s insistence that I think more clearly about my actions.
When I got home there was a message lying on the kitchen table: “Call Susan Horton’s mother!” Susan had been the closest thing I ever had to a childhood sweetheart. She had been a cheerleader and homecoming queen at Colton High School the year I graduated. She was the quintessential California blonde with a stunning figure, large blue eyes, and a sweet smile. Her steady had been a junior college all-American quarterback named Eddie Groves from San Bernardino Valley College. He was handsome and physically imposing. Of course they would be together. That is, if you discount the potency of music and art on the psyche of young romantically inclined females, and to do so would be a mistake. Suffice to say that both of us lost her. She married a schoolteacher named John and they had been tweaking their relationship for several years. It was an unstable union for the most part because she was a dancer and constantly going on the road for various engagements. The one thing she loved more than all of us put together was dancing. In the interval I had written countless songs for her—“By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” and “MacArthur Park,” to mention three. This bothered her and it was a devastating and constant psychological weapon on the radio.
I called her mother frequently to see how she was. I never deliberately messed with her marriage. I didn’t know John well enough to say anything bad about him; I just knew he wasn’t making her happy. I read her mother’s phone number off the paper and punched it into one of the newfangled maize-colored push-button phones. Her mother answered and told me Susan and John were separated again, and her daughter was dancing in Omaha. John, the mercurial husband, had embarked to destinations unknown. A wave of lust and longing tugged me off my feet and swept me into an emotional riptide. What separated us except a few hundred miles of empty space and a good deal of unhappiness that had come—in my mind—from being apart for too many years?
I chartered a Learjet to Omaha, arriving late at night but still in time to see Susan in the Tickle Your Fancy Review at a nameless casino. I was on fire to see her but I played it as cool as I could manage. I had loved her since high school but my slumbering passion had been quickened by some real life experiences. I wasn’t afraid, or even shy, about claiming her.
Six girls and a couple of guys worked their way through some rather thin routines with a small orchestra. It seems there was a comedian, too, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was watching the one to whom I had devoted thousands of hours of unrequited love. The one who, in spite of every velvet contrivance, had gotten away.
After the show I took all the dancing girls out to the airport in a limousine for a ride in the jet. There was so much youth, so much beauty, in that plane it was like riding in a giant corsage at five hundred miles per hour.
The next day I brought Susan back to Campo de Encino with me. She laughingly refers to it as a “kidnapping” and remembers lots of crying and protestation on her part. I don’t remember it that way. I remember her insisting she was flying back to Omaha as soon as she could get another plane, and I offered to pay for the ticket. Was I heavy-handed? More than usual or perhaps more than ever—that I admit. I gave her some time to think about it while I showed her the house and grounds. She was given her own room, a delightful affair, all done up in lilac, with windows overlooking the pool. She calmed down. I sent Garth out with her on a shopping trip to buy “anything and everything she wants.” I was extremely happy just knowing she was in the house.
At this precise moment David Geffen called, which was his habit almost every afternoon, to ask me what I was doing. (Oh, nothing much, just kidnapped my girlfriend and dragged her across four state lines.) I told him about my reunion with my long-lost sweetheart.
“Oh, that’s fantastic!” he replied. “You should come with me to Kauai! I’m leaving tomorrow. I know the most beautiful place. Have you ever been?”
No, I confessed, I had never been to Kauai, which unlike today’s Kauai was then an obscure hangout of island connoisseurs carrying gold American Express cards and a yen for the local psilocybin, which grew in almost any cow pasture.
“David, that’s so generous of you, but I couldn’t leave Susan behind, especially right now.”
“No, no!” he protested. “You will both be my guests! It’ll be perfect!” He went on to describe the plantation at Hanalei Bay where an impressive list of movies had been filmed, including South Pacific. I confess that a person only has to say “beautiful South Seas island” once to get my attention. What better place to take Susan than a brand-new island to get things started with perfection?
“David,” I responded with a burst of enthusiasm, “we’ll come! I can’t wait!”
The phone immediately rang again. It was the D-e-v-i-l. “What’s up?” he asked.
“Really?” I asked.
“Really,” he replied.
“Well, I just went to Omaha and kidnapped Susan and now I’m going to re-kidnap her and take her to Hawaii with David Geffen.”
“It sounds like your sex life is getting complicated.” He chortled. “I need a place to stay. How about your place for a while?”
“Sure, I could put you up for a while. You can watch the place while I’m away.”
“Thanks, Bud,” he said as he hung up. And somewhere in the high belfry of the exoverse, great black bells chimed anti-tonal and dispersed a low beating of sub-eternal defibrillation throughout all of space, changing the course of time.
1961
The basketball coach at Laverne was an alpha male named E. G. Pete Jayroe. He could have played the sheriff in any Western epic that Hollywood could conjure. His daughter Jayne was a sophomore like me and was hands down the prettiest girl in Laverne. History would eventually show that she was also the prettiest girl in Oklahoma and then all of America in rapid succession. She was famous in our school because she could sing like blazes, and she was the star of every choral event held in the cavernous gymnasium.
I would loiter shamelessly in the school cafeteria at lunchtime and play the quavering spinet, lots of “Blue Moon” and “Let It Be Me” and Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date.” There would be catcalls and coyote howls from the jocks but sometimes a girl would pause and flutter to a landing on a nearby folding chair.
Eventually the day came when it was Jayne who passed by and paused, and then sat down with a smile. As long as I would sit there a
nd play she would listen and sing along. I took to visiting over at the Jayroes’ and playing the piano for Jayne to sing whatever and whenever she wanted.
The coach said to me one day when he opened the front door, “Every time I look up around here I see you!” But he never turned me away.
Jayne and I became great pals and started dreaming of one day going to Oklahoma City and making a record. I had created some of my first original songs; one I still remember was “Gray Skies Are Better Than Blue.” It was a tune David Hemmings years later would call “real crapola,” but Jayne liked it. I stone flat-out loved her, but I was doing an unusually fine job of screwing that up, as I had created such a platonic friendship that I was in no position to ask her out on a date.
Hawaii, 1970
On the North Shore of Kauai was a small road that wound a half mile off the highway to the old Hanalei Plantation, a venerable watering hole and hideout for movie stars and other celebs since the forties. This string of native-style huts was bordered to the west by the idyllic and placid Hanalei River flowing serenely into Hanalei Bay. To the east lay postcard beach called Pu’u Poa. Each little hut had an unobstructed view of the ocean and beach area below. The walk up and down the mountain required a medium to strenuous effort and occasionally an overweight haole tourist would collapse on the way up and either pass over immediately or be transported to the hospital in Lihue. In Hawaii there existed a bizarre duality that has amazed me since I first traveled there. Side by side with the serene and deep peace of an ancient and benign natural beauty existed the possibility of a sudden, banal, or even comical death. So it must always have been.
David, Susan, and I were ensconced in adjoining tiki huts. David presented the staggering view of the Pacific Ocean as though it were his own personal production, smile beaming at maximum wattage. Susan’s eyes were as big as eggs. Forty-eight hours earlier she had been in Omaha getting ready to tap dance.
We dined together in what amounted to a large crow’s nest hung on the edge of a cliff that served as the resort’s restaurant. David was rightfully curious as to what celestial orb Susan had descended from. She was a perfect little California doll with cornflower blue eyes and long blond hair that gave the impression she was a shampoo model. We had mai tais, endured a seemingly endless serenade of lachrymose Hawaiian ballads performed by the usual trio in flowered shirts, and as candles blossomed all over the restaurant and the trails were lit by Malibu lights, we made our way to bed. David went to his hut and Susan and I went to ours. Before the sun’s last bashful blush on the western horizon, two reunited lovers were holding hands fast asleep.