by Jimmy Webb
The next morning David came in bubbling with plans. He thought to ease into the trip we should just take sandwiches down to Pu’u Poa where there was a beautiful old banyan tree and have lunch, perhaps swim a little bit, and then drop some acid.
By this time in my life I had been high on weed and had learned to drink a little bit but had only taken acid that one time with Johnny Rivers. I had no idea what Susan’s reaction would be to any mention of LSD. She thought I was half crazy already.
The three of us headed down the steep hillside on the well-worn trail until we emerged from a small grove of wood rose and cedar onto a narrow beach of fine, slightly pink sand. A half mile away, roughly in the center of the beach, stood a singular tree, an old banyan with a patch of grass and a small boulder close by.
After we had pitched our minimal camp under the banyan tree Geffen took out the clear glass bottle with little orange pills inside.
“Acid anyone?” He beamed.
“Okay, I’ll have one,” I said, as though this was the usual sort of thing. I quickly added, “Susan … you don’t have to do this.”
Her dancing eyes smiled and she said, “I’m going along!”
David shook three tabs out on to the palm of his hand and then we didst partake of Osley’s sacrament, what Derek Taylor eloquently called “the old dreaded heaven and hell.” For perhaps five minutes it seemed as though nothing at all happened, but when one abruptly realizes that one has been staring at the fractal edge of a cloud for twenty minutes or more, watching individual water molecules split off the main body and dissipate into the ethos one particle at a time, then one knows that alternate realities aren’t just fairy tales.
Unknown time passed. I looked for Susan and she was gone. Even in my highly stoned condition this was a matter of concern. At the far end of the beach I could see her climbing the lower flank of the mountain that led back to something vaguely remembered as normalcy. Suddenly my love for her flooded my being with a comber of longing so powerful that I was weeping to see her going away. I plowed through the water, the coral, crossed a great deal of beach, and ran shoeless into a patch of lava rock. My feet were bleeding at every step.
I came into the hotel room sweaty, bloody, and emotionally charged. Susan washed my feet and we held each other, sitting and leaning against the wall. When I had caught my breath I went over to my cassette player and slid Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 into the slot. We sat with our arms around each other as the sun passed overhead, as the planets and the moons reconfigured, as the notes of Bach, a man two hundred years in his tomb, danced around us in liquid silver droplets of sound.
Hours went by and the sun buried itself in purple and indigo, froth and spray. We made love deeply, until there was no reason to ever make love again.
We had found ourselves. In a storm of counterbalanced probability, after years of Laurel and Hardy flimflam, here in this clichéd honeymoon location, in the middle of a hallucination, we had actually made the connection.
Cottonwood Farm, Jimmy in foreground, white shirt. (Courtesy of the author)
CHAPTER FIVE
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that.
—Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, 1949
1970
Upon our return from Hawaii, I gathered a rhythm section for my first foray into the world of the singer/songwriter. There was Fred Tackett of Arkansas. He was a North Texas School of Music alumnus, a trumpet major, who played, for our band, the electric guitar. His appearance was not unlike one of Little Dixie’s moonshiners.
Our bass player was Elton “Skip” Moser, a star at Cal Poly and an intellectual who had stepped away from covert projects in the aerospace industry for a spot with the band. Earlier Skip and I had played together in a quartet called Four More and had made a dozen or so uneven demos. He played bass with a metronomic precision, but understood music like no mere pickup musician. He doubled on flute, a virtuoso.
Freddy had brought our drummer, lean, curly haired, red-faced Ray Rich out of Oklahoma. He was anything but quiet. A collector of one-liners, e.g., “It’s so nice out! (pause) I think I’ll leave it out!” (Rim Shot!) Ray had come out of the Midwestern club circuit with a lot of experience.
We began to work every night on songs Freddy and I had been rehearsing for my first album, Words and Music. It was our intention to perform all this music, some quite complicated, on stage. From this humble goal grew a great ambition: to reproduce the records on stage for the audience exactly as they were heard on the disc. To extrapolate: If we had on stage what amounted to a complete recording studio, we could record our orchestral accompaniment on Studer 16-track (multitrack) machines—those machines would be on stage as well—and we would be able to perform in sync flawlessly with prerecorded strings and horns.
Today, technological gimmickry is common on stage. But at the time, no one had done this before. Brian Wilson had pushed studio technology to the forefront on his universally admired Pet Sounds album, which inspired The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles declined to attempt performing Sgt. Pepper’s tracks live on stage, partly because they thought it would not be possible. I thought otherwise. A change of course was dictated for Brian Ingoldsby, slaving away on the construction of our monstrous sound system in a deserted ’30s dance palace known as the Aragon Ballroom in Santa Monica. So it would add a good many thousand dollars, but could we have our own recording and playback system incorporated into the P.A. design?
A lot of effects that we had created for the album in the studio would automatically click in where they were supposed to under the watchful eye of the balance engineer. Susan Webb—my sister—and Suzy Horton—my long lost love—had spent hundreds of hours recording harmonies just so, and these would magically appear, without waver or false start. The whole thing would be mixed in a lovely stereophonic bowl with all its attendant echoes and effects. The audience would be stunned.
The live component of the band would sing and play in the flesh. It’s just that we also wanted to bring the recording studio, all that technological flash, into the concert hall with us. Very little thought was given to a plan B. It would have been a nice moment, for instance, for the Great Satan to step in and say, “Umm, you guys are losing it all over the place.” But he didn’t. I began to rely on him more and more for managerial advice and one day I said, “Shit, you know you just ought to be my personal manager. I’m getting ready to go out on the road for a long time. I’m going to need someone to look out for the Camp, look after Susan while I’m gone, and tell me what the fuck I should be doing!” He became a permanent fixture around the house.
We burned through January and into February with an all-important concert date looming over our heads. It was our plan to debut Words and Music on February 20 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, L.A.’s answer to Lincoln Center in New York. A high-powered publicity firm had already invited the A-list. Zsa Zsa Gabor was coming, for Christ’s sake!
Sure, it was a dicey plan. The one thing that would save us was the brilliant and diabolical machine, which would be lit up like something from Doctor Who and would take the place of all those pesky musicians and all those hours of rehearsal.
I can hear you saying, “Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?” You bet your ass we are! The musician’s union had strict rules demanding the use of live musicians on stage. A contingent of lawyers and managers went off with Satan to have a meeting with Local 47, of which I was a proud member, to explain to them the brilliance of our plans. We were offering to pay each member of the original recording orchestra double scale for the use of the tape at Dorothy Chandler, plus the same amount for every use of the tape in a live setting into perpetuity, a generous offer that involved no labor of any kind on their part. In our minds it was an offer they couldn’t refuse. Lat
er that day Satan and Howard Golden and my dad, along with some other guys in suits came into the Aragon Ballroom where we were running a full dress rehearsal. They saw magic in motion: a whole recording studio set up on risers so that all the parts could be seen, lights blinking, tape spinning so “the music comes out here.” It could change the way music would be performed for the next hundred years.
One close look at my suit guys was enough for me to know the meeting with Local 47 had not been a successful one. We sat on the risers and I looked at the glum faces.
“Well, I’ve got good news and bad news,” said Howard Golden, with the only smile in the bunch.
“Let’s hear it,” I shot back. I figured it was now going to cost more money, possibly a lot more money. But I was prepared for some negotiation.
“You can’t use the machine,” Howard said, his smile never wavering.
I blew up. It wasn’t a pretty sight and I take no pleasure in describing the cussing, stomping fit to which I subjected the others. After a string of obscenities that was only brought to a close by a caution from my father was I settled enough to ask, “So what’s the good news then?”
“Well,” Howard replied, flustered by my reaction, his eyes darting from side to side. “Local 47 is prepared to offer you their complete cooperation in scheduling rehearsals to accommodate you on such short notice, and brought it to my attention that you don’t have to pay double scale for live musicians!”
The rehearsal disintegrated. My dad filled me in as we put our instruments away and gathered our belongings. “Son, we are dealing with some very rough people here. They don’t want to know any more about this contraption than they already do,” he said, gesturing at the huge set and a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of worthless junk.
As though to disclaim this assertion two big bruisers in blue suits came ambling into the old dance hall, all but cracking their knuckles. They were wearing hats. Nobody had worn a hat since the Kennedy assassination! They came up to me as all of our personnel disbanded and dribbled out of the room.
“Duh, uh, so okay, is this the gadget?” the bigger muscle-bound brute asked me, jerking his thumb at the mobile studio. I asked him who he was and why he was concerned. He informed me he worked for Local 47 and was investigating a possible infringement of union rules.
Howard came over and whispered in my ear, “We need to get this shit out of here. I don’t like the look of this.”
The enforcers walked all over the set and pried into every nook and technological cranny with the clumsiness that advertises total ignorance of the subject. With their inspection finished they tipped the crowns of their Borsalinos and bid us a cordial evening. Still, the consensus among leadership was to put the equipment back on the truck. It was torn down and back on the road before midnight.
Two nights later, the old deserted Aragon Ballroom caught fire and burned to the ground in flaming Art Deco splendor.
I felt like a fool. I had worked with the union for years and had benefited from a system that most heartily discouraged technical inroads of any kind on the traditional canon of union regulations. Sadly this creed of respect for the abilities and welfare of professional musicians has eroded over time into a hodgepodge of compromises. In this day and age, pretty much anything in the world of tracking, syncing, doubling, sampling, and outright stealing goes on unmolested. Though now such matters are mundane, I would be the first to admit, I had inadvertently wandered to the dark side. At the time, my fury and contempt for the union was boundless.
I talked with Howard and my managers about how best to proceed. My first idea, and one in retrospect I should have seized like a pit bull, was to cancel the concert. But I was learning the First Commandment of live performing: The show must go on. If one thinks there’s anything faintly amusing about that notion then one just hasn’t been there.
I sucked it up and started thinking about what needed to be done. We could cancel the show and pretty much ruin the record release, or we could play live with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. We would need to get the band accustomed to playing with an orchestra. It would be just three vocalists, two girls and me, which was going to be thin. A person in their right mind would try to sweeten that up a little bit, bring in Ginger Blake and Clydie King and Herb Pedersen on backgrounds. But no. We were off in this “purity of the garage band” mentality where it was just our little family against the world. That the audience wouldn’t give a flying burrito about anything except the sound was a concept that had yet to gain traction with me.
We launched into a hurried series of rehearsals with the L.A. Philharmonic. We found that we could just barely manage to play what was mainly rock music all the way through with the orchestra. No thought was given to lighting, presentation, or staging. We had no feel for the immensity and sheer spatial volume of a symphonic concert hall, with its ranks of balconies and parking lot–sized stage and peculiar acoustic responses.
I toyed with a new black leather outfit that was supposed to make me look mean and Jaggerish. I had decided not to play the piano but to perform standing up, something that I had never done in my life. I was a non-dancer, had no moves, no charisma, nor one noticeable iota of physical grace. About all I had going for me was that great leather outfit.
It was about this time news broke that Epic Records was releasing the first solo album by wunderkind Jimmy Webb, called, with razor sharp wit, Jim Webb Sings Jim Webb. (At this point in the narrative the sinking Titanic breaks completely in half and the band strikes up “Londonderry Air.”)
When I was a greenhorn and driving up to L.A. habitually in search of studios where I could record for nothing, I had traded the rights to many songs for studio time without hesitation. In other words, I would trade the performance rights or publishing share, amounting to 50 percent of the income for a given song, to a recording studio owner for a few hours of precious studio time. This was a sacrifice I made in order to hone and refine my songs, make rough records with my buddies, and explore the parameters of studio craft. In a word: education.
I had signed a deal with Bob Ross Music Service to use their studio to record a band called Four More. Skip Moser, so it happens, was the bass player. I was lead vocalist, never a strong spot for me, but we figured if Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones could cut hit records, then anything was possible.
My rise to fame had not gone unnoticed at Bob Ross Music. The fact that the company was in possession of eleven or twelve unknown Webb songs with some passable basic tracks and demo vocals by yours truly loomed as an inviting source of income for them. If they came out with the very first Jimmy Webb solo album they would make a killing. Quietly they went about their plan. An obscure producer named Hank Levine was brought in. As far as I was concerned, he was barely competent. But what did that matter? The material at hand was very close to unusable so the components would be complementary.
They (Bob and Hank) began by overdubbing huge “MacArthur Park”–sized orchestras on every track. The arranging was desultory if not criminally negligent. Mixed with the Rolling Stones soundalike knockoff tracks and my out-of-tune vocal song demos from 1965 and engineered by one of the B-string talents of the technical world, the results sounded like a collision between Royal Albert Hall and a tour bus full of Deadheads. They sent me a copy of the record and a polite letter stating that since they owned the rights, and since the masters also belonged to them, that they would like to have my blessing in releasing it.
I called Bob and told him it was in no way acceptable. I told him it was a bald-faced scheme to take advantage of a notoriety that his recordings had in no way created. I told him I would make an entirely new record for him and pay for it myself if he would desist in his apparent determination to ruin my entire career for the sake of a few thousand quick dollars. He was immovable. He professed to believe Jim Webb Sings Jim Webb was a work of genius! An album way ahead of its time. (In the sense that any time would be too soon I suppose I agreed.) Desperate, I explained about the Doro
thy Chandler concert and my contract with Reprise records. About my pending record release. About the betrayal—intended or not—that was inherent in their scheme. They were as immovable as Local 47. From their point of view, the griddle was hot and it was time to sell pancakes.
They released it. It was sent to every radio station in the United States. As far as I know the only reaction to it was loathing. I never heard it played on the air. It was unmentionable in my circle. If somebody really wanted to get under my skin and make an enemy for life they could bring it out for an autograph.
The harm that it did me was incalculable. I can hear some voices out there from the back of the bar saying, “Well, it couldn’t have done you any more damage than the album that you actually put out!” There is, regrettably, ample room for argument on that point, but at least my album, mistakes and all, was something I did myself. The first impression broadcasters received of my voice from Jim Webb Sings Jim Webb was indelible. This was no singer. It was a sixteen-year-old kid screaming and carrying on in a cheap imitation of Mick. As a lead-up to my actual debut album nothing could have served as a more ominous precursor.
What was there for us to do except carry on? We stumbled toward the February 20 Dorothy Chandler date and even managed to work up a little excitement, a trace of esprit de corps. By God, we would go out there and in spite of all we would make it a hit! The two thousand–odd seats were packed from orchestra to chandelier. Rather than attempt to list the A-listers and B-listers who packed every cranny it’s easier to say that Paul McCartney was not there. A few others were absent, but not many.