by Jimmy Webb
We stood in a little group, Fred, Patricia, Joni, David, and myself, and listened to the Mozart oboe sonata. It was then we all noticed something peculiar that would not be seen at any ordinary chamber music concert. It takes almost superhuman abdominal strength to support the embouchure of an oboist playing the infamous instrument. This contraction of the lower torso was for the first time in my experience revealed in the flesh as well as the bouncing testicle that accompanied each note and beat of the composition. Pity the poor musician as the audience struggled to retain their composure in the face of such distraction, but to his credit he played on bravely and brought the piece to its conclusion.
The climactic tour de force of the event was the Mozart French horn concerto, and everyone gathered in the orchard after a couple of hours. A chamber orchestra of about twenty musicians was sitting among the trees in folding chairs awaiting the downbeat as skin, accustomed to the concert hall, reddened under the hot sun and the bites of unseen insects. All reticence, all embarrassment had fled. This was a serene group of professional musicians with but one purpose at the forefront of their concern: The Performance.
Mickey Newbury of the Mermaid Tavern took the baton in hand and they went at it, pregnant cellist and all. The clear, haunting tones of the French horn rang out over the neighborhood and echoed from its hillsides to the reservoir high above. The neighbors came out of their houses, arrayed in a kind of impromptu outdoor amphitheater, their view of the players unobstructed. Was this the part, I wondered, where we would be arrested? But the onlookers stood, entranced by the glory of the music and perhaps even somewhat amused by the novelty of the nude orchestra, a spectacle of the once-in-a-lifetime variety, until the last notes of Mozart’s masterpiece echoed from the hillsides and faded into silence. Our neighbors ventured a smattering of applause and a couple of cheers before returning to the saner world inside their houses. We had done it. For the first time in recorded history a symphony orchestra had played a naked concert in public and had not gone to jail.
Jimmy Webb and The Contessas. (Courtesy of Suzy Horton Ronstadt)
CHAPTER SIX
When I die I don’t want to go to heaven
I just want to drive my beautiful machine
Up north on some Sonoma country road
With Jimmy Dean and Steve McQueen
—JLW, “Too Young to Die,” 1993
1970
My television special was barely breathing at Universal. We were working for ways around Sinatra and Aretha Franklin as these were essential artists from the Black Tower perspective. I know for certain that later when Mr. Sinatra and I were closer friends and even mutual admirers he would not have hesitated to do me this favor. Aretha, who I did not know and with whom I had no recording history, was an almost mysterious choice from my point of view. This game is often played in the halls of Hollywood. Universal could not deliver her. They were leveraging me in hopes that I would be desperate enough to somehow get her to do it. I called her and had an inconclusive conversation.
While these frustrations and exertions played out they sent me to scout locations. It was odd beyond measure to be sent to Oklahoma to survey farms as a setting for parts of the show. There was a juxtaposing of realities as I landed at the Oklahoma City airport on my mission. This mad ride had started with me driving a tractor on one of those checkerboards down there looking up into the sky, trying to devise a scheme to somehow escape. Now, a handful of years later, I was flying back to look down and rediscover that starting point.
A Bell Jet Ranger picked me up at the private air terminal and I directed the pilot west and south toward Beckham County and the fertile farm country that had birthed my parents. In ten minutes we were in sight of Sayre, a town that could have served as a model for George Lucas’s American Graffiti with its pretty red-and-white brick courthouse and cupola. We circled the courthouse and the main street, the single traffic light, the Stovall Theatre where I had first seen 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as an eight-year-old. I gestured to the pilot further west and a little more north, in the direction of the very farm where most of my young life had unreeled, Buffalo, Oklahoma, home of the Webbs and the Killingsworths.
“Just a little farther and look for a cemetery on a hill,” I told the pilot, and he nodded. He banked sharply and the landscape tilted to one side as a little white clapboard church lurched into view, surrounded by only a few unkempt tombstones peeking from the tall grasses and wildflowers bending to the will of the unceasing wind. For one, surreal second, I saw a new pink marble gravestone; it could be no other. The disconsolate snapshot swept by suddenly and the small, seasonal Cimarron River snaked into view a mile away.
Nestled up against the trickling stream were forty acres of prime cotton land, plants well along, hunter green against the noticeably red color of the bottomland. I held out my hand palm down in a stabilizing gesture and the pilot pulled us up into a hover at about five hundred feet. There was the serpentine brook shielded and overshadowed by giant cottonwoods.
From where the helicopter hovered I could see my granddad, clad in his overalls and sky blue denim shirt, driving his tractor, the same old patched-up Allis Chalmers, away down the length of the field towing a cultivator. He was an apparition, an anachronism, and yet a familiar fixture all at once in his worn straw hat. I knew, without being close enough to discern this detail, that a toothpick would be clenched in the corner of his mouth. His back was to us. His tractor made enough noise to mask our presence so I decided to arrange a little surprise for him.
While Granddad was turning around and shifting his aching frame behind the large radius of the tractor wheel, he saw a black and turquoise jet-powered helicopter land right in front of him, just five hundred yards away. The red dust and noise were cataclysmic. He never opened his mouth, shifted his gaze, or blinked for that matter. He bore straight toward us as though he hadn’t seen a bloody thing.
I sat with the pilot as the RPM spooled off the turbine and the main blades and tail rotor wound down, watching the old man drive the tractor, right up to the edge of the field. He no doubt assumed we were some representation of authority, at the very least an unwarranted intrusion by a surveyor or some such meddler. He looked right at me through the Plexiglas, took off his battered straw hat, and dried his face and neck with a red bandana. He put his hat back on and began turning the plow. Once it was straight and ready he dropped the blades into the topsoil, engaged the engine with the clutch, and proceeded on his way right back in the opposite direction.
The pilot looked at me and shrugged. “Friendly fella,” he said.
I grinned to myself. It was just my granddad. He plowed all the way up to the other end and made his elaborate turn yet again. How many thousands of hours had he spent here all by himself in the middle of this cotton patch? Eventually he came rolling up to us, using the hydraulic lift to pull the plow out of the ground and slowly, painfully it would seem, crabbed his way off the propane-powered Chalmers.
He took a tentative step in our direction and I bailed out of the chopper.
“Granddaddy! It’s Jimmy!” I shouted as I ran up to him and grabbed his hand. It was the only time in my life I ever saw him truly surprised. By God, he was even smiling!
“I got you, didn’t I?” I was laughing, too. He broke down and let me hug him. “Your grandmother will want to see you,” he said in that high, quiet, seldom-used voice. We walked up to the house and cleaned our feet on the foot scraper.
“What is going on out there, for heaven’s sake?” Maggie asked, turning around from the kitchen stove, flailing at some biscuit dough in a mixing bowl. She freezes there in my memory, as though caught in a strobe flash, mouth completely open, round eyed, and brows arched behind her bifocals in complete surprise.
“Jimmy Layne, why goodness gracious alive! How did you get here, for heaven’s sake?”
I remember her plain country short-sleeved dress and the pattern of tiny faded flowers run amok. I hugged her and puffed flour all down th
e front of my jeans and on my shirtfront. She was highly strung, and while I’m sure she was glad to see me she was plainly unnerved. That would be my fault. It had been at least three years since I had seen or spoke with them.
We sat in the kitchen for a while and had sandwiches: white bread and bologna, mayonnaise, and some beat-down iceberg lettuce. Iced tea with lots of sugar and lemon juice. We talked about the rain and the milk cows, not as many as there used to be, he explained. I tried to describe what I did for a living, which seemed to be elusive to them.
“And you use a helicopter?” Grandmother asked incredulously.
I could tell she thought I had taken leave of my senses. I was a mystery to them. I had come down out of the sky telling strange stories.
After I burned through a thousand dollars or so of the studio’s money I looked at my watch and prepared to take my inevitable leave.
“Would you like to go flying in the helicopter?” I asked my grandmother.
“Oh no, good Lord almighty, no thank you, I’m sure. I think I’ll just watch you take off,” she said. In our whole encounter she smiled just that once.
Granddad and I walked down past the barn and followed the cow trail, deeply etched in the rough pasture, across the creek onto the Webb side.
I asked him if everything was okay and if he needed anything. “Nope, don’t need anything,” he said with finality, as we climbed up the rise toward the tractor and the futuristic flying dart. It is hard to imagine two conveyances more different in appearance or purpose. Or two people for that matter.
From the chopper I saw him remount the steel leviathan and turn it 180 degrees to resume his task. The turbine spun up and the great blades became a solid shining circle. He never gawked at the helicopter or even looked up. The flying machine ascended as he became once more a tiny farmer on a toy tractor. I marveled at him. At his singularity and strength. At his determination to force a living out of this land. Perhaps on the surface we were different. Deep down inside, however, we shared something indistinguishable: Neither one of us would ever be anybody else’s man.
1963
The family exited the San Bernardino Freeway in our Plymouth Fury and rode in silence through the postwar chicken wire and plaster mishmash of modern Colton, California. I was flabbergasted. On all the billboards and in the movies and magazines California was a lush landscape of exotic flora, green grass, swimming pools, and palm trees. Colton was more like the movie Inferno. A few hardy palm trees sprouted here and there but the area’s hifalutin moniker, “The Inland Empire,” hardly seemed deserved.
On Jeryl Avenue, a side street in a beautiful grove of old oak and eucalyptus trees, we pulled up in front of a stylish house, lushly surrounded by an irrigated lawn and landscaping. A bougainvillea bloomed outrageously at one corner of the low brick structure. After the long hot reaches of Route 66 it looked shady and inviting. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad here.
I was lying on my bed one afternoon in my new room, ’30s-style industrial metal windows cranked open, when I was hypnotized by the sound of unsynchronized sprinklers at work all over the quiet neighborhood. Joni Mitchell would call it “the hissing of summer lawns.” As my eyes closed, I heard a song floating through the garden.
“There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to,
In my room, in my room.”
—Brian Wilson
I went out the back door as though in a dream, and followed the sound across to the neighbor’s fence. A teenager, stripped down to his shorts at the back of his driveway, was soaping down a dirty van in the shade. On top of the vehicle were a couple of long shapes I vaguely recognized as surfboards.
“Hey!” I said to the stranger, who jumped and turned to face me. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” he challenged.
“What’s that song?”
“Dude, are you puttin’ me on?”
“I’m new around here.”
“No shit.” His tanned and freckled face broke into a sawtooth grin. “That’s the Beach Boys, man. The Beach Boys?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I bluffed.
“Wanna come inside?” He walked over to the fence. “They’ve gotta coupla albums out.”
California slipped it to me somewhere about halfway through my first Beach Boys album. I caught a case of California and I would be deliriously ill for a long, long time.
In a couple of short weeks Janice, Tommy, and I were back at the schoolhouse standing in long lines and facing for the umpteenth time the ice-water glances of total strangers who thought our twangy accents betrayed innate ignorance. However, by this stage we knew a whole hell of a lot more about getting along with others than most kids we encountered. Even so, the masses of students astounded me. It was a hundred times more populated than Laverne High.
The only class I remember taking was P.E., and the only memory I have of P.E. is doing jumping jacks on the football pitch in my gray sweats. At the other end of the field I saw the cheerleader corps in their short gold-and-white pleated skirts and cuddly sweaters. California girls. But as pretty as they all were, one stood out. She was shapely, blond, and had a personality that made her the center of attention.
I asked my nameless P.E. mate about the cheerleaders. “Who’s that one in front? There! She just jumped halfway over the bleachers!”
“Uh-huh,” he grunted. “That’s Suzy Horton. She’s just about the most bitchin’ girl in school.”
He had that right. But Suzy Horton might as well have been on the moon as far as I was concerned.
I went out for marching band, as it was a tremendous organization at Colton High, winning awards all over Southern California. Since the cheerleaders went along on the competitions, Susan and I met without too much drama. She was choreographing steps for the whole band—a new thing in those days. As a non-dancer I didn’t feel conspicuous spending extra time with her. When she would touch my arm to adjust my position my whole body would freeze into a grooming trance. She would laugh and say, “Hey, loosen up!”
During this time I wrote songs in a frenzy. I would listen to records by major artists like Little Anthony and the Imperials or the Four Tops, and then attempt to write my own version. My parents were so distracted by my incessant caterwauling that they moved the family piano into the garage, up against the wall beside the car. On those fall nights I would back the car out into the driveway and open the garage door wide. Neighbors would crack their windows and yell, “Keep it down!” I had my first fans.
I gave only an occasional thought to what Jayne Jayroe and the rest of my former classmates might be doing. I wrote Jayne from time to time and followed her growing success in the world of beauty pageants, but the rest seemed to fade away quickly. California moved into my head with a sense of its own importance. It had its own fashion, its own music, and even its own language. It also held out the chance, however small, of some fragment of fame and fortune. Hollywood beckoned, only an hour’s drive away from Colton High School.
With all this, the best thing California had going for it was still Suzy Horton. I had emboldened myself to talk to her a couple of times in the cafeteria and persuaded her to sit down on a piano bench and I barraged her with original material. She was only a little impressed. Still, I had managed to develop a connection, even though she wore the ring of a Junior College All-American from San Bernardino Valley College. Eddie Groves knew about me and we even crossed paths in her front yard a couple of times. He glowered at me. Easy, big fella.
I invited Suzy out to the hills in Grand Terrace nearby, where there was some decent rock climbing, and as the weather warmed up, so did we. The orange blossoms bloomed in the vast, pungent groves that encircled the region. There was a boulder there, near the top of the hill, where I kissed her for the first time and she kissed me back. I had been in love with her for months. I had already written songs for her. I began hanging around her like a wasp haunts a mint julep. I would walk three miles down El Rancho from Johnston Street to Latham S
treet, and knock on her door at night. She wouldn’t let me in, but she would direct me around the side of the house and she would come out to the porch swing in the back. We would sit in the dark and talk softly, the way young men and women have talked for millennia. The night-blooming jasmine would fill our nostrils. There would be a few tender kisses. Some talk about Eddie and what the hell we were going to do with him. The harmonies of the Lettermen would drift softly from the house. There was a lot of ambivalence. After all, it was only a first love.
1971
I was giving an interview to a Rolling Stone reporter at Campo de Encino. It was one of a series of interviews with different publications that all seemed to be asking the same question: “What the fuck is a Jimmy Webb?” This made me all the more anxious to reinforce my left-wing credentials, the fact that I played at the Monterey Pop Festival and loved the Rolling Stones above all. Yes, I hated the war in Vietnam and the Mike Curb Congregation. No, I wasn’t on the same Orange County Republican bandwagon with Glen Campbell and Bob Hope and John Wayne. When Johnny Mercer had called me up and asked me to organize a library of my favorite recordings for the White House (for the warmonger Richard Nixon), I turned him down, explaining I didn’t think the Nixons would appreciate Frank Zappa’s Live at the Fillmore East, or Little Feat’s Sailin’ Shoes, or Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones.
The political orientation phase of the interview continued with a question about gun control. I assured my interviewer I was against violence of any type but that I, in fact, owned my very own handgun, strictly because the extensive grounds of Campo de Encino invited nocturnal visitors and my chosen career encouraged rumors of caches of cash and drug stashes. My reporter’s eyes widened. He had just interviewed Neil Young and Neil had lots of guns! I relaxed a little. Could he see my gun? Sensing no pitfall I went into my bathroom and reached up on the top shelf of the closet to retrieve my Colt 1911 .45 in matte black.