The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir

by Jimmy Webb

  There is a terrible symbiosis between cocaine and firearms. Garth and I added a couple AK-47s, two Browning fourteen-shot 9mm automatics, crossbows, and Bowie knives to our arsenal. It all went together in the world of coke-logic. We patrolled our six acres at night with binoculars, armed to the teeth. A limb cracking down in the dead of night from a towering eucalyptus would cause a wide-awake state of alarm in our house.

  When I went to bed, I prayed that some crazy hippies would come over and try to kill us, or just anyone actually. It was Elvis behavior: the paranoia, the surfeit of weapons, new drugs, and Cadillacs. Elvis was right. You couldn’t trust anybody.

  1965

  Otto Mielenz was conducting Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” with the San Bernardino Valley College mixed chorus. He stood on the podium in front of us emoting with his hands as the stirring polyphonic masterpiece burst from fifty passionate throats. The music was strong. It was redolent of sacrifice, death, and dedication. Tears sprang from Otto’s eyes as the theme and subthemes crossed and intertwined on their almost painful journey to salvation. Sympathetic aquifers sprang from the eyes of most of Otto’s singing acolytes. This was no ordinary choir. This was Otto’s fraternity, drinking club, and cult. As the piece ended, choir members embraced one another and the divine tension evaporated in laughter. The young women dashed out to fix their makeup and the men gathered around Otto, the font of all our inspiration.

  “Well, boys, is it time for a beer?” He laughed with a smile that meandered like a river.

  Otto was that one teacher that a student has to meet at some point during his or her education for all the pieces to come together. He taught us that blowing air through our pipes and following a score wasn’t singing. Singing could only take place if the soul was engaged. This philosophy was directly connected to the works of the great master J. S. Bach, who had stated without equivocation that his music was an extension of the voice of the creator.

  My roommates, Mickey and Billy Penyak, were such identical twins I wasn’t able to tell them apart for years, and then only by their quirks of personality. We were starving most of the time. I remember the three of us crouched forlornly over the last slice of pizza in the box, all of us hungry but unwilling to take the last piece from our mates.

  I played gigs with drummer Jimmy Stotler, a phenomenal musician named Elton “Skip” Moser who played electric bass and flute, and Greg Waitman, brought in on electric guitar. For lack of a better name we called the band Four More. Immediately we started making pretty good money on one-nighters and began driving the hour and a half into Hollywood for sessions at Bob Ross’s little clapboard studio. Just across the way was the biggest music store in L.A., Wallichs Music City. Miles of vinyl records lined the aisles.

  One sunny afternoon I was driving to Newport Beach to meet some acquaintances from college, a stack of vinyl on the passenger seat of my trusty VW, and a tune began to circulate in my head. I hummed it, and because I had nothing to write the notes on, I concentrated fiercely to fix it in my head. I began adding lyrics. They seemed good enough that I was loath to have them fly out of the open window to be left on the shoulder of the Santa Ana Freeway. Over and over I sang the simple two-verse song to myself:

  This time we almost made the pieces fit, didn’t we?

  This time we almost made some sense of it, didn’t we?

  This time I had the answer right here in my hand,

  Then I touched it and

  It had turned to sand

  This time we almost sang our song in tune, didn’t we?

  This time we almost made it to the moon, didn’t we?

  This time we almost made our poem rhyme

  This time we almost made that long hard climb

  Didn’t we almost make it this time?

  —JLW, “Didn’t We?”

  I walked into Betty Wall’s house and went straight to a piano, with a face screwed into an expression of concentration. I sat down and sang “Didn’t We?” in one smooth motion, front to back. When I finished I turned around to see the owner of the house, and several of her guests, standing there dumbfounded, mouths hanging open. I never had written a song on the fly like that and never did again.

  I was halfway across the Rubicon as far as going pro was concerned and it made life difficult. It was about this time that I met the Devil.

  One day he drove his metallic green Mustang coupe over to the music department and parked outside the administration building. I called and pestered him so much while he was on the air that he finally given and agreed to come see me and find out what all the fuss was about. He was wearing tight jeans, a cowboy shirt, and a rodeo belt buckle. His smile unfurled as wide as a four-lane highway and his teeth were white and predatory. He was slightly bandy legged, and this effect was accentuated by his stitched cowboy boots. I had never seen anybody quite like him. We went to one of the practice rooms and I started to rip through songs, talking and singing at the same time about the Contessas, and Four More, and this guy George Clements who wanted to put up some money for a record. I was trying my best to impress him. Finally after ten or fourteen songs he said, “Hey, I tell you what. I’m on my way to kind of a cool thing. You want to go?”

  Hell, yes, I wanted to go, and the next thing I knew I was in his special edition green Mustang with a big engine and leather upholstery and all that. I was babbling about how much I loved his show and my favorite records and did he really think The Beatles were here to stay? He looked at me occasionally with a bemused smile. He had seen my kind of youthful enthusiasm before.

  We pulled up in front of a hot dog stand that was bedecked with all sorts of horrid, yellow plastic flags and a big sign that said FREE HOT DOGS! And another one that said FREE BALLOON RIDES!

  “Wanna go for a balloon ride, Jimmy?” he asked me as we got out of the car.

  I didn’t even know it was possible to go for a balloon ride but I said sure and I started lookin’ around, the adrenaline pounding in my veins because this was the guy who could put me on the radio.

  “I don’t see any balloon,” I said. I held my hands out in a gesture of futility and he grinned politely and pointed upward, and sure enough, up there in the sky there was a great big beautiful balloon. He explained it was a “tethered” balloon and would soon come back to earth. I stared up into the cathedral-like interior of the huge inverted pear shape with awe. The alternating panels of blue and red reflected sunlight on the inside like stained glass windows. A woven wicker basket swung underneath as it ascended to a height of perhaps fifty or sixty feet. I could see people looking over the edge of the basket and chomping on their free hot dogs.

  In due time the balloon descended and Belial and I cut in line because it was a radio station promotion event and I was with the big-time jock. We climbed inside and up we went for an adventure that was anticlimactic. Tethered ballooning is not exactly a high-adrenaline thrill ride. On the long ascent he told me about his idea.

  “You know these beach movies with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Well, I’ve got this idea for a screenplay about balloons. All these kids are out in the desert, no ocean or surfboards. They’re making out around campfires, riding horses, and singing rock songs and shit like that, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I’m getting it,” I said, trying to be cool.

  “Instead of riding surfboards, they are getting into balloon races, and falling in love and fucking in balloons. They are crashing and getting into storms and, you know, all the detail stuff like that, I can work it out. We get some great-looking chicks in bikinis. We’ve got to keep the bikinis, and some old rock stars who will work cheap and it’s a fucking hit, man. What we need is a song.”

  “A song?” I was momentarily confused.

  “Before the beach blanket movies there were the Beach Boys and hit songs about surfing and shit, right? We need a hit song about balloons and then we can make the bal
loon blanket movies!”

  He was excited and his enthusiasm was contagious.

  “Can you write me a song about balloons?”

  “Hey, it’s a great theme. It’s a happy idea,” I said, staring up into the dizzying architecture of the giant balloon.

  “Check it out,” he said, staring up. “Look at those curves, the colors. This is the next big thing, Jimmy!”

  By the time he dropped me back at Valley College he had me convinced I should write a song about a balloon. As I watched him drive away I was sure I had found my guru, the show business insider who was going to pave the way for me.

  There wasn’t a soul in the music wing except for a couple of piano majors down in the practice rooms slaving away on Chopin. I had the rehearsal room on the ground floor right outside Otto’s office all to myself. I sat down at the brown Steinway and started slamming out the opening chords to my new song about balloons.

  An hour and a half later I had a finished version of “Up, Up and Away.” The phrase was familiar in the American vernacular because in the original Superman radio show of the forties it had been the man of steel’s stock exit line. Song titles are happily (or sadly depending on your point of view) not subject to copyright. Theoretically there is nothing preventing a writer from creating a new song called “White Christmas.” Nothing, that is, except the contempt and disdain of every other songwriter.

  So the Devil and I became acquaintances, companions, and eventually best friends. He never wrote a script for the balloon movie, which I found disappointing, but I was soon to learn he had a tendency to leap at an idea with a burst of energy and verbalize it without being prepared to dig in. I added the bouncy little song to my portfolio and in the short term set about rearranging my domestic situation.

  As much as I loved the choir and worshipped Otto Mielenz, my presence at the college had become mostly symbolic. In harmony and musicianship I was hanging on with a D. One day my professor Russell C. called me in to tell me I had earned an A on the final, which consisted of an original composition. Notwithstanding my final grade, he informed me I would flunk the course because of a lack of attendance and a very spotty record for turning in homework on time, if ever. Russell C. was a big African American man and I could detect under his crusty exterior an ember of affection for my dreams of becoming the next Irving Berlin. He gave me a brief lecture that day:

  “Mr. Webb. We don’t enjoy your presence at our institution any more than you enjoy being here. If you want to go to Hollywood and be a goddamn songwriter, then why the hell don’t you go to Hollywood and be a goddamn songwriter!”

  He politely held his office door open in order to facilitate my exit. It was the most useful thing any of my many teachers had ever said to me in my journey through the educational system.

  Jimmy Webb in his Schweizer. (Courtesy of Henry Diltz)

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  All truth is a tale I’m telling myself.

  —Brion Gysin, 1970

  1971

  And So: On was released and recognized as Record of the Year by Stereo Review magazine, the gold standard of the audiophile. I went on a support tour for And So: On as the weather began to turn cold all over the country. We played many of the familiar gymnasiums and coffeehouses. We played Doug Weston’s Troubadour, which was becoming famous as a nightspot where a person could become immediately famous. Joni Mitchell for one. Elton John for another. I, however, did not immediately become famous. I did find a carving on the dressing room wall, which certain informers attributed to Tom Waits: JIMMY WEBB PLAYS GOOD CASH REGISTER. In the present era money is all anyone cares about, but in those days of supposed utopian equanimity (All you need is love!), I was embarrassed and a little guilty about the influx of unceasing cash. I deliberately dressed down. I went to extraordinary lengths to prove my collar was blue and my politics were pink. Meanwhile Mr. Sinatra was playing “Didn’t We?” at Royal Festival Hall in London and giving me a shout-out from the stage. Glen Campbell sang “Wichita Lineman” on Johnny Cash’s television show. The “Wichita Lineman” album had been a “stone cold smash” as the promo guys liked to say in that ancient time. Is the reader tracking the dichotomy between the world I lived in and the world my music lived in?

  On November 17, I was booked on the Dick Cavett Show. I surmised I was there to explain some of the inconsistencies in my career, my appearance, my politics, “MacArthur Park,” and my private life. I was rumored to be a drug user. My reaction to this was: “Hot damn! Now we’re getting somewhere!” I found out once I got on the set that I was merely the opening act. I played a couple of tunes; I don’t recall exactly which ones. I chatted with Dick perfunctorily as he couldn’t have been any less interested in me had I turned out to be an expert on parking space management. Once we negotiated the fifteen-minute segment with an interview that was not a high point of either career, Dick moved to the reason he had shown up for work.

  His special guest that evening was an alleged murderer, ex–army officer, and doctor, Jeffrey MacDonald. I perched on the couch and watched this devastatingly charming man in the hot chair deny that he had killed his wife and three little girls and then faked the scene to make it appear as though Manson sympathizers had done the killing. The crime scene had been painted in blood with messages such as “Kill the pigs!” This interview consumed the rest of the show and I found out everything I needed to know about the army’s relentless persecution of Jeff MacDonald. The mysterious woman in the yellow hat, the impossibility of certain crime scene details occurring without interference of the police (i.e., it was a big setup and he was being sent down the river). A blond refugee from a GQ cover with a nice gold watch, fashionable jacket, and good shoes, MacDonald looked more like Michael Douglas than a murderer. After the show I went over to him under the influence of some inexplicable impulse to shake his hand. I suppose I thought if I shook his hand I would know; something would tell me if that hand had throttled three little babies.

  He greeted me with a huge smile and automatically took my hand.

  “Hey, man, I love your music. Thanks for listening,” he greeted me.

  I believed him. His energy, his deportment, and the look in his eyes did not suggest any culpability in murder. I followed MacDonald’s travails for years after that. He was in and out of prison, he had new trials, and he appealed incessantly and with inevitable futility. He never escaped the ambiguity of whatever actually did happen.

  Cavett himself found MacDonald to be a poseur and insufficiently convincing. “His affect is wrong, totally wrong,” Cavett said years later after viewing footage of the interview.

  1965

  The Contessas tapped their college funds, I gathered together the small bills and smaller change I made off band gigs and tips, and we put it all together and moved to Hollywood. We shared our first apartment: a twin bedroom and kitchenette two-floor affair. I slept on an air mattress in the dining room downstairs. The atmosphere was redolent of hair spray, perfume, and a mixture of all the ointments, permanent treatments, creams, poisons, and spells that are necessary to epitomize the female persona times four. There was an occasional spat, but considering five people were living in a space designed fastidiously for two, we got along. Because it was my goal to keep “the group” together, it fell to me to referee and organize peace summits from time to time. All the group members had to be treated with painstaking equanimity. So Susan’s and my relationship, or lack of one, was put on permanent ice, pending the outcome of the group’s fortunes.

  I was damned proud of those women when they were turned out. They had good taste in clothes; their platinum blond tresses were immaculately styled and maintained. They labored tirelessly on their routines and harmonies. Suzanne Weir, a very pretty woman and the lead singer, was like a lot of overly trained classical musicians: not finicky about pitch at times. I would take them over to Motown to see if Frank and Hal could rub some “soul” into her; however, “soul” is a hellaciously difficult thing to teach. There were whi
te singers in the pool who could sing “soulfully”: the Righteous Brothers, the Walker Brothers, Joe Cocker, Tom Jones, Felix Cavaliere, or Janis Joplin. Sometimes white folk could decorate their singing with the correct artifacts and affectations to sound soulful, but “white soul” was truly a rare thing.

  I hoped Motown might want to sign them. Their record had just been released on “E” Records and the ladies would dress up in identical blue gingham “farmer’s daughter” dresses with blue ribbons in their hair. Into Motown West we would troop, through the oversize door. Immediately Suzanne Weir would find a way to get into Hal Davis’s lap. Frank Wilson would be there with his almost impossibly handsome face and soft voice, often with George Clements, our producer, and sometimes Gil the promotion man. Tapes from Detroit would manifest from locked cabinet doors and I remember one night hearing “My Girl” (Smokey Robinson and Ronald White) for the first time, long before it hit the airwaves. I knew as soon as I heard the opening bass line and verse that it would be one of the biggest records of the era.

  Meanwhile the Contessas flirted, insinuated, and enchanted the office like a well-trained machine, knowing instinctively what was required and precisely when to ease off on the throttle to avoid any suggestion of entanglement. This is something I never coached.

  There was that much lauded je ne sais quoi in the ambience of the office. It was a pulsating excitement that was only just short of something you could put out your hand and touch. Motown was on a roll with the Supremes. They had released five or six number-one records in a row with Diana, Mary, and Florence, and the Contessas were blatantly motivated to be a white version of that.

  The girls made one major promotional assault at a San Bernardino radio station. They invaded the station one afternoon and went into their full-on flirt mode, sitting on laps, posing for photos and pretend-smooching, but this time it was disconcerting and I felt slightly queasy. A Top 40 radio station was where the rubber met the road. The Devil had already recounted to me several anecdotes about major recording stars handing over sex right on the premises, in the control room or in a car outside; anything to get their record played. Jocks were accustomed to these kinds of favors without having to ask. It was a perk of the job. Female artists were under subtle but steady pressure because so many artists were vying for a limited number of slots on that chart. In other words I knew the girls were teasing but the jocks didn’t or, maybe to put a more accurate read on it, didn’t care. I felt like a hockey goalie fending off a hat trick.