by Jimmy Webb
We had reached a critical juncture, but I wasn’t ready to tell the ladies if they wanted airplay and if they wanted to crack key stations they might have to do some unladylike things. So far it had been good fun. No one had gotten hurt. I crossed my fingers and prayed for the indefinable mojo that would turn our first record into a hit.
The Contessas’ single “This Time Last Summer,” backed with “Keep On Keepin’ On,” fluttered unsteadily toward the sky and rock ’n’ roll heaven in the summer of ’65 and came up short, plunging to earth after a few short weeks. Still, the ladies had created enough excitement that West Coast president Marc Gordon offered them a recording contract at Motown. It was exactly as I had pictured it, and then, unaccountably, the Contessas began to talk about breaking up. Almost simultaneously Marc Gordon resigned or was canned at the label. I found myself superfluous and Jobete let me out of my songwriting contract. I had written forty-five songs for them. They were generous and returned many of my copyrights, including “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and “Up, Up and Away.” I left behind an album cut with the Supremes called “My Christmas Tree” and a Billy Eckstine single “I Did It All for You,” and some other bits and pieces.
Sharon went back to Colton and married guitarist Greg Waitman. Alyce went home as well, and enrolled in classes with the intention of pursuing her dancing aspirations. Suzanne Weir threw up her hands at the unpredictability of show business and headed back toward academic circles. Susan Horton ended up at an insurance desk, installed in an imposing skyscraper that stood just west of MacArthur Park near Wilshire Boulevard. George Clements somewhat bitterly wrote off his investment in “E” Records with the suggestion that I probably should have paid my share.
Well, he had paid his money; he took the ride and had his fun. Four More, Jim Stotler, Skip Moser, Greg Waitman, and I went our separate ways as well. The Vietnamese Conflict was revving up and the draft was a growing concern for all of us. Jim and Greg suddenly joined the Marines and thankfully spent the duration stateside. Skip graduated from Cal Tech and went to work on helicopter blades for a secret military project.
There was a sense that I’d had my ride on the carousel and the ring had somehow slipped from my grasp and was now rolling away like an errant coin. I set about finding myself a niche somewhere in “the star maker machinery behind the popular song” (J. Mitchell). I had no money. No income. I had borrowed money from Betty Wall in Newport Beach to purchase an old battered Volkswagen. I began a sojourn on the meaner side of the Hollywood streets.
1971
And So: On was a sensation with the critics. Rolling Stone’s reviewer wrote that the album was “another impressive step in [Webb’s] conspiracy to recover his identity from the housewives of America and rightfully install him at the forefront of contemporary composers/performers.” This was, incidentally, back when what Rolling Stone said about records meant a hell of a lot in the marketplace. Still, sales were tepid. Radio stations were nervous about my image, unsure where to place me in the starting grid. Warner Bros. sent me out on the road with a seasoned promotion man named Walt Calloway as a buffer, a grizzled pioneer of the airwaves, who looked the part with his white mane of hair and matching mustache. Walt walked me into every Top 40 station in America with a copy of Rolling Stone magazine and a big “Why not?”
Top 40 jocks ruled the world in those days and if you weren’t someone they took seriously they would leave you cooling your heels in the waiting room while they got around to your inevitable pitch. I was sitting in the anteroom of a small station somewhere out in the provinces for almost an hour and chanced to look up at the same time as the guy sitting opposite me who had been there since before I sat down. It was Jim Croce.
Walt would have me stay over for dinner with a program director and his wife and friends as a guest to be slightly poked and prodded like a dodgy bit of food, gingerly examined, one might say. I remember one night in an Italian restaurant sitting across from a P.D.’s wife. She was all gussied up in a low-cut gown and kept looking at me like some exhibit from a museum. Finally she wrinkled up her pretty little face and asked, “When are you going to write another ‘MacArthur Park’?”
This translates pretty much straight across as “When are you going to write another hit?”
“Never,” I said. “I’ll never write another ‘MacArthur Park.’”
When I got home I sat at my kitchen table, contemplative and angry. The LA Times was open to the entertainment section and something caught my eye. A sailplane, a sleek facsimile of a modern fighter aircraft, complete with the transparent bubble canopy and aerodynamically smooth shape. It differed primarily and significantly from a small jet in the fact that it used no engine to achieve flight. Nor did it have a “delta” or V-shaped wing, but instead an unbelievably long and tapered span that met the fuselage at ninety degrees. After a bit of reading I learned it was no mere “glider” but a “soaring plane,” a sophisticated machine that was designed to ride air currents and was made with a highly efficient airfoil and lightweight materials.
I decided immediately I was going to fly one.
That weekend I drove my XJ6 out the Ventura Freeway to Highway 14 and ascended into the high desert. The San Gabriels rose ruggedly, with their crests of pine, on the right. I merged onto the Pearblossom Highway, a potholed two-laner that was a shortcut to Vegas if you were ornery enough. Truckers dominated this ominous track at high speed, reaching seventy or eighty miles an hour as they met automobiles also making up time. Occasionally two of these missiles would come together at 160 miles an hour. Steel tore apart like paper. Arms and legs would fly.
I had a little trouble finding the turnoff, but spotted a few small aircraft fairly close to the ground out my window and turned that way. A half mile up the road, virtually in the shadow of majestic snow-covered Mount Baden-Powell, was a hand-painted sign: GREAT WESTERN SOARING SCHOOL.
The scene that greeted me through the windshield was one of almost chaotic industry. The dirt runway curving up and down like a roller coaster was packed with gliders and towplanes. The northeastern end of the strip was nose tip to rudder with about twenty gliders waiting to take off. A Super Cub roared at full rpm as it towed an impossibly graceful and eager high-performance sailplane off the deck and slowly out into a wide circle. The two aircraft climbed as one, linked by the towrope. A Piper Ag Cat came whistling over the line of waiting aircraft, coming in for its next pickup, a nylon towrope flailing behind.
With a loud metallic ringing sound, a long towrope was secured to a pelican-looking bird with two people inside. The pilot of the Ag Cat gunned his engine and the towrope came taut, the two craft strained together for a moment, moved forward, and then, effortlessly, the sailplane lifted.
At this moment another ship approached the runway, apparently traveling the wrong way, and a tough-looking cowboy in a tennis hat ran out of the operations trailer, red faced and screaming, “You can’t do that, goddamn it!” He ran out on the flight line waving his arms and screaming, “Shut it down, for cryin’ out loud, shut it all down!” He stood on a thin strip of tarmac and stared at the glider bearing down on him as though daring the pilot to run him over. “You idiot!” he yelled, shaking his fist. The gawky bird touched down just over the weeds at the far end of the runway, and attempted to make a right turn. He hung his right wingtip in the dirt and the glider circled at high speed toward other ships tied down helplessly at the edge of the field. He skidded within inches of the control trailer and dramatically stopped, nose in the dirt and tail high in the air. The cowboy went about restoring order.
Finally the reverberations of this episode ebbed and I felt emboldened enough to walk up to the cowboy and introduce myself.
“Hi, I’m Jimmy Webb, I called you.”
The fierce individual was suddenly all charm.
“Hello, Jimmy, I’m Fred Robinson! Sorry about all the excitement. Some well-meaning journalist put a story in the paper about this old ranch and things have been snafu’d eve
r since.” He grinned and threw up his arms for a second and then dropped them helplessly. “I’m just afraid some idiot is going to get themselves killed out here. It happens, you know!” He snorted. “What can I do for you, Jimmy?”
“I would like you to teach me to fly.”
“That’s what we do out here,” he exhorted “Let me show you our training aircraft.”
He walked me out to a temporarily idle kite, one of the ungainly pelicans. “This is our Schweizer 2-33. Thousands of people have learned to fly in this.” I glanced at the high wing 33 but my attention was diverted by another design. She was tied down securely next to the trailer and was the exact plane I had seen in the Times.
“What about that one?” I gestured toward it.
“That’s a Schweizer product as well, a 2-32. But that’s a high-performance sailplane. We normally don’t teach in that.”
“How much is a glider like that?” I asked.
He was surprised. “Uh, about fifteen thousand dollars.”
I walked her sleek length, grazing the thin aluminum skin with the tips of my fingers. I looked through the clear glistening canopy at the intriguing world of analog instruments that were clustered on the panel. I took in the big five-point flying harness that secured the pilot to his seat.
I smiled at him. “I’ll take it.”
“Well, you can’t take that one. It belongs to a customer!” he complained.
“How about a brand-new one? Blue trim.” He stopped fretting and grinned. He was beginning to get an inkling of my intent.
1965
I got a job at a low-rent music studio as a demo pianist, lead sheet maker, and mostly, a janitor. As an added perk, the studio manager let me sleep in her spare room. There was one bright light in my life. Though the Contessas had scattered to the wind, Susan Horton was unaccountably still living in Los Angeles. We met each other many times at MacArthur Park, a vestige of Wilshire Boulevard’s more genteel days. Well-heeled people had lived here and taken their promenades beside the large inviting body of water, lush with palm trees, beneath the quaint, turn-of-the-century streetlamps. Then drug dealers moved in and replaced bright curiosities like paddleboats and mallard ducks. The vivid colors faded under a layer of dust as traffic became a nonstop polluting stream.
Neglect was the word that sprang to mind when Susan and I met for lunch on the grass that summer and watched the old men playing checkers and chess in their last surviving enclave under the trees. We had never even made love. I was an eighteen-year-old virgin, for Christ’s sake. Here I am, saving myself for her, and our conversations are drifting into long silences. In her vague, unfocused gaze I could see that the park wasn’t even real to her. It was streaked and faded like a watercolor wash and I was dissolving with it like a snowflake on the hot dirty sidewalk. The life was drawn out of me. And yet I loved her. Even as I walked away for the last time and behind me, out of my sight, MacArthur Park melted in the dark.
1971
Harry Nilsson announced he was headed over to London for a while and suggested I consider visiting. In my life Harry and cocaine were hopelessly entwined. When I was with Harry I was probably doing lots of cocaine but that is in no sense his fault. Cocaine was gaining momentum and I always had to have a bottle in my pocket if I went out. Harry, it must be said, went the extra mile.
One night, we were waiting for our drinks at Marconi’s, a place packed to the gills with industry types and celebrities. Harry reached inside his suit coat and pulled a gram out of his inner pocket. He took the plastic screw top off the little bottle. Then, elevating his left hand in order to make a level surface, Harry poured a small mountain of cocaine on the back of it. Everyone within eyeshot stopped what they were doing to watch. H, as his intimates called him, shotgunned the coke up both nostrils with a great hooting snort. White powder went all over the place: down his beard and the front of his shirt, into the air where it lazily drifted onto other patron’s tables, all over me—it was like setting off a cocaine bomb. The clientele paused for a second and then went back to their steaks and martinis.
“Want some?” Harry offered, with a smile that showed all his teeth.
“Maybe later,” I replied softly. Harry’s big red nose was decorated with a splotch of white icing.
As we sat there I told him one of my best buds had punched my girl’s ticket while I was out on the road. He told me something similar had happened to him recently.
“A close friend?” I asked him.
“They don’t get any closer,” he responded drily.
It is small confidences such as this that close the distance between two people.
Let me correct any negative impression I may have created about Harry of the great golden heart. Drinker he was. Fatalist he was. Knight in shining armor he also was.
One late night Harry was driving down a lonely stretch of Pico Boulevard, which was not one of East Hollywood’s more elegant thoroughfares, when he heard screams. In the middle of a car dealership’s abandoned lot, a young woman was being hit in the face by two grimy-looking thugs. Harry hung a 180 and drove directly into the center of the melee, flying out of his German mystery vehicle to tackle the nearest lowlife. This philosopher, this poet, this man with the fine vulnerable voice of a rare canary threw himself bodily into the midst of the fracas. He ended up in the hospital with a bruised spleen, broken bones, and numerous lacerations and contusions about the head and shoulders. Those of us who knew him would back him come hell or high water.
When we got to London, I went to several of the Nilsson Schmilsson sessions. My friends Jimmy Keltner and Gordon were on the gig, as well as Klaus Voormann on bass, and many of Elton John’s sidemen. Harry was the de facto pianist and always prepared very carefully for recording. We would go to a pub, have a couple of brandies, and then visit the loo and snort coke off the back of our hands. Then we would smoke some hash in the alley and go to the studio. After the session we’d retreat to one of Soho’s late-night jazz bars and do straight shots of tequila and snort coke. One had to be more careful in London; one couldn’t lay mountains of marching powder out openly on the bar. Not cricket, old boy. Daylight would find us wherever we passed out. Sometimes we would have breakfast; sometimes he would disappear. Sometimes a girl might be seen, but never more than once or twice. Harry’s sex life at the time, if any, was circumspect. After all, he was a new dad, and trying to make it work with his wife, Diane.
I came back from London and my late-night hangs with Nilsson, drinking much more heavily and on a steady regimen of cocaine use. None of this hangs in Harry’s closet. He never forced anything down my throat—or up my nose for that matter. Harry’s unfettered chain-of-consciousness approach to record making had been an epiphany during the creation of Nilsson Schmilsson. I started planning some songs and arrangements for my next solo LP, songs I thought would please Harry. Cocaine gave me the energy to stay up all night and create. To my mind, it wasn’t affecting my creative touch. I couldn’t see that I was making mistakes.
1965
Marc Gordon, formerly of Motown, called and asked me if I would like to take a trip up to Vegas, all expenses paid.
“What’s the catch?” I asked.
He explained that Tony Martin, one-time Motown artist and husband of Cyd Charisse, had been asking about me and wanted to hear anything new I might have. He was playing the Riviera Hotel and offered to buy me a plane ticket and put me up for the night in return for a song or two. I grabbed my binder of songs and my one pair of slacks and headed for the airport.
I arrived early, checked into a very decent accommodation and around 6:00 P.M., not being able to contain myself, went down to the stage entrance. I walked backstage unsupervised and gazed in wonder at the soaring proscenium arch and the hundreds of lights suspended in midair, decorated with their festive-colored gels. I wandered into a back corridor carrying my fat score and found myself standing in front of the breakroom, where performers could rest or watch television between shows.
After a few minutes my companion on the couch stirred a bit, and groped in his coat pocket for an old handkerchief. I heard him blow his nose very loud. Then he said, “What you got there?” in a voice like an old scratched record.
“Me?” I squawked, dropping the binder into my lap and looking into his large eyes. He was focused on me now and was probably going to light into me for waking him up.
“Yeh. What you lookin’ at so hard there, young man?”
“Oh, this? Oh, this is nothin’ much. Just some of my songs for Mr. Martin. Mr. Martin? Mr. Tony?” I sputtered.
“Oh, I know who he is all right. Bring that over here.”
I stood up and the binder slid off my lap onto the floor. I scrabbled around on the linoleum gathering up some leaves that had come loose. My hand landed on “Didn’t We?”
“That one right there. Bring that one over here,” he ordered.