by Jimmy Webb
“Uh, this one? Uh, okay … It’s really not one of the best ones.…” I trailed off.
He reached up and whipped the towel off the lamp. In the sudden flood of light I saw the old man’s lips, encompassed by a white circular scar. A lifetime of performing was indelibly carved into his face and I recognized him in that instant as Louis Armstrong.
He took the lead sheet from me and scanned the melody, raising one eyebrow slightly and barely humming the tune. Suddenly he raised the battered and bent trumpet and softly blew the opening strain:
This time we almost made the pieces fit, didn’t we?
This time we almost made some sense of it, didn’t we?
He paused and looked at me, or perhaps down my throat as my mouth hung open like a tailgate on a Ford pickup.
“You gonna stick wid this, right?” he said gently in his gruff voice. My head swirled as I nodded affirmatively.
“Thank you, sir, thank you,” I managed to respond.
Out in the hallway someone was knocking and summoning.
“Mr. Armstrong! Five minutes!”
Louis “Satch” Armstrong smiled at me and held on to my hand.
“You stick wid it, kid, you got something,” he said as he stood up and headed for the door. He was gone for a second but then he leaned back into the room for a final word and a smile.
“You stick wid it.” And then he really was gone.
I stood there with a warm golden glow suffusing my whole body. Eventually I looked at my Timex and realized I was late for Tony Martin. I went down the hall to his dressing room and he treated me like a prince, looking at every single song and highlighting a few for future interest. As curtain time loomed he was immensely preoccupied with his vitamin B1 shot and back brace, his coif and all the makeup and arcane applications of an aging star who still summons the courage to walk on stage and singlehandedly roll back the hands of time. A happy warrior, laughing old age in the face in the dressing room mirror.
1971
I learned to fly in thirty days, give or take.
Once the towrope is released, a sailplane’s path upward through the sky is remarkably similar to the circular one that carries hawks and other raptors aloft. The view from the deeply banked glider, through the clear blister, is dizzying.
As I gained experience and confidence with the controls, my lines of flight became more stable and there were fewer jolts and aimless meanderings. The tension level also came down. Ergo I started feeling better and actually enjoyed the occasional look around at the scenery, indulging in a deep breath or two, but such recreation almost always immediately evoked a warning from Fred in the backseat that my nose was dropping, or that I was too slow or dragging a wing. It was a game of precision where an aggregation of tiny mistakes could eventually bring the big bird down to an ignominious plow through an unfortunate farmer’s field.
One afternoon we went up routinely, butterflies fluttering in my torso as usual, and Fred had me “box” the towplane and practice recovering from a couple of stalls. After the second recovery he made his first editorial comment since the beginning of instruction.
“You’re a born pilot, Jimmy.” We landed back at the field and he popped the canopy and got out. He waved at a towplane pilot, who taxied over.
“Time for you to leave the nest and fly solo.” Fred grinned wryly as he bent over to secure the towline. I palmed a big red knob with a pull and release that secured the ring to the rope. He didn’t actually expect me to fly this turkey by myself, did he? He did. He walked back about thirty feet and stood there with his arms crossed. The tow pilot opened the throttle just a shade and the slack went out of the towline with a slight tug on the airframe. I waggled my rudder to signal the tow pilot that I was ready, my palms sweating on the stick.
I looked out and Fred was running my wingtip. As the two aircraft gained momentum he kept the wings level. The empennage lifted off the deck. The airframe began to float in ground effect. The controls became living extensions of my arms and legs, another instrument for me to learn to play. A feather touch of back stick and the glider was airborne. It was my job to keep it in an imaginary box behind the towplane.
At about three thousand feet I checked my altitude and looked out over the billiard table–flat desert toward the Tehachapi Mountains forty miles to the northeast. I reached forward and pulled the spring-loaded release. There was a metallic thunk as the towline twisted and flailed and the towplane banked hard right and disappeared. My first sensation once I was settled down was loneliness. There was no reaffirming gentle voice right behind my head to tell me what to do.
I started thinking almost immediately about how I was going to get down. As I checked for traffic, “neck on a swivel” as they say in the fraternity, I noticed a strange wisp of cloud southeast of my position and began to witness the formation of a small cumulus cloud. It blossomed like a cotton ball while I watched; a burgeoning animated cauliflower that glowed an unearthly white in the bright sun. Well, this was interesting. Perhaps I was in a position to investigate such a hypnotic unfolding from a new perspective. I drifted over to the vicinity of the cumulus that was now as big as a small skyscraper. The closer I approached, the more absorbed I became by its deepening contours and darkening grays and indigos.
It was a smattering of raindrops across my canopy that brought me back to a sobering reality. I was a fledgling pilot, several miles from my home field and approaching cloud base under a cumulonimbus cloud that suddenly towered in vertical walls far above me. I flew along the side of the cliff, awed by what my tiny white carnation had become in a matter of minutes. More important, I pointed the nose of the glider at the ground and watched the airspeed wind up to eighty and then eighty-five knots. Against all expectations I continued to gain altitude. I turned away as the cloud moved laterally, trying to pull me in. I ran up to a hundred miles an hour, close to red line, now terrified. It had me.
I was in peril of being sucked into the cloud. This was potentially disastrous, as I would immediately be blind to any external visual reference and would probably stall or go into a spin, providing the enormous vertical shear inside the cloud didn’t rip us apart without ceremony. I got a grip on my emotions and resolved, as Robinson had always admonished me, to “never stop flying the glider.” I was at ten thousand feet and the cockpit was suddenly frigid. I was shaking. But my teacher had introduced me to artificial emergencies. By using a special sliding lever, slats, whose only function was to spoil lift, could be raised on the upper side of the wings. Hence their nickname, “spoilers.”
As I increased my angle of descent by pointing the nose further downward I engaged the spoilers and anxiously scrutinized my instruments. Slowly but surely I began to see altitude spooling off and eventually I approached level flight once again, no sign of the cloud except a light pelleting of raindrops that spattered over the canopy.
I made my approach downwind, flying a base leg that was more of a closed loop. I wanted to get down. I used the dive brake, adjusting the threshold for my touchdown, and when I landed it was no cinematic, slow-motion landing but rather I planted the plane firmly on the X and then, almost in tears, steered and braked the Schweitzer to a stop in front of my tie-down.
Fred Robinson strolled over with a brace of instructors and an ice-cold soda.
“Congratulations, Jimmy!” He beamed from ear to ear in a highly uncharacteristic pose. As I clambered out of the deep cockpit I was clapped on the back as other friends from the field gathered round to add their congratulations.
The flight line was busy and as I gulped at the soda the impromptu celebration broke up quickly. Normal operations resumed.
Fred looked at me with an appraising stance. “So, how was your solo, Jimmy?”
“I loved it. Er … a little scary landing by myself, but I had a good teacher!”
“Did I teach you to stay at least five hundred feet laterally from any cloud at all times?”
“Yes, sir,” I bluffed on.
“So that must have been someone else I saw up there clowning around in that big q-nim then.” He reached out his hand to shake mine.
“Hands are a little chilly there, Jimmy, and shaking, too.”
I stood there looking at the blue patch of sky over the flying field. What untold mysteries floated there in plain sight and yet invisible? It was another world entirely, a place of three-dimensional freedom where a man’s senses were elevated far beyond those of the earth crawlers below. I loved it more than anything I had ever known in my life save perhaps music.
The 5th Dimension, Jimmy Webb, and Marc Gordon at the Grammy Awards. (Courtesy of William Eastabrook and NARAS)
CHAPTER NINE
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
We could float among the stars together, you and I
For we can fly, we can fly
Up, up and away in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon
—JLW, “Up, Up and Away,” 1967
1966–67
Though he unaccountably remains underrated by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Johnny Rivers had just been selected “Male Entertainer of the Year” for the third year in a row. He would go on to win a fourth time.
Johnny decided to double down on his burgeoning star power and create a record label: Soul City. Again, Marc Gordon put in a good word for me. He brought Johnny by the studio where I was working and I played a few songs. Johnny decided to take me on as a writer, and invited me to stay in his house until I was on my feet. He paid me $100 a week and offered me a new car.
When it comes to the ’60s Johnny Rivers lived at ground zero. I was lucky enough to be along for the ride. He brought me on board as a rehearsal pianist for the 5th Dimension, a group Marc Gordon had brought to him after the departure from Motown. The singers consisted of Lamonte McLemore, Ron Townson, Florence LaRue, Billy Davis, and Marilyn McCoo.
I knew Marilyn and Lamonte from my short-lived Motown songwriting tenure; he had been a photographer and she a model. They were dating at the time. Marilyn was a UCLA business school alumna, her father was a doctor, she sang phenomenally well, and she looked like a New York haute couture fashion model.
Billy Davis, one of the finest singers it was ever my privilege to work with, was from East St. Louis, where life had been a little bit different. He had grown up in rough neighborhoods on the fringe of criminality. His feet were well under him and he was as physically hard to move as the bollard of a cruise ship. Not someone to cross, though his eyes often betrayed him as being generally filled with unrestrained mirth.
Florence was a vivacious pinup, bright as a penny, a born organizer and trustee of the ethos of “the group,” which was a mystery to me in many ways. They had their own rules, their own means of determining future actions, and a system of rights and entitlements that was codified but never written down. I was never, not even for a second, “in the group.”
Ron Townson, a tenor, was a trained opera singer given to a generous avoirdupois and a florid Neapolitan style, which could be blended gorgeously into the group’s choral work but seemed a bit out of place at a rock show. Regardless, he had a solo spot on each album, the same as all the other members. One of his favorite routines was to come on stage dressed as a clown and sing Pagliacci to a makeup mirror. He was a tough guy. He belonged to the Police Auxiliary and sometimes wore a holstered snub-nosed .38 to rehearsals and recording sessions. He was a loving man, quick to laugh, but his emotional hair trigger could just as easily snap the other way and once pissed off it was a job getting him back on track.
Lamonte the Implacable, the peacemaker, the bass, was a benign imperfection, with a home-styled grit to his voice that may have been one of the 5th Dimension’s great secret weapons. He came in at about the same altitude as the listener. His was a street voice, honed and shaded around fiery oil drums on cold winter nights.
At first called “The Versatiles,” it didn’t take the quintet long to vote for the more trendy “The 5th Dimension.” All together, they were simply brilliant.
We gathered for rehearsals huddled around the piano, me wearing a pair of moccasins that had holes worn through the soles. I would sit cross-legged on the bench sometimes, and one day, right in the middle of a vocal run-through I felt one of Billy’s fingers wiggling through the hole in my shoe like a snake. I jumped as high as a bullfrog and Billy laughed maniacally and they all teased me, “Jimmy, when are you going to get yourself a new pair of shoes?” When things calmed down we went on, pounding out the notes for each line of every song. “Woodshedding,” we would call it. No music paper, no iPads, nothing but our brains.
“Let’s try this.” Lamonte would jump in and sing a line.
“And then,” I would say, “if you guys do that then the girls could do this.” I would pound a line out on the piano.
They would stack up the harmonies and Florence would say, “Wouldn’t it be better if Ron sung this? We could switch notes with him.”
And I would nod and we would have another bar. Painstaking. Note by note. Person by person. Idea on idea. We loved it into being. It was the very stuff of our lives. And we could change our lives with this magic stuff.
The biggest American act in the country was the Mamas and the Papas: John and Michelle Phillips, Cass Elliot, and Denny Doherty. “California Dreamin’” was an example of the group at their best. Johnny pitched us a song written by John Phillips for his group called “Go Where You Wanna Go,” a song that had never taken off for them. We began rehearsing parts that sounded remarkably like those of the Mamas and the Papas. It was slightly irritating to me that we would go off in that direction. The 5th were going to be a black version of the Mamas and the Papas? The concept seemed flawed.
Johnny, Marc, and I worked hard on the album, experimenting like mad scientists with any kind of instrument or non-instrument that had a possibility. We were just beginning to realize what could be done with multitrack recorders and the search was on for “new sounds.” Multitrack recorders gave the musician access to eight or even sixteen separate tracks on which instruments or voices could be layered. Orchestras and effects could be overdubbed at will in perfect sync with other instruments. Hundreds of instruments could be overdubbed theoretically, by “bouncing” two or more tracks to a single track repeatedly. For the first time, highly technical studios and recorders melded with musicians as an integral part of the creative process.
That was the spirit of the time … innovation and the exploitation of new technology. Al Casey played a Japanese guitar called a biwa on “Go Where You Want to Go.” The Baldwin Electric Harpsichord was a new invention. We procured a prototype, and Knechtel and I sat side by side combining a plethora of keyboards and organs. We visited the ubiquitous electric sitar, a fad that started with Joe South’s “The Games People Play” and ended a month or so later. The studio had been full of gourds, castanets, congas, jawbones, tin cans full of popcorn, Styrofoam cups full of BBs, wind chimes, and thumb harps. Hal Blaine developed a set of tuned tom-toms of different sizes, flared around his perch like a keyboard. Ringo Starr heard about these and asked Hal to come to London and bring a set.
Up, Up and Away was released into a maelstrom of competition from England, Haight-Ashbury, Motown, and Mussel Shoals in April of 1967. The first single? John Phillips’s “Go Where You Wanna Go.” The 5th Dimension had consulted with a popular costume designer of the day, Boyd Clopton, and the result, while imaginative in the extreme, was a bit of a head scratcher for the unwashed. Each group member appeared as though they had dressed individually in their street clothes: hats, vests, skirts, pants, blouses, belts, and buckles, and yet the fabrics, velour and velveteen in complementary shades of similar thematic colors, sent a mixed message. That message was “We are individuals but we are wearing some sort of coded uniform.” This was in an era when a person’s mode of attire was an unambiguous comment on their entire ethical position on all the important questions of
the day without portfolio. Traditional performers, such as the Four Tops and Gladys Knight and the Pips, wore identical uniforms. Then came the Rolling Stones apparently wearing on stage whatever they woke up in. The original 5th Dimension costumes were stylistically located on a point midway between these two. It was confusing.
At the same time, with all due respect to John Phillips, “Go Where You Wanna Go” had not come blazing off the launching pad. It had entered the chart in a respectable position but when the public saw the 5th Dimension on television in their outfits, singing a track heavily influenced by the Ma’s and Pa’s, they just didn’t know how to identify the product. The record was stalling in the high thirties or low forties when Johnny decided to pull it. Briefly Tim Hardin’s “Misty Roses” was in the running but Johnny’s choice for the next single was “Up, Up and Away,” the Devil’s little brainchild from the film that never was. At the same time the 5th dropped the quasi cowboy gear and adapted a more uniform rhythm and blues appearance, embracing the fact they were a vocal singing group with choreography, a recognizable team.
There was a lot of discussion about “Up, Up and Away” before it was given a chance. It was said to be a “show tune.” It belonged in a musical, not on a rock ’n’ roll radio station. What was that sound anyway, that orchestra stuff? Was that jazz or what? I could see the bend in the river. If the record hit, it would change my life forever. It was more likely by far it would not be a hit (it sounded like nothing else on the radio) and my life would take a random off-ramp into a small town somewhere, where I would burn out in the role of an embittered band director with a plain wife and kids with bad skin.
Stoically, Rivers put the record out in April and it took off like it had a Saturn V strapped to its behind, thanks largely to promotion genius Marty Lippman working it to the bone. It was everywhere, just suddenly “there,” always on the airwaves. I would hear “So Happy Together” by the Turtles and then “Up, Up and Away” with no comment whatsoever on it being a weird song, or an old-fashioned song, or any of that. The song went to number seven on the Billboard chart, and the 5th Dimension was launched in a big way. They were an attractive, energetic, and appealing group of bright kids and they grabbed the brass ring with both hands, determined to exact their last full measure of success from this wonderful, unlikely carousel ride. Almost immediately they were playing live in the most posh of venues. As long as the group stayed together it was an unstoppable and beloved American original, and they’d go on to have hits with other notable writers, like Laura Nyro’s “Stoned Soul Picnic,” Rice and Webber’s “Age of Aquarius,” and Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “One Less Bell to Answer.”