by Jimmy Webb
1971
Toward the beginning of the year I did The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, a fact unlikely to be verified because of the loss of several years of Tonight Show kinescopes in a studio mishap. The producers would occasionally book a “novelty guest” such as a child prodigy who would do complicated math problems and look cute as Carson deadpanned straight at the camera. I was still young enough to be regarded as a wunderkind of sorts and I believe that was what they had in mind.
Carson: So, you decided to write a song that’s seven minutes and twenty seconds long?
Cute Kid: Well, my mother used to say the longer the better, sir.
Carson: Deer-in-the-headlights-look right into camera A.
I didn’t really play cute kid as much as I projected angry, tortured young man. This was exacerbated by the fact that I wasn’t a one-liner virtuoso. For all the real communication or sympathy that was exchanged, I might as well have been talking to a television. The great man got a few laughs by working around me and then he sent me off to perform “MacArthur Park” with Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Orchestra. The band was excited about doing my chart; they relished the challenge of tackling something a bit out of the ordinary.
I sat down in my hippie flowered shirt at the grand piano and played the introduction. Strictly routine. I looked at Doc, who stood with his glittering trumpet and an infectious smile, more bandleader in the traditional sense than conductor. It was easy going as I yodeled through the first verse and chorus and we found ourselves floating in the center section. This was childishly simple, a ballad from the 1930s really, and a matter of no concern. Then came the interlude in 3/8 leading to the allegro and instrumental section. Good. We were chugging along with a great rock beat and … but wait, as we entered that second break in the middle of a fast part I felt a couple of horns get out of sync. It seemed impossible, but part of the band was now on the second eighth of each beat and for the present that seemed awkward, but it was still being barely held together. Then we approached the second interlude where there was a drastic change into a slower tempo, the classically flavored stair steps leading up to a crescendo that ended with a last dramatic verse. And here, right now, on The Tonight Show ladies and gentlemen, in front of twenty million Americans, the band and I were quickly, inexorably, and inexplicably breaking apart. Confusion and discord were spreading quickly, and then I missed my vocal entrance. I panicked. I did the only thing I knew to fix it.
“Hold it!” I yelled. On live television. “Hold it, guys, hold it!”
Carson, the crowd, the crew, and most of all Doc Severinsen looked at me in horrified surprise. The band came to a ragged stop.
I turned on my bench to face the band. “All right, guys,” I yelled, “bar eighty-seven, one, two, three, four!”
The band started up again like a smoothly tuned machine. I sang the last verse and mercifully we reached the end. The trumpets played closing notes so high and perfect they threatened to wipe out my immediate past but I bolted for my dressing room, red-faced and looking for a place to die. Doc caught me in the narrow passageway behind the set and turned me around.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going, genius?” he asked me without a smile. My face must have crumpled. “I don’t know what to say,” I almost sobbed. “I don’t even know what happened!”
“Hey, Jimmy, you’re a pro! I couldn’t have done better myself.” Doc Severinsen was grinning at me. “I just wanted to ask you to write something for the band. You know we play on the weekends.”
He patted me on the back and moved on.
Jimmy Webb and Ray Rich at the Royal Albert Hall, London. (Courtesy of Ray Rich)
CHAPTER TEN
This is the answer to the letter unsent which even so arrived some years later
Like a song sometimes written for love long before it is alive …
— JLW, “Simile,” 1972
1966
Benny Shapiro bore an uncanny resemblance to Captain Kangaroo.
In the fifties he had started a beatnik club just across the street from the forties nightclub Ciro’s. He called it the Renaissance. It became a mecca for the beats and it was where Lenny Bruce got his start. It was also where Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, and many others had blazed the first trails of modern jazz.
Benny had a house full of kids and a happy wife. The walls of their home were decorated with representations of India’s deities and Sanskrit banners, the atmosphere heavy with incense, and wind chimes tinkled softly in the garden. He was Ravi Shankar’s manager.
In 1966 Benny had an idea. It was a big, goddam, explosive show business idea. Why not harness the powerful tribal instinct that had kids out in the streets in the thousands, burning vehicles and stoning cops? What about inviting them all to the biggest, ass-kicking-est Battle of the Bands ever staged on the planet? He would start with Ravi and build around him. He chose Monterey, already the site of the Monterey Jazz Festival. It was a nice central location where the Haight-Ashbury scene could drift south. The Sunset Strip, Venice Beach, and Topanga crowd could hitchhike north up the Pacific Coast Highway to one of the most beautiful places on earth. Monterey would be the place.
I remember Benny telling me and Johnny Rivers about it and Johnny getting extremely excited and sharing the idea with mega-producer and founder of Dunhill Records, Lou Adler. Lou involved his attorney Seymour Lazar and inevitably told the Mamas and the Papas about this once-in-a-lifetime event and its nascent opportunity. As the players became more important and influential, other financiers heard of Monterey and became interested. The pressure mounted on Benny, a small-time promoter in the opinion of many. However, Benny had earned himself a place at the table by copywriting the name, and protecting the concept under the banner of the Monterey Pop Festival.
Benny was getting elbowed by some powerful people to take a secondary role or perhaps just walk away, but he was a stubborn guy and wouldn’t surrender his brainchild that easily. Through it all he was adamant that it would be a free concert. Lou Adler and John Phillips redoubled their efforts to wrest it away from him. How do I know this? Benny told me.
One idyllic Sunday afternoon while Benny and his wife were at the movies, their house burned to the ground with all the mystic Indian gods and the Sanskrit banners unable to prevent it. The housekeeper was able to escape safely with the Shapiro’s children.
It would be unseemly of me to suggest there could be any possible connection between the fire and the festival; yet not two weeks passed before Benny’s fierce handlebar mustache had disappeared from the inner circle where the decisions were being made.
How do I know this? Because my fate and that of the festival were entwined and traveling the same curve through space.
One afternoon, fellow songwriter P. F. Sloan and I and the 5th Dimension were in our garret above the old Imperial Records office, rehearsing parts. Johnny suddenly popped his head through the door and said, “C’mon, kids, let’s go for a ride.”
He required only the two songwriters to go along so we said farewell to the 5th and wandered out to the parking lot where Johnny’s black Buick Riviera was idling, his/our ancient bagman Harvey Lippman lolling in the shotgun seat. The two of us bundled into the back and Johnny drove down La Brea to Sunset and made a right. Twenty minutes later, we were turning into the gates of exclusive Bel Air and soon thereafter found ourselves idling in front of a massive pile I recognized as that of John and Michelle Phillips.
As we waited, Johnny demonstrated his impression of W. C. Fields.
“Well, boys, this is it, yes indeedy, this is the big one.” He grinned at us over the backseat. I gave it a seven.
“The big what?” I asked, biting my tongue.
“All will be revealed,” said Harv.
Johnny and Harv had their game faces on. We were admitted to the house and found ourselves surrounded by lush Persian rugs, heavy wrought iron sconces, and massive Spanish furnishings, making me feel as if I were in the lair of a seventee
nth-century warrior prince.
Lou Adler, producer of the Mamas and the Papas, stood in the foyer, stroking his beard thoughtfully. It was his careful overdubbing of four-part contrapuntal harmonies that was the secret of their sound and success. Years of hunching over faders in the studio had given him an eternally grief-stricken posture and countenance. Cass arrived and then Denny. John and Michelle came downstairs together and joined us as drinks were served. There was microscopic small talk, containing not a clue as to what this was all about. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel walked in next and my mouth hung open like the village idiot. This wasn’t a meeting; this was a summit.
The last person through the door was Lou’s grim-faced lawyer, Lazar. He was carrying his briefcase, and as soon as he entered two huge iron-bound doors opened into the dining room as though on cue. Harv began shooing the guests into the dining room, except for P. F. Sloan and myself. We were told politely but firmly our presence wasn’t required.
Flip and I, a little disappointed, scuffed down the gravel drive to Johnny’s Buick Riviera and smoked a reefer in the front seat.
I don’t know, and I don’t suppose anyone will ever know, exactly what was said around the table that afternoon. I know seed money was raised for the Monterey Pop Festival. Around $40,000 was promised by Johnny, the Phillipses, Lou, Simon, and Garfunkel. It was a hell of a lot of money in those days.
One result of this secretive meeting was obvious. All the performers at that table eventually appeared at Monterey, including Johnny, who was taking a serious beating from snobby rock critics for his middle-of-the-road covers of Motown hits. It is my opinion that Artie and Paul, and Johnny and the Mamas and the Papas, were the nuclear core that attracted a lot of the big-name talent and insured their attendance.
Lou and John came away as the “producers” of Monterey and ended up also shooting the documentary. Lou was jefe from then on. A small office was opened, secretaries were hired, and art designers were engaged to produce an official poster and a logo. In one interesting footnote it is said that Lou Adler went to Monterey and had a private meeting with the police chief. Conjecture has held that an agreement was reached by which the heat would be turned down during the festival on recreational drug use.
Johnny continued to make a contribution to many of the details of the concert. Time would reveal it to be a unique, almost perfect idyll in sublime weather. The first and the best of its genre. However, it was destined to end in a particularly surprising way, not at all included in the best-laid plans.
1971
On the surface, Joni Mitchell was a friendly, almost deliberately ordinary Canadian girl with a bright smile and a quick wit. But when it came to music and lyrics she had been blessed with a divine gift. I knew with no envy or jealousy that she was a better writer than I was. I envied her easy conversational phrasing that turned everyday banter into a new kind of song lyric. Her sensual guitar tunings delivered deep, dissonant, yet compelling chords that, to use an expression by Linda Ronstadt, “rubbed.” Play that warm chord. I would sit with her and watch her hands and listen to her songs in the making, determined to follow, at least for a while, as closely in her shadow as I could. I was especially entranced by her surprising and unheard-of habit of opening the air-sealed titanium housing around her most inner being and letting the whole world gawk at the intricate workings of her complicated, gifted, tormented, soul.
I saw her frequently at my manager Sandy Gallin’s soirées in Trousdale, where the objective seemed to be to invite as many famous people as practicable and then, if possible, persuade them to perform for one another. One night Joni excised me from the center of the party where I was playing a medley of my hits at the baby grand. She wanted to talk to me privately. She told me quite a tale.
Back in 1968 when she had first opened at Doug Weston’s Troubadour she had not been aware I was in attendance, nor even aware of my existence. The rush of stardom initiated by that engagement perplexed and even frightened her as it came like a tsunami out of years of playing tiny, cheap bars and literally passing the hat among the bitter grounds of the coffeehouse scene. Then in a flash her genius was recognized and she was captured by the nameless millions and swept away. Fortunately, and wisely for her, she was also swept away by mega-managers Elliot Roberts and David Geffen. Years passed. She came to know me and actually liked some of my songs. She found me to be an affable guy and had been fascinated by my nude concert on the grounds of Campo de Encino. It was wonderful that we had become friends, she said.
Recently she had moved house. Her new place in the world called for a proper residence and the old house in the Hollywood Hills where she had lived was a time capsule. The original pre-stardom furniture was there with the cats and the photos and mystery boxes. She set out to clean the place up, discard what she could bear to part with, and carry the remaining treasures to her new digs in Bel Air. Halfway through she and her helpers had decided to move a large, heavy couch in the living room as it was destined for the Salvation Army. As they moved the stubborn couch from its groove, an old piece of paper was liberated and fluttered to the floor. Puzzled, she picked it up and perused: It was a letter from me, from 1968.
June 12, 1968, I was in the Troubadour for no particular reason. I had wanted to meet Doug Weston for a long time and talk about doing some kind of appearance there. It was a large club for folk music with a capacity of about four hundred seats, way too big for me. When Joni started playing I happened to be leaning on the balcony upstairs and watched her come on stage.
There was a center spot on her, displaying her long blond tresses to great advantage, but she was highlighted with that damn train light in her eyes for the whole evening. Nobody moved or even breathed loudly while she was singing. The atmosphere was electromagnetic. Yes, her playing and singing charmed me, especially the repertoire of grainy, almost jazz-based chords on her Martin. I am attracted to the basic dark matter of music wherever I find it. Her soprano was crystal clear with considerably less vibrato than she would come to use later as her career progressed.
My affections turned on a dime at that stage of my life, but this was different. I was fascinated, entranced by her ability to communicate on the deepest level from the outset. After the show and the encores and the immense roar of approval that shook the old house to its foundations and dislodged decades of dust languishing in the beam work high above, I could think of nothing but her.
Years later I would watch Jackson Browne fall in love with her. I remember him coming to me, very nervous, and saying, “So, how should I talk to her?” And I smiled, moved yet deeply amused at the same time.
“You just talk to her like you would talk to … a really nice person,” I said.
He tried to absorb her through the music and the words and when that failed he inevitably moved toward something more immediate. In more or less the same delicate state I went home that night in 1968 and poured out my bleeding soul on a piece of stationery. It was one of those moments that—twice considered—would never evolve beyond the first crumpled missile aimed in the general direction of the wastebasket. I sent her the letter backstage, hand delivered to her Troubadour dressing room, with twenty-four long-stemmed roses of the most rare and fragrant variety. Years passed without a reply.
Joni smiled at me.
“I just wanted you to know I got your letter.”
I blushed deeply trying to remember exactly what I had written in the way one always dreads what one has written.
She laughed.
“It was a very nice letter, and yes, of course I would like to see you for tea or dinner!”
Her blue eyes danced with barely restrained mirth.
“If I’m not too late,” she remonstrated.
Sandy Gallin, with his elfin demeanor and ringmaster patois, came through the bedroom door like a fabulous jinni and found us sitting on the bed.
“Am I interrupting? Where in the world are my performers?” He did his impeccable imitation of Kate Smith.
Joni and I became friends. We liked flea markets and stuffy old antique shops. Before Morton’s on Robinson became the power restaurant of the Hollywood cognoscenti it had been a fashionable old barn full of antiques run by proprietor Jules Bucheri. We went in one day together and bought a most gorgeous Art Deco chandelier. She insisted I take custody of it. One time in a not-so-subtle hint about my wardrobe she fitted me for a herringbone jacket in a flea market off Melrose. It must have looked a little strange; a man with more hair and beard than John Lennon and Jesus put together posing in an English gentleman’s country costume. She insisted it was perfect.
Joni consented to come in and sing “just a little” with my sister Susan on my latest LP Letters. A woman of her word she ended up singing just two notes. Two glorious notes. My world was on the surface chaotic and yet beneath the storm, a very well-kept secret: I had things exactly the way I wanted them.
1967
I was beginning to chafe in the role of Johnny’s contract writer. Musically I was headed in the direction of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor as well as Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, and Lowell George.
In the studio with John I really should have been content to tread water for a while but there were issues. John and I would be looking at a chord sheet and he would be trying to finger it on his rose-colored Les Paul and he would say: “Why does it have to have those two extra notes, the low one that’s a discord and the other one that just sounds weird?”