The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir

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The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir Page 20

by Jimmy Webb


  One reaches the point where the nerves are trying to climb up through the skin and escape the body. This is stage fright. Usually it gets progressively worse for me, much like stretching a bungee cord, right out to the end where a heart attack is imminent. TV studios were generally where I had stage fright the worst. They were kept so frigid a slight fright could turn into a tremor that would affect my piano playing. I broke down on the Steve Allen Show once and stopped playing in the middle of a song, shivering. Steve was a real gentleman about it.

  Derek Taylor introduced me in his calm, understated way while this torture was ratcheting up. I stood in the wings shifting my weight from foot to foot. I looked up into the cavernous dome of Albert Hall and around at the crowded seats. The rumor was correct. Derek had covered the stage, every inch of it, with roses, surrounding the orchestra, the band, and the piano player. It was very much like a symphony seated in a garden. “Jimmy Webb!” I heard my name. I nervously walked on to a tidal wave of anticipatory applause.

  One thing I remember about the concert, which will be obvious to anyone who has a copy of it, is that I sang no vocal on “Wichita Lineman.” This was very near the beginning of the show and I remember the lovely Carol Kaye intro being reproduced by the cellos and the contrabasses, the high plaintive string line by Al De Lory, and I realized that it was certainly almost time for me to sing. For some inexplicable reason I did not.

  I determined there was nothing for it but to play an instrumental. Feeling like a deranged goose I sat there, blood rushing to my head and played one of the loveliest instrumentals you will ever hear. I was devastated. When on stage, one mistake has a tendency to procreate. The mind dwells on a small error and on ways to redress the balance and in the process makes another mistake, this one more damaging than the first, and so on. In this case I had gone out and made a monstrous, amateurish, insufferable mistake right off the bat. I was off balance and panicked throughout the whole show. The audience’s response was a standing ovation and repeated curtain calls. Nevertheless I was despondent afterward as I made my way through one of the labyrinthine passages of the ancient hall and sought out my dressing room in order to have a proper nervous breakdown.

  The dressing tables were covered with gifts of roses. I knew it hadn’t been that good. People began arriving to dispense congratulations or condolences or both. My business manager, Jerry Rubinstein, and his wife, Carol, all the way from the United States, were consoling in their praise.

  Harry stuck his head in and said, “See you at the hotel.” I went over to him and whispered in his ear, “That coke is industrial waste. Don’t try to find it. Don’t touch it!” He smiled his sly smile.

  Officials and fans with programs for signing were attended to in a blur until finally Sandy Gallin came in beaming and spouting, “Was that fantastic? I mean, really, was that fantastic or what?” Meaning: Could have been better but keep smiling.

  “I would like to introduce you to someone,” he said, and gestured to a lady who stood just behind him. My first impression was of a tall person with beautiful long dark hair burnished to a sheen, wearing a most elegant gown of dark black and magenta, piercing me with green-flecked blue eyes that were large and wide, set over a sweetly shaped mouth and an enticing smile.

  Everything on the face of the Earth stopped. I looked at her with sudden recognition. She was the girl in the Cock ’n Bull, tired from frolic and not caring if I knew it, whose husband I had mistaken for Johnny Rivers. Somewhere in the distance Sandy was saying, “This is Rosemarie.”

  “You were absolutely fantastic, Mr. Webb,” Rosemarie reassured, and she meant it.

  “Jimmy,” I said.

  “Mr. Webb, I mean Jimmy, I would like you to meet my friend Dudley Moore.”

  It was him all right, and the lucky bastard had her on his arm.

  “Would you care to join me at my place for Champagne and autopsy?” I asked, staring at her.

  “It was a wonderful evening, perhaps we will join you,” she said, and took my hand. When she touched me I felt like my hair had been set on fire.

  When I got back to the hotel there were already guests in my room. Hors d’oeuvres were being distributed by uniformed waiters. There was a bar with silver buckets of iced Perrier-Jouët. Rosemarie was radiant, dancing with Dudley Moore who responded with hysterical pantomimes of people who can’t dance. I seethed with jealousy.

  I greeted Jerry and Carol Rubinstein. Jerry was a low-key, highly efficient business manager who also handled Harry and Joni and was quickly becoming the baron of celebrity CPAs. Carol was his attractive brunette partner, New Age before that coinage was even dreamed of. I conveyed my best as I passed them, intent on getting to the action.

  “Hello,” I said as I approached Dudley and Rosemarie. “I know you’re Rosemarie, how could I ever forget? But I didn’t catch your last name!” I smiled at her.

  “It’s Frankland, old boy,” Dudley answered for her. He turned to look her up and down theatrically. “Regrettably, interminably married to a lucky sod,” Dudley opined, taking a glass of Champagne off a passing tray.

  “I see,” I murmured, surprised and dismayed. So she was still married. I turned to Dudley. “I’m a great fan of yours and the band of course.” I flattered him mercilessly but in truth he was one hell of a keyboard player and a better-than-average composer.

  “Oh yah, right, thanks so much, Jim.”

  Beautiful people smoked cigarettes on the wraparound balcony and as always, a few toked on the foul smelling gif. Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush was wailing on the stereo. Harry was sitting at the round wooden dining table in his shirtsleeves, sweating profusely, his face red as a beet. In spite of my dire warnings he was chopping up the substance that was best qualified as an unknown toxic chemical.

  Carol Rubinstein appeared behind him and, no doubt meaning to surprise and delight, slipped her jeweled arms around his neck from behind and bent over him to put her hands over his eyes.

  “Oh, Harry, my beautiful genius!” she crowed.

  “Get away from me, you fucking bitch!” Harry snarled, leaping to his feet, throwing her backward as he flailed his arms in the air to detach her.

  Jerry Rubinstein turned as white as Travertine marble and I saw a hard notion, basic and brutal, form in his normally benign expression. Carol retreated to the lavatory weeping, disgraced and disheveled. The whole room stood silent after witnessing the encounter. I put my arm around Jerry’s shoulders, hard as rocks, and walked him out on the side balcony facing the hotel across the street. He was choking, he was gasping, his eyes were tearing up.

  “I feel like I have to kill him.”

  “Listen to me, Jerry,” I said quickly. “First, he’s a client. Second, he’s pretty much out of control on coke right now.”

  He shrugged me off.

  “Just yesterday, Jerry, he told me what a great pal I was, his best pal. I seized on the opportunity to ask him to introduce me at the Albert Hall. He turned me down. I mean it was two seconds later. He laughed and said he didn’t think it would do him any good.”

  “I need to look after Carol,” he said suddenly.

  “Exactly. Don’t hate him, Jer. He won’t remember it tomorrow.”

  I could only imagine what those few moments had been like for the couple. Humiliated by a client in full view of an audience of luminaries? Harry was slipping.

  The Rubinsteins left and many others followed. The festive spirit of the moment had evaporated. I said good night to Rosemarie, not knowing how or when I would see her again but prescient with confidence that it would be soon. Dudley carried her off with a wink of triumph.

  I went on a hunt for Harry intending to give him a little bit of what he had given Carol. I found him and George Harrison in my bedroom, a pile of the dreaded crap from Mordor lying untidily on the end table. George was clutching a handkerchief to his nose that dripped with fresh blood.

  “Goddamn it, I told you to stay out of that shit!” I erupted.

&nb
sp; George was trying to speak through the handkerchief even as he tried to stuff it up his nose.

  “Manks arot Jmmf,” he said, apparently to me. They got up and, supporting each other, headed for the door. Harry was past speech. As they opened the door and stumbled into the hall George said one last time as clear as a bell in his Liverpudlian brogue: “Thanks a lot, Jim.”

  Ah yes, someone would have to take the blame for this debacle. Nevertheless I eventually came to be friends with George. He was a fine man.

  I turned out the lights, chuckling in spite of myself, thinking about the accidental instrumental “Wichita Lineman.” I went to the piano in the dim and littered salon that looked like that of a suddenly abandoned ship. I played the opening notes for a new song. A song about Rosemarie.

  Jimmy Webb conducting the orchestra during “MacArthur Park” recording session. (Courtesy of Henry Diltz)

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Love is a glass of wine balanced on the side rail of a ship

  Across the sea at midnight comes, It may not last the daylight comes

  And the trip is long, and the waves are strong

  But then again it might be up there forever

  I’ve heard of birds that never touch the land

  But sleep on the winds …

  —JLW, “Asleep on the Wind,” 1974

  1967

  When the Monterey Pop Festival was over, the alchemists and fakirs, the princes and wood nymphs, the trolls, fairies, pirates, magicians, troubadours, wood carvers, candlemakers, accountants, and cameramen faded away as suddenly as they had appeared, “… like a moment’s sunlight fading on the grass” (w. Chet Powers). Something had happened to change the space-time continuum in those three ecstatic yet conflicted days. The sense of bonding with others of their own kind would hold these rebels in continuing proximity. It was the beginning of a movement and a national outrage over the Vietnam tragedy that would gain momentum and eventually move worlds.

  Johnny and I didn’t pause to reflect on the possible cosmic reverberations of Monterey. He grabbed me and we jumped on a plane to San Francisco. He wanted to check out Haight-Ashbury and the Fillmore West. He wanted to talk to Bill Graham and more particularly to Janis Joplin. Big Brother and the Holding Company had made a splash at the festival and Johnny was building a record company, so north we went. As we left the hotel a rumor made the rounds that Paul McCartney had paid a secret visit to the festival grounds. Johnny and I were laughing hysterically in the car and he was having me on. “McCartney, we’re going to do this,” and “McCartney, you should do that.” Thankfully the nickname did not stick.

  The Fillmore West was dirty, starting with the bathrooms and extending to the debris-strewn floor and air quality. “I hate this fuckin’ place,” Johnny said. By comparison the Monterey Pop Festival had been a wholesome high school outing. This was a darker vibe. There weren’t a lot of wildflowers and circle dancing around the Fillmore. We could smell the sweat of addiction. We threaded our way through the crowd, occasionally pushing off somebody who was temporarily missing from their body.

  On stage were Janis Joplin and the Big Brother organization. She was working very strong, singing “Ball and Chain.” Her voice was a sawtooth blade that cut through the smoke and boredom. The band was sloppier than hell and I don’t mean their state of dress.

  We stood by one of the pillars off to the side and listened to several songs. Johnny was excited; Janis was having a very good night. After a quarter of an hour Bill Graham materialized out of the gloom. He was the entrepreneur behind the Fillmore West and its sister venue in New York, Fillmore East. Bill offered to take us backstage as the show ended in a storm of feedback and odd rim shots and shitty drum licks. Sloppy.

  “Backstage” is a word I choose euphemistically as it was a flophouse of squalor back there. The band sprawled like a clutch of playhouse dolls thrown into a soapbox. Two or three expressionless women were breastfeeding infants. There were a couple of near-empty bottles of Jack Daniel’s sitting on an instrument case that served as a bar and coffee table. The cloying scent of vomit hung nearby.

  Graham introduced us to Janis, who was jocular and expansive, articulating a very bluesy patois punctuated with four-letter words. She was down to earth and very soulful. An earth mama. She swigged Jack Daniel’s out of the bottle and chain-smoked tobacco while Johnny talked.

  Had they ever thought about a record label? John wanted to know. Janis replied that rather than labels and career strategy the Holding Company was more interested in bread. Enough money would do any trick. As for the rest of the band they sat in amiable silence, a collection of knees and elbows and hair.

  “Where could we get together and talk it down?” asked John eagerly.

  “As soon as we pack up this shit,” said Janis, “we’ll meet you at Sambo’s on the corner.”

  No problem, everybody knew where Sambo’s was.

  The two of us left the Fillmore West quite happily, Johnny grumbling as we passed through the door, “Whew, that was fonkey!” When John said “fonkey” with an “o” he meant “less than fastidious” as opposed to “funky” with a “u,” which meant “infectious and down to earth.” He was very particular about cleanliness, and had all kinds of other provincial Southern traits I admired.

  We were sitting in Sambo’s a few minutes later when Janis and her boyfriend and their bald-headed lawyer came through the swinging door of the restaurant and plopped into the orange vinyl booth opposite us.

  First they told the story about how half the female contingent were either pregnant or had small babies. The band’s equipment was shot and one thing wasn’t negotiable: bigger amplifiers.

  “How much do you think you guys need?” Johnny asked. I looked at the veins on the lawyer’s bald head, pulsating. There was tangible suspense.

  “Eighty thousand dollars,” the attorney said confidently. There was a long silence. Was Johnny thinking? Was he completely shocked into silence?

  “Well?” Janis finally asked.

  “I can’t write you a check right here,” said John. “Let me think about it.” Faster than you could finish a cup of coffee Big Brother was gone.

  We paid the check and walked toward our hired car. “Goddamn,” Johnny said, “they must be fucking crazy!”

  Now we know Clive Davis gave Janis the $80,000 and more and she eventually made a very good move in dropping the Holding Company and their domestic difficulties, and she became the biggest blues singer in the country since Bessie Smith. She would have been worth millions to Soul City Records.

  In the aftermath of Monterey there was little sense of a letdown. Johnny had just released an album called Changes that contained both a lovely ballad he had written called “Poor Side of Town” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which he had cherry-picked out of my small catalog as a single.

  “I know it’s a hit,” Johnny said of “Phoenix” at the time. Meanwhile “Poor Side of Town” went screaming up the charts earning a “bullet” (a red dot signifying a hot single) almost every week as it ran straight into the top ten.

  Johnny had recorded a song in 1962 called “The Long Black Veil” with a young sideman from Arkansas named Glen Campbell. The cut appeared on the modestly titled album The Sensational Johnny Rivers on Imperial Records. Johnny followed Glen’s progress as he helped form the Wrecking Crew and appeared on hit single after hit single in every imaginable genre. Among Glen’s innumerable accomplishments was the feat of playing the lead electric guitars for the legendary T.A.M.I. [Teenage Awards Music International] Show movie because many of the live musicians were, bluntly speaking, not up to par. On the grainy video he can be seen in silhouette, just offstage in a folding chair, playing the guitar parts.

  More recently he had enjoyed a modest hit with the unabashed war protest song “Universal Soldier” (w. Buffy Sainte-Marie), as well as a significant chart appearance featuring John Hartford’s brilliant and poetic “Gentle On My Mind” that peaked at thirty-nine on Billbo
ard Hot 100 and thirty on Billboard Hot Country Singles. Glen was a powerhouse. A born showman and brilliant arranger who could improve even great writing into records that would chart.

  Johnny started thinking about Glen Campbell and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” On impulse he placed a phone call to Al De Lory, Glen’s producer and string arranger. He told De Lory in no uncertain terms that he had a hit for Glen Campbell.

  Al drove over to Johnny’s house on Angelo Drive and walked in, probably thinking he was on another wild-goose chase. Johnny walked over to his Macintosh rig and dropped the needle down. De Lory sat there in shock.

  “Why would you give us this record?” he asked. “Phoenix” was fully fledged, with Marty Paich’s gorgeous strings and Bud Shank playing his elegant jazz-based flute riffs. “This could be a number one for you,” Al marveled.

  “Al, you can only have one hit at a time,” Johnny said. “Run with it.”

  Johnny remembers hearing it on the radio a couple of weeks later. I had nothing to do with it.

  Meanwhile, I moved out of his house and into Laurel Canyon, a nexus of songwriting activity. One night in my little shack on Kirkwood Drive I was watching television and clicked onto the Miss America pageant. They were crowning my Laverne classmate Jayne Jayroe as Miss America. Her familiar radiance warmed me.

  It was about this time Johnny and I got a hold of one of the early pressings of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Johnny had just come off the road after a few days and brought the intricately decorated album sleeve into the house like a sacred object. We scored some first-class LSD and lit the living room with candles. John reverentially slipped the ornately covered album out of its Shrink Wrap and turned on the sound system.

  A whole generation knows what we heard next. It was a tidal wave of sound on sound, texture on cross texture. The melodies soared and seduced. The lyrics teased and shamed and stirred one’s soul. They announced a new creed. They called for a better world. Music had never in its entire history said or done quite so much.

 

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