by Jimmy Webb
1968, London
I was invited to a Beatles session through the auspices of Harv and Ron Cass. I hopped on the next Pan Am flight back to London.
Unbeknownst to me, The Beatles were very antsy about visitors in the studio though I would have found that attitude perfectly understandable. In his book Here, There and Everywhere Geoff Emerick described their prickly demeanor when confronted with looky loos and front office types while at work. As Harv and I navigated the narrow alley called Queen Anne’s Court, searching for the nondescript entrance to Trident Studios in Wardour Street, I could scarcely believe our good luck.
We hit the buzzer and a figure appeared in a window overhead. “Ooh is it then?” he yelled. Harv made the introductions. A strapping young man in jeans and a rumpled T-shirt admitted us with no further security measures. Besides some upbeat music faintly audible through a door in front of us there was no sign of life in the foyer. No groupies, no guards or receptionist, just an expressionless young fellow escorting us along a corridor decorated with award discs. It seemed a long walk toward the tinny timbre of the music, echoing, it seemed, from another era.
Honey Pie, my condition is tragic
Come and show me the magic
Of your Hollywood song
We opened a door into the control room and I dropped onto a black leatherette couch, as far away from the action as possible. After shuffling uncertainly for a moment Harv did the same. The name of the game when visiting a film set or recording session or backstage is to make yourself as small as possible. Nothing grates on my nerves like an unsolicited opinion or even unintentional noise from a visitor. Therefore, I kept quiet and tried to observe and remember as much as possible for the day when I might want to write it down.
Directly in front of me the wide window, found in most studios, revealed that the studio itself was one floor below the control desk. I had no view of the goings-on down on the studio floor, though I could hear the familiar Liverpudlian chatter of some of the most famous voices in the world. The take had broken down and The Beatles were talking.
They were consulting with a silver-haired gentleman seated behind the board, the word gentleman not being chosen lightly because starting with his appearance he could have been nothing else. He stood, speaking softly yet firmly, radiating confidence and trustworthiness. He was tall, almost gangly, and yet his stance was erect and noble. He was an astounding-looking man. So this was George Martin. I had half-expected a tubby, balding, uncouth, sweating record producer. This individual looked as though he had descended from the cast of Korda’s The Shape of Things to Come.
As the session progressed, with no one having taken the slightest notice of my presence, I emboldened myself to stand up. Now I could see clearly into the mysterious lower chamber of the studio. On the left side, McCartney sat at a grand piano wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a sweater tied loosely around his neck. He seemed to be making the lyrics up as he went along and was stopping the takes frequently. Linda Eastman sat behind him on the piano bench, motorcycle style, her arms tightly around his neck, chin resting on his shoulder. I was amazed that he could play or sing at all with this considerable handicap but he seemed to be inordinately cheerful, chortling and wisecracking constantly. The deliberately banal lyrics continued:
Honey pie, you are driving me crazy
I’m in love but I’m lazy
So won’t you please come home
On the right side of the studio was another tableau. John Lennon, long-bearded and adorned by a thick fall of dark brown hair, sat on an intricate rug of Indian design, legs folded in the manner of a yogi. He sat calmly and for the most part silently, cradling an acoustic guitar on his lap, which appeared to be a Martin D-18. He strummed along with Paul sometimes and sometimes not. Close by sat Yoko Ono in support, occasionally kissing or trifling with his hair, sometimes resting her right arm around his shoulder. Candles and incense burned around them in a semicircle creating the impression of an improvised altar.
Standing between the two collaborators and their respective girlfriends, George Harrison diffidently plucked at an electric bass on a strap, spaghetti thin and seemingly at a remove from the other two.
And what of the fourth? There was no sign of any drums and yet I could hear them snapping along on the two-beat rhythm, high hat and bass drum. Ringo’s voice was clearly audible on the studio monitors.
“How long am I going to have to stay in here?” he asked at least once.
“Hello?” he would inquire plaintively.
“Is anybody listening?”
The truth is no one appeared to paying much attention to him. He was in a drum booth directly beneath the control room, a sort of windowless cell, where he whiled away the hours sequestered from human contact.
The arrangement of the personnel was somewhat strange to my eye. No American band would play without eye contact from the drummer, who was—in spite of much demeaning banter to the contrary—often considered to be the most valuable of members.
There was much symbolism to be read into the physical arrangement of the onetime “mop tops.”
After a few runs at the track, which seemed focused primarily on Paul’s piano, Martin and McCartney decided it was time for a listen and the band broke. John was invited in for the playback but declined.
“I’ll just stay here with me drums,” Ringo also responded, morosely.
After a short delay, Linda and Paul burst through the door laughing, and Harrison followed. The second engineer fiddled with some tapes and suddenly it seemed a whole other track, featuring a lot of electric guitar, was on the overheads.
“Hey everybody, I want you to meet Tom Dowd from Atlantic Records!” Paul announced to the room and I looked at the control room door, expecting to see the engineering/producing legend from Atlantic Records. There were no new arrivals. George Martin extended his hand in welcome to me. Confusedly I got up off the couch.
“I’m Jimmy,” I said to George Martin who smiled at me with sympathy and a bit of pity.
“So Tom,” McCartney said, too loud and right in my face, “fantastic, you’re such a legend and all! Want to hear a track?”
“I’m Jimmy,” I said extending my hand. Paul ignored it.
“Take a listen to this, Tom,” he barreled ahead nodding at the second engineer. A button was pushed and a guitar solo blared at his extraordinary level, which I would learn was standard for the group. George Martin eventually lost an hearing in both ears. I stood nervously beside him and yet being trained to listen analytically, I automatically evaluated the playing. For originality and powerful rendition, it was superb.
“So Tom, what do you think of that take?”
“Very good,” I said, “but I’m not…”
“Good, then I have another take…” He nodded at the second engineer and a different guitar solo thundered in the tiny room. Once again I automatically concentrated on the performance. He would get no hackneyed answer from me.
“That one was very good as well,” I said honestly. “Amazing.”
“Which one would you choose, Tom?” Everyone else in the room, Harrison, Harv, Martin, and balance engineer Barry Sheffield stood simply watching. I was bewildered. Did Paul McCartney actually think he was speaking to Tom Dowd? If so he was pretty high on some very good shit. If he knew he was talking to me, he was having me off royally.
“I wouldn’t make a decision like that for you, Paul,” I said. I was getting pissed.
“Well”—he laughed, a demented court jester—“I guess we’d better get back to work.”
They stood and listened to “Honey Pie” a couple of times. Any additional opinion of mine was not solicited. They all trooped back downstairs and only George Harrison paused as he passed me to say, “Fantastic arrangement on ‘MacArthur Park,’ Jim.” He smiled and shook my hand warmly.
As they left the control room so did I. Harv trailed me into the alley.
“What the hell was that all about?” Harv seemed genuinely co
nfused.
“Paul called me last year and asked me to write a song for Mary Hopkin’s album,” I clarified.
“So?” he asked me.
“I guess I should have tried a little harder,” I said with resignation. It was the only reason I could think of for such bizarre theatre. Henceforth, Paul and I were never what you could call friends.
Jimmy Webb and Art Garfunkel rehearsing. (Courtesy of the author)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Driftwood in its voyage steered by stars
Blown by wind to landfall close ashore
Through the spray, swept away
To the coastline tossed and torn
Thrown high and falls to rest like people
Baby like you and I
—JLW, “Driftwood,” 1978
1972
San Francisco’s morning was a symphony of white clouds and wind-scoured blue sky. The Golden Gate Bridge and Sausalito, Pacific Heights, and Coit Tower loomed. The Bay was dotted by a hundred white gouache sails in a quickening breeze, all vibrating to the frequency of blinding sunlight.
I was there to meet Art Garfunkel and his gifted engineer/producer, Roy Halee. Art and Paul Simon had broken up two years earlier to splashy headlines. Since Paul wrote all the songs, Art needed material and was actively screening top writers such as James Taylor and Stephen Bishop. I was honored to be invited to audition.
On Russian Hill I walked into a cavelike environment—down a hallway and into a control room where it could have been midnight. In the holy of holies there was always a sacred mantra of peaceful, climate-controlled tranquility, emphasized by the soft acoustic shapes that covered virtually every surface. Amid a star map of colored lights and glowing VU meters I found Artie, relaxed and leaning against the console. He was tall and lithe. His bearing was aristocratic. Roy Halee—an imposing figure in his own right with the round face of a burgher—sat in the captain’s chair and puffed on a slightly curved briar pipe. They greeted me warmly.
We traded the essential social trivialities for barely a minute and then Art walked with me out into the studio where the subdued lighting revealed a seven-foot Steinway and the studio’s interior, resembling a cubist painting with its baffles, angles, and geometric blind corners. It was a fitting surround for a man of intellect who had studied architecture at Columbia University and earned a degree in art history.
Art coolly sized me up as I took a seat at the grand and ripped through a few chords to get the feel of the instrument. I had come unarmed. I had no lyrics or lead sheets, only the repertoire in my head. I played songs for him, uncorked a couple of good ones, and he nodded but gently coaxed me onward. He had not heard what he wanted to hear.
I had a new song I’d written in London for Rosemarie. I regarded it with suspicion as Rosemarie had dismissed it as “silly,” but I took a chance and launched into “All I Know.” Art stood seemingly spellbound while I played the simple intro and then gradually increased the volume and intensity until the climactic last line.
There was a moment of uncertainty and then a smile broke out on his face.
“That’s very good, Jim, very good.”
He peered through the control room window and Roy nodded and emitted a puff of cherry-scented smoke from the pipe clenched between his teeth. They had been recording.
Art invited me back inside where the three of us listened to the rough performance of “All I Know” on the studio monitors. “I think we could make a hit out of that, don’t you, Roy?” Art said. I was exploding internally with joy at my good fortune. It was a historic moment. “All I Know” would be Art’s first hit single after the Simon and Garfunkel breakup.
I found a house I liked, called Campo de Encino, and Evie agreed to come give her mark of approval. As we drove downt the hill she looked at Van Nuys and laughed hysterically.
“Jimmy? The Valley? Really?”
When I showed her around the property she was duly impressed, though not everything was perfect. She didn’t care for the bathroom upstairs.
“You need to put a tub right there,” she said, pointing to the corner, “with a Jacuzzi and a bigger window.” I called Jerry Rubenstein and told him to go ahead with escrow.
Rosemarie and I seemed helpless to do anything about our situation. We continued to meet in the aching, dramatic, and physically overwhelming atmosphere that permeates adultery like a bittersweet poison. Whenever she could see me she would.
We drove to Solvang, an ersatz Dutch village north of Santa Barbara, and browsed through the tourist shops, buying shell necklaces and faceted glass pieces from discarded chandeliers. We spent the night in a kitschy mid-California landmark called the Madonna Inn, drinking Champagne. At dawn we were out in the almost empty parking lot turning doughnuts in the Cobra and listening to Son of Schmilsson, singing along and laughing hysterically until security guards stopped us. We ran back to our room, where the nightstand phone was ringing.
It was Art Garfunkel. I looked into Rosemarie’s eyes and felt the blood draining from my face. Artie was at a recording studio in Hollywood. He was perplexed because the string arrangements I was supposed to write for an 8 A.M. session didn’t seem to be on hand, nor was there any sign of my copyist and it was almost time for the session to start. I could hear an orchestra tuning up in the background.
So potent was my preoccupation with Rosemarie (it was veering into mental illness), I had forgotten this recording session completely. There would be no arrangements for the musicians that morning and haltingly I began an apology that would last the rest of my life. What I had done was unpardonable. There isn’t much a producer can do with a string orchestra that has no arrangements. In the dollars of the day that session was going to cost Artie around ten or fifteen grand at least. Lamely I offered to pay for the date. He ended the call abruptly and I couldn’t blame him. How could I forget a string date? If such a story were circulated in town, it would hurt me.
Rosemarie and I jumped into the Cobra, drove south on the PCH, and parked in a turnout high over the immensity of the Pacific far below. Here the noise of swells colliding with burly boulders was muted and modulated by the onshore breeze.
“I love you, Rosemarie,” I said.
“I love you, too, Jimmy.”
As we stood, me with my foot up on a rock, Rosemarie with her arm around my shoulders, lost in the music of wind and wave, something extraordinary happened.
It started with a few birds circling unevenly a hundred yards out toward the sea and slightly south of us. Behind them the afternoon sun was partially obscured by a sudden massive cloud that sent shafts of golden light to the ground. More birds joined until there were perhaps a hundred individual birds circling a half mile out, their wings catching the irregular ministrations of direct sunlight and flashing an indecipherable code. I could feel it and knew Rosemarie felt it, too. Something was going to happen; exactly what I could not tell, but the gaggle of birds moved closer to shore and their increasingly excited cries became a suspenseful soundtrack. A hundred birds became a thousand. They broadened their circle into a sizeable noisy cloud. For reasons unfathomable, more arrived on the scene of what seemed a deliberate congregation. Their number had subtly grown to proportions Alfred Hitchcock would appreciate. There must have been ten thousand by then. It was a wide gyre of beating wings, quite close and circling like a typhoon, their shrill cries discouraging normal speech. We took an involuntary step back and almost into the path of another car that had pulled into the turnout to get a closer look at the huge massing of birds. Eerily, their numbers continued to multiply.
“Good Lord,” I prayed.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Rosemarie said, her voice small and thoughtful.
The living pillar had tripled and individual birds became hard to distinguish, as the swirling column seemed to be slowly revolving about a mile out to sea from wave top to cloud base. This might well have been all the birds on the coast all the way to San Francisco gathered together. Of course we as
sumed, as lovers will, that the whole thing had been laid on for our benefit by the angels. Eventually the mega-gaggle began to thin and birds fled in droves over our heads and away. It was the end of a most solemn convocation.
“Why don’t we just break it clean?” she said to my sad surprise. “Entanglements make people unhappy and ruin so many happy memories. We have a chance to keep this clean and free of anything bad.”
“Of course, you’re right. We should do the adult thing.” I bluffed bravely.
“You’ll always be my Cloudman,” she said, and kissed me sweetly.
1972
David Geffen called and asked if I would like to produce the Supremes. I thought Motown was a small receding speck in my rearview mirror and suddenly here they were with a dream project. The one little hang-up: Diana Ross was leaving the group to pursue a solo career. Well, of course! That’s what successful groups do. It is so hard to come up with that elusive chemistry, that prime number that can’t be divided by anything except itself, and when you have it—a virtual money machine—well, of course you break it.
Jean Terrell was a powerful singer, more from the Aretha Franklin mold of gospel influence than the “little voice” sound of Diana Ross who she was set to replace. Her brother was World Heavyweight Champion Ernie Terrell. Replacing Cindy Birdsong was Lynda Laurence. I heard a number of sides and demos by her and, satisfied that Mary Wilson was still on board I thought, why not? Perhaps we could rework the franchise and cut something that would take advantage of the singer-songwriter wave currently inundating the nation.
The girls didn’t blink an eye when I walked in the first night with “All I Want” by Joni Mitchell. They were ready for changes to their traditional repertoire. I also had the hopeful “When Can Brown Begin?” The label wasn’t looking over my shoulder so I ran with it. I worked the group hard. So hard in fact, that one night Jeanie came in with a note from her doctor. It was brief: