by Jimmy Webb
“Dear Mr. Webb, could you please refrain from requiring Miss Terrell to sing any notes above a high C? I believe she is damaging her vocal cords. Yours truly, Dr. So and So.”
I laughed and looked at Jean and said, “You’re puttin’ me on, right?”
“If you think so,” she said. “Next time I’ll have my brother come over and ’splain it to ya.”
Okay. I still wasn’t getting the sound I needed. I called Darlene Love and she brought in Fanita James and Jean King and now the sound was fat. The Supremes backgrounds had never sounded so good. We finished it up and turned it over to the label. They promptly brought in Shirley Matthews and Deke Richards to produce a “single.” This turned out to be Stephen Schwartz’s lovely song “I Guess I’ll Miss the Man.” They turned it over to the art department.
The cover was a close-up of a dandelion puffball backlit by a setting sun. Now, if I wanted to call attention to a new album by a bunch of new Supremes I would put their goddamn pictures on the front of it and call it “The New Supremes.” This product, almost impossible to recognize as a Supremes album, was called The Supremes (Produced by Jimmy Webb). When I saw the cover, I knew it was a goner. The whole genetically engineered mess hit the floor like a chunk of lard. It achieved the lowest chart position in Supremes history: 129. So much for “When Can Brown Begin?” Even though the album scored a respectable twenty-seven on the Billboard R&B chart, none of my productions for this album were ever released as a single. Revisionists laud this album and say it was among the best of the Supremes but I’m sure that is not correct. There was only one real problem with it: it wasn’t the Supremes.
1972
In September, Letters, my third album, was released. I had a new look on the sepia-toned Letters cover: a long beard, shoulder-length hair, and ungroomed mustache. This was not your father’s Jimmy Webb. I had written a comical homage to Harry Nilsson called “Campo de Encino” (which he eventually recorded). I covered Glen Campbell’s “Galveston” as an elegiac opening featuring a masterful, acoustic guitar intro by Fred Tackett. I covered a forgotten Everly Brothers album cut called “Love Hurts,” written by the incomparable Boudleaux Bryant. (It would be recorded at least forty-seven more times by a wide range of artists.) “Simile” was a song I had written about the letter I sent to Joni Mitchell. “Once in the Morning” was a cocaine song, a satire on Freud’s Rx to patients suffering “from the ennui”; he prescribed a dollop of coke “once in the morning and once at night.” Freddy had written some punchy Stax/Volt horns for the track. In “Catharsis” I imagined I’d castigated an old friend who had betrayed me. I was the first artist in history to put the word “fuck” on record in a little ditty called “Song Seller,” which took the piss out of the record industry:
I’ll cut you a track that’s truly truckin’
If you want me to I’ll sing about fuckin’
Sing about it fast or sing about it slow
I want to hear it on the radio though.
Is it possible I was trying to do too much on a simple phonograph record? If true then I paid the price for it. There was a rumor Mr. Sinatra wasn’t happy about the four-letter word I had put on “his” label. I was adamant about including the word “fuckin’” on the pressing in spite of real pushback from Warner. I needn’t have worried. The future of foul language in pop music was in safe hands.
It probably doomed the album, in spite of positive reviews. The record did not “break out.” Not one DJ dared play the unexpurgated version of “Song Seller,” insider rock masterpiece or not. We went about the required tour, but came off the road tired and disillusioned.
When I got back home I told Susan Horton as nicely as I could that it was time for us to go our separate ways. I would take care of her finances for the time being and she shouldn’t worry. My life was overburdened and careening out of control. My recordings, most of which Susan had sung background on with my sister, also named Susan, were critical successes but not hits. It didn’t seem to be very important. I had another obsession. Just a short drive over Benedict Canyon was Sunset Boulevard, where Rosemarie lived.
Stained glass window at Campo de Encino. (Courtesy of Janice Linnens)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
If I could do it over, there’d be some changes made
I’d paint with brighter colors, I’d stay out of the shade
I’d make everybody happy with the lessons I have learned
I might not find the joy in life but I’d leave no stone unturned
I’d leave no stone unturned
—JLW, “Sandy Cove,” 1993
1969
I tried to buy the Camino Palmero house but it was not for sale, at any price. The whole street, a synoptic garden of silent film’s golden hours, would fall under the wrecking ball. In their place would rise chockablock apartment buildings in the ticky-tacky style.
This tight commune, the interwoven braids of my hippie lifestyle, began to untangle. I bid farewell to the crew as each one shipped off.
I had never lived alone. I was ready for a clean house and, no matter how hard it was to endure, unblemished solitude. I found it two blocks away at the corner of Sunset and LaBrea, at the Hollywood Versailles, a Tom Brady Hail Mary from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The Versailles was a gleaming new tower with panoramic floor-to-ceiling views of Franklin Ave. and the Hollywood Hills. I settled into the penthouse with a hospital-clean, stainless steel kitchen. The movers had to dismantle my windows and hoist the nine-foot Yamaha skyward with a giant crane. A crowd of onlookers gathered, perhaps in hope of a catastrophic musical sforzando. I held my breath as my only piece of furniture came floating into the living room nine floors above the beating heart of Hollywood.
When the nominations came out again for the Grammys it was a mixed blessing. Happily I was nominated for Best Orchestration Accompanying a Vocalist for “MacArthur Park.” Glen Campbell was nominated for Album of the Year for Wichita Lineman. The committee in their wisdom—or for other reasons—had seen fit to omit either “Wichita” or “Mac Park” from the Song of the Year category. The songs that were chosen were “Little Green Apples” (Bobby Russell), “Harper Valley PTA” (Tom T. Hall), “Hey Jude” (Lennon and McCartney), “Honey” (Bobby Russell), and “Mrs. Robinson” (Paul Simon). In my opinion, Simon was the guy to watch. It was interesting that grizzled veteran Bobby Russell was facing the same quandary as I had the year before: He had two horses in the race. When I was a kid he had written “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”
“MacArthur Park” had been an extraordinary record. Every time it was played on the radio I was paid for three song performances. Never before and not since would a “song” change the face of commercial radio in such a dramatic way. We had given The Beatles a sudden jolt. They rushed into the studio with George Martin and lengthened the fade on “Hey Jude” in order to make it over seven minutes (7:11). It was not a coincidence, George Martin told me. He said group members stood by the control desk at Abbey Road watching the VU meter and carefully dialed down the repetitious fade in “Hey Jude” in order to close the margin on the 7:21 of “Mac Park.” The fade in “Hey Jude” had been lengthened by creating a tape loop.
I loved “Hey Jude.” I remember dancing to it at Tramp with Evie draped around my neck. I think we first truly fell in love during that long fade.
1973
Rosemarie was involved in a traffic accident on Sunset Boulevard barely a half block from her house. A few reliable sources told me her husband and his friend, a doctor, had taken her to Hawaii for rest and recuperation. I was told she had received an injection to tranquilize her for the trip. This detail, for some reason, drove me right up the wall. I imagined she had been taken against her will, or in some serious condition. I became paralyzed. I rarely left the house and the immediate vicinity of my telephone on the off chance she might call me.
I went over every detail of every conversation she and I ever had with forensic concentration. I wrestled with the possibility t
hat she might be gone for good, that it was all just a ruse to put me behind her. I drifted onto the downslope of insanity without even trying. One time I put the Vaughan Williams Symphony No. 6 on my turntable and turned up my Altec 604s as high as I could stand. I rang her and when the answering machine responded with a cheery greeting I left a recording of the warlike music in the first movement.
I stopped eating. I stared at the telephone. I talked to the damn thing. Weeks slipped by in a haze of marijuana smoke and doses of strong cocaine. I was losing weight. I could not move forward nor could I retreat. David Geffen called about the new record and I presume my response was incoherent. Soon afterward Sandy Gallin called good-naturedly wanting to know if I had lost my mind.
“Yes, I believe I have,” I responded.
One night I opened a drawer in my bathroom hesitantly. Inside were two videos: I’ll Take Sweden starring Bob Hope, and A Hard Day’s Night. I watched the Bob Hope movie and recognized Rosemarie. She was a few years younger and seemed strangely immature. She cavorted in a bikini and laughed at Bob’s painfully dumb jokes during a leering, innuendo-packed scenario that seemed hopelessly out of sync with current tastes. I watched it again. I didn’t feel her there somehow. I watched A Hard Day’s Night and eventually The Beatles arrived at the Ed Sullivan Theater for their big debut and there were some chorus girls about. Lovely, tall girls dressed in feathered headdresses and sequined costumes revealing perfectly tapered legs. I saw her on a backstage circular stairway in her avian costume and the ache was unbearable. I forwarded and reversed the videotape over and over. Up and down the stairway she went endlessly until I realized there was no way I could pull her out of the screen and hold her in a fluorescent embrace.
Then one day she called. She was as matter-of-fact as though she had just stepped out for a smoke on the patio. Yes, she was back and feeling much better. She was sorry she hadn’t called but she had been watched. She had been held prisoner.
Prisoner? Yes, her husband had gone insane. That made two of us. I didn’t care. She was alive and speaking, laughing, chirruping on the line. The color began to bleed back into the landscape. I looked around me. The surrounding area appeared to be the nesting place of a large raccoon. She offered to drive over but I put her off for a day in order to clean the place. It was inhuman the way she just dropped back into my life, apparently with no intimation or concern for the tailspin she had induced. Never mind. We were still on.
I got on the phone to David Geffen, who offered me a berth. I had already had my three bites at the solo album apple but it was no act of philanthropy on David’s part. He thought I could do it. I asked him if he would be comfortable with Robin Cable, the affable and tireless first engineer on Nilsson Schmilsson, at the head of our new project. Robin would know the best English studios and musicians. David gave me the go-ahead. I became more animated as the electricity began to flow and the amperage increased. I began to consider dates and pencil in travel arrangements.
When Rosemarie got out to the house it was as though we had never parted. I could not let on how shattered I had been. We lounged by the pool, her favorite spot, and I tried to keep the conversation chipper and casual. Sometimes it was difficult.
“There must be hundreds of beautiful girls out there who would fall all over you,” she opined while we sipped on mimosas. “Why don’t you find someone a little less complicated?” This mix of sophistication and placidity in regard to a sensation that burned in my breast like a white-hot poker almost unhinged me.
“Hmm.” I pondered calmly. “Maybe I’ll just do that. I could find someone younger as well.”
She turned the pitcher of mimosas over my head. I jumped into the pool to escape and it became a water fight and then a laugh fest and eventually lovemaking. I asked her what she wanted for dinner and she said, as though setting me an impossible task, “I want a three-pound lobster from the Palm!”
It was twenty miles away and at least an hour through the pre-dinner rush. This was complicated by the fact that the Palm absolutely and without exception refused to prepare food to go. I called up Don Gee at Starlight Limousine.
“Don!”
I could all but see his heels clicking together as he saluted. He had mastered the art of smiling on the telephone, realizing one can actually hear a smile over the line.
“Yes, sir. What can I do for you this evening?”
“Don, I want you to go over to the Palm and sit down in a booth. I want you to order dinner on me. Order two three-and-a-half-pound lobsters steamed and then broiled. Order creamed spinach and chop/chop salad. Eat one of the lobsters. Have them put the rest in a pooch bag and bring it over to the ranch.”
“Yes, sir,” he replied briskly. “Immediately, sir.” Click.
The story got around. People would come up to me at a party somewhere and ask, “Did you really…?” Uh-huh.
1969
The release of “Galveston” was a great housewarming gift in Encino and another hit for Glen Campbell, who was by then becoming a small industry. It went to number four on the top ten. The record also prompted a letter from the mayor of Galveston, Texas. It was an invitation to serve as Grand Marshal at the Shrimp Festival and Parade on the small island just off the Gulf Coast of southeast Texas. It was an area haunted by the ghosts of Jean and Pierre Lafitte, who had held illegal slave auctions on the island in the early 1800s. Generations of storytellers had greatly inflated the Lafittes’ reputations as brave fighters and “swashbucklers.” The island was also famous for surviving Isaac’s Storm, a horrific hurricane and tidal wave that had demolished the prosperous, bustling city in September of 1900, killing at least eight thousand people, most of whom drowned.
I don’t know why I said yes. It was a nonpaying gig and there was no concert to justify the time it would consume out of my schedule. I suppose I was infected with the first symptoms of hubris; the idea of being cheered by a crowd of thousands became irresistible. In my single-mindedness I selected from my wardrobe a Pierre Cardin spacesuit, a tartan in gray, green, and red featuring a long coat and his odd circular zippered collar.
I flew down to Galveston unescorted, and was greeted at the airport by a committee of local dignitaries whose collective jaws dropped at the sight of me in my round shoulder collar, festooned with nickel-plated zippers and pull rings. They couldn’t take their eyes off my hair, no doubt the longest they had ever seen in the real. Once a couple of them had replaced their false uppers and got over the initial shock, we began to discuss the master plan for the day’s activities. The working shrimpers of Galveston, in that day quite numerous, would parade their festive decked-out workboats past a reviewing stand where I would be observing. Good. No problem. I would be presented with the keys to the city and photos would be taken. A simple task. Then I would move to the rear seat of a Cadillac convertible joined by Miss Shrimp Boat Festival, a lush coed to whom I was elaborately introduced. Being a proper Southern belle she disguised any surprise she may have felt for my spaced-out costume. We would be together for a few precious moments, waving to the crowd that would line the parade route. I would be on my way back to Los Angeles by nightfall.
The day was partly cloudy and mostly fair so I reacted with sheer delight when they told me I would be riding to the reviewing stand on my own speedboat. The good ol’ boys and I went east to a pier a few miles down the shore of Galveston Bay. Tied up there was a hellacious-looking drag boat with a fully chromed Dodge Hemi engine exposed behind the two bucket seats perched precariously on the prow. On the stern was proudly emblazoned in red flaming letters: Hellstar.
The guys were surprised to see me clamber eagerly aboard and secure myself with no assistance. The mayor introduced me to my driver, Tiny, an affable giant who seemed to downscale everyone and everything he touched. The aluminum steering wheel on the drag boat shrunk to the diameter of a coffee saucer in his hands as big as hams. With a sudden eruption of white smoke and a sound like an ill-synchronized firing squad, the massive power plant r
ipped into action with the loping gait of a full race cam. Tiny fed her spurts of gas to keep her running as the fellows on shore gave a gigantic shove and we drifted away from the dock on waters that were as placid as a goldfish pond. The boat turned into a trace of a breeze and started west along the coast, Tiny slowly but surely edging up the throttle.
It is a unique experience to be strapped to the front of a waterborne missile straining to leave the wet surface. My long hair blew back past my ears and began to tie itself into interesting knots. We ran out from behind a protective promontory and into a chop, which—at our speed—caused my teeth to chatter uncontrollably.
“Well, Jimmy, should we stop pokin’ along here?” Tiny asked with an innocent grin.
“Hell yes,” I said in my gruff voice, putting on my Southern accent. “Let’s stop pokin’ around.” He shoved the throttle up to about eighty-five percent and Hellstar lunged forward into warp drive, taking short flights above the water and free-falling back with bone-rattling jolts and spouts of spume and foam. “Soaked to the skin” is more than a cliché. It is a precise physical moment when clothing reaches its maximum moisture absorption level and the body loses its ability to maintain a normal, life-sustaining temperature. Tiny looked at me with his disingenuous grin and asked, “Yokay?”
“Ungggg,” I said through clenched teeth, nodding. He delivered me to the waters off downtown Galveston looking like a thrice-drowned rodent, long hair plastered to my skull, clothing steaming slightly as a hot sun broke from behind a cloud. I submitted to being helped ashore by the mayor as Galvestonians gazed upon their poet laureate. For the most part they were impassive. There was a palpable atmosphere of disappointment. This was it? This was the guy who wrote the song? Their kids turned away, bored.
I sat on the reviewing stand with Miss Shrimp Boat Festival, watching the fleet pass in review and attempting to rehabilitate myself with a sheaf of paper towels Tiny shoved helpfully into my hand. Galveston was largely a blue-collar environment. They looked at me with an unmistakable challenge in their gaze. It was the unspeakable “who are you to profit by us?” I looked just like the kind of fool who had never done a lick of work in my life. Too late to change into jeans and a Pendleton shirt, however. I began to think seriously about how far I had drifted from the agrarian authenticity of my youth. At the same time I was defensive. I had worked hard for every goddamn thing I had achieved. I was the captain of my own vessel. I fished for a different animal, but it was certainly no easier to haul aboard. Thus, mentally reconstructed, I accepted the keys to the city to a smattering of applause and entered the Cadillac with Miss Shrimp Boat and big Tiny driving. We joined a cordon of fire trucks, marching bands, and policemen on motorcycles to drive slowly down Galveston’s main street.