Reporter: Glen, have you played music all your life?
Glen Campbell: Not yet.
Glen Campbell finished 1968 as the US’s top-selling artist, outdistancing the Beatles by a considerable margin. That year, four of his albums sold over a million copies. In December alone, he accounted for over $4.5 million in LP sales. He picked up four Grammy awards, was named the Entertainer of the Year by Nashville’s Country Music Association and somehow ended up as the honorary chairman of the National Arthritis Foundation. He was a genuine phenomenon. The Academy of Country and Western Music also named him the Best Male Vocalist of the Year and Top Television Personality, and presented him with an award for Best Album. He started 1969 with more of the same: television, movies, awards, state fairs, guest appearances, records, concerts.
It was Campbell’s relationship with Jimmy Webb that made his career, and it was Webb’s relationship with Campbell that made his. ‘You need a good piece of poetry up front and then a great melody to go with it,’ was Campbell’s summation of Webb’s genius. After ‘Wichita Lineman’, the pair would continue to work together, off and on, for years, with Campbell performing Webb’s songs and both of them appearing together in concert; they even worked on an album together, Reunion, in 1974. In 1969, there had been that third town song, ‘Galveston’, written by Webb and performed by Campbell. The first two collaborations spun tales of journeys, love and longing, personalising the universal by juxtaposing the prosaic with the extraordinary. ‘Galveston’ was originally an anti-war song, until it was tweaked by Campbell to make it more ambiguous. He even appeared in a promotional video wearing a uniform, even though the line that resonates so much is the one in which he says he’s afraid of dying.
As someone who understood the power of dissonance, it’s ironic that Webb will probably be remembered most for his ability to add a little sweetness to the day, something he does so expertly in ‘Galveston’. Here he persuades Campbell to elongate the name of the city, to give it some gravitas, to make it appear more romantic as well as more iconic. Even so, Webb was expecting to hear some Samuel Barber-type strings on the record, only to be disappointed by Campbell’s rat-a-tat-tat let’s-go-kick-their-ass arrangement. Still, it’s hardly surprising that Webb often wants to sweeten his songs as well as novelise them; after all, for a man who is so sentimental and nostalgic about the expiration of grace from our way of life, home is of paramount importance to him, even more than it was when he was a lanky farmboy. In ‘Galveston’ he adopts the POV of a soldier who flashes back to romantic encounters by the Gulf to help get over his dread of dying in combat.
Not long after the song was a hit, Webb appeared in a street parade in the city, part of its shrimp festival (it is next door to Louisiana), and was pelted as he walked through the streets with his long hair, wearing a Pierre Cardin suit and an extravagant scarf. ‘I was in the middle of a politically polarised situation,’ he said. ‘People didn’t know how they felt about the song – is this guy a peacenik or what?’ They would give him the keys to the city, so the act of acknowledgement was obviously more important than any ideological nuance.
Webb’s original lyrics in the second verse were obviously anti-war, although in Campbell’s version they were altered to become rather more patriotic. ‘I’m not a writer, I’m really a “song doctor”,’ Campbell once said. ‘If I hear a good song that I like, I’ll change lines and chord progressions, and make it my own.’
Unsurprisingly, ‘Galveston’ became especially beloved by members of the armed services. According to Webb, the sailors aboard two US Navy warships stationed in the South China Sea, USS Galveston and USS Wichita, used to stage mock musical battles on the open seas using his songs. As it awaited refuelling, the Galveston would play ‘Galveston’ over its PA to the approaching Wichita, which responded by blasting ‘Wichita Lineman’. (Four decades later, R.E.M. would release a response song called ‘Houston’.)
More importantly, because ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘Galveston’ and ‘Where’s the Playground, Susie?’ (another Jimmy Webb classic that was released in April 1969 as the second single from the Galveston album, and again written about Susan Horton) were such massive hits, they redefined what a pop single could be: complex emotions and idiosyncratic arrangements and orchestrations, coupled with Campbell-like no-frills delivery and emotional purity.
‘Galveston’ certainly helped Campbell’s upward trajectory. In the summer of 1968, in the wake of his success with ‘Phoenix’ and ‘Wichita’, he guest-hosted The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The successful appearance led to his own variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, which ran until 1972. The likes of Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and Linda Ronstadt appeared on the programme, which also gave a national platform to rising country stars like Willie Nelson. ‘He exposed us to a big part of the world that would have never had the chance to see us,’ said Nelson. Having become a proper TV star, Campbell built himself a gargantuan 16,500-square-foot house on a hill high up in Laurel Canyon.
A young Steve Martin was a writer on the show. ‘He just went along with it,’ says Martin. ‘He was completely game, and completely fun, and had kind of a down-home sense of humour. It was just an incredible treat for us young writers to be introduced to talent at that level at such a young age.’
Campbell looked like a cowboy, so much so that he was cast opposite John Wayne in the ageing hero’s 1969 vehicle True Grit. Campbell was blond as the midday sun, solid as a hay bale and with a seemingly never-ending supply of hats, embroidered denim, western shirts and cowboy boots. He later said that his acting was so amateurish that he ‘gave John Wayne that push to win the Academy Award’. Wayne didn’t appear to be too enamoured of his co-star, however, and gave him the same advice he gave Michael Caine when he first came to Hollywood: ‘Kid, talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much. Then you’ll be fine.’ Campbell’s first starring vehicle, Norwood, flopped, however, and the hits dried up until he bounced back into town with the studied countrypolitan pop of ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ in 1975. ‘Cowboy’ had already been turned down by both Elvis and Neil Diamond by the time it was offered to Campbell. A reflective piece about pursuing the American Dream, it immediately became one of Campbell’s signature tunes. According to its author, Larry Weiss, the chorus came from the 1944 movie Buffalo Bill, in the last scene of which Bill rides out on a white horse, in a white outfit and with a long white beard, and thanks everybody for giving him such a great life.
There would be more country albums, too, as Campbell attempted to reconnect with a constituency he had always been in two minds about. He tried what a lot of crossover artists had done before, and would do again, namely get more country – very country. Dolly Parton had done the same thing: after all the fame, the smash records and the hit movies – there was a time when you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing ‘Jolene’ or ‘9 to 5’ – the country girl moved away from commercial music and successfully reconnected with the genre she grew up with – bluegrass. ‘If I could have made a living, and still had the career, doing this kind of music, I would have done that,’ she said. ‘I had to get rich in order to afford to sing like I was poor again. Isn’t that a hell of a note?’
Campbell would marry four times, producing five sons and three daughters (some of whom would eventually play with him on stage, which contributed to much sibling rivalry between the various families). In 1980, after his third divorce, he said, ‘Perhaps I’ve found the secret for an unhappy private life. Every three years I go and marry a girl who doesn’t love me, and then she proceeds to take all my money.’ That year, he started a short, tempestuous and very high-profile relationship with the singer Tanya Tucker, who was twenty-three years his junior. At the time, he was battling alcoholism and cocaine addiction, so the affair made him tabloid catnip. He showered her with jewels, spent nearly $60,000 on her birthday party and at one point was going to underwrite a high-fashion boutique, Rhinestone Cowgirl, that she was planning to open in Beverly Hills. In his heyday Campbell had been saddled with nicknames such as the ‘Farmboy Choirboy’ and the ‘Hip Hick’, but his dalliance with Tucker soon put paid to those. She had exploded into the country charts at the age of thirteen with ‘Delta Dawn’, rapidly racking up half a dozen other hits while posing in black leather and tight skimpy tops. Overnight she became the wild child of country and western. When they started seeing each other – she only twenty-one and he a forty-four-year-old grandfather – she boasted, ‘He’s the horniest man I ever met. Men are supposed to slow down after forty, but it’s just the opposite with Glen. I mean, I thought I could handle a lot.’ The relationship faltered, apparently because of Campbell’s jealousy, although their behaviour seemed to be aggravated by a relationship with booze and cocaine that could apparently be called ‘attentive’. (‘He did cocaine more than just about anybody,’ said his friend Alice Cooper.) After they split, Tucker would file a $3 million lawsuit against her former lover, charging ‘Battery, Mayhem, Assault with a deadly weapon, and Fraud’. The case was settled out of court, although never again would Campbell be called the Farmboy Choirboy. Because if, with his voice, he had once been able to weaponise sadness, with this kind of tabloid behaviour all he had managed to do was encourage pity. In 1981, for instance, he became embroiled in such a heated argument with a member of the Indonesian government on a long-haul flight that he promised to ‘call my friend Ronald Reagan and ask him to bomb Jakarta’.
After his years of substance abuse, it perhaps wasn’t any great surprise that Campbell would eventually find religion – obviously such a well-worn stepping stone on the Nashville path to redemption – and because of this he developed some particularly unsavoury opinions, notably involving the pro-life movement. And then in 1982 he married Kimberly Woollen, a Radio City Music Hall Rockette, who helped Campbell get sober.
‘On our first date he took me to a restaurant at the Waldorf and before we ate he bowed his head and said a prayer and I thought, “Oh good, he believes in God,”’ she said. ‘Of course, as the night went on I also found out he had an alcohol problem. But he [was] always such a great person; so generous, so sweet and loving and kind. It was just the alcohol that turned him into a monster. He was obnoxious. He was mean. It wasn’t the Glen I knew him to be. So we got involved in the church and started studying the Bible together and got some godly friends around who encouraged you. We started surrounding ourselves with family. His brother came to live with us and Shorty said, “Glen, I don’t want you to end up like Elvis, you really need to stop drinking.” Gene Autry called him and said, “The booze is no good, Glen.” So a lot of people who loved him encouraged him. He would fall down drunk five nights a week. Just pass out. I would never advise anybody to do what I did; go into a relationship knowing that someone is so messed up.’
Jimmy Webb also witnessed Campbell’s bizarre duality. ‘With Glen, there used to be something definitely disconcerting about the mix between the Holy Bible and the cocaine. He would be delivering the most astounding lecture from the Old Testament, and at the same time there would be lines laid out on the table. It was just surreal.’
In 2003, Campbell fell off the wagon in spectacular fashion and was arrested for a hit-and-run, pleading guilty to extreme drunken driving and leaving the scene of an accident, and spending ten days in jail. Robert Chalmers interviewed him for the Independent on Sunday in 2007, in the Orleans Casino in Las Vegas, and enjoyed the way in which the singer could talk about his misdemeanours without rancour. He was in a happy place and could largely laugh at some of the scrapes he’d been in. Largely. ‘If there’s a drawback to frequenting a public area such as this, it’s that many of the looks he does attract are connected not so much with his artistic output, as with his arrest for driving while intoxicated near Phoenix, Arizona, in November 2003,’ wrote Chalmers. ‘The police photograph – to his great distress – has become the most famous single image of Campbell: wide-eyed and handcuffed wearing a reversed baseball cap, Arizona Diamondbacks T-shirt, shorts and trainers. The picture was taken after his silver BMW performed a bold and unorthodox manoeuvre, resulting in a collision with a vehicle driven by a sommelier called Mr Roote.’ Campbell compounded his crime by kneeing the police officer in the thigh while resisting arrest. The officer said he smelled alcohol on Campbell’s breath, and when he knocked on his car door, the singer kneed him in the leg, landing himself an aggravated assault charge. After pleading guilty he was sentenced to ten days in prison, but when he was questioned about it later, he said, ‘I wasn’t really that drunk. I was just over-served.’
Eventually he got clean. Eight years later, the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone went to LA to interview him, offering a vignette of the Campbells’ churchly domesticity: ‘We are sitting in a large sunlit villa looking over the Malibu hills and surrounded by memorabilia from Campbell’s career. There are trophy cabinets and rooms full of photographs of Campbell with Elvis, Dean Martin, Ray Charles and Sammy Davis Jr and everybody who was everybody – permanent reminders of who he was. Huge leather-bound Bibles, far too heavy to pick up, lie on tables. Kim was brought up in the Methodist Presbyterian church, he in the Church of Christ, Baptist, but early into their marriage they joined a Messianic synagogue that follows the Old Testament but believes Jesus is the Messiah. The Campbells eat kosher and celebrate Jewish festivals. On Friday nights, Campbell blesses the bread and wine.’
‘God saved me,’ he told Hattenstone.
The abuse never seemed to affect his voice, though. It was always sweet, but never too sweet, even when he was singing dentist music. ‘He had the pure flowing tone of a crooner but with something smoky in there, a whiskey catch at the back of his throat that tugged at the heart of a melody and left listeners feeling every shift in the lyric,’ wrote Neil McCormick in an obituary of Campbell in the Irish Independent. ‘He had an impossible range that could pluck notes out of the ether but somehow made every song he ever sang sound easy.’ Obits tend to go one of two ways, either by using inordinate amounts of flattery or by diminishing achievement. McCormick was fulsome in his praise, meaning every word of it. ‘His readings of Webb’s country gothic classics surely stand amongst the greatest records ever made,’ he wrote. Webb once told him it was easy to write his vastly ambitious, deeply romantic songs knowing he had Campbell to sing them.
McCormick also mentioned one of the reasons why Campbell was such a great interpreter of Webb’s material, something that had actually been acknowledged by both of them: namely that he always seemed a little bit out of time himself. Campbell sat between two stools, between country and pop, between the swing era and rock and roll, between old-fashioned values and new-fashioned attitudes. He was in his own vortex, in a cultural never-never land. McCormick describes watching him on his Saturday-night TV show, handsome and wholesome, yet with an edge that came, perhaps, from his country roots. ‘There were subtle dimensions of doubt and pain that resonated in his rich chord changes and lush orchestrations, the inescapable sense there was more going on than met the eye.’ He was, as he sang himself, a rhinestone cowboy.
‘He had that beautiful tenor with a crystal-clear guitar sound, playing lines that were so inventive,’ said Tom Petty in 2011. ‘It moved me.’
Campbell was always very respectful of Jimmy Webb, and more than grateful that he had benefited so much from his partner’s ability to write songs that helped define him as an entertainer. There are dozens of old clips of Campbell appearing on TV chat shows, willingly sitting down in the comfy chair opposite the likes of Johnny Carson or Craig Kilborn, often with a guitar in his hand, and always with a big smile on his face. The singer always took his success seriously, never took it for granted, and understood that the people who bought his records and turned up at his concerts could just as easily change their minds and start spending their money on someone else. So, for him, appearing on one of those chat shows wasn’t a chore or an inconvenience, it was all part of the show, all part of the entertainer’s life. And wasn’t he lucky to have one?
As he sinks into the chair, you can often detect a nervous glance at the host, which is when you can see Campbell’s carapace crack for a moment, as he looks across and wonders what the smart-ass TV men were going to say to him, instinctively worrying that they were going to make some gag or other. But even when they did – and it usually seemed to be affectionate – he’d flip whatever it was right back at them, his all-enveloping smile getting bigger as he did so. He’d try and keep the conversation light, remind everyone how lucky he was, what fun he was having, and how he was sure that their lives would be improved no end by buying into whatever he was on the show to push.
He would often be asked about his relationship with Jimmy Webb, and then the smile would be put away. When discussing his friend, Campbell would be even more respectful than he was about his own career, paying homage to a man he would repeatedly call a genius, a man who conjured such beautiful songs. Occasionally he would become proprietorial, in a way that a football manager might be about a player, where the emphasis on the relationship inevitably infers that one works for the other, although even when the singer hinted that the songwriter was a hired hand, he made sure that everyone knew his hands were the finest in the business. Glen Campbell loved Jimmy Webb. He had his back.
‘Webb’s stuff is a little bit country. But … actually I don’t like to segregate music,’ said Campbell. ‘To me it’s like segregating people … People who say, “That’s Country and I don’t like Country” gotta be pretty narrow-minded. Either that or they don’t know a damn thing about music. “I don’t like country music” – that’s the dumbest remark I ever heard. Then you start naming off some country songs and they say, “Is that Country? I didn’t know that.” There’s good in all music. It’s like when I record, I don’t aim at anything. I just find a good song and go do it like I want to. And if the country fans gripe or the pop fans gripe, I can’t help it.’
In 2006, when Campbell was in his seventies, he said that he still sang ‘Wichita Lineman’ with genuine emotion. ‘I think it’s as good a chord progression and melody as I’ve ever seen. I’m so glad that I had hits with songs that I like,’ he said, ‘because I know a lot of guys who say, “If I have to sing that song one more time I’m getting out of the business.” That’s so stupid.’
It’s easy to spot those entertainers who begrudge performing their earlier, more successful work, perhaps the songs that made them famous. They’ll look upon them as sketches, bagatelles, mere crumbs that pale in comparison to the bigger, grander, more mature work they’re performing now, in spite of the fact that neither the critics nor the public appear to be taking much interest in it. Glen Campbell never felt this way, and he was more than happy to play ‘Wichita Lineman’ or ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ if that was what the TV producer wanted. It would be great if he could play one from the new album as well, yet he understood that he had a sturdy and popular enough back catalogue to satisfy demand.
Like Burt Bacharach, another composer who wanted to sing, Jimmy Webb didn’t want to be just the architect, he wanted to be the building, too; and while, in the early seventies, he was starting to work with some of the finest vocalists in the business, Webb insisted on interpreting his songs himself. His voice, as someone once put it, couldn’t always call on the colours his challenging material required, and yet he was determined to make it as a solo performer.
Webb had an all-access pass to those at both ends of the culture, working with Sinatra in Vegas one minute and Joni Mitchell in Laurel Canyon the next. Increasingly popular with the mainstream, he was nevertheless smitten by the new breed of singer-songwriters, people like Mitchell, James Taylor, Randy Newman and Jackson Browne. ‘What they were doing was almost conversational. People like Joni were fishing beneath the thermal clime, and so I began to reach very deep into the soul for my songs.’ He wasn’t always welcomed with open arms, though. He came into the studio one night when Mitchell was recording, and a voice behind him said, ‘Oh, it’s Mr Balloons.’ For a lot of people, Webb’s songs felt too conservative, too showbiz. ‘They felt packaged for a middle-of-the-road, older crowd,’ said Tom Petty. ‘At first, you go, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” But it was such pure, good stuff that you had to put off your prejudices and learn to love it. It taught me not to have those prejudices.’
Apart from Harry Nilsson (who was as much of a drinking buddy as anything else), the singer/songwriter he was closest to was Mitchell. ‘She sang backgrounds on my albums – was a joy to be around – and was a great teacher because she’s really one of the finest song constructors that’s ever lived. And very open, she wasn’t biased, she wasn’t like, “Oh, this guy writes songs for Glen Campbell, I can’t hang out with him.” People in the early seventies were extremely sensitive to what was politically correct. To the point of bigotry. As guilty of bigotry as any group of people who’ve ever lived.’
To some, he epitomised mainstream culture, and not in a good way. He was one of those named in Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, in which Scott-Heron says that the theme song won’t be sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Engelbert Humperdinck or the Rare Earth, nor written by Webb.
Webb certainly adopted the lifestyle of a rock star, and having acquired the Encino estate of former screen goddess Alice Faye, blew his considerable wealth on cocaine and cars, crashing a Shelby 427 Cobra five times and raising hell with the likes of Harry Nilsson.
The eighteen-month period between early 1968 and late 1969 was an extraordinary one for Webb, when his entire being was reimagined, and when he went from being a Nobody to a Somebody. After the success of ‘Up, Up and Away’, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ and ‘Wichita Lineman’, he was afforded so many opportunities, some of which he grabbed and some of which he squandered (he still regrets not returning a call from Paul McCartney in the summer of 1968). However, in 1969, he managed to find the time to produce Thelma Houston’s debut album, Sunshower. Unsuccessful at the time – it reached no. 50 on the Billboard R&B charts – it has since become recognised as something of a lost classic. Made by the former lead vocalist of a group called the Art Reynolds Singers, much was expected of the record. Webb was hot, she was new, and Dunhill Records thought the stars, and the public, would look kindly on the collaboration. It was not to be. One reviewer said the album was one of those perfect records that let the singer and producer complement one another without either stealing the show. But the public weren’t interested.
In 1970, Webb talked briefly to David Geffen about being managed by him, but Geffen, the playmakers’ playmaker, could see this wouldn’t be an easy gig. Like everyone else in the industry, he could see that Webb was caught between two stools, frozen between two buses going in different directions – one going uptown to where all the fancy supper-club people went, the other moving downtown, where supper club meant something else entirely. Webb explained to Geffen that he had turned down a ton of money to play a residency in Vegas (performing an instrumental version of ‘MacArthur Park’ every night, in costume, in front of a full orchestra), told him his favourite singer was Joni Mitchell, told him he probably smoked more grass than everyone else Geffen managed, combined. But even with Geffen’s help, Webb was stranded, neither fish nor fowl.
As he told Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times in 1971, ‘By the time I was twenty-one, I had accomplished all the goals I had set up for myself for a lifetime. That’s destructive in a way. You have all this energy left and you don’t know exactly what to do with it. You find yourself sitting down and saying: “Well, that’s fine for today; now, what am I going to do tomorrow?” From what I’ve seen of this business, there is a tendency for songwriters, once they have become successful, to stick to a formula. They drift along in the formula that established them, playing the same kind of songs until they die, I suppose. Maybe I’ll learn in my lifetime that it has to be that way, but I hope it isn’t true.
‘I decided that I wanted to keep writing, that I wanted to evolve. I wanted to break out of the formula. I wanted to improve as a writer and to interpret the songs myself rather than just keep producing records and writing songs for other artists.’
But the songs kept coming, exquisite little gems such as ‘P. F. Sloan’, ‘One Lady’, ‘Met Her on a Plane’, ‘When Can Brown Begin?’, ‘Crying in My Sleep’, ‘Scissors Cut’, ‘Christiaan, No’, ‘Gauguin’, ‘Skywriter’, ‘Time Flies’, etc. – songs that showed real depth, real meaning, songs delivered with plenty of grace and a minimum of fuss. Everything Webb did in the early seventies was designed to single him out as a performer as much as a writer, everything a defiant act of self-ownership.
‘I made my share of mistakes, probably more than my share, but I gained an understanding of what fame was like,’ he told me. ‘I had way too much money for a twenty-year-old kid, let me tell you. I also became acquainted with the phenomenon of when you are a celebrity, you’re always right. There’s always a group of willing participants, of enablers. You drive by a dealership in Beverly Hills and you see a beautiful sedan and you remark to your assistant, “Wow, I’d really like to have one of those, that’s nice,” and then the next morning it’s sitting in your driveway – that kind of stuff. For a while I was convinced that I could write a hit any time I wanted to. And an experience like the “Wichita Lineman” story will make you think that that’s actually true. Then you start coming up against it and you realise it isn’t that easy, and that all is not what it seems. I can remember sitting at a fancy dinner with a radio-programme director back in the Midwest somewhere, maybe Chicago. I’m sitting there and I’m talking, being cordial, and the programme director’s wife put her hands down in her lap, as women do, and she looked at me as though to say enough of this nonsense, and said, “So, when are you going to write a ‘MacArthur Park’?” And I realised that what she meant was, when was I going to write another hit?’
In 1973, he would overdose on PCP – ‘enough to kill an elephant’ – having taken it believing it was cocaine, and temporarily lose his ability to play the piano. Like Glen Campbell, he would later eschew drugs, although without exchanging them for God. His final seventies album, El Mirage, was produced in LA by George Martin, but despite containing such orch-pop nuggets as ‘The Highwayman’, ‘Where the Universes Are’ and ‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’, its commercial failure was something of a blow to Webb, who didn’t release another record for five years. He would continue collaborating with Campbell, though, continue having hits. In 1975, they collaborated on ‘It’s a Sin When You Love Somebody’, and in 1987 developed another classic song, ‘Still Within the Sound of My Voice’, written by Webb and sung by Campbell, which reached no. 5 on the Billboard Country charts. It was covered brilliantly by Linda Ronstadt two years later.
So where did they come from, these words, these conflicts and trials, these battle-weary vignettes and musical pictures? Where do they come from now? Webb wrote an entire book about songwriting (and a very brilliant one at that, maybe the very best – Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting (1999)), and when pushed will admit to getting his ideas from the same place every other songwriter does, from anywhere and everywhere, using his own particular brand of symbolism and spiritualism. He tells a fascinating story about the inspiration for his song ‘The Highwayman’.
He’d been staying at the Inn on the Park in London, ‘hanging out with Harry Nilsson and behaving badly. And I had this room with a piano in it and one night I had this Dick Turpinesque nightmare about being chased by these grenadiers on horseback. And I was fairly certain if they caught me they’d hang me. It was one of those night terrors where the sheets are soaked. And I woke up and I could feel this character. I could see him and feel him and I rolled out of bed to the piano and in an hour I had the first verse. The idea was that he’d been caught and hung and then I decided to drop him into another body.’
‘And this magical lyric about reincarnation rolls out that seems to span four hundred years,’ said Mark Ellen, who thinks it’s one of the greatest lyrics ever written. ‘It starts in the eighteenth century with the image of the highwayman with his sword and pistol relieving young maidens of their baubles. He’s killed and reborn as a sailor in the nineteenth century aboard a schooner (Webb once told me he was writing about “the age of the clipper ships”, which was around 1850). And he’s drowned in an accident and gets reborn as a dam-builder in the twentieth century, who dies when he falls into the wet concrete of the Hoover Dam. And the dam-builder’s reborn in a distant twenty-first-century future as a space pilot flying “a starship across the universe divide”. And the pilot may return as a highwayman, so the whole four-century jumble of creation is about to reboot. Or, he adds as an afterthought, he may return “as a single drop of rain”, the most powerful and head-spinning lyric about space and time I’ve ever heard. I can’t think of another song as huge and encompassing. And it’s circular, so it seems eternal. It has an immaculate, giddying symmetry, so much compressed into so few lines, and all carried by a gorgeous melody. It’s a masterpiece. It’s perfect.’
Webb is justly proud of ‘Wichita Lineman’ and has often said that it’s his own favourite, and praises its perfection (seen through a prism of imperfections, obviously). However, he has also been exasperated by its seemingly random popularity.
‘I’m just telling you from a songwriter’s point of view that sometimes I am absolutely amazed at the take someone will have for one song and how oblivious they are to another one that I’ve laboured over and burnt the midnight oil over and suffered over, and it goes by with no notice whatsoever,’ he said, not with any anger but with something approaching incredulity. ‘I’m somewhat bewildered by it. I would like to be as grateful as I could possibly be. It’s just another song to me. I’ve written a thousand of them, and it’s really just another one.’
Supportive of his friend as ever, Campbell was convinced Webb’s songs would last for ever, confident enough to proclaim that they were as good as anything that had been written, that would be written. Campbell grew up in an age when some songs were deemed to be standards, and he was sure enough of his own opinion and such a devotee of the work that he knew these songs would stand the test of time. Because they were modern standards, that’s why.
‘I don’t think of me as a country writer,’ Webb told GQ’s Jason Barlow, ‘but Glen cherished me as a writer. There was no way in the world he was going to say anything to alienate me enough where I’d say to him, “Fuck you and your cowboy shit!!” And I’d go off and write songs for Bette Midler, or something.’
Webb is the only artist ever to have received Grammy Awards for music, lyrics and orchestration. He’s been given the Ivor Novello International Award and the Academy of Country Music’s Poet Award, and was the youngest person ever inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In May 2012, at the Ivor Novello Awards in London, he received the songwriting equivalent of an endorsement from the Almighty. As he was presented with the Special International Award, a vintage quote flashed on the screen, in which Sammy Cahn, the legendary lyricist and contributor to the Great American Songbook, the co-writer of dozens of timeless ballads such as ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’, ‘Come Fly with Me’, ‘All the Way’, ‘Call Me Irresponsible’ and ‘My Kind of Town’, described Webb as ‘one of the real, real geniuses’. Increasingly inclined to call himself a romanticist, Webb continued to use the kind of vivid imagery his contemporaries had long abandoned. ‘I like words,’ he said. ‘I like the way they clash around together and bang up against each other, especially in songs.’
John Updike had a famous line about trying to give ‘the mundane its beautiful due’ in his writing, and you could say that Webb has devoted a large part of his songwriting career to doing precisely that. ‘My style is novelistic, detailed,’ he said. ‘I draw the audience into my problem or my world and hope that they feel like “I’ve felt that before, I just didn’t know how to say it.” A songwriter’s job is to articulate these feelings. When you do that well, then quite often you find out you have a hit song.’
Mark Ellen once asked Webb why so many songwriters are drawn to melancholic songs. ‘Well, there’s a lot of happy songs, but they’re not very good. You can dash off four in an afternoon. The territory I tend to inhabit is that sort of “crushed lonely hearts” thing. The first part of a relationship is usually that white-hot centre when all the happy songs come. When that’s gone it can be devastating, and that’s when the sorrowful songs come.’
Webb continues to be an influence on modern writers, and you only have to study the reviews of the Arctic Monkeys’ Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino to see that some think Webb has made as much of an impact on Alex Turner’s writing as David Bowie. It’s also rare to read anything about Josh Tillman or his alter ego Father John Misty without seeing a reference to Webb or Glen Campbell.
The one missed opportunity in Webb’s career was the chance to record with Elvis, although it wasn’t for lack of trying. ‘It was certainly nothing that I did that prevented me from working with him,’ Webb said, pointing the blame squarely at Elvis’s notoriously controlling manager Colonel Tom Parker. ‘I have bootleg recordings of Elvis doing “MacArthur Park” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”. We talked about recording together, but Colonel Tom Parker insisted on one hundred per cent of the publishing. I was being recorded by Mr Sinatra and Tony Bennett and Glen Campbell and I just didn’t feel that I was in a position where I had to make that kind of a sacrifice. In retrospect I would have loved to have had a record with him, but I guess I stood on principle and it wouldn’t be the first time or the last time in life that I would cut off my nose to spite my face.’
If you study Elvis’s records from the late sixties onwards, after he’d finally finished with the movies, they are all strikingly similar – maudlin, melodramatic, almost as if everything in life was something of a fait accompli. You can almost hear him shrugging his shoulders, giving up, feeling blue for you, on stage, on record, where everyone can see and hear. There would be the occasional tacky rocker, a schmaltzy R&B number that would allow him to swing his hips again and ‘rock out’ a little, but the bulk of his material was sad and fatalistic.
Webb was fascinated by Elvis’s work, and not just the early stuff. ‘I listened to Elvis Presley a lot,’ he said. ‘And as a teenager, I was enchanted and hypnotized by Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s songs, so I followed them and what they did with Dionne Warwick. I listened to Tony Hatch and, also, to Teddy Randazzo, who wrote “Hurt So Bad” and “Goin’ Out of My Head” for Little Anthony. That was always the thing for me – the big orchestral ballad – my weak spot. So I would imitate those guys when I could and I always had dreams of using an orchestra on my records. And as fate would have it, I was able to do that. I was eventually able to teach myself orchestration on the job, so to speak.’
He also saw Elvis perform his first-ever show in Vegas, in what would become the King’s natural habitat. ‘Vegas was great for all of us, because you could get up close to the animal. You know, you could practically get Sinatra’s sweat on you. It was very visceral. You should have seen the kind of money that was changing hands, just to get closer to the stage. Anything to get closer to the stage. I saw Elvis when he came back and opened at the International Hotel [what became the Hilton International]. A lot of people from LA went up, thinking no one really knew what Elvis was gonna do, as it had been a long time since he had played a live show. Even Elvis didn’t know what was going to happen. He was very nervous about it. I think a lot of cynics went up, kind of hoping, “Yeah, I hope he falls on his ass …”, that kind of thing. I kind of went up dispassionately, you know, thinking I just want to check this out. I walked into this gorgeous showroom, brand new, probably two thousand people. I think they served two thousand dinners at each performance. That first night, I was sitting right next to the stage, and about six seats down this guy was glowering at me, giving me a bad face. I was closer than anyone. But Elvis came out and did the whole Elvis thing, and I just became an Elvis fan to the core. There was no doubting that there was this magic, a magnetism that just permeated the room, just got inside you. James Burton playing guitar, great drumming, he was very solid in the rhythm section and he knew what he was doing there. And he was a rocker, he really was the king of rock and roll. After the show he walked right down to the front of the stage and was giving out silk scarves to all the girls, as by now there were hundreds of girls around the stage, and he was kissing them. He gets down on the stage, bends over me, and I’m thinking, “Oh, God, he’s going to kiss me.” I had really long hair at the time. But he dropped a note, a piece of paper on the table, and the note said, “Jimmy, come back stage. Elvis.” And after the show these two burly highway patrol-type guys half carried me through the crowd, back through the kitchen and through all these double doors, and finally came up to this drab-looking dressing room, and they pushed open the door and Colonel Tom Parker was there …’
And that was that.
In the same way that Parker didn’t entertain the idea of missing out on any royalties, so Elvis never really understood the concept of ‘the album’. As pop began to expand in the mid-sixties, and as concept albums became commonplace, Elvis stuck to the time-honoured formula of an album being a portmanteau collection of singles, bits and pieces and not much else. His albums were all filler, no killer. Elvis was never going to be interested in making anything like Sgt. Pepper or Wish You Were Here, but he also had no interest in producing a modern echo of Songs for Swinging Lovers, the Frank Sinatra LP that is often credited with being the first concept album. Elvis could be an exemplary interpreter of popular song, and when he chose the right one, he’d find it relatively easy to turn it into a classic, or turn in a version that made people say he ‘owned it’. But, absurdly, he couldn’t knit together a dozen of them, had no interest in running alongside Simon & Garfunkel or Todd Rundgren, or even keeping up with Fleetwood Mac or Neil Diamond, a man who probably wouldn’t have had a career were it not for Elvis. He was such an influential figure that he could have commanded the very best songwriters in the world to pitch him songs. Would Lennon and McCartney have turned down an opportunity to write an entire album for Elvis? Would Dylan? Would Jimmy Webb? Towards the end of the sixties, Lennon and McCartney’s relationship was in such a parlous state that writing to order might have encouraged them to be more collaborative. Also, even though Elvis had long been diminished in their eyes by a decade of poor product, neither of them could ever forget the debt they owed him, would never forget the debt the entire industry owed him, and they would have looked upon the project as an honour. At the time, they were thinking about the past a lot, and having tired of the convoluted way they had been recording for the last three or four years, were looking forward to recording live again, feeling like a band again and focusing on simpler material. When they initially started recording Let It Be, they would break into old rock and roll classics in between their new songs, bashing away at ‘Stand by Me’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Words of Love’ and ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’. Imagine if a relationship with Elvis had been formed, and imagine him singing some of the more spartan material Lennon would go on to record for the Plastic Ono Band LP … Imagine, for instance, Elvis singing ‘Working Class Hero’. Imagine Elvis hearing a demo of ‘Let It Be’ and deciding that he had to record it before anyone else, including the man who wrote it. But of course he was never going to hear the demo because he never socialised, never travelled, and kept himself to himself, living out Groundhog Day at Graceland. Elvis wasn’t going to a cocktail party, Elvis wasn’t hanging out at the wrap party for Easy Rider, wasn’t going to the Oscars, wasn’t going to appear on The Tonight Show, wasn’t going anywhere outside Memphis, not if he could help it.
‘He loved “MacArthur Park”,’ Webb said of Presley. ‘I don’t say that to brag. It’s been documented. I have a tape of him singing it. At that time, though, I wanted to get a song done by Elvis. But as I was leaving after my meeting with Elvis, Col. Parker followed me to the door and said, “I guess we won’t be seeing you here again.” I said, “Oh, really?”’ Parker wanted only songs to which he could get full publishing rights, and as Webb says, ‘I didn’t need Elvis to record “MacArthur Park”. It was already a number one hit. Col. Parker was a crude man … He was the man who told Elvis he shouldn’t record with the Beatles.’
The closest that Webb came to a collaboration with Elvis was making him the subject of his 1991 song ‘Elvis and Me’, based on his various meetings with him.*
* Glen Campbell befriended Presley when he helped record the soundtrack for Viva Las Vegas in 1964. He later said, ‘Elvis and I were brought up the same humble way – picking cotton and looking at the north end of a southbound mule.’ Campbell was a terrific mimic, and one of his best impressions was Elvis singing ‘That’s Alright (Mama)’.
One night in early 1976 they were on stage together in Las Vegas. ‘It was just incredible,’ said Campbell. ‘In Vegas, I was kidding him. He introduced me and said, “Campbell, I understand you’re doing an imitation of me. I just want you to know it will always be an imitation.” And I said, “I’m not gonna do it no more. I got to gain some weight first.” He laughed, and the audience went, “Oh, hey, boo.” I said, “Can’t you take a joke?” Elvis could take it, but the audience just got on my ass. Elvis said, “Well, when you’re down here next I’m coming down and I’m gonna sit in the front row and read a newspaper and heckle.” The audience laughed, and I said, “Elvis, if I’m singing as good as you are, I won’t care.” Backstage we were talking, and I said, “Did you believe the way the people reacted?” Elvis said, “Yeah, I know, it’s like everything is supposedly taboo because people are afraid they will say something that isn’t true.” He didn’t say lied, he said tell you something other than the facts. That makes life so much harder to deal with than if people tell you what they think. People are afraid to say, “Hey, Elvis, you’re fat.” I didn’t say, Hey Elvis you’re fat, I just said you better back away from the table. I mean there are cool ways of handling it. In fact, I was teasing and said can I have some of your old clothes. He said, “Campbell, you ain’t getting ’em. I’m gonna grow back into them.”’
Their mutual respect was huge. Elvis would cover Campbell’s ‘Gentle on My Mind’ during his From Elvis in Memphis sessions with producer Chips Moman in 1969, while a year later Presley suggested Campbell recut Conway Twitty’s fifties hit ‘It’s Only Make Believe’, which he did, yielding a massive worldwide hit. Both Campbell and Presley would become top draws playing Las Vegas in the late sixties, often seeing each other perform. As Campbell would recall, ‘When we played … in Vegas, [Elvis] would go in for a month, and I’d go in for a month. Then we’d switch. Elvis had more charisma in his little finger than everybody else put together. What d’you call it? Electricity.’