Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is but one and only Jimmy Webb. Jimmy,
Speaker 1: you've been playing live. Someone who comes to your show,
Speaker 1: what might they expect?
Speaker 2: Well, they shouldn't expect an orchestra, because it's just me
Speaker 2: and my you know, trustee piano. But I think they
Speaker 2: will get a sort of a lightly polished show, not
Speaker 2: not a not a slick show at all. It's anecdotal.
Speaker 2: It's quite quite a lot of it is funny, and
Speaker 2: then it's interspersed with some hit songs, some that are
Speaker 2: not quite so well known, and it's just kind of
Speaker 2: a you know, my father was a Baptist preacher. It's
Speaker 2: just kind of my version of a revival meeting. And
Speaker 2: occasionally I go off on a diatribe about uh, streaming
Speaker 2: and all that political stuff, but I'm not going there today.
Speaker 1: Well we could go there. When you say streaming and
Speaker 1: political stuff if you're talking about music business, are also
Speaker 1: political stuff in the naty.
Speaker 2: Oh no no no, not not the presidential race. I'm
Speaker 2: really talking about the kind of shoddy treatment that I
Speaker 2: feel that songwriters are still getting after decades and decades
Speaker 2: and decades of sort of being on the bottom of
Speaker 2: the totem pole where we I think some of us
Speaker 2: had anticipated that the whole digital revolution would end up
Speaker 2: being well, let me tell you a small anecdote. Doug
Speaker 2: would and I, who sit on the ASCAT board before
Speaker 2: this whole thing started, there was a small company here
Speaker 2: in New York that claimed that they had a program
Speaker 2: that would recognize any song. It would recognize any song
Speaker 2: in any record within x seconds. And I said, Doug,
Speaker 2: that sounds great. You know, if we had that every
Speaker 2: we could really follow every performance out there, so we
Speaker 2: would be getting rich. And I said, so this is
Speaker 2: a good thing. Let's go tell the board if it
Speaker 2: works right. If it works well, the damn thing worked,
Speaker 2: it could tell you. It would pop up and say
Speaker 2: Evergreen by Andy Williams, and so it could hear the
Speaker 2: music and identify it, which I saw as a pretty
Speaker 2: good long run, because we as songwriters always felt maybe
Speaker 2: the count wasn't right, maybe something was amiss somewhere along
Speaker 2: the way in getting paid, and this would cure all.
Speaker 2: But when the deals were made, a lot of them
Speaker 2: were made without us being at the table, and sadly,
Speaker 2: you know, we end up The only statistic I have
Speaker 2: that I know, at least once it was accurate, is
Speaker 2: that we were making point zero or zero seven to
Speaker 2: eight cents per stream. And that's when Adele did her
Speaker 2: famous kind of publicisty shot where she came out and
Speaker 2: said she had had the largest selling album in history,
Speaker 2: and she got a check for twenty thousand make that
Speaker 2: single the largest selling single in history. And I think
Speaker 2: she got about twenty thousand dollars, so that that is
Speaker 2: not even on a par with what I was getting
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty seven when I was a journeyman beginning songwriter.
Speaker 2: So in that realm, I'm kind of an activist. I
Speaker 2: get a little angry about it sometimes that the song,
Speaker 2: which is really the basic building block of all entertainment enterprise,
Speaker 2: depends on these songs, and yet we're sort of taken
Speaker 2: for granted a lot of times. Specifically, now we're being
Speaker 2: sampled a lot without our permission. There's something that we
Speaker 2: have to watch every day. I mean, I could tell
Speaker 2: that's what I mean. That's where I didn't want to go.
Speaker 1: No no, no, no no. People are definitely interested in this.
Speaker 1: So pre internet, post Internet, how has that affected your
Speaker 1: songwriting royalties.
Speaker 2: Well, they're down a little bit, for sure. They haven't.
Speaker 2: It hasn't been the bonanza that you know, Doug and
Speaker 2: I were fantasizing about, Oh wow, now all our problems
Speaker 2: are solved. You know, it's streaming doesn't pay us, pay
Speaker 2: us enough. And I think that you would see most
Speaker 2: people in my position, young or old, agreeing with the
Speaker 2: fact that we've in terms of the way it's affected us.
Speaker 2: The sort of fallout has been that I feel like
Speaker 2: I have to play live to augment my income and
Speaker 2: make sure that, you know, the big house gets built
Speaker 2: and that I can take care of my children. I
Speaker 2: have five boys and a girl, and they're spread all
Speaker 2: over the world, so I never know when I get
Speaker 2: the midnight phone call, you know that. So there's some
Speaker 2: dire thing that needs to be addressed. We really are
Speaker 2: depending on live performance, and that's one of the reasons
Speaker 2: I'm out there and I'm embarking on this. This is
Speaker 2: kind of a you know, there's a colorful expression I
Speaker 2: could use, but let's just say this is going to
Speaker 2: be a really tough tour. I'm seventy seven. I'll be
Speaker 2: seventy eight on August fifteenth, and I don't know how
Speaker 2: much longer I can tour the way I'm touring, So
Speaker 2: I think it's affected us all that way.
Speaker 1: Okay, this brings up a lot of issues. Ay, who
Speaker 1: owns your songs?
Speaker 2: Well, I I own first of all. You know that
Speaker 2: the ownership of a copyright is split in two, so
Speaker 2: it's the publishing half and it's the songwriter half. So
Speaker 2: on a lot of my songs in my company Jimmy
Speaker 2: Webb Music, or the newer songs, I own them outright.
Speaker 2: A lot of my songs are being returned as a
Speaker 2: result of this copyright window that was provided by the
Speaker 2: Copyright Office for US. Teenagers basically were then who signed
Speaker 2: contracts without a lawyer present, which I was doing all
Speaker 2: the time. I was always I'd sign anything to get
Speaker 2: into a studio for an hour. I'd sign my life
Speaker 2: away because studios. It's hard to explain the zeitgeist of
Speaker 2: all of this, really, but the studio used to be
Speaker 2: the holy of holies. It was like a temple where
Speaker 2: you sort of wanted to have the password to gain entry,
Speaker 2: the aberkadab or to get into that room and record,
Speaker 2: because they were special rooms and not everybody had one.
Speaker 2: So I ended up trading a lot of publishing for
Speaker 2: studio time. That sort of an arrangement.
Speaker 1: You have this incredible catalog. I'm sure you've been approached
Speaker 1: by the third party company's primary wave hypnosis about purchasing
Speaker 1: your catalog. Would you ever do that?
Speaker 2: Do it? I? You know, I'm aware that it looks
Speaker 2: like easy money, so why not let's get, you know,
Speaker 2: on the money train. On the other hand, I sort
Speaker 2: of come from the the the the well the methodist
Speaker 2: side of the record business, where holding up onto your
Speaker 2: public publishing as a kin to a religion. It's it's
Speaker 2: been drummed into me to hold on in my publishing.
Speaker 2: And the only publishing I relinquish I was was because
Speaker 2: of events beyond my control. But for now I'm happy
Speaker 2: to hang on to it. I I don't need the money,
Speaker 2: so I yeah, I don't know. I can. You know,
Speaker 2: there are some publishers out there who are offering some
Speaker 2: very interesting deals where they're coming in and saying, well,
Speaker 2: what we'll do is we'll advance X dollars to you
Speaker 2: the you know, the this is the bait that's wiggling
Speaker 2: on the hook, and maybe we'd do this, and maybe
Speaker 2: we'll do that and you know, maybe I'll give you
Speaker 2: my rare Southsea shell collection. They're offering a lot of
Speaker 2: different things to different people and really trying to appeal
Speaker 2: to individuals on that basis. And the deal would be
Speaker 2: that you become partners with the publisher and now you're
Speaker 2: both owners of the publishing company, and the theory behind
Speaker 2: that being that the publishing company has a vested interest
Speaker 2: then in promoting your catalog and seeking out sync rights
Speaker 2: and what have you, and that their heart is more
Speaker 2: in the game, their dog is more in the fight
Speaker 2: if they have a partnership with you as opposed to
Speaker 2: an administration deal. Now, you know, I can see that,
Speaker 2: I can see that in theory that ought of work.
Speaker 2: But things are changing so fast I cannot believe. In
Speaker 2: the twenty for twenty three years that I've been on
Speaker 2: the ASCAT board, we went from Napster to Spotify, and
Speaker 2: there was all kinds of there were there were little
Speaker 2: there were little conflicts ongoing throughout. Some of them were
Speaker 2: pretty strange where we had I know that one of
Speaker 2: them was that I'm a major I'm not talking, I'm
Speaker 2: talking a giant company was sitting on the board and
Speaker 2: taking the position that Napster was illegal, and at the
Speaker 2: same time they were investing in Napster, and so that
Speaker 2: at one point they ended up in court suing themselves.
Speaker 2: So it's been so fused that I'm wary. I'm I'm
Speaker 2: standing off. I want to see where this is going
Speaker 2: and what's happening. I have an obligation to my family
Speaker 2: and uh, I believe in the copyrights. I believe there's
Speaker 2: special there's a special catalog, and I would, you know,
Speaker 2: want special treatment for that for those songs.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to the ASCAP board. In ASCAP, With
Speaker 1: the Internet, satellite radio, other means of distribution, there are
Speaker 1: more ways for performing rights organizations to collect. Have you
Speaker 1: seen your performing rights royalties go up down steady?
Speaker 2: Well, uh, I think that. Uh without revealing information that
Speaker 2: I'm just that I'm not permitted to reveal. But uh,
Speaker 2: I can say that, I can say that ASCAP's never
Speaker 2: been doing any better than they are. So it hasn't effected.
Speaker 2: It hasn't effected the gross it's in a negative way.
Speaker 2: It's been It's the volume is so tremendous that the
Speaker 2: overall effect is positive. If you look at the at
Speaker 2: the end of the year, and the money that's left
Speaker 2: to distribute. So the overfall all effect is positive, positive,
Speaker 2: But for guys like me who had their biggest hits
Speaker 2: years ago and are not like, you know, a red
Speaker 2: hot Rapper act or something, clearly the the line share
Speaker 2: is going to the to the top, uh to the
Speaker 2: top artists, the artists of the week. Uh So, And
Speaker 2: that's internal stuff that you know, I'm not really at
Speaker 2: liberty to discuss, but yeah, it's ironic. Overall, I think
Speaker 2: that we're doing better, but it's not trickling down to
Speaker 2: the to the what I would call the standards.
Speaker 1: Okay, so nineteen ninety eight, nineteen ninety nine, prior to Napster,
Speaker 1: your publishing income today, what percent is your published income
Speaker 1: to that? Leaving out just we're talking mechanicals. Let's not
Speaker 1: talk performing rights, which is its own thing unto itself.
Speaker 2: Well, mechanicals are they've been through a particularly critical period
Speaker 2: because there are no more or mechanicals. By definition, there
Speaker 2: aren't any records, There aren't any CDs. Sheet music is
Speaker 2: not a big deal anymore. Folios, things of that nature.
Speaker 2: Any physical objects are like out there, they're you know,
Speaker 2: if you're holding a CD in your hand, that's the
Speaker 2: last physical object you're ever going to have that has
Speaker 2: music on it for sale. We're I. I had envisioned
Speaker 2: at world where there would be an intermediary between the
Speaker 2: CD and the and the cloud. But it looks like
Speaker 2: that we skipped over that one, and there's an acceleration
Speaker 2: in work here. I don't know that, frankly makes me nervous,
Speaker 2: But could we go back to the gist of that question.
Speaker 1: Okay, let let me let me put it a different way.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: In the old days of physical there were acts that
Speaker 1: were not hit, acts that were selling product generating royalties.
Speaker 1: What many people forget is a lot of those acts
Speaker 1: were in upside down positions with their labels in it,
Speaker 1: so they never got royalties beyond the advance. And today
Speaker 1: anybody can make music and put it up on Spotify.
Speaker 1: So we have a number of people on the losing
Speaker 1: end of Spotify and the other streaming outlets. We have
Speaker 1: people who were propped up by the record industry of
Speaker 1: your and now they're competing with all these wannabes that
Speaker 1: they didn't used to have to compete with. A lot
Speaker 1: of these acts sold x number of physical records, generating income, etc.
Speaker 1: Now we are in the streaming world. The streaming world
Speaker 1: is one of consumption as opposed to sale.
Speaker 2: What do we know?
Speaker 1: The song writers got screwed on streaming in terms of
Speaker 1: the overall percentage they get. If there's one hundred pennies
Speaker 1: in let's just you know, there literally is no per
Speaker 1: stream rate. It's a division, etc. Changes And of course
Speaker 1: there are different rates for on demand as opposed to radio,
Speaker 1: but approximately sixty cents on the dollar goes to the recording,
Speaker 1: and the song should get more. But the records were
Speaker 1: needed by Spotify at all, and they ended up making
Speaker 1: deals where the songwriters did not get as much.
Speaker 2: They made their deals with the artists first. It was
Speaker 2: a very shrewd tactical move on their part. Is that
Speaker 2: the songwriter deals were already in place, and in my
Speaker 2: mind I feel that those were And again these aren't figures,
Speaker 2: but I believe that the song that the the actual
Speaker 2: artists who and by the way, who only recently in
Speaker 2: cosmic time recently gained the right of royalty over the
Speaker 2: performance on the record, and they slipped in there and
Speaker 2: negotiated their deal, their streaming deal with Spotify. Specifically, before
Speaker 2: we we were kind of left. We didn't have a
Speaker 2: seat at that table. So they're roughly where they were before.
Speaker 2: They're in the seven seven to eight territory of the
Speaker 2: of the gross and we we ended up I think
Speaker 2: a little worse than we were before.
Speaker 1: I agree with that, but let me get to my
Speaker 1: ultimate point. Okay, in streaming, it's winners and losers. Yes,
Speaker 1: the Taylor swifts the weekends, there's a ton of money
Speaker 1: generated there. A lot of people who used to rely
Speaker 1: on physical sale income are not doing well on streaming. However,
Speaker 1: you are not like many people in that. You know,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people saying, well, I had
Speaker 1: an album, there weren't really hits on it. You have
Speaker 1: written standards, household name standards. So at this late date,
Speaker 1: ten odd years into streaming, do those standards to what
Speaker 1: degree do they generate income for you as opposed to
Speaker 1: the physical era.
Speaker 2: You know, look, I think we've all taken a hit.
Speaker 2: We've all taken a hit, and you know, I feel
Speaker 2: a little self conscious about revealing, you know, exact figures,
Speaker 2: but I think I may as well say it. And
Speaker 2: I'll say I'll say it because regardless of any regardless
Speaker 2: of the way it may affect the way people perceive me,
Speaker 2: or my or my my standing in the ranks, my
Speaker 2: level of success. I'm disregarding that for a moment. I
Speaker 2: would say that it's I'm getting about half of what
Speaker 2: I used to get on my standards.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's what I wanted to know before we leave ASCAP. Well,
Speaker 1: do let one other thing. You said you're going on
Speaker 1: the road to pay your bills. Is that a figure
Speaker 1: a speech or economically do you literally have to go
Speaker 1: on the road.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, if I if I want to retire
Speaker 2: right now and button everything up and and and have
Speaker 2: no expenses, you know, the road is expensive. Devote myself
Speaker 2: to you know, maybe some other musical projects that uh
Speaker 2: with with less chance of success. Uh and and sort
Speaker 2: of work out of my house. And and I have
Speaker 2: a very nice house. Uh, I drive a very nice
Speaker 2: automobile in my lifestyle. I'm sure it would be the
Speaker 2: envy but a lot of people. So I'm not gonna
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna equivocate about that. And I and I
Speaker 2: can maintain that. But I can't dream. I can't I
Speaker 2: can't dream of of having a ranch in Montana, or
Speaker 2: I can't dream of building a recording studio in in Mexico,
Speaker 2: and and in other words, I'm the road to advancement
Speaker 2: in terms of the money I can make is now
Speaker 2: pretty much dictated by what I can make on the road.
Speaker 2: That's the money that I would use to invest in
Speaker 2: a recording studio, or invest in a label, or or
Speaker 2: in a maybe select a young artist and say this
Speaker 2: is this kid is going to be tremendous. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: invest some money here. So it's about it's about it's
Speaker 2: a it's not just about a comfort level. It's it's about, uh,
Speaker 2: in a world where you know, I mean, it's silly
Speaker 2: how much money there is. And I would like to
Speaker 2: have some of that because I think I could use
Speaker 2: it in a very positive way. I I'm not know,
Speaker 2: I'm not so desperate that I have to go out
Speaker 2: on the road and play. I play because I enjoy
Speaker 2: the audience. I get a lot of energy. It's making
Speaker 2: me live longer, I'm sure of it. Uh I. It's
Speaker 2: a very joyful experience for me. Even though I've never really,
Speaker 2: you know, quote made it big as a performer. I
Speaker 2: have a following. I have people who will show up
Speaker 2: every damn time. I you know, every time I go
Speaker 2: to that venue, they're there, uh, and I'm doing I'm
Speaker 2: doing very very well at it. And so suddenly to
Speaker 2: be doing well at performing is really ironic at this
Speaker 2: point after cutting ten albums that you know haven't been
Speaker 2: well let's see, not top of the pops.
Speaker 3: But.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's a mixed emotions. I uh, it's
Speaker 2: it's ready cash and it's tempting to go out there
Speaker 2: and get it. You know. I think that the people
Speaker 2: that are that have been really hardest hit, sadly enough,
Speaker 2: are the are the people who are who are older
Speaker 2: or have physical impediments. Sudden, sudden things occur. Let's say,
Speaker 2: just for instance, Parkinson's sets in and you lose your
Speaker 2: voice and you can't perform anymore. Now you're now you
Speaker 2: really have to depend on those royalties. You can't you
Speaker 2: can't augment who doesn't want to augment their income? Bob,
Speaker 2: you know in some way.
Speaker 1: Okay, you say that your live business is on the
Speaker 1: upswing without a hit album in the past. What do
Speaker 1: you think is driving that upsling?
Speaker 2: I don't know. Maybe there's a bit, maybe there's a
Speaker 2: healthy curiosity, or maybe there's a I don't know, maybe
Speaker 2: there's there maybe I have achieved that, I don't know,
Speaker 2: elevator music status, where you know, it's a name that
Speaker 2: people finally, after all these years, they recognize and they
Speaker 2: they say, this guy can't be he can't be doing
Speaker 2: a very good show. Let's go see. The first time
Speaker 2: I went to see Elvis, I was a cynic. I
Speaker 2: was like twenty years old, and I went up to
Speaker 2: Vegas to see Elvis, and it was like sort of shown.
Speaker 2: I was shown for it. I sort of wanted to
Speaker 2: see him paul on his butt, and instead I became
Speaker 2: like number one Elvis fan in the world. So I
Speaker 2: think maybe some people come out of curiosity and they say,
Speaker 2: you know what, this guy seems pretty good. He's been improving,
Speaker 2: and I give them insight into the workings of the
Speaker 2: song and the meaning of the song and the way
Speaker 2: the craft of songwriting works, which is something that I'm
Speaker 2: really concerned about because I don't think that that's being
Speaker 2: passed down, it's not being mentored down sufficiently to this
Speaker 2: coming generation or these generations now that are on our heels.
Speaker 2: I think that a lot of these young writers don't
Speaker 2: pay much attention to, for instance, the Great American Songbook
Speaker 2: and the classic methodology of songwriting. So that's why we
Speaker 2: have We have like a monotonous, almost dreary like repetition
Speaker 2: of the same little melodic phrases over and over again,
Speaker 2: and almost everything is the same tempo. Forget dynamics. There's
Speaker 2: no loud, there's no soft. It's not you've lost that
Speaker 2: loving feeling, which is majestic masterpiece of the sixties Barry Man,
Speaker 2: isn't the a while and there doesn't. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think we may have failed in not taking more
Speaker 2: of these young people under our wing and saying, you know,
Speaker 2: here's here's how to write it, here's how to write
Speaker 2: a verse, here's a verse, here's the chorus, here's a bridge,
Speaker 2: you know, here's a lead in, here's a you know,
Speaker 2: on the fade. You want to work on the fade.
Speaker 2: You know. We used to work harder on the fade
Speaker 2: than we did on any part of the record. That's
Speaker 2: out the window. We don't we don't really have fades anymore.
Speaker 2: You just go to the next record like this.
Speaker 1: So it's.
Speaker 2: It's a big it's it's there is going to be
Speaker 2: a tremendous change in the next ten years, and I
Speaker 2: hope that I'm around just because I want to see
Speaker 2: what happens. I really want to see if the digital
Speaker 2: promise is fulfilled, which is that it would benefit all
Speaker 2: of us, that we would all benefit from this technology,
Speaker 2: and I would like to see if that dream comes true.
Speaker 2: I'm very, very curious, and in the meantime, I'm sitting
Speaker 2: on my standards, and it may be my children that
Speaker 2: make the final decision on what happens to the catalog.
Speaker 1: Well, one thing I want to say, you've all progressed
Speaker 1: their losses. It used to be prior to the lead
Speaker 1: six these little later than that every car didn't come
Speaker 1: with air conditioning, had a vent window. Vent windows were great.
Speaker 1: Now all cars come with air conditioning, which is even better,
Speaker 1: but there are no more vent windows. But you mentioned
Speaker 1: a ton of stuff I want to get into. How
Speaker 1: do you feel, being on the ASCAP board, that these
Speaker 1: other performing rights agencies have changed into for profit models?
Speaker 2: Well, certainly I think that when this idea first sort
Speaker 2: of surfaced, you know, like a from the murky depths
Speaker 2: of the South. When this being my thing hit the news,
Speaker 2: I had a moment of panic because I thought, well,
Speaker 2: it's over, this is it. We're going to be taken
Speaker 2: it's all going to be like this, But ASCAP is
Speaker 2: never going to be that. In fact, I think you're
Speaker 2: probably aware of the fact that we've we've we've consolidated,
Speaker 2: consolidated our position really on supporting human songwriters, uh and
Speaker 2: protecting legacy catalogs and and things of that nature. I
Speaker 2: know that a lot of B and my writers are
Speaker 2: very very nervous, uh, that that situation is still teetering.
Speaker 2: In my opinion, I don't think that that all the
Speaker 2: shoes have hit the floor over there, and I don't
Speaker 2: think that there's ever been a I might be wrong,
Speaker 2: and and you know, I don't mind being called out
Speaker 2: if I'm wrong, but I think that this is the
Speaker 2: first time that a p r O has been being
Speaker 2: has been owned by moneymen, I'll just put it that way,
Speaker 2: by hedge funds, by banks, by cartels investors. We know
Speaker 2: at ASCAP that we don't want those people sitting on
Speaker 2: our board because they don't know anything about music, and
Speaker 2: they don't we don't know that they love songs the
Speaker 2: way we love songs. You know. This is this is
Speaker 2: the part of it that is so hard to express
Speaker 2: because it's not in our modern vernacular to talk in
Speaker 2: a romantic way or a sentimental way about anything. You know,
Speaker 2: we're so hard nosed, but I think that ASCAP we're
Speaker 2: still rather sentimental about our songs. They mean a lot
Speaker 2: to us. The songs of Harold Arland mean a lot
Speaker 2: of Richard Rodgers and Larry Hart. I mean, when I
Speaker 2: hear the name David Rason, my head reverberates with Laura.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: I remember the little story that David told me about
Speaker 2: how he wrote it, and I'm not going to tell
Speaker 2: the story. But we are much more personally at ASCAP,
Speaker 2: which is a fraternal organization, We are much more concerned
Speaker 2: with the actual preservation of the music and the dignity
Speaker 2: of the music, which just as maybe as a slight digression,
Speaker 2: you know. The use of these standards now in these
Speaker 2: rap records is something that everybody's watching very keenly, and
Speaker 2: I have had unbelievable requests come in to use. Well,
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna I'm not gonna name the song because
Speaker 2: I don't want to identify any particular individuals. But if
Speaker 2: I was approached, let's say, by a rapper who wants
Speaker 2: to just play the first verse of Up Up in
Speaker 2: a way, just the way it was in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 2: and then except speed it up a little bit because
Speaker 2: it's not in the tempo that he wants it, so
Speaker 2: you have to speed it up, and it kind of
Speaker 2: makes the fifty minutes mention sound like chipmunks. But you
Speaker 2: put a whole verse of that before his record starts.
Speaker 2: Now that's a substantial that's a substantial use of a
Speaker 2: cop be right. That's that's akin to making it a
Speaker 2: closing titles in a film. It's it's really on the
Speaker 2: same basis. So the uses we're only beginning to see
Speaker 2: how they they And I don't want to say how
Speaker 2: we are going to use these standards and what links
Speaker 2: we're going to go to to exploit something that is
Speaker 2: so much a part of the American psyche that we
Speaker 2: automatically respond to it because it's buried so deeply in
Speaker 2: us that the advertisers now and it's clear, it's as
Speaker 2: clear as the nose on your face, have explored the
Speaker 2: idea of not using pop hits from the sixties, seventies
Speaker 2: and even before, and they've they've tried doing commercials without
Speaker 2: those songs and they don't work. So now they're going
Speaker 2: back to the sixties. They're going back and they love
Speaker 2: to get their hands on a Jackson Brown song. Uh,
Speaker 2: some of them are are just they're out of reach.
Speaker 2: Sometimes they don't bother to ask for your permission, by
Speaker 2: the way, and the use they they put, they put
Speaker 2: let's say, a two or three bar phrase in a
Speaker 2: record and put a lot of echo in it, and
Speaker 2: it's just an orchestral thing, and it goes on and
Speaker 2: on and on and on. So essentially, about three or
Speaker 2: four bars of one of my songs is being repeated
Speaker 2: in deep echo over and over and over and over again,
Speaker 2: and that and and and the gentleman wraps on top
Speaker 2: of that. So I'm his, I'm his, I'm his rhythm track,
Speaker 2: you know, like piece of something that I've done. Yet
Speaker 2: they don't want to list us as creative contributors to that.
Speaker 2: We're not eligible for Song of the Year over NARS
Speaker 2: because we because in my song do what you Gotta Do,
Speaker 2: which Kanye West did called it famous, but musicologists said
Speaker 2: sixty percent of it was do what you Gotta Do.
Speaker 2: And we came to an agreement because they had already
Speaker 2: put it out. It was number one, and when it
Speaker 2: went to Nares. It was nominated for Song of the Year,
Speaker 2: and they listed thirteen writers as eligible for Grammy Award
Speaker 2: for Song of the Year. There were thirteen writers nominated
Speaker 2: for Song of the Year, and I was omitted they're
Speaker 2: going to use our music. I think they should give
Speaker 2: us credit. I mean, that's just to just say, you know, look,
Speaker 2: songs aren't like it's not like doing a collage out
Speaker 2: of a bunch of old people magazines with a pair
Speaker 2: of scissors. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be that way.
Speaker 2: And so I think we're waiting. Wait. You know, look,
Speaker 2: a lot of people are really depending on sync rights
Speaker 2: and sampling rights. That is the hot sector right now
Speaker 2: in publishing is to get these old songs rehabilitated somehow.
Speaker 2: And one way that you can do that is to
Speaker 2: put them in a commercial or put them on a
Speaker 2: wrap record. So it's really strange because that's become the
Speaker 2: way we promote our music is by sort of allowing
Speaker 2: it to be infringed on.
Speaker 1: Now you talk about all these opportunities, you talk about ripoffs.
Speaker 1: Who is managing this? Do you have a manager? Do
Speaker 1: you have an attorney? Or is your phone ringing off
Speaker 1: the hook or is your email coming in? Who's on
Speaker 1: top of.
Speaker 2: This for you? Well, I have a guy, uh and
Speaker 2: I'll mention him because he's a lovely guy, John Leno,
Speaker 2: who's handled all my returns, my returns on my copyrights,
Speaker 2: which is a byzantine process. It is so complicated and
Speaker 2: you have to be so determined to stay the course
Speaker 2: and fill out the forms and make the windows. If
Speaker 2: you miss your window too bad, you don't get your
Speaker 2: you don't you don't get your publishing back. So you
Speaker 2: do need someone at the controls. And we we we
Speaker 2: have a good a good guy there. Uh. My wife
Speaker 2: Laura is ex officio, you know, manages me because nobody
Speaker 2: else could take nobody else can stand me. Uh, but yeah,
Speaker 2: I have the phone is ringing. In fact, yesterday we
Speaker 2: had two requests for I don't know what it calls
Speaker 2: these sampling, sampling or sync because one of the requests
Speaker 2: was to use a complete verse of a record, I
Speaker 2: mean just cold a verse of another record and then
Speaker 2: the rap song starts, so this standard becomes the intro
Speaker 2: to this rap. I don't know how I feel about that.
Speaker 2: Is that devaluing my copyright or is that promoting my copyright?
Speaker 3: And and.
Speaker 2: Do I know? Do I know the answer to the question. No,
Speaker 2: I don't, so I'm kind of like standing there with
Speaker 2: my sucking on my thumb, going h I wonder you
Speaker 2: know is that is it? Will? Will I one day
Speaker 2: regret not taking advantage of more of these opportunities to
Speaker 2: let these songs be heard, even in sometimes not the
Speaker 2: most flattering surroundings, but at least the melodies are getting
Speaker 2: out there and a sense of what the record was.
Speaker 2: And does that over time inspire some sort of curiosity
Speaker 2: about the song that lies deeply buried behind all of
Speaker 2: that rapping, And I'm not sure that it does. I
Speaker 2: think there's an argument that it could devalue that sync
Speaker 2: rites could in the long run, devalue a song, except
Speaker 2: when they're used in movies. When they're used in movies,
Speaker 2: I see that as a clear when when some of
Speaker 2: the sampling stuff, it still worries me. I'm not sure
Speaker 2: what role it plays in the future of the copyright.
Speaker 1: You talk about younger generations in their ability or lack thereof,
Speaker 1: to write songs. When you do live shows, do younger
Speaker 1: generations come and to what degree are you approached or
Speaker 1: interact with younger generations about songwriting.
Speaker 2: Well, I have an intern wonderful young guy named Pete
Speaker 2: Mancini who's one of the best songwriters, young songwriters I've
Speaker 2: ever heard. And he's he's he's under my wing. I
Speaker 2: can't take care of the whole world, but this kid
Speaker 2: is talented, and I take him out with me and
Speaker 2: I let him open for me, do his songs, which
Speaker 2: are good. He always the audience always laps it up.
Speaker 2: He's very good looking, which I'm not. He he's young.
Speaker 2: He loves the old music. He loves the old tracks.
Speaker 2: You know, did you ever hear you know, like Royal Scam?
Speaker 2: You know, you know, we talk about it and it's like, yeah, now, yeah,
Speaker 2: I knew Jeff Carroll, Oh you knew Jeff Pi, Carol
Speaker 2: oh Man.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: So there's a group out there who are all over this.
Speaker 2: I mean it's a small it's right now, it's a
Speaker 2: small group. But I believe it's growing. I believe the
Speaker 2: interest in the sixties and seventies catalogs to some degree
Speaker 2: is growing. I think less there's less less growth in
Speaker 2: the in the Great American Songbook. I see the Great
Speaker 2: American Songbook to me fading from public memory now I've
Speaker 2: lived long enough to see these things, which scares me.
Speaker 2: It scares me to death that I have actually seen
Speaker 2: these things happen. But I know that if I went
Speaker 2: outside here and I had a remote unit of some kind,
Speaker 2: and I stopped a fifteen year old girl outside and
Speaker 2: I said, I'm going to sing this song and tell you,
Speaker 2: tell me you have a song, my funny Valentine, sweet
Speaker 2: comic Valentine. What does that mean you? I don't know.
Speaker 2: You know, it doesn't mean anything to her. And so
Speaker 2: we're I think that when the boomers go down, and
Speaker 2: we're going down making no mistake and very swiftly, there's
Speaker 2: a change of scenery and cast members on the entertainment
Speaker 2: stage is taking place. Even as we speak. Each day,
Speaker 2: one of our brethren, one of our colleagues, most of
Speaker 2: them beloved and irreplaceable in our mind, passes the bar,
Speaker 2: and I feel that maybe some of the respect and
Speaker 2: love that we have for the Great American Songbook may
Speaker 2: go with us. So I don't know what sort of
Speaker 2: I would love to have a peek into the future
Speaker 2: if I had, like if I could go like Boom
Speaker 2: fifty years fifty years in the future. I just want
Speaker 2: to listen to the radio. Just take me somewhere and
Speaker 2: let me listen to the radio. Well, we don't have
Speaker 2: radio anymore. It's all implanted in your skull, and we
Speaker 2: sort of play what we play, what we want you
Speaker 2: to hear. You know. Sometimes I kind of feel like
Speaker 2: that's what they're doing. They're playing what they want us
Speaker 2: to hear at, you know. And I think that record
Speaker 2: it shook it. It's really shaken up record promotion. I'm very,
Speaker 2: very very concerned that this great American art form has
Speaker 2: been our number one export for decades, American music. I've
Speaker 2: traveled all over the world. They are listening to American
Speaker 2: music in Copenhagen and Hamburg. In Santiago and Waynas areas
Speaker 2: they're listening to American music. And Moscow right now in
Speaker 2: China they're listening. They're watching without paying royalties. Of course,
Speaker 2: they're watching American movies and listening to our music. It's
Speaker 2: still so profoundly influential that it ranks as one of
Speaker 2: our more significant exports, and I think, much more significant
Speaker 2: than our missiles and our howitzers and our grenades. I
Speaker 2: sort of feel like Billy Joel when he went over
Speaker 2: and toured the Union. I think he kind of brought up,
Speaker 2: brought last knows, you know, to its full majority there.
Speaker 2: And some people say that Levi's won the Cold War
Speaker 2: because the Russians wanted Levi's so badly. But American music
Speaker 2: is a treasure, that's being that's not being careful, carefully
Speaker 2: husband husband did or cultivated right now, right now, in
Speaker 2: this particular moment, with the exception of a few major
Speaker 2: artists at the very top who have the influence, like
Speaker 2: a Taylor Swift, for instance, when she was fourteen years old.
Speaker 2: Fifteen years old, I heard her and I heard her songs,
Speaker 2: and I said, you know, she's going to be successful.
Speaker 2: She knows how to do all the parts. She knows
Speaker 2: like the intro, she knows the verses, she knows the
Speaker 2: bridge that Nashville training. You know, in Nashville is the
Speaker 2: citadel of songwriting. It's the last you know, It's Ford Apache,
Speaker 2: It's you know, It's where you make your last stand.
Speaker 2: I guess as a songwriter. But it's been disturbing recently
Speaker 2: to see people like Don Schlitz, who wrote The Gambler,
Speaker 2: which is in my view, a veritable perfect song. People
Speaker 2: are always talking about the perfect song. Well, there are
Speaker 2: a lot of perfect songs, but certainly the Gambler and
Speaker 2: the way that story is told, and that o Henry
Speaker 2: has twist at the end, and just the brilliance of
Speaker 2: that chorus. You got to know when to hold them, no,
Speaker 2: when to fold them, no, when to walk away, no
Speaker 2: one to run And the fact that this is happening
Speaker 2: on a darkened train. There's such drama in this. And
Speaker 2: the man who wrote that, who I Knew is kind
Speaker 2: of a good time. You're out there down you know,
Speaker 2: I love you, you know, as a guy who had
Speaker 2: entirely too much fun all the time. He last time
Speaker 2: I met him face to face that I'm done. He said,
Speaker 2: I don't see any point in writing anymore.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to Taylor Swift, since you seem to
Speaker 1: pay attention to the scene. The country albums were co
Speaker 1: written with Liz Rose. Then she moved into a pop sphere,
Speaker 1: tends to work with the a level town in the
Speaker 1: pops sphere. Do you have any thoughts about her modern.
Speaker 2: Work, You know only that it's you know, extremely well produced,
Speaker 2: and and there's there's a there's there. There are there
Speaker 2: are a few songs that I that I that I like, I,
Speaker 2: I still haven't heard you've lost that love and feeling.
Speaker 2: I you know, I think that might be a forlorn
Speaker 2: hope at this point. But I you know, I I
Speaker 2: thought I think that Adele, Lady Gaga, Taylor. I think
Speaker 2: they're trying. I really think they're trying to write songs,
Speaker 2: and that's encouraging. That's encouraging, whether anyone would I I've
Speaker 2: actually heard melody creeping back into some of this hip
Speaker 2: hop music. H And I remember Paul Simon saying to me.
Speaker 2: We were talking one day and I said, you know, Paul,
Speaker 2: it's just really disturbing, like chords are disappearing. You know,
Speaker 2: there's I don't and I love. I love chords. You know,
Speaker 2: chords are anyway, that's that's life to me, that's life,
Speaker 2: that's that nurtures my soul. So I said, Paul, I
Speaker 2: think we're losing chords. He said, Jimmy, he said, we're
Speaker 2: going to lose melody. I said, Paul, I said, you
Speaker 2: must be wrong. You can't be right about that. He said,
Speaker 2: he says we're going to lose it. We're going to
Speaker 2: lose it all. And this is ten, this is ten
Speaker 2: or twelve years ago.
Speaker 1: Well that way, he was very pressured because a lot
Speaker 1: of modern songs don't have melody. Let's go back to
Speaker 1: the beginning to Oklahoma. You know, we used to talk
Speaker 1: about flyover country in the sixties and seventies. There is
Speaker 1: no flyover country. Everybody has the Internet, everybody has mobile phones,
Speaker 1: cable TV. What was it like growing up in Oklahoma
Speaker 1: in the forties and fifties.
Speaker 2: It was pretty stark. I lived in western Texas and
Speaker 2: western Oklahoma, which you know, you don't you don't to
Speaker 2: see any difference when you cross that sign it says
Speaker 2: welcome to Texas. Texas doesn't look any different than Oklahoma.
Speaker 2: It's all the same. It's flat. And they had little
Speaker 2: hills out there in the old timers, and say, you know,
Speaker 2: if you go out there and stand on top of
Speaker 2: that hill, you could see New Mexico from here fifty
Speaker 2: miles and I tried it, and by golly, they were
Speaker 2: pretty close to the truth. And that's kind of the
Speaker 2: landscape that I grew up in. My father was a
Speaker 2: Baptist minister. He was also an ex marine. It was
Speaker 2: a strict Protestant upbringing that put us as children. That
Speaker 2: were five of us. My siblings, my brother Tommy, and
Speaker 2: my three sisters, Janice, Susan, and Sylvia, and it put
Speaker 2: us constantly in the public eye. So I grew up
Speaker 2: knowing that I was being watched, that every action was
Speaker 2: going to be reported back to my dad. And my
Speaker 2: dad hated rock and roll. He had the crazy idea
Speaker 2: somewhere along the way that rock and roll was about sex.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know who gave him that idea,
Speaker 2: but he got his stuck in his head and I
Speaker 2: couldn't get it out, and so I was climbing out
Speaker 2: the rear window and sneaking out to go to dances,
Speaker 2: and dancing is not allowed in the in the Southern
Speaker 2: Baptist religion. And I used to look at my sisters
Speaker 2: with this deep sense of pity as they would sit
Speaker 2: on the front porch and listen to the music coming
Speaker 2: from teen Town and imagine what's going through their heads
Speaker 2: because they can't go there and fraternize and be with
Speaker 2: So I think that that Southern Baptist made a tremendous
Speaker 2: mistake when they disallowed when we went to camp, we
Speaker 2: had to swim separately from the from the girls. There
Speaker 2: was this sort of just non proportional response to the
Speaker 2: sexual question that emphasized the difference that sort of I
Speaker 2: think titillated the whole idea of maybe being naughty, whereas
Speaker 2: the Methodists, who I always envied, could go to dances
Speaker 2: and they had a much more relaxed And I think
Speaker 2: later in life that it affects relationships. I really do.
Speaker 2: I know it for fact, it sets up some psychological
Speaker 2: barriers that are never going to be taken down. So anyway,
Speaker 2: get off of that subject. But I was church pianist,
Speaker 2: and I learned pretty early to improvise on Hymn's one
Speaker 2: Suitisan Goddard was a wonderful teacher in Oklahoma City, and
Speaker 2: she would teach me well what Leonard Bernstein called transformational elements,
Speaker 2: and she just called piano arranging. But it would be
Speaker 2: like playing playing amazing grace like this, Let me try
Speaker 2: that again, you know something in that vein. So I
Speaker 2: learned like a lot of improvisation. Dad played a little guitar,
Speaker 2: my mom played a little accordion. We would do our
Speaker 2: family thing at church on Sunday, sing parts. I grew
Speaker 2: up singing three parts. Dad always wanted me to sing tenor,
Speaker 2: and I really ended up being a baritone, but eventually
Speaker 2: I made it to church pianist, which my mother thought
Speaker 2: was the pinnacle of show business. You couldn't like get
Speaker 2: me higher than that. And then alas we lost her
Speaker 2: and it was my senior year in high school. I
Speaker 2: was sixteen, she was thirty six, and that sort of
Speaker 2: dropped a nuclear bomb on us as a family. I
Speaker 2: don't think my father ever got over it. It affected
Speaker 2: his relationship whatever that was, with God, which is a
Speaker 2: very weighty subject. But you have to believe in what
Speaker 2: you're preaching. You can't, just like you have to believe
Speaker 2: in what you're performing. It has to be coming from
Speaker 2: somewhere because people know when it's not. They know they
Speaker 2: they can detect that thin nasal wine of the of
Speaker 2: the not completely sure of himself performer, just as they
Speaker 2: can a Baptist preacher who he told me one night,
Speaker 2: he says, Jimmy, I don't believe anything that's coming out
Speaker 2: of my mouth. So I put him to work in
Speaker 2: the record business and he did very well. Discovered a
Speaker 2: group called Five Man Electrical Band and had a hit
Speaker 2: record and went to work for Mike Curve for a while.
Speaker 2: So it all turned out it all turned out in
Speaker 2: the end. But I lived in an agrarian environment. I
Speaker 2: got these hands dirty picking cotton, poe and cotton doing
Speaker 2: essentially it's you know, look, I don't want to get
Speaker 2: into anything cultural here, but my grandfather did not use
Speaker 2: migrant labor. There were enough cousins and uncles and aunts
Speaker 2: in our family that we could go out like a
Speaker 2: swarm of locusts and clear up, you know, forty acres
Speaker 2: of cotton in a couple of days, three days. I
Speaker 2: remember one day, my father pulled five hundred pounds of
Speaker 2: cotton that day. And uh, that's uh, that's a lot
Speaker 2: of cotton. Because cotton doesn't weigh very much, so five
Speaker 2: hundred pounds of it would probably fill this this room
Speaker 2: pretty much. Uh. I always admired him. He was a
Speaker 2: he was a magnetic tall, very handsome. As an orator,
Speaker 2: he was you know, he was persuasive. Uh, he was difficult.
Speaker 2: He believed in corporal punishment. We got whacked around a
Speaker 2: lot with good cause. With good cause, you know, I
Speaker 2: mean it wasn't nice to turn the heat off in
Speaker 2: the babistery so that the back water in the babistery
Speaker 2: was ice cold, so that when the When the portly
Speaker 2: lady started coming down the steps into the babistry, She's going,
Speaker 2: oh my God, oh Jesus, oh oh. Everybody thought she's
Speaker 2: having a transcendental experience. But the water in the babbisty
Speaker 2: is below zero, you know, so fun in games. The
Speaker 2: the thing I remember most about growing up was always
Speaker 2: feeling as though I was on the outside looking in.
Speaker 2: I was not sports minded, particularly even though I went out.
Speaker 2: I played football because my dad wanted me to the
Speaker 2: violence I didn't like. But I played and played hard.
Speaker 2: But I was a second stringer. I was in the band,
Speaker 2: so I grew, so I got a little bit of
Speaker 2: experience on other instruments, and I floated on the outside
Speaker 2: edge of every party I ever was ever attended. I
Speaker 2: would be I would be in a corner somewhere, leaned up,
Speaker 2: hopefully where I couldn't be seen, just watching, just watching
Speaker 2: and feeling clumsy. And at one point my act and
Speaker 2: he was out of control, and I just I just
Speaker 2: had that awful teenage, teenage angst that you go through
Speaker 2: when you're just ugly. You just there's just a time
Speaker 2: in your life when you're ugly. You look in the
Speaker 2: mirror and you go, I'm ugly, you know, and you
Speaker 2: get through it. You get through it. And then I
Speaker 2: got through it by writing songs, by h doing my
Speaker 2: own therapy and exercising my demons, you know, at the piano,
Speaker 2: and particularly when I when I finally got the podium
Speaker 2: and I was writing, and I I wrote, Uh, I wrote,
Speaker 2: I wrote a song called good Evening, mister critic. And
Speaker 2: it was for some reason I had it in. I
Speaker 2: had it in for critics. It turns out that critics
Speaker 2: have been my best friends in this life. They have
Speaker 2: literally literally been my best friends. Stephen Holden was one
Speaker 2: of my best friends.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: But my very first concert at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I
Speaker 2: went out and I sung about the critics, you know,
Speaker 2: and it was a very very taunting you know, how
Speaker 2: many how many shows did you close all by yourself,
Speaker 2: mister critic? Uh? It castigated the critics, it really uh.
Speaker 2: And this is what I chose to open my first
Speaker 2: concert with. So one can only imagine what followed. Leonard Feather,
Speaker 2: who was an eloquent writer, music critic for the La
Speaker 2: Times and well known in the jazz world, wrote mister
Speaker 2: Webb's theory that songs are best heard when performed by
Speaker 2: the writer. Was definitively unproven. Last night, that's a Dorothy
Speaker 2: cha in pavilion. And for years, for years, he raked
Speaker 2: me over the colds. But the truth is that by
Speaker 2: and large, if you look at the critical response to
Speaker 2: my albums, my second album all I Know, excuse me.
Speaker 2: Second second album.
Speaker 4: Was and so on.
Speaker 2: Was selected by Stereo Review magazine, which in those days
Speaker 2: was a pretty big deal. Stereo Review that was for
Speaker 2: the high fid nuts. They gave me Album of the Year.
Speaker 2: You know, I probably sold like for forty five fifty records,
Speaker 2: and they gave me their Album of the Year award
Speaker 2: for outstanding recording achievement, and they printed the full color
Speaker 2: cover inside magazine. It was a very prestigious, but could
Speaker 2: never It's interesting because now I can look at it
Speaker 2: and I can say I spent my whole life pounding
Speaker 2: my head up against that wall. Maybe it's time to stop.
Speaker 2: But I think I'm going to do one more album.
Speaker 2: I think I have a few songs that I would
Speaker 2: like to leave before I leave the room. I'd like
Speaker 2: to play a few more songs. And I've had fantastic
Speaker 2: luck with other artists covering my songs on my albums.
Speaker 2: For instance, Judy Collins picking up the Moon as a
Speaker 2: Harsh Mistress in my minor standard recorded by a lot
Speaker 2: of people. Highwayman was on one of my albums. It
Speaker 2: was actually the album that I did with George Martin.
Speaker 2: I've done an album with everybody.
Speaker 1: I was on all.
Speaker 2: All the Warner Late I was all the time Warner Labels,
Speaker 2: I was on them, I was on Reprise, I was
Speaker 2: on Warner Brothers, and then they kicked me over to
Speaker 2: Asylum and then I made an album. Linda Ronstat produced
Speaker 2: me and we made an album with Jack Holtzman at
Speaker 2: Elektra and uh I'm at Ergon used to come to
Speaker 2: well not every every studio, but every every session. He
Speaker 2: would come to sessions quite often. He would come in
Speaker 2: with his with his gold tip cane, and he come
Speaker 2: in with the dapper little goatee, and he was a
Speaker 2: wonderful cat. And he walked in and and he listened
Speaker 2: to me and he'd go, you know, kid, he said,
Speaker 2: it's part. He said, you've got the heart, you know,
Speaker 2: and so I that's I don't know when you've got
Speaker 2: that kind of backing and you can't somehow pull up,
Speaker 2: pull up, you know, some kind of a record out
Speaker 2: of it. I don't. I don't know what kind of
Speaker 2: a curse is on you. But I did pray at
Speaker 2: one point when I was young, and I prayed to God,
Speaker 2: please let me grow up, and please let me write
Speaker 2: a song for Glenn Campbell, because I loved Glenn Campbell.
Speaker 2: He had a record because turn around, look at me,
Speaker 2: turn it around, looking at me. Oh, I've wait, but
Speaker 2: I'll wait for uh. And it was a it was
Speaker 2: a regional hit, and I heard this beautiful voice, and
Speaker 2: I just want to write songs for him. So when
Speaker 2: I met him, finally I met him in the flesh,
Speaker 2: I actually had a bunch of songs that i'd written
Speaker 2: form Uh. It's it's like a cinderellative story. Really, a
Speaker 2: lot of it is so fantastic that people don't believe
Speaker 2: me when I tell them what happened to me. I mean,
Speaker 2: all my dreams came true.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 1: You know, Okay, you talk about being in Oklahoma but
Speaker 1: being a teenager feeling like you're outside. Did you continue
Speaker 1: to feel that in your life to this day that
Speaker 1: you were outside observing or alienated or did that change?
Speaker 2: No? I'm exactly the same kid, I'm exactly the same guy,
Speaker 2: and I just transferred, you know, the alienation that I
Speaker 2: felt in the classroom, I transferred it to Hollywood because
Speaker 2: I couldn't. I felt like I was being banished from
Speaker 2: rock and roll and put with the old people, old
Speaker 2: people who were like forty, people like mister Sinatra, Tony Bennett.
Speaker 2: You know, I actually wrote a song for Rosemary Clooney.
Speaker 2: So in the middle of the road, the middle of
Speaker 2: the road, which was Glenn in the fifth dimension and
Speaker 2: Richard Harris. People could not comprehend Richard Harris at all,
Speaker 2: and so there was a lot of confusion about where
Speaker 2: the pigeon, where my pigeon hole was. And I already
Speaker 2: knew that there wasn't a hole for me. I learned
Speaker 2: that in school, so I knew there wasn't already made
Speaker 2: slot for me to slip into because I know I'm
Speaker 2: too egocentric and eccentric and eclectic, if you will, if
Speaker 2: you could put all those in one word, that would
Speaker 2: be me. And I know there's no real home for
Speaker 2: me in this business. But I yearn I yearned to be,
Speaker 2: you know, to have dinner with Paul Simon, and Ardie
Speaker 2: Garfunkland eventually already asked me for a song, which was
Speaker 2: all I know and answer, oh oh, anyway, uh. When
Speaker 2: I after I worked with Artie and we that was
Speaker 2: his first record coming back from the split with Paul Simon,
Speaker 2: which I'm not going to go into that drama because
Speaker 2: I think people know a lot about that, and if
Speaker 2: you don't know, you can find out easily. But you know,
Speaker 2: they were in the first grade together, and it's been
Speaker 2: a rough relationship all the way for them. I've seen
Speaker 2: a lot of it because I've known already now since
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy one, and I've been through several ups and
Speaker 2: downs between him and Paul. But I did eventually, you know,
Speaker 2: sit down and have dinner with him, and then I
Speaker 2: was invited to kind of hang out with Crosby, Dave
Speaker 2: Crosby and Graham Nash. We got to be pretty good friends.
Speaker 2: And then a very good friend of mine was Joni Mitchell,
Speaker 2: and she changed the way I write songs. I would
Speaker 2: say she was one of the she was one of
Speaker 2: the epiphanes that I when I When I was I
Speaker 2: was cruising along there, I was making pretty good money
Speaker 2: and I thought, damn I know everything there is to
Speaker 2: know about this. I can write one of these anytime.
Speaker 2: And I ran across Joni's work saw actually saw live
Speaker 2: at the Troubadour one night, sent her a letter and
Speaker 2: said I want to take you out for tea and
Speaker 2: I said, you were you know, you're a golden child.
Speaker 2: And I loved what she did and everything. She found
Speaker 2: the letter like fifteen seventeen years later, it was behind
Speaker 2: her couch. She never opened it. It's true story. But
Speaker 2: she and I became pretty really pretty close friends, and
Speaker 2: I watched her a lot, and she would I loved
Speaker 2: her voicings on the guitar. I love these kind of
Speaker 2: just kind of to me, that's that's her world. It's
Speaker 2: kind of a it's a D tuning or you know
Speaker 2: these used to call it a lot of times, called
Speaker 2: it the Joni Mitchell tooning. And I played on guitar
Speaker 2: for a while. I wrote a couple of songs on that,
Speaker 2: and but her conversational style all really changed my riding.
Speaker 2: There was no more Witch Tall Lineman. There was no
Speaker 2: more I was riding. You know, I was writing put
Speaker 2: it down here right. It's kind of early for vocalizability.
Speaker 5: See her how she flopped old and sail across this
Speaker 5: guy lose enough to tell about that airful if future,
Speaker 5: Oh ship looks as warm as go.
Speaker 2: Uh it just it became I think deeper and more
Speaker 2: uh uh Joan. She was the first to open her
Speaker 2: chest up completely and say, okay, look, this is really
Speaker 2: what's going on here? I am not happy sometimes and
Speaker 2: and she would expose things that entertainment has always been.
Speaker 2: Yet aren't we all happy? And they we're gonna go
Speaker 2: home now? Yeah? And here here, suddenly is is a
Speaker 2: voice that is profound up in the sterilized room where
Speaker 2: they let you be lazy. You know, stories about Freudian
Speaker 2: with Freudian overtones, and some of them so inspirational that
Speaker 2: I would cry listening to them.
Speaker 1: Like m.
Speaker 2: Just before you, just before our love got lost, you said,
Speaker 2: my love is constant.
Speaker 1: You told me it was constant. Is I love was constant?
Speaker 1: Is a northern star?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Where's that at?
Speaker 1: I'll meet you in the bar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you want me, I'll be in the bar. Well.
Speaker 2: She had me there, She had me. It was like,
Speaker 2: I don't know how to write like that. She's I
Speaker 2: call it conversational tone. And another guy who does it
Speaker 2: and does it in a very humorous ways, randing him.
Speaker 2: The lines aren't so formalized as Moon, June and Spoon.
Speaker 2: You know, there are things that people might actually say.
Speaker 2: So I thought, well, this is the wave of the future,
Speaker 2: and my songs became more elaborate. I wrote a song
Speaker 2: called Paul Gogan in the South Seas that was almost
Speaker 2: impossible to form. It was like the Surf's Up. You know,
Speaker 2: nobody could cover Surfs Up because nobody could play it.
Speaker 1: But let's go back. You talk about being feeling separate,
Speaker 1: feeling alienated. You talk about opening your concert with the
Speaker 1: critic songs of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. To what degree
Speaker 1: are you angry? I think he's got a bad connotation,
Speaker 1: but you know, a frustration of feeling that you're not
Speaker 1: a member of the group, You're not part of the center.
Speaker 1: There's somewhere you want to be.
Speaker 2: Was that an element, Well, it would have been until recently.
Speaker 2: But I'm at peace with where I am, who I am,
Speaker 2: what I am. When I step back and look at it,
Speaker 2: it's an unbelievable story. I mean, in anybody's book, it's
Speaker 2: a fantastic Horatio Alger story. If you will rags for riches.
Speaker 2: On the surface, it's that simple, but in a more
Speaker 2: profound sense, it was a journey into into the art
Speaker 2: of songwriting and to come to be influenced by this
Speaker 2: wonderful group of people who eventually really did embrace me.
Speaker 2: The rock and roll crowd. You know, Guns and Roses
Speaker 2: are playing which tall Lineman every night on the show.
Speaker 2: So and I think I got when I got invited
Speaker 2: to play MacArthur Park at the Rainforest, Well, when James
Speaker 2: Taylor cut which tall Linman? He covered which Tall Liman,
Speaker 2: and I thought, I think I'm going to put some
Speaker 2: of this to bed. I don't think there's a conspiracy.
Speaker 2: I don't think they're out to get me anymore. You know,
Speaker 2: there may may have been a time when there were
Speaker 2: when when I was looked on with some degree of suspicion,
Speaker 2: But frankly I laugh at that now because I shouldn't
Speaker 2: have cared about that. I should have been here on
Speaker 2: the piano doing doing what God, exercising the gift that
Speaker 2: he gave me, uh and not not being so self conscious.
Speaker 2: But again I go back to being the bat babbitist,
Speaker 2: the Baptist preacher's kid, and being watched all the time,
Speaker 2: and having and being rejected a lot, uh, being called
Speaker 2: four eyes, being called preach, having four or five kids
Speaker 2: just jump on me and beat the crap out of
Speaker 2: me after school. You know, because I work glasses and
Speaker 2: I it has it has. Yes, I have an anger
Speaker 2: in me. My anger is is for the bullies of
Speaker 2: this world. It's it's it's for the the unfair, the
Speaker 2: unfairly treated. Uh majority of people in the world who
Speaker 2: lived in some abject poverty and terror. Sometimes while another
Speaker 2: segment of society lives on Mount Olympus and wear golden
Speaker 2: crowns and float around in togas making decisions that affect
Speaker 2: the lives of that cause cause or do not cause
Speaker 2: wars and things of that nature to occur in other
Speaker 2: people's country. That kind of stuff makes me angry. I
Speaker 2: was incredibly angry about Vietnam. I knew in my gut
Speaker 2: that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a false flag.
Speaker 2: I knew it. I knew we need I knew I
Speaker 2: knew that. I just feel it, and I think that
Speaker 2: they're gonna have it's going to become harder and harder
Speaker 2: for administrations to put through these mil to go on
Speaker 2: these military adventures after after our generation and after Vietnam. Uh.
Speaker 2: Now it hasn't dissuaded them because they've been now wherever
Speaker 2: they've been to the Gulf War uh uh they've went,
Speaker 2: They've been to they've gone over and erecked Iraq, and
Speaker 2: they've wrecked Afghanistan. I mean, what, what are what actually
Speaker 2: are we doing as a country to make life better
Speaker 2: on this world for more people, for our own people
Speaker 2: when we don't have elder care for even a half
Speaker 2: of the of the people who need it in this country. So,
Speaker 2: you know, yeah, those things. I'm I'm an activist. I'm
Speaker 2: a leftist if you want, you want to all me that.
Speaker 2: I've always been aligned politically with with with a liberal society.
Speaker 2: And I don't see anything wrong with national health. They
Speaker 2: have it in Australia, they have it in England, and
Speaker 2: it takes care of a lot of people who would
Speaker 2: normally if they only if they only had to depend
Speaker 2: on money, they wouldn't get medical care. And I think
Speaker 2: when you keep seriously injured people sitting in the waiting
Speaker 2: room while people with the money are like going past
Speaker 2: them and going to get care. So you know what,
Speaker 2: I'm saying I think there's a lot of injustice. I'm
Speaker 2: angry about that. I'm angry about people causing other people's deaths, uh,
Speaker 2: needlessly spending human lives in pursuit of some I don't know,
Speaker 2: some reactionary, borderline fascist like dream of a society. Well,
Speaker 2: in our case, I'm very nervous because I was raised
Speaker 2: and rigorous religious framework, where if you got outside across
Speaker 2: the laser beam, a buzzer sounded, and you got an
Speaker 2: electric shop. I'm afraid of religion being too close to government.
Speaker 2: I think that the founding fathers knew exactly what they
Speaker 2: were doing when they separated church in state, and the
Speaker 2: idea that well, no, I was a long time ago,
Speaker 2: and now we need to we need to get them
Speaker 2: closer together, you know, to get America back on its path.
Speaker 2: I'm not persuaded that religion ever did anything to help government.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to Oklahoma, your Baptist minister's son. How
Speaker 1: do you hear rock and roll? How do you hear Elvis?
Speaker 1: To what degree does it change you? To what degree
Speaker 1: does it affect you?
Speaker 2: Well, my father made a critical mistake at one point
Speaker 2: because he was also kind of left minded, believe it
Speaker 2: or not. And during the Civil rights movement, he would
Speaker 2: have black congregations come to our church. And when they came,
Speaker 2: they brought their drums and their electric guitars, and they,
Speaker 2: you know, sang the gospel. And Elvis was up to
Speaker 2: his neck in the gospel music.
Speaker 6: So he was.
Speaker 2: And so my father was really I was proud of
Speaker 2: his stand. He let he he was inclusive. He he
Speaker 2: knew perfectly well there were two gay guys who came
Speaker 2: to service, and they were there every Sunday, and he
Speaker 2: never said a word about it until his deacons came
Speaker 2: in and said, you've got to stop those guys from coming,
Speaker 2: because you know that's not in the Bibles. And he said, well,
Speaker 2: he said, I'm not going to say anything to them,
Speaker 2: but you're no longer my deacons. So he fired the deacons.
Speaker 2: His stand was impeccable. And I don't know, I don't know,
Speaker 2: I honestly, Bob, I don't know where I was leading
Speaker 2: with that.
Speaker 1: But well, tell me about hearing rock music curing Elvis.
Speaker 2: Well, when these when these black congregations would come in
Speaker 2: and play service, we the gospel was like a rock
Speaker 2: and roll. There was drums, they had drums up there,
Speaker 2: you know, in the front of the church. I would
Speaker 2: as I as I said, I would sometimes absent myself
Speaker 2: from the house to go to various functions where people
Speaker 2: work dancing. You know. Glenn Campbell said, you know why
Speaker 2: Southern Baptists don't make love standing up? And I said, no, Glenn,
Speaker 2: why not? He said, because people will think they're dancing.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: He used to control the radio, and you know, so
Speaker 2: we would like try to get on a station where
Speaker 2: we could hear Elvis or you know, Buddy Holly or
Speaker 2: somebody else, and he would like slap our hands, you know,
Speaker 2: he'd get back on that. All those preachers who used
Speaker 2: to preach out of Del Rio, Texas. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I found my when my mother passed. As I said,
Speaker 2: I was a senior in high school, so I was
Speaker 2: out from under the family umbrella very early on my
Speaker 2: own in Los Angeles, sleeping on an air mattress with
Speaker 2: some girls I knew who had like they let me
Speaker 2: use their dining room. And I had a little portfolio
Speaker 2: of songs. And I was an independent human being and
Speaker 2: I've never been so happy in my life. And I
Speaker 2: had nothing. I had nothing, and I walked around Hollywood
Speaker 2: with my songs, and if somebody asked me what I did,
Speaker 2: I'd say, I'm a songwriter and I was proud of it.
Speaker 2: And I got a couple of everly brother cuts. Everly
Speaker 2: brothers always worship.
Speaker 1: Well, l wait, wait, wait, let's slow down a little bit.
Speaker 1: At what point and how and why do you side
Speaker 1: I'm going to be a songwriter as a profession.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm at sam Bernardino of Ali College, and I'm wait, wait, wait.
Speaker 1: Before you go there? How did the family end up
Speaker 1: moving from Oklahoma to California?
Speaker 2: That was always my father's dream.
Speaker 6: He was.
Speaker 2: He was always going to go there. It was just
Speaker 2: a matter of times. So when he got a call
Speaker 2: from this church in Colton, which is famous mostly for Wyatt,
Speaker 2: for roy Erp. Wyatt's brother was buried there. So that's
Speaker 2: that was one of the That was the tourist attraction.
Speaker 2: It was roy ERP's gravestone, it was he you know.
Speaker 2: So we're in California, which was a complete makeover for
Speaker 2: me in terms of one of the first thing I
Speaker 2: heard that summer that we moved in u there was
Speaker 2: a there was a consciousness, a consciousness changing event, and
Speaker 2: it was the Beach Boys singing on the radio station
Speaker 2: The Look. I came in, k me in and they
Speaker 2: were they were singing in my room. And I was
Speaker 2: moving into my new bedroom in California, and all the
Speaker 2: windows were up, and I hear the same song on
Speaker 2: all the radios, all two or three different houses. They're
Speaker 2: all tuned in to. Came in and they're listening to
Speaker 2: the Beach Boys. And all this bogun villa's dripping down
Speaker 2: and it's warm and everything is green. And I see
Speaker 2: this kid in his backyard abutting our property and he's
Speaker 2: got on a Volkswagen bus and he's got a surfboard
Speaker 2: up on top of it and he's washing it all down.
Speaker 2: He's come back, he just got back from the beach.
Speaker 2: He's washing his rig down. I looked over there and
Speaker 2: I said, what's that? He said, what's what? I said,
Speaker 2: That is thing on top of your car. He says,
Speaker 2: that's my surfboard. Man, Hey dude, you know. I said, well,
Speaker 2: what's that music you're playing? You know in my room?
Speaker 2: He said, hey, dude, he said, you don't know who
Speaker 2: the Beach Boys are. I said, well, I sort of
Speaker 2: like I know. I heard Jan and Dean record about
Speaker 2: Surf City, but I don't know much about it. He said,
Speaker 2: come in here, and I went into his room and
Speaker 2: he played me everything the beach boys had done up
Speaker 2: until then. And I walked that and I felt like
Speaker 2: a changed person that I can't explain the vibration of
Speaker 2: it was so strong that I was that I was
Speaker 2: now in a different environment, uh, emotionally. And it was
Speaker 2: shortly after that my mother passed. She she uh, she
Speaker 2: tripped over a piece of furniture in the living room
Speaker 2: one afternoon, and five weeks later she died of a
Speaker 2: brain tumor.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: So I was, I was free, I was I was broken,
Speaker 2: and my father was destroyed. So all the rules we
Speaker 2: had no rules now. All my whole life had been
Speaker 2: about rules, and now all of a sudden, there's no rules.
Speaker 2: And walking into the house at one or two in
Speaker 2: the morning, drunk as a skunk and stepping over my
Speaker 2: father who's already passed out on the living room floor.
Speaker 2: That's when I found out that Native American blood is
Speaker 2: susceptible to alcohol. Because I'm a sixteenth and my father
Speaker 2: was an eighth. And once he stopped preaching and started drinking,
Speaker 2: he he sort of proved that he was you know,
Speaker 2: he could, he could, he could, uh, he could drink
Speaker 2: with the best of them, and he had a lot
Speaker 2: of girlfriends. The whole temperature changed there pretty soon. He
Speaker 2: was he was he was fed up and wanted to
Speaker 2: go back to Oklahoma. So they went and I stayed,
Speaker 2: and I was trying to go to sam Rindino Valley
Speaker 2: College and I'm not a very good student, and I'm
Speaker 2: skipping classes and I'm going. In the den of music
Speaker 2: was a guy named Russell C. Baldwin, you know, fantastic,
Speaker 2: a concert pianist who had damaged one of his hands
Speaker 2: in a car wreck and it had cost him his career.
Speaker 2: So now he's teaching. He wasn't bitter, but my favorite
Speaker 2: parts of the class would be when he would say,
Speaker 2: I think today I'm just going to play some Beethoven
Speaker 2: piano sonatus for your kids. And he would sit there
Speaker 2: and he would play Beethoven, just spellbinding, and then he
Speaker 2: would say, okay, now for your semester final we're going
Speaker 2: to do We're gonna set He said, you each pick
Speaker 2: a poem, and you and you write a choral arrangement
Speaker 2: and a piano accompaniment. And he said that'll be your
Speaker 2: final grade. So I went in, and I'd been to
Speaker 2: class about three times. I wrote this arrangement for choir,
Speaker 2: and I think the text was when I am old
Speaker 2: and gray, and when you were old and gray and
Speaker 2: full of sleep and sitting by the fire, take down
Speaker 2: this book, slowly read and dream, John Keats. I think
Speaker 2: that's what it was. And he called me into his
Speaker 2: office that afternoon and I went, uh, oh, you know Russell,
Speaker 2: the dean of music. And I walked in and he said,
Speaker 2: sit down, mister Webb, and he said, I see this
Speaker 2: morning that you were late for class. You were recalcitrant. Again.
Speaker 2: I didn't even know what recalcitrant meant, but he said
Speaker 2: I was recalcitrant. And he said, you know, he said,
Speaker 2: I know that you spend most of your time down
Speaker 2: in the practice rooms writing. I don't know how he
Speaker 2: knew that, but he said, you know something, He said,
Speaker 2: we here at the college, we don't enjoy having you
Speaker 2: here any more than you enjoy being here. So he said,
Speaker 2: if you want to be a songwriter, why don't you
Speaker 2: go to Los Angeles and be a goddamn songwriter And
Speaker 2: kicked me out of his office. And it was like
Speaker 2: an epiphody. It was like God spoke to me through
Speaker 2: my you know, through my dean of music. And when
Speaker 2: I think back on it, that was probably the thing
Speaker 2: that propelled me out of that mindset that I had
Speaker 2: to somehow get this musical education. He said, you know
Speaker 2: everything he handed He handed me my my test score,
Speaker 2: and I had an A plus on my original composition
Speaker 2: and my arranging. And I had an F for the
Speaker 2: class because of incomplete assignments and absenteeism. So I had
Speaker 2: an eight plus in the music, but I failed the
Speaker 2: mechanical demands of being a student. So I was out
Speaker 2: of there, and I borrowed some money from friends in
Speaker 2: Newport Beach who had a little extra, bought a Volkswagen
Speaker 2: and went up to Hollywood and started walking around with
Speaker 2: a battered portfolio of these songs that I've been writing
Speaker 2: since age twelve, certainly since I heard that wonderful Jerry
Speaker 2: k Parts song around look at Me with Glenn Campbell,
Speaker 2: And I'm looking at Hollywood, and I'm thinking, somewhere in
Speaker 2: Hollywood Glenn Campbell is right now. I could probably see him.
Speaker 2: I just knew which building he's in. I could go
Speaker 2: to it and I could walk in and I would
Speaker 2: see Glenn Campbell and there was a magic to that.
Speaker 2: And so I went everywhere, and like I said, I
Speaker 2: went over to Warner Brothers Music and actually got a
Speaker 2: couple of cuts with the Everly Brothers through a guy
Speaker 2: named Dick Blasser. And I thought, well, I'm I'm gonna,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna, you know, tear this place to pieces. Man,
Speaker 2: I'm on my way. And then it was weeks and
Speaker 2: weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks where nothing happened.
Speaker 2: And finally a friend of mine, Jimmy Stotler, who was
Speaker 2: a drummer, he said, you know, he said, his label
Speaker 2: in America. I said, what he says, it's Motown. He said,
Speaker 2: why don't you go over to Motown? I said, well,
Speaker 2: Motown is it's he says.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 2: I know, he said, but you've done everything else. He said,
Speaker 2: try it. So I went over there. I went over
Speaker 2: to Motown, went into the office, these two big doors opened,
Speaker 2: very fancy office. I sat down with this kind of
Speaker 2: ratty sort of it was almost like a paper bag
Speaker 2: full of songs, and talked to the receptionist for a while,
Speaker 2: and I said, I'd really like to have somebody to
Speaker 2: get listen to one of my songs. And she's just
Speaker 2: having lunch, and it was Vicky. She and I got
Speaker 2: to be really close, and she said, why you poor
Speaker 2: little sprawling things. She said, We're gonna have to fatten
Speaker 2: you up. Said, are you going to fade away? She
Speaker 2: talked to me for a while, and then she said listen.
Speaker 2: She said, you got a song you really like. I said, yeah,
Speaker 2: I had one call this time last summer and I said,
Speaker 2: this one right here, and I had it on a cassette.
Speaker 2: I actually I had it on a rough reel to reel.
Speaker 2: We used to have real to reel then. And she
Speaker 2: went into the office, this big door. She went the
Speaker 2: inner office. She came right back out and closed the door.
Speaker 2: A few beats passed, and I hear.
Speaker 3: This this time less ceremony you need bet the sky
Speaker 3: would events blue.
Speaker 2: And I hear my song coming through the door. And
Speaker 2: then there's a pause, and then the door opens and
Speaker 2: I see this angelic face. It was a guy, Frank Wilson,
Speaker 2: and people who are familiar with the town will know
Speaker 2: who he is. He had a very soft voice and
Speaker 2: he said which I said, what he said, Well, you
Speaker 2: come in here please, and I said, I said I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: He said, would you come in here please? And I
Speaker 2: said okay, And that was it. The door opened and
Speaker 2: I walked in and life. Life was never the same
Speaker 2: after that. I worked there. I was under contract for
Speaker 2: two years. I got a cut on a Supremes album.
Speaker 2: It was a Christmas album called Merry Christmas from the Supremes.
Speaker 2: I worked with Brenda Holloway, I worked with Tony Martin.
Speaker 2: They had signed they would they would send all the
Speaker 2: white artists to me, and I have to tell you,
Speaker 2: they treated me like a prince. They really gave me
Speaker 2: the keys to the kingdom there. They gave me the
Speaker 2: education that I really needed. I got it motown. I
Speaker 2: learned to work a board, I learned the parts of
Speaker 2: the song that were important, the hook, and they were
Speaker 2: endlessly patient with me. And I wrote a lot of
Speaker 2: songs there. I walked out. When I left two years later,
Speaker 2: they said, listen, you've tried hard here, but we don't
Speaker 2: think we're ever going to be able to use these songs.
Speaker 2: And I said, here, take this song up, up and away.
Speaker 2: We're not going to use that. They said, take this.
Speaker 2: By the time we get to Phoenix. I'd written for
Speaker 2: Paul Peterson, who's like a kid who appeared on the
Speaker 2: Donner Egio, but apparently he didn't like it, so they
Speaker 2: gave me Up, Up and Away. By the time I
Speaker 2: get to Phoenix Galveston, didn't we all the early songs,
Speaker 2: not Wichita because I wrote that for Glant. So I
Speaker 2: walked out of there with four or five hit records
Speaker 2: in my knapsack, didn't know it at the time, and
Speaker 2: went to work for Johnny Rivers Music.
Speaker 1: How'd you meet Johnny Rivers.
Speaker 2: Through Mark Gordon who was the president of Motown at
Speaker 2: that time, and he knew I was looking for a
Speaker 2: gig and he bought out my contract. You know, it's
Speaker 2: crazy they he bought those songs. I was just telling
Speaker 2: you about all those hits. He bought those songs. There
Speaker 2: were about ten of them, and he bought my contract
Speaker 2: for fifteen thousand dollars. And the fifteenth thousand dollars I
Speaker 2: had to pay back out of my royalties, and the first,
Speaker 2: the first hit I ever had, was Up, Up and Away,
Speaker 2: and my royalties paid back. I paid back my fifteen
Speaker 2: thousand dollars and I bought a grand piano and that
Speaker 2: was my furniture. I had a little house in Laurel Canyon.
Speaker 2: Now there's a lot of to do about Laurel Canyon,
Speaker 2: and this one was there, and this one lived there,
Speaker 2: and I lived there too. I mean quietly. I'm not
Speaker 2: in the documentary, I'm not in the book. I'm not
Speaker 2: the thing. But I used to walk down to the
Speaker 2: country store, get my groceries and walk back up there,
Speaker 2: wrote things like I wrote MacArthur Park there and the
Speaker 2: only furniture I had was a bunch of mind you
Speaker 2: we were hippies. But I had a bunch of cushions,
Speaker 2: different sized cushions pushed up underneath the piano, and I
Speaker 2: slept under there. So I was sleeping under my piano.
Speaker 2: And I just roll out in the morning, sometimes take
Speaker 2: a shower, and sit down and start writing music.
Speaker 1: And I was.
Speaker 2: I was probably writing at least I'm gonna say I
Speaker 2: would say three songs a week, but I'll say two
Speaker 2: to three. At least two or three songs a week
Speaker 2: I would write. And they weren't written for anybody. They
Speaker 2: had no destination. They were just it was just pouring
Speaker 2: out my feelings for this girl or that girl. I
Speaker 2: had all these tragic romances, that whole row of them.
Speaker 2: And it was a very very you know, like a
Speaker 2: difficult relationship or a disappointing relationship is a gold mine
Speaker 2: for a songwriter. They'll all tell you, you know, you
Speaker 2: don't you're not gonna make it until some chick really
Speaker 2: busts you up, man, and then then you're gonna then
Speaker 2: you're gonna be fine, you know. But you know, you
Speaker 2: got some you gotta do some living. So Johnny and
Speaker 2: I I moved into his house and stayed in the
Speaker 2: back room, and we used to get on his motorcycle
Speaker 2: and go down to the Whiskey of Go Go and, uh,
Speaker 2: listen to John Lee Hooker listened to Smoky Smokey Robinson
Speaker 2: and the Miracles. Can you imagine that in the Whiskey
Speaker 2: of Go Go, it's probably about as big as this studio.
Speaker 2: And uh, there they were, you know, and with all
Speaker 2: the moves and the you know, all the motown stuff
Speaker 2: and the and the outfits and and uh the go
Speaker 2: go go girls in the Cages, which were really originated
Speaker 2: at Whisky at the Whiskey, That's where that came from.
Speaker 2: The Girls in the Cages and psychedelic light shows all
Speaker 2: over the wall and stuff, and uh, we we've got
Speaker 2: we've got to be good friends. And uh he had
Speaker 2: me working with this group, Fifth Dimension, And Johnny Rivers
Speaker 2: remembered a relationship he had with Glenn Campbell. They had
Speaker 2: done an album called The Long Black Veil for Mercury Records,
Speaker 2: and he remembered that Glenn was such a great guy,
Speaker 2: such beautiful person, and such an accomplished musician. He said,
Speaker 2: you should have a hit record, and Glenn said, I
Speaker 2: just can't find the right song. And Johnny, after he
Speaker 2: signed me, one of the first things he did is
Speaker 2: cut by the time I get to Phoenix. And he
Speaker 2: called Glenn, and Glenn and Al Delorie came over to
Speaker 2: his house and heard his that they used to call it.
Speaker 2: It was a it was a rough master, is what
Speaker 2: it was.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: It was a it was a record. It was a record.
Speaker 2: You know, you put it. So he put it on there, Uh,
Speaker 2: test pressing, and he put it on the thing and
Speaker 2: he and third song image like by the time we
Speaker 2: get to Phoenix. He lined it up and played it
Speaker 2: and that both of them just sat there with their
Speaker 2: mouths open. And this is the way the story was
Speaker 2: told me that Al de Laurie said, I don't get it.
Speaker 2: He says, you know you've got a hit. You know,
Speaker 2: Johnny had this. Can you tell me how much you
Speaker 2: missed me? Beautiful, beautiful thing, poor side of Town? And
Speaker 2: I think it was number one? And Ali said, I
Speaker 2: don't get it. He said, you know this is a hit.
Speaker 2: He said, this is a hit, isn't it?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: And Glenn said yeah. He said, it feels pretty good.
Speaker 2: But why are you giving it to us? And he said, guys,
Speaker 2: He said, you can only have one number one record
Speaker 2: at a time. He said, but what he was really
Speaker 2: doing was doing something for me. He was doing doing
Speaker 2: it well. Of course he's helping himself as well, but
Speaker 2: he did care about me, and he put me in
Speaker 2: charge of the fifth dimension. He put me in charge
Speaker 2: of kind of their day to day rehearsing. And it
Speaker 2: turned out that they recorded up up in a week.
Speaker 2: Glenn recorded by the time we get to Phoenix, all
Speaker 2: of this happened really fast. And so in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 2: that's all you heard. And we went to the Monterey
Speaker 2: Pop Festival and we played up there. I played up
Speaker 2: there with a wrecking crew. Hal Blaine, Larry Necktel Joe Osborne,
Speaker 2: and there was very little. It's not you know, Johnny
Speaker 2: wasn't even in the film, and he put up twenty
Speaker 2: five percent of the money and he kind of got
Speaker 2: screwed on that deal. But I was I was just
Speaker 2: coming back from the Monterey Pop Festival and hearing two
Speaker 2: of my songs on the radio at you know, in
Speaker 2: constant rotation all the time. They were both nominated for
Speaker 2: Song of the Year by the NARIS Board, and I thought, well,
Speaker 2: that's unbelievable. First of all, is heart stopping. I mean,
Speaker 2: I was moving so fast that I was, I was
Speaker 2: out in front of my airstream. I felt I was
Speaker 2: like lightheaded, like I could couldn't breathe because I was moving.
Speaker 2: My career was moving faster than I was, and so
Speaker 2: I didn't fully grasp what was going on. But I thought,
Speaker 2: if I'm nominated twice the same category for Song of
Speaker 2: the Year, I'm gonna lose because the competition was general
Speaker 2: on my mind by Glenn Campbell that John Hartford song,
Speaker 2: which is a poem, which is an absolute masterpiece. I
Speaker 2: would have stole that song a second so and owed
Speaker 2: to Billy Joe, which was the Jimmy Haskell Spooky String
Speaker 2: Arrangement and what did Billy Joe McAllister throw off the
Speaker 2: Tallahassee Bridge, Remember that? And so Bobby was pretty hot.
Speaker 2: I thought she was that that was a very original record,
Speaker 2: and I think he got a Grammy for that arrangement.
Speaker 2: He should have. So I figured one of those songs
Speaker 2: will win. Half of my people are going to vote
Speaker 2: for a up in a way, half of my people
Speaker 2: are going to vote for Glenn. It's clearly two different
Speaker 2: groups of people, and so I won't win, but I'm
Speaker 2: going to go to the ceremony anyway because all my
Speaker 2: friends are going. And I put on my blue Knahru
Speaker 2: jacket with a silk with a Irish lace shirt underneath
Speaker 2: and went down there like I was gonna win a
Speaker 2: Grammy Award, but really didn't think I was. And I
Speaker 2: kind of leaned up on the back of the auditorium
Speaker 2: that's where you'll usually find me, like on the fringe,
Speaker 2: leaned up on the back wall, and just watch things
Speaker 2: going around, watch what people were doing, and all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, the Fifth Dimension starts winning Grammy Awards. They
Speaker 2: won a Grammy Award for Best New Artist Record of
Speaker 2: the Year Album of the Year, Best Album Cover, Best
Speaker 2: Choral Arrangement for a Group, on and on and on,
Speaker 2: and I thought, well, God, bless them, you know, I
Speaker 2: mean we worked there, I mean we worked hard together
Speaker 2: to get that, to get that album done. And then
Speaker 2: also Glenn won a Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance
Speaker 2: for By the time we get to Phoenix and I'm going, wow,
Speaker 2: this is shit going to be a pretty good night,
Speaker 2: even if. But now I'm starting to feel a little
Speaker 2: left out because everybody has a Grammy except me. And
Speaker 2: the woman lady stepped up to the microphone and said,
Speaker 2: and now she said for Song of the Year, which
Speaker 2: was one of the big awards. She said, Jimmy Webb
Speaker 2: for Up, Up and Away, And the place just went
Speaker 2: crazy and I was drunk and Larry nectl hal Blaine
Speaker 2: both had a hold of me and they escorted me
Speaker 2: up to the stage, thank god. And I got up
Speaker 2: there and I got worded, I'm looking around and the
Speaker 2: flash bulbs are popping it. I mean, I finally got
Speaker 2: off and on my way back to my ideo, I
Speaker 2: passed Glenn's table quite by accident. He reached up and
Speaker 2: grabbed my hand. That was the first time that i'd
Speaker 2: ever seen him face to face. It was like the
Speaker 2: Panhandle of Oklahoma, like like just passed before my eyes,
Speaker 2: you know, the tractor I was driving that day when
Speaker 2: I heard that Glenn Campbell's song, and it was like,
Speaker 2: how could this be happening? How could this actually be happening,
Speaker 2: because it's something that I only imagined could. I thought
Speaker 2: maybe I would get a couple of songs recorded, you know,
Speaker 2: I thought some of them were pretty good, But all
Speaker 2: of a sudden they were They were giving me the
Speaker 2: keys to Hollywood, and it was it was heady, overpowering experience,
Speaker 2: and and I lost over the fun. In the following
Speaker 2: months and years for a while, I think I may
Speaker 2: have lost some of my equilibrium. I I remember being
Speaker 2: just outraged that I wasn't sort of recognized as a
Speaker 2: California songwriter like Jerry Beckley and Dewy Ban all in America,
Speaker 2: like the Eagles, like like all those guys who you
Speaker 2: know live we all lived in the same place. That's
Speaker 2: that's that's that's where the anger came from that I
Speaker 2: was talking about earlier. But I certainly wasn't ashamed of
Speaker 2: my association with Glenn or the Fifth Dimension still hold
Speaker 2: him in the highest regard of probably the top one
Speaker 2: percent performers that I ever worked with. But I almost
Speaker 2: immediately had access to mister Satra, and you know, country
Speaker 2: boy makes good. I moved into the Philippine Embassy, which
Speaker 2: was temporarily vacant. It was on a street called Comino
Speaker 2: Paul Merrow, and it's a huge mansion. I never even
Speaker 2: seen a mansion like this, but it was for rent
Speaker 2: and I rented it, and I had a bunch of people,
Speaker 2: a bunch of friends, and so there were a lot
Speaker 2: of rooms in there, and I think I had about
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five people living with me because I embraced
Speaker 2: the whole hippie the whole ideology of love is all
Speaker 2: we need. All we need is love, as proposed by
Speaker 2: mister Lennan McCartney. It turned out that we didn't need
Speaker 2: a few other things besides love. But at that time
Speaker 2: I was spreading the wealth and I had a lot
Speaker 2: of friends. I've gone to college, I'd been to choir
Speaker 2: and inquire with and some resolved set in that I
Speaker 2: was gonna and I wasn't going to leave any of
Speaker 2: these people behind. I was going to bring them along.
Speaker 2: I didn't know where I was going, but wherever I
Speaker 2: was going, I was going to bring them with me.
Speaker 2: So I had them all in this big mansion and
Speaker 2: I'm doing my best to get them record deals, get
Speaker 2: them signed. I signed some of them to my own label.
Speaker 2: I actually put out a Christmas record with the choir,
Speaker 2: but the San Bernino Valley College Choir, and I just
Speaker 2: had this feeling that I should bring everyone else along,
Speaker 2: like the closest thing to it is we all live
Speaker 2: in the yellow submarine and yellows submarine submarine, all my
Speaker 2: friend friends will be aboard. And it didn't work. I couldn't.
Speaker 2: I couldn't do it. I was able to do get
Speaker 2: some records out for people. I got a couple of
Speaker 2: people signed, and I maintained some of the friendships that
Speaker 2: that I made there.
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 2: I was instrumental in getting Freddie Tackett started in LA
Speaker 2: who eventually joined Little Feet, still still in a little fat.
Speaker 2: I was able to do some things, but at some
Speaker 2: point I began to feel I suppose, well, I don't suppose,
Speaker 2: I know, I know that I felt guilty about my success.
Speaker 2: I felt there's a lot of people out there who,
Speaker 2: you know, really did go ahead and get their degrees
Speaker 2: and music, and there's people who can play piano better
Speaker 2: than me and can sing better than me, and there's
Speaker 2: people who write songs better than me. And it was
Speaker 2: just my turn. It was just somehow or other money.
Speaker 2: My number came up, and I think I'm I think
Speaker 2: I'm all. I had enough adversity in my life that
Speaker 2: I think I'm over the feeling guilty about it part.
Speaker 1: Okay, you have this incredible success.
Speaker 2: What about writing thereafter? You inhibited? Well, not particularly. I
Speaker 2: wrote to MacArthur Park afterwards, and I wrote it at
Speaker 2: the behest of Bones, how who was a legend and
Speaker 2: as the best tape cutter in Hollywood. That's why they
Speaker 2: call him Bones. He's a really good producer as well,
Speaker 2: and he was producing the Association. They were on my
Speaker 2: list of favorite bands because of they were they they
Speaker 2: like chords. I have this thing about chords, he said,
Speaker 2: Do you think called me? He said, do you think
Speaker 2: that you could do like something like with a classical bent?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 2: He said, I want it to be rock and roll.
Speaker 2: I want it to be contemporary, but I wanted to
Speaker 2: have movements like a symphony, you know, like slow fast, slow,
Speaker 2: He says, and I really wanted to build like a
Speaker 2: like a symphony again. And I just laughed and I said, doctor,
Speaker 2: you came to the right place. I said, I'm the
Speaker 2: guy who can do this. And I wrote it on
Speaker 2: that on that piano that I bought with with the
Speaker 2: up up and away royalties, and I still have it,
Speaker 2: by the way. It's in storage right now, but I
Speaker 2: have that act and I uh. I sat there for
Speaker 2: about two or three days working on MacArthur Park.
Speaker 6: I was.
Speaker 2: I was really kind of proud of it.
Speaker 6: Mm hm.
Speaker 2: And I took it down at the studio to play
Speaker 2: it for the association and I go and I spread
Speaker 2: it out and it looks like it's it looks like
Speaker 2: an albatross. This music is like all over this big
Speaker 2: sheet with wings and they're going, oh who and I
Speaker 2: and I sat down to start playing this thing. When
Speaker 2: I did, my clothes were wretched, the clothes I had.
Speaker 2: When I sat down, I ripped the bottom out of
Speaker 2: my jeans and you could hear it. It was like
Speaker 2: Douglas Fairbanks sticking a dagger into a sail and then
Speaker 2: sliding down the sail. It was this long, ripping, embarrassing sound.
Speaker 2: And they all cracked it up and laughed and then
Speaker 2: I started playing it and I sang, I recall the
Speaker 2: yellow cotton dress. It was phoning like a way on
Speaker 2: the ground round and they turned me down. They turned
Speaker 2: it down. One reason they turned me down is I
Speaker 2: think it was just too much for them to grasp
Speaker 2: as to learn it in one bite, that it was
Speaker 2: going to take. They were at the end of an album,
Speaker 2: not the beginning. They were at the end. They just
Speaker 2: needed a song to nail down the end of this album.
Speaker 2: And Boone's house said that you guys ought to cut it.
Speaker 2: He said, well, you don't think so, and they did
Speaker 2: something else. And the story, which this is a true story,
Speaker 2: he told them. He said, the day that MacArthur Park
Speaker 2: goes into the top ten, he said, I'm resigning as
Speaker 2: your producer. Now, this is not a made up story.
Speaker 2: This is what he told the band. And months went
Speaker 2: by and somehow there's you know, stories endless. But I
Speaker 2: hooked up with this crazy Irish actor and Richard Eiris
Speaker 2: who taught me Olympic class professional drinking, and invited me
Speaker 2: over to London and said.
Speaker 6: Oh, I'll make a record. We'll make a record and
Speaker 6: it'll be a hit and I'll be a rock star, you.
Speaker 2: Know, And I'm going, yeah, right, But I don't care.
Speaker 2: I love the guy. He's a he's a blast to
Speaker 2: be around. We're always in a Phantom five that he
Speaker 2: bought from Princess Margaret. And he's still got the emblems
Speaker 2: on the Royal of the Royal Household on the radiator.
Speaker 2: So every gate opens everywhere we go. They just opened
Speaker 2: the gate, you know, it's and so it was hysterical
Speaker 2: fun for a long time. We went to Ireland to
Speaker 2: kill Key Limerick, which is his own hometown, and meanwhile,
Speaker 2: as a hobby, were working on this record. And I remember.
Speaker 2: The interesting thing about Richard was that when we first
Speaker 2: started out, we'd bring Roughs in from the studio and
Speaker 2: we'd be listening and he'd say, haw.
Speaker 6: Tom, see, I think the voice is too loud. It's
Speaker 6: too loud. We need to turn up the orchestra.
Speaker 2: And this was because he was insecure about his voice. Obviously,
Speaker 2: even though you just start in Camelot, that Alan J.
Speaker 2: Lerner score, he got through that pretty well, I thought.
Speaker 2: And then as the record progressed, his personality became to change,
Speaker 2: and finally towards the end he was saying.
Speaker 4: Ah, Jimmy Webb, he said, you've done it again. You've
Speaker 4: got the orchestra too loud. He said, you're covering up
Speaker 4: my voice. He said, why are you covering up my voice? Said,
Speaker 4: I'm not I'm not covering up your voice. I'm just
Speaker 4: mixing the record. He said, well, my voice, you know,
Speaker 4: my mighty voice. It needs to be louder, you know,
Speaker 4: if I'm going to be a pop star.
Speaker 2: So he went from no confidence to way too much confidence.
Speaker 2: And I'm doing the record kind of tongue in cheek
Speaker 2: and thinking, well, this is going to be a fun
Speaker 2: thing to do, and then I'll get back to Hollywood
Speaker 2: and I'll get back to the real, to the real
Speaker 2: thing that I do. And I'm telling you, when that
Speaker 2: thing came out, it was like a UFO, nobody doing
Speaker 2: what to think about it. But we back in those days,
Speaker 2: we had and I'm sure you'll remember what we called
Speaker 2: underground radio or FM radio sometimes and they would play anything.
Speaker 2: They didn't care. I mean they the disc jockeys actually
Speaker 2: could play what they wanted. This was before the playlist
Speaker 2: became iron bound, you know, law that you couldn't break,
Speaker 2: you couldn't put any you couldn't you know how it
Speaker 2: came to be that disc jockeys could no longer play
Speaker 2: the records they wanted to play. They had to play
Speaker 2: the list. Well, that's what they were doing. They were
Speaker 2: playing the list and they weren't going to play MacArthur Park.
Speaker 2: But underground they were playing it because they were playing
Speaker 2: the Long Doors version of Light My Fire, and they
Speaker 2: were playing the long Bob Dylan version of All Along
Speaker 2: the watch Tower. And there were several records out there
Speaker 2: that were six and it's sixties touching seven, and so
Speaker 2: they decide they'll play MacArthur Park. And some somewhere up
Speaker 2: somewhere in heaven, somebody punched a button and a station
Speaker 2: in the Midwest went on it in the in the
Speaker 2: afternoon and played a played the whole record in the
Speaker 2: switchboard lit up. People said, what was that? Play that again?
Speaker 2: And the next thing, you know, you have you know
Speaker 2: we used to call a breakout where you have it
Speaker 2: goes viral, like stations are picking it up. They're beginning
Speaker 2: to pick it up. It's fine, it's not it's not
Speaker 2: a sure thing, but it's like, well this is interesting.
Speaker 2: We've got like five top forty stations in the Midwest
Speaker 2: on MacArthur park the whole version, and they're altering their
Speaker 2: commercial schedule and they're changing all kinds of stuff that
Speaker 2: these stations don't do this. They don't they don't change
Speaker 2: their whole way of playing records. But it was seven
Speaker 2: minutes twenty one seconds long the original. Now you could
Speaker 2: not predict what was going to happen next because I'll
Speaker 2: just jump to the day that Ron Jacobs, who used
Speaker 2: to be a director, came in in sam Rendino, where
Speaker 2: I went to college. When Ron Jacobs called me at
Speaker 2: home instead, Hey, Jimmy, he said, we've got this MacArthur
Speaker 2: Parker record over here, and he said we'd like to
Speaker 2: go on it. And I said, well, have you got
Speaker 2: cag J was the hottest top forty radio station in
Speaker 2: the country, and the real Don Steele was their top
Speaker 2: jock over there. And they said, the only thing is
Speaker 2: we want you to edit it because we can't play
Speaker 2: seven minutes twenty We can't play seven minutes and twenty
Speaker 2: one seconds on cage J. We can't do it. You know,
Speaker 2: they won't let us do it. Bill Drake won't let
Speaker 2: us do it. Bill Drake was like doing all the
Speaker 2: playlist and Bill Drake was was programming fifteen hundred radio stations.
Speaker 2: The fifteen hundred radio stations were playing his list, and
Speaker 2: so I said, well, I'll have to think about it. Ron,
Speaker 2: and I talked to my partner in crime, his fellow
Speaker 2: name William F. Williams, and I said, what do you
Speaker 2: think I ought to do? And he said a four
Speaker 2: letter expletive. Expedit them. They can like play it like
Speaker 2: it is or piss off. Right. So when Ron called back,
Speaker 2: I said, Ron, I've thought about it, and for artistic reasons,
Speaker 2: and I said, it would be nice to have the
Speaker 2: record on cag J, but I can't. I'm not going
Speaker 2: to edit it. I said, I don't think it makes
Speaker 2: any sense when you edit it. It doesn't. It only
Speaker 2: sounds like something when it's all put together the way
Speaker 2: it's supposed to be put together. Otherwise it's just it's
Speaker 2: fragmentary and you don't know what you're listening. He said, okay, okay, okay,
Speaker 2: he said all right, He said, I'll get back to you.
Speaker 2: The next day. Case J went on MacArthur Park the
Speaker 2: full length version, and from then on d it was
Speaker 2: it was a stone cold hit. It went to number
Speaker 2: two in America, went to number one in the United
Speaker 2: Kingdom twice. In other words, it went up to number one,
Speaker 2: came down, then went back up to number one, and
Speaker 2: roughly ten years later was number one in the United
Speaker 2: States with Donna Summers disco version, and so the the
Speaker 2: you know, this little, this unlikely project with this eye,
Speaker 2: and he had a big career off of that. He
Speaker 2: played everywhere, He made several albums, he he did Okay
Speaker 2: behind it.
Speaker 1: Tell us the story of wichital alignment.
Speaker 2: Well, which till i'mann came fairly fairly in close proximity
Speaker 2: to the other events that I've been describing. But like
Speaker 2: I said, it was all happening so fast. Glenn called
Speaker 2: me one day at home and said, you know, I
Speaker 2: need to follow up for by the time I get
Speaker 2: to Phoenix. Now, I don't know, there may be people
Speaker 2: out there who don't know what a follow up is,
Speaker 2: but I think you know what one is, and uh,
Speaker 2: just in case there are there are those out there
Speaker 2: who don't realize the way the record business used to
Speaker 2: be is if you had a hit record, you would
Speaker 2: put out another one that had a similar orchestration, similar characteristics,
Speaker 2: same artist, and it wasn't supposed to be the same song,
Speaker 2: but it was supposed to evoke the first song, so
Speaker 2: that you were borrowing from the popularity of the first record,
Speaker 2: and some of it was supposed to rub off on
Speaker 2: the second record, but it had to be a different thing. Uh,
Speaker 2: but similarities built in, and that's what a follow up was.
Speaker 3: And uh.
Speaker 2: In fact, when I was learning to write songs, so
Speaker 2: that's all I listened to was follow ups because I
Speaker 2: was comparing my follow ups to theirs, And at one
Speaker 2: point I decided my follow ups were as good as
Speaker 2: theirs are better, and so I really, they don't do
Speaker 2: that anymore. I don't think. I don't think it per
Speaker 2: se that they do that anymore. But then they they did.
Speaker 2: And Glenn said, I really need this follow up. He said,
Speaker 2: can you write me something about a town? And I'm thinking, oh, Lord,
Speaker 2: and I and I and I said, Glenn, I said,
Speaker 2: I think I think I'm just about finishing with my
Speaker 2: rand McNally phase. I'm you know, drowning in towns over here.
Speaker 2: And I he said, oh, well, that's too bad. He said, well,
Speaker 2: he said, how about could you make it geographical? And
Speaker 2: I said, well, I guess yeah. Let me think about
Speaker 2: that for a minute, hung up the phone, sat there,
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, I know you'll think I'm
Speaker 2: making this up, But West Texas and Oklahoma, Panana drifts
Speaker 2: in front of my eyes, that big flat slab of prairie,
Speaker 2: and the fact that you could drive for fifty miles
Speaker 2: over into Mexico, New Mexico and not see anything. Maybe
Speaker 2: a pig farm here, pig farm there, but nothing, not
Speaker 2: a business. Some old, maybe ramshackle farmhouses that were already
Speaker 2: laying down, very in a way desolate. But I loved it.
Speaker 2: I loved it. I love it still, especially the at
Speaker 2: night the stars. But I'm driving along in my mind
Speaker 2: and I see the man up on the telephone pole
Speaker 2: on the phone, and I thought that guy there was
Speaker 2: always a guy up there talking on the phone. Who
Speaker 2: was he talking to? And I remember our dad. You
Speaker 2: stopped the car and say now, because it was real
Speaker 2: quiet out there, there was nobody else out there. And
Speaker 2: Dad would say, okay, now, but he still he says,
Speaker 2: we're going to walk up on these telephone wires and
Speaker 2: I want you to listen. And we'd walk up close
Speaker 2: to the to the pole and just being really quiet
Speaker 2: and listening and you could hear the wire, you could
Speaker 2: hear the wires. You could hear them like you could
Speaker 2: hear them doing that. Hence the line, I hear you
Speaker 2: singing in the wires. So I thought, I'm going to
Speaker 2: write it about the man on the pole because I
Speaker 2: wanted to write her out blue collar heroes. They were
Speaker 2: my heroes, like in Galveston. He's why is he from Galveston? Well,
Speaker 2: he's from Galveston because it's a damn hard town to
Speaker 2: grow up in. It was no Riviera, and I wanted
Speaker 2: an ordinary guy. And so here's an ordinary guy up
Speaker 2: on a telephone pole and what is he thinking. He's
Speaker 2: thinking that he's in love with this girl, and it
Speaker 2: just began to unroll. I got the melody and a
Speaker 2: few chords. I start off on this, you know, journey.
Speaker 2: Every song is a journey. It's taking you somewhere. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it takes you to the end of the road where
Speaker 2: all the burnout cars aren't. You got a bummer. But
Speaker 2: this one wanted to be written. So when a song
Speaker 2: wants to be written, it will help you. It will
Speaker 2: help you. It will write with you and not against you.
Speaker 2: And that's that's what I call being connected. And for
Speaker 2: those unbelievers out there, you know, who feel sorry for me,
Speaker 2: I feel just as sorry for you. But I know
Speaker 2: that there is this connection. I know it because I've
Speaker 2: used it in many, many, many times in my life
Speaker 2: when I was in trouble, when I needed help, when
Speaker 2: I was unhappy. When I was writing a song and
Speaker 2: I said, please God, you know, give me a give
Speaker 2: me an idea, he give me a line, give me
Speaker 2: something I gotta So I wrote these two verses, and
Speaker 2: he was calling me like every five minutes from western
Speaker 2: three and saying is it done yet? Is it done yet?
Speaker 2: And what I wanted to say was that go on,
Speaker 2: you know, if you guys would stop calling me up here,
Speaker 2: you know I got this thing done, you know. So
Speaker 2: from like eleven in the morning to like about five
Speaker 2: five point thirty took me to like bang out a
Speaker 2: couple of verses pretty much what you know when you
Speaker 2: when you think of the song. But I was wondering
Speaker 2: at the time, is this enough? See where getting to
Speaker 2: the it's the first verse, I'm gonta do it again. Okay,
Speaker 2: so two verses. Now I'm as a songwriter and a
Speaker 2: professional songwriter, I'm sitting I'm going to Okay, now do
Speaker 2: I need to now do? And I need to go?
Speaker 2: You know I need to go. Why don't you come
Speaker 2: along with me? So I'm gonna bridge and go back
Speaker 2: into that melody or or do I And then I'm
Speaker 2: gonna have to write a last verse, you know. I exhausted.
Speaker 2: I put it in a Manila envelope and I put
Speaker 2: my cassette in there, and I wrote a note, dear Glenn,
Speaker 2: this song isn't finished. But I thought I would run
Speaker 2: it past you guys, and if you want me to
Speaker 2: keep right and all right, if you don't want it,
Speaker 2: let me know, and put a smiley face on it,
Speaker 2: and called a messenger and sent it down to Western Three.
Speaker 2: Didn't hear anything about it for a long time. It
Speaker 2: was probably three weeks later. I'd say that I walked
Speaker 2: into Armnsteiner's sound recorders and Glenn was there with the
Speaker 2: boys with the with the gang and working. Apparently he
Speaker 2: was because he was still sitting in with the recon crew,
Speaker 2: even though he was becoming a star. He was sitting
Speaker 2: in with the record group. And I walked in and
Speaker 2: I said, so, how you doing. Go ahead, I'm doing fine,
Speaker 2: said well, I said, you know, listen, I don't want
Speaker 2: you to feel bad about that tune I wrote. I said,
Speaker 2: you know, I wrote it in kind of a hurry,
Speaker 2: and I realized it's it's kind of outside and I said,
Speaker 2: you know, don't worry about it, because I'm really used
Speaker 2: to rejection, you know, because writing songs is ninety percent rejection.
Speaker 2: So we get unless unless if you don't, if you
Speaker 2: can't digest rejection and judgment, sometimes a false judgment, but
Speaker 2: a harsh judgment from somebody else, you should get in
Speaker 2: another line of work because you're going to have a
Speaker 2: steady diet of disappointment and rejection. So I was hardened
Speaker 2: by then. I'd been to my town, I'd done my thing,
Speaker 2: and I said, you know, I'll write another one. He says,
Speaker 2: you're talking about which to lineman and I said yeah,
Speaker 2: and he said we cut that And I said, well,
Speaker 2: didn't you see the note. Didn't you see where it
Speaker 2: said this is not finished. Call me in let me
Speaker 2: know what you think. He said. I said, because Glenn,
Speaker 2: it really wasn't finished. And he said it is now,
Speaker 2: and they played it for me and it was beautiful.
Speaker 2: It was beautiful, and I ended up overdubbing an Oregon
Speaker 2: on it. I had a church organ in my house,
Speaker 2: gul Branson Series seven hundred, and we didn't have synthesizers,
Speaker 2: but church organs had a lot of bells and whistles
Speaker 2: on them. They had a lot of different kind of
Speaker 2: sounds ethereal angelic kind of things on them. And if
Speaker 2: you listen to the very beginning of the records, you
Speaker 2: can hear it clearly. I'm playing these little forests and
Speaker 2: fist going, but it's in heavy sustain and the organ's going.
Speaker 2: It's tremologus and it sounds like a satellite. You sort
Speaker 2: of hear it on the beginning, then you hear it
Speaker 2: prominently on the fade. So that was my contribution to
Speaker 2: the record.
Speaker 1: So how did you feel when the hits dried up?
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know. I knew that it was inevitable
Speaker 2: in a sense, but there was I was always being covered,
Speaker 2: even when, even when I didn't have hit songs per
Speaker 2: se on the charts. Was I was getting covers off
Speaker 2: my own albums of different things. And like I said,
Speaker 2: in seventy eight, Donna Summer had a number one with
Speaker 2: MacArthur Park again, and in eighty six ten years later
Speaker 2: I had Highwaymen with Willie Neilson Whale and Jenny's christ Consasson,
Speaker 2: Chris Christofferson Johnny Cash, which went to number one, which
Speaker 2: was a country music video of the Year, and then
Speaker 2: they named the group The Highwayman, the Highwayman, and they
Speaker 2: went on the road, and that song is still being covered.
Speaker 2: The last time it was covered was with Amanda McBride
Speaker 2: and her the ladies that call themselves the high Women,
Speaker 2: who I told them just to go write their own
Speaker 2: words for it. But in that sense, I never I
Speaker 2: never felt that I wasn't getting things done or that
Speaker 2: good things weren't happening for me. And I don't know.
Speaker 2: I I think that you look at everybody in this business,
Speaker 2: and not only that, but the business that I'm in,
Speaker 2: and in the business that Cole Porter was in, and
Speaker 2: then before him, the business that Jerome Kern was in,
Speaker 2: and you realize that it happens to everybody. It happens
Speaker 2: to everybody. There's a there's an arc, it goes up,
Speaker 2: it levels off for a while, and inevitably it begins
Speaker 2: to client. Unless you do something about that, Unless you
Speaker 2: do something to change that trajectory. The only thing I
Speaker 2: could think of doing was cutting a hit album as
Speaker 2: a singer songwriter. I thought that would change. I thought
Speaker 2: that would that would be back on the charts, back
Speaker 2: back at the very center of things. And uh and
Speaker 2: and that's when I began butting my head against that
Speaker 2: brick wall. And I made an album. The first one
Speaker 2: I produced by myself. The second one I cut at
Speaker 2: my home studio, which is out Ensino. And I stress
Speaker 2: that I I didn't stop making money because I didn't
Speaker 2: have records on the charts. I was still you know,
Speaker 2: my my annual income was pretty much the same, you
Speaker 2: know it was. It was steady, so there. So there
Speaker 2: was still a lot of play in those tunes, and
Speaker 2: there were a lot of sync riots and different things
Speaker 2: going on. Tried my hand at scoring a couple of films.
Speaker 2: I didn't really feel like, I I don't know, it
Speaker 2: didn't click. I made an album with George Martin. I
Speaker 2: thought that might cure me. We made a lovely album.
Speaker 2: Not much happened. The album, probably the best album that
Speaker 2: I ever cut a solo artist, was Suspending Disbelief that
Speaker 2: I did with Linda Ronstatt and George Messenberg. And another
Speaker 2: little album called ten Easy Pieces, which is a cult
Speaker 2: hit that I cut in a basement up in Toronto.
Speaker 2: Was the first time I ever sung any of those
Speaker 2: hit songs. And people can call me right now. As
Speaker 2: soon as and when I get home, there'll be messages
Speaker 2: for people call me and saying can I get that album?
Speaker 2: And the fact is that it's not being manufactured anymore,
Speaker 2: so I'm gonna have to It's a different world. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna have to trade. I'm gonna have to find that
Speaker 2: those masters and either get permission from those people to
Speaker 2: get them to press some records for me to sell.
Speaker 2: Because we make a lot of money on merchandise as well.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's where we are today, recording all recording artists, everybody.
Speaker 2: It's merchandise and live gigs and that's real money that
Speaker 2: you can and it's substantial if you. I mean this
Speaker 2: tour I'm doing just to give you, give you some idea.
Speaker 2: This isn't all of it that I'm I'm starting in
Speaker 2: except September through December. I'm doing what twenty shows. I'm
Speaker 2: doing Paramount Hudson Valley. I'm doing the Old Town School
Speaker 2: of Folk in Chicago. I'm doing the Coach House in
Speaker 2: San Juan Capistrano, which I said last time I was there,
Speaker 2: I sold it out. They wanted to do two nights.
Speaker 2: I'm doing Yoshi's in Oakland. I think I sold that
Speaker 2: place out. The Vogel many An Apple, Minneapolis. My concerts
Speaker 2: are always full of there, Kansas City, Saint Louis, same thing, Austin.
Speaker 2: Austin's a little bit more difficult for me, but that's
Speaker 2: a few of the places that I'm going to be playing.
Speaker 2: Just at the end of this year. And before COVID,
Speaker 2: I was doing like fifty a year, and I was
Speaker 2: making some decent money, and I thought, well, this is
Speaker 2: real money, and I'm making the money by doing something
Speaker 2: that I love to do, and I'm exposing my music
Speaker 2: to the public. And that's an avenue that's been close
Speaker 2: to me. By this digital machine thing that they've set
Speaker 2: up here. They don't, you know, I'm not going to
Speaker 2: be I don't think breaking a record on Spotify, so
Speaker 2: you know, I I wish some things could have gone
Speaker 2: better for me, But by and large, it's just been
Speaker 2: a great life surrounded by wonderful friends, helpers all along
Speaker 2: the way, and great personalities and friends for life everywhere
Speaker 2: and I don't think that my life has been too
Speaker 2: different from that of the average songwriter. I think that
Speaker 2: most songwriters will have a red hot moment like a
Speaker 2: Paul Anka, and then styles change, and and and and
Speaker 2: the spotlight the spotlight, the spotlight goes, some focuses somewhere else.
Speaker 2: I watched the same thing happen to film stars, and
Speaker 2: I see like one of my old favorite actors like
Speaker 2: doing some cheap movie that I mean really cheap. You
Speaker 2: can tell that it's it's it's being shot you know
Speaker 2: on it's you know, it's it's being shot with with
Speaker 2: the home home cameras and mh. I realized that it
Speaker 2: must be very disappointing for them not to be commanding
Speaker 2: the kind of salaries that commanded the kind of respect
Speaker 2: when they walk into a room. I understand all that,
Speaker 2: but I cling to the idea that I am one
Speaker 2: of the best people that do what I do, that
Speaker 2: I could be better, that all I need is a
Speaker 2: Broadway show. All I need that anything can happen, and
Speaker 2: it always has happened for me, and I expect it.
Speaker 1: Well again, Okay, you know, I don't mean to cut
Speaker 1: you short, but we've been going on a long time.
Speaker 1: Maybe we'll come back and visit again. But I think
Speaker 1: you've been a good case for people to go to
Speaker 1: see you live. There's a lot of stuff I want
Speaker 1: to know more like the Linda Ronstad easy for you
Speaker 1: to say and the lyrics. But I think for now
Speaker 1: this is a good stopping point.
Speaker 2: Okay. I mean, I hope I've given you something. Oh
Speaker 2: you're giving me. You're giving me a lot.
Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot. You know. Listen, when you
Speaker 1: start telling about your personality and when you start telling
Speaker 1: about the tales of your I eat that stuff up.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, listen, Robert, it's tough. It's not a
Speaker 2: life that I would recommend to anybody, but but it's mine,
Speaker 2: and I would if I had to do it again,
Speaker 2: I would do it again. Would I not work with
Speaker 2: Frank Sinatra because he wasn't because he was a Republican
Speaker 2: and because you know, the hippies didn't like him, you know,
Speaker 2: would I?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: I don't think.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: I was privileged to walk with them, to know Lewis Armstrong,
Speaker 2: to to know rosem Rosemy. It gives me a perspective.
Speaker 2: It's very unique because I so new intimately, well, I
Speaker 2: don't want to say antimately, because that that's an inference
Speaker 2: that I don't want to put on that. But I
Speaker 2: had fantastic relationship with Share and with with the Supremes
Speaker 2: and with Linda Ronstadt and and uh Graham Nash and
Speaker 2: David h who were always like good, good pals of mine.
Speaker 2: It's enough already, well I could always get more.
Speaker 1: But Jimmy, I want to thank you for taking this
Speaker 1: time with my audience.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you. It's an honor to be on this show.
Speaker 2: It's it's well known hot spot on the internet, and
Speaker 2: I congratulate you on that. And I haven't I hope
Speaker 2: I haven't misled anyone. And if I've made an error,
Speaker 2: h please the public is invited to point out my
Speaker 2: shortcomings and honor respond on jimmyweb dot com.
Speaker 1: Okay, you can reach out to Jimmy there. Until next time.
Speaker 1: This is Bob left Sis