Jimmy Webb

Track	Album
P.F. Sloan	Words And Music
All My Love’s Laughter	And So: On
Galveston	Letters
Crying In My Sleep	Land’s End
The Highwayman	El Mirage
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress	El Mirage
Angel Heart	Angel Heart
Old Wing Mouth	Angel Heart
Elvis And Me	Suspending Disbelief
Wichita Lineman	Ten Easy Pieces

In the late sixties Jimmy Webb virtually defined American popular songwriting. His hits for acts such as 5th Dimension (Up Up And Away), Richard Harris (two whole albums, including the epic MacArthur Park), Art Garfunkel (notably 1977’s Watermark) and most famously Glen Campbell (By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, Galveston and many others) have earned him a reputation as one of the most important songwriters of the last 60 years. He’s perhaps the only composer to be covered by Frank Sinatra, Donna Summer and Nick Cave.

What’s not so widely known is that many Jim Webb songs that were hits in the hands of others have also been recorded by Webb. So for this Toppermost, I’ve picked ten – some very familiar and some not so well known.

His first album, Jim Webb Sings Jim Webb, an unauthorised compilation of demos released in 1968 when he was barely 22, was disowned by Webb. The second, Words And Music (1970) was issued on the back of his enormous success with a string of Top 10 songs. It contains the brilliant P.F. Sloan, written while Webb was visiting the UK and more recently covered by Rumer. It’s about a contemporary songwriter, Philip ‘Flip’ Sloan, the man who penned the protest anthem Eve Of Destruction, a massive mid-sixties hit for Barry McGuire.

Other tracks on Words And Music worth stopping to hear are Love Song and the folk-gospel closer, Once Before I Die.

The third album, And So: On, appeared in 1971 and from this I’ve chosen All My Love’s Laughter, a track I think Tom Waits could perhaps have written in his early days. This and Marionette would later be covered by Art Garfunkel during his mid-seventies collaboration with Webb.

The opener, Met Her On A Plane, is also a great track.

Letters followed the next year and includes Webb’s own haunting version of one of his best-known compositions, Galveston. This song had been popularised by Glen Campbell in 1969 and as with By The Time I Get To Phoenix is about a man, as Webb puts it, ‘caught up in something he doesn’t understand’, with his mind on home and the woman he’s left behind, this time from the noise and smoke of the battlefield.

I’ve read that Webb claimed Letters was heavily influenced by his close friendship with Joni Mitchell, most apparent perhaps in confessional jazz-tinged compositions like Simile, Catharsis (also covered by Art Garfunkel as Mr Shuck ‘n’ Jive) and the reflective Piano, which sounds like it was recorded on an old barroom upright.

The original of another later Garfunkel cover, Crying In My Sleep, can be found on Webb’s fifth album, Land’s End (1974), and was also issued as a single on Asylum records, the quintessential West Coast label. I’ve always loved this story of a guy who can’t get over a breakup. It’s a bit like By The Time I Get To Phoenix, sung in the first person – although this time it’s the woman who’s gone and the protagonist spends his days pottering about the house, trying to avoid doing the things that remind him of her.

Land’s End has a fuller sound than its predecessor, more guitar-based, and includes some other decent tracks including Ocean In His Eyes and the Nilsson-esque Cloudman.

After this album, Webb took a three-year break from recording – not unusual these days but, as with Van Morrison who avoided the studio during the same period, it would have seemed quite a hiatus at the time, to those who were watching. He returned in 1977 with El Mirage, one of his finest records. Produced by George Martin, its opener, The Highwayman, has become one of his best-known tracks and has been covered by many.

Elsewhere, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (its title borrowed from a science fiction novel) has also been widely covered, notably by the likes of Glen Campbell and Linda Ronstadt. Jimmy also re-recorded the song P.F. Sloan for this album.

In 1982, Webb followed up El Mirage with Angel Heart, another strong collection of classy adult-oriented pop with a dark underbelly, such as the sinister Old Wing Mouth. In contrast, the title track is an exuberant paean to his valentine. Angel Heart also includes the brilliant Scissors Cut and In Cars (both of which had already provided Art Garfunkel with yet more ethereal album cuts).

Webb kept a low profile in the new releases racks for the rest of the decade, returning in 1993 with Suspending Disbelief, on the Elektra label, perhaps his most coherent album to date. This was something of a comeback for Webb, who was now 46 and revered as one of the most important songwriters of the previous thirty years. Suspending Disbelief is sophisticated, orchestrated pop in a similar vein to singer-songwriter contemporaries like Marc Cohn and features guest spots by David Crosby, Don Henley and Linda Ronstadt. Elvis And Me is a straightforward account of his meeting with Presley in the lobby of a Vegas hotel, at some point when presumably Jimmy was still a young gun in the first flush of fame. Elvis already knew his name. Other highlights here are Sandy Cove and Adios.

Three years later, Webb released Ten Easy Pieces, a reflective look back at his greatest hits, reinterpreted for the solo piano. Included here are all the songs we know him for – The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and The Highwayman; Didn’t We and MacArthur Park, both originally recorded by Richard Harris during his collaboration with Webb in the late sixties.

With this collection Webb finally got around to releasing his own version of By The Time I Get To Phoenix, which has been recorded by countless artists, from Glen Campbell and Johnny Rivers to Bert Weedon, Nick Cave and Frank Sinatra. When I first heard this sad tale of a man driving from town to town, thinking about the woman he’d left behind, it sounded to me like a movie short. I later discovered Isaac Hayes’s astonishing twenty-minute version in which he dreams up a whole backstory to the action – that was the full-length feature. Amazing.

Another highlight of Ten Easy Pieces is Wichita Lineman, written for Glen Campbell in 1968 as a follow up to By The Time I Get To Pheonix. This version is replete with a staccato ‘morse code’ motif, conveying the tingle in the wire, which Jimmy also loves to play live while he explains how the song came to be – or at least he did this when I caught him in a solo performance in the early 2000s.

Since Ten Easy Pieces, Jimmy Webb has released a handful of albums, most of which comprise further reconfigurations of old songs, often with guest vocalists on board to help boost sales (Webb has never been the greatest of singers – Harry Nilsson once told him his voice ‘stinks’ – although his vocal range did improve on later releases). The best of these is perhaps Just Across The River (2010). By contrast, his most recent output, SlipCover (2019), is almost entirely instrumental covers of songs written by old friends such as Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman and Warren Zevon.

If you appreciate folk, country, Americana, piano ballads, or just great story telling, there is much to discover on Webb’s dozen or so albums.

Official Website

Facebook Page

Songwriters Hall of Fame 1986

List of Songs written by Jimmy Webb

Robert Webb (no relation, honest!) is a freelance writer and editor. His writing has appeared in The Independent and BBC Online. He is the author of The 100 Greatest Cover Versions and a biography of John Lennon.

Some of Robert’s other topper-posts: Colin Blunstone, Kathe Green, Alan Hull, Laura Nyro, Van Dyke Parks, Todd Rundgren, Television, Scott Walker, Bobby Womack

Read the Toppermosts of some of the other artists mentioned in this post: Glen Campbell, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon

TopperPost #1,177