Car wrecks, drug binges and a naked Joni Mitchell: Jimmy Webb’s wild ride

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Legendary singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb reckons Australian audiences are some of the best in the world, and he retains special memories of his shows here.

“Playing in Australia has always been an exceptional experience for me,” he says. He and his wife Laura honeymooned here 20 years ago.

Australia has a special place in Jimmy Webb’s heart.

Webb, who you know from hits like Up, Up, and Away, Wichita Lineman, Galveston, and, of course, MacArthur Park, recalls in particular a vineyard concert from decades ago, when his hard-partying days were not yet behind him.

It was a small show, and a bit rustic, he recalls with a chuckle in an interview from his home on Long Island. For the performance he’d been provided an upright piano – something akin to Nick Krygios playing the New York Open with a badminton racquet – but it was a nice night. Towards the end of the show, after singing By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Webb needed to relieve himself, but didn’t know what to do or where to go.

“I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you’ll have to excuse me,’ and I went behind a trailer to do my business,” he says – during which time the audience, picking up on what was going on, accompanied him throughout with rousing applause and cheers. “I was red as a beet,” he says.

That probably will not happen at his upcoming show in Sydney: the Sydney Recital Hall has indoor facilities. And in any case, his hard-drinking days are behind him, and this trip to Australia has familial duties as well. One of his sons married an Australian and now lives in Melbourne with three grandchildren, which Webb and his wife Laura are keen to see for the first time.

Jimmy Webb in 1975, an era of mega-hits and hard partying.Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Talking to Webb, now 77, the Texas twang of his childhood still evident, is a whirlwind tour through a roiling time in pop culture, which Webb thrived within and yet also existed slightly outside of. Unlike a lot of ’60s figures, Webb was grounded in the traditions of Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook.

“I was right on the tail end of the songbook itself,” he says. “I came close; that period expired in the early 1960s. I came in at that moment. Now, back then, the roles were very clearly defined; there were writers, and there were performers.”

Webb’s web of influences made him unique. His upbringing grounded him in country music, too; besides that, he was a musician’s musician who could arrange and orchestrate. He worked with the crack LA session squad known as the Wrecking Crew on their own high level. There was that countercultural pull as well, and Webb, with his mane of long hair, had one tasselled boot firmly in counterculture.

“I took extraordinary lengths to be a hippie!” he exclaims. “I was the first person in the world to use the world f — on a record. That’s one of my accomplishments.”

Webb performing at the piano on the BBC TV show The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1971.Credit: Michael Putland/Getty Images

The result was a singular output, ranging from ballads with a faint but unmistakable political undertow (the beautiful and powerful Galveston, about a soldier in Vietnam thinking about home), existential statements of working-class identity (Wichita Lineman), and his own sui generis baroque pop. The best example of this last category was of course MacArthur Park, with its infamous “Someone left the cake out in the rain” chorus, which became a massive worldwide hit for Richard Harris in 1968.

But while Webb wrote hit after hit, and recorded a string of albums at the peak of his songwriting success, he was never recognised as a recording artist in his own right,

And so today he tends to be known instead merely as the songwriting powerhouse who won a Song of the Year Grammy for Up, Up and Away at 21; wrote a string of classic hits for Glen Campbell; delivered a powerful hit in All I Know to jumpstart Art Garfunkel’s solo career; and even saw MacArthur Park eventually become a No.1 pop hit for disco diva Donna Summer in 1978.

As his 2017 memoir, The Cake and the Rain, makes plain, there was still fun to be had. There was his close friend Harry Nilsson, possessed of the angelic voice behind Without You and Everybody’s Talkin’ but with a devilish bent as well. The pair’s drinking and drugging nearly killed them both.

One day, Webb recalls, Nilsson showed up at Webb’s house with a friend, asking if he could borrow Webb’s new Jaguar to show the friend LA in style. Webb tossed him the keys – and didn’t see his car again until Nilsson had it shipped back to him, wrecked, by rail car.

“It looked like he had taken it to Cambodia,” Webb says. Nilsson rebuilt the car for him.

There was the time Webb held a concert recital in the backyard of his LA manse – and required attendees to enjoy the show au naturel. Joni Mitchell showed up with a very young David Geffen, the future music and film mogul, and both graciously complied with the dress code.

Unlike many memoirists, Webb isn’t afraid to talk about the dark side of it all. His book ends with a difficult passage in which he and Nilsson overdose on PCP, also known as angel dust; Webb is confronted with a fear of having forgotten how to play music. This painful scene is paired with another event, too lurid to be recounted in a family newspaper, that includes Nilsson and fellow hellion John Lennon.

It’s all a reminder of something that Webb hasn’t forgotten. There was a grim edge to the ’60s.

And he still reflects on his uneasy place in that firmament. “Certain people would accept me, and certain people wouldn’t accept me,” he says.

So many years on, he still remembers Paul McCartney deliberately slighting him in a studio one day. And when McCartney was asked about his drug use years later, Webb says, the star replied, “When Jimmy Webb offers you coke, you know it’s time to quit.”

“That’s one of Paul’s snarky aspects.” Webb says.

To this day, he says, he embraces all of the forms of music that created him and his work. “I was always referred to as the guy who writes them the way they used to,” he says, as the conversation comes to an end.

“But I never saw music in these sort of artificial cells.

“Some people say, ‘I only listen to Tom Petty,’ or ‘I only listen to classical music.’ When I hear that, I want to seek out another companion. I’d rather sit and talk to [late Rolling Stones drummer] Charlie Watts. He was an erudite man who embraced the music and everything around him. That’s the man I wanted to be.”

An Evening With Jimmy Webb, City Recital Hall, December 10.

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