This Legendary Songwriter Has Your Heart in a Sling. Whether or Not You Recognize the Name.

Jimmy Webb was a 14-year-old working the family farm when he heard a Glen Campbell song on the radio. It brought him to his knees. “I was driving a tractor in the middle of a wheat field in the Oklahoma Panhandle – which is a pretty remote area – listening to my transistor radio. They played a song by Glen called ‘Turn Around, Look at Me,’ written by Jerry Capehart” – Webb is punctilious about songwriting credit, understandably – “and I said to myself, ‘That’s the guy I want to work with! I want to write songs for Glen Campbell!’” Picture, if you will, a teen stick figure in overalls astride a tractor and hollering at a field of wheat. “That night I actually took it to my knees,” Webb says. “‘Dear Lord, please let me meet Glen Campbell – and Lord? Make it possible for us to make a record together.’” Webb chuckles. “Yeah. I spelled it out.” 

The kid’s prayer worked. On July 13, legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb plays the historic Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara. Webb’s absolutely inimitable songs have been performed by Frank Sinatra, Nick Cave, and a host of other wildly varied songbirds one is surprised to see flocking together; the common thread – Webb’s gemlike songs. If you’re not sure of the name, you know his work, which is quietly omnipresent in the culture and has become hallowed: “Galveston,” “All I Know,” “Up, Up, and Away,” “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” the seven-minute pop suite “MacArthur Park” (whose cryptic lament about a cake in the rain got the Donna Summer treatment for the ‘70s dance floor dervishes)… and two songs that explosively launched Webb in the late ‘sixties, allying him in the public mind, and in fact, with the great, late Glen Campbell.

“Where Glen and I are concerned, that prayer was definitely answered,” Webb says with muted awe nearly 60 years later. “I don’t know what power on Earth could have brought us together.” In 1967, Webb’s song “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” earned Campbell two Grammys, establishing the 21-year-old Webb as a songwriter to be reckoned with and lofting Glen Campbell – the idol haunting Webb’s transistor radio that day – into a pop stratosphere that would thereafter host him with some regularity. That year, vocal group The 5th Dimension also snagged four Grammys for Webb’s song “Up, Up, and Away,”Webb himself taking home the pint-sized Victrola for Song of the Year. It was a good evening for Jimmy.

But the next year, 1968, Webb penned a tune – “Wichita Lineman” – that would inextricably link him and Campbell in artistic perpetuity, ushering them both into the vaunted cathedral of beloved American song. “That’s what this performance is about in many regards,” Webb says of his Lobero show. “I have to trace my success in the business back to Glen — and a couple of early records.” Right out of the gate “Wichita” stunned with its confluence of songcraft, Campbell’s measured, emotive singing, and an orchestral arrangement by Al De Lory that tastefully tears the heart out. Like the rest of us, Webb becomes more enamored of the song as time passes. “I love listening to ‘Wichita Lineman.’ It’s such a classic record. Yeah it still absolutely scintillates. It’s got this wonderful energy on it – and there are various recordings down through the years that have totally blown me away. When James Taylor covered ‘Wichita Lineman,’ he did such a fantastic job, it just… it blew my mind.” 

The blue-sky beatitude that is “Wichita Lineman”summons both a whispering prairie vastness, and love’s incandescent power to find us where it will. Weird and gorgeous (a potent combination), the song has been described as “existential.” In 2020, “Wichita Lineman” was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress, and though it has been covered by everyone and your uncle, this classic song will forever be associated with Glen Campbell, who passed from Alzheimer’s in 2017. So, yeah. In the Grammy category “aspirational 14-year-old boys on bended knee in the middle of nowhere,” Jimmy Webb is something of a standout.

“We loved chord structure, melody, and songwriters; both of us,” Webb says of Campbell. “Glen just loved songwriters. He recorded Bob Dylan’s ‘Universal Soldier,’ you know. Glen and Dylan weren’t aligned politically but Glen thought it was a great song and he cut it.” Jimmy Webb’s very name invokes that late ‘sixties epoch when songs, as art objects worthy of discussion and critical analysis, began incrementally to eclipse bands. He takes the 10,000-foot view of his career. It should come as no surprise that a beloved and respected songwriter, whose greatness has long since been chiseled into our cultural granite, might occasionally imagine having had his own hit records with his own compositions. Over the years the man has released 14 solo albums, after all. There is a mild bittersweetness about Webb when he opens up, likely a species of that inarticulate melancholy we all feel when looking back; possibly trebled by Jimmy’s having aspired to art from a precocious early age. 

“I’m resigned to the idea that there’s a catalog out there that I’m going to have to live with, and it stands pretty well,” he says, almost talking to himself, it seems. “I do feel that sometimes songwriters are the surrogates for people who may have difficulty expressing their emotions. ‘All I Know,’ the song that I wrote for Artie Garfunkel, right? So many people have come up to me and said, ‘I was having trouble with my girlfriend and we thought we were going to break up in college. And I went over, and I taped this record to her dorm room door and she played it… and we ended up getting married, and here are our kids.’” I could hear the master songwriter speaking through a grin. “And I look at them and I think, okay – I guess in some way I’m responsible for that,” and Jimmy Webb barks out a fugitive laugh that seems to surprise him. For so many people – countless people around the world – Webb’s songs glowingly infuse the most emotionally redolent chapters of their lives.

“I’ll never forget the couple that came to me and said, ‘You know, we played ‘MacArthur Park’ at our wedding,’ and for a second – I mean, I really almost laughed out loud. I had to bite my lip because of (starts singing)… ‘after all the loves of my life, you’ll still be the one…’ (laughs heartily). When you start thinking about the lyrics, ‘MacArthur Park’ is something you do not want to hear at a wedding. It’s disastrous!” Webb laughs long and loud, then grows quiet. “I love these people and I love them dearly. There’s not an ounce of phoniness about them. Because of my songs, they come to see me as family,” he says, and sighs. “They are dear to me beyond anything you can imagine. They’ve been touched by the same things I’ve been touched by.”  

An Evening with Jimmy Webb is on Thursday, July 13, at 8 pm at the Lobero. Visit www.lobero.org for tickets.