“What surprises people about Wichita Lineman is that it was written in a hurry. If I'd had more time, I would have looked at that couplet and taken it out”: Jimmy Webb on Elvis, his lost weekend with Nilsson and Lennon, and that classic lyric

(Image credit: Bobby Bank/Getty Images)

“I was in the Nancy Sinatra Suite of the International Hotel in Las Vegas. Late-’60s, sometime,” recalls legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb. “Elvis was appearing there and a bunch of us had been invited upstairs to meet The King. Lotta well known faces... Lou Adler, John Phillips. Elvis and I were talking. Y’know, getting along just fine. He told me that he wanted to record my song, MacArthur Park. I thought it was a great idea and I’m sure it would have been an astounding record.”

There was a problem, though: “I hadn’t figured on Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’ manager,” says Webb. “He kept a close eye on people and didn’t like anyone getting too close to Elvis. Seems I was getting too close. The Colonel stood up and announced, ‘Right, y’all got to leave because Elvis has picked a girl’.

There were, like, 30 vestal virgins lined up and Elvis had chosen one for the night. All the guests stood up and filed towards the door, where The Colonel was making sure we left. I shook his hand and said, ‘Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to spend time with Elvis’. Something like that. At which point, he leaned in closer and whispered, ‘I don’t think we’re going to be seeing much of you around here, boy’. He was right. I never saw Elvis again.”

Jimmy Webb is the son of a Baptist Minister, born and raised in the rugged agricultural expanse of the Oklahoma Panhandle. His mother stuck him on a piano stool at six years old and, by the age of 12, he was the church pianist. Rock ‘n’ roll was, insisted his parents, the Devil’s Music. But Webb’s secret transistor radio was crackling out hits from the likes of the Shirelles and Little Anthony and the Imperials and he started copying those hits on the piano his father made him keep in the garage.

“People don’t realise how much of a teacher the radio can be,” reckons Webb. “I would sit there and work out how it was done, how the pieces fitted together. Some people listen to the radio and the music just washes over them. With me, it set my heart on fire. I wanted to understand it. And more than anything else, I wanted to write songs that were as good as the ones I was listening to... better than the ones I was listening to.”

For his final year at school, the family moved to San Bernadino, California, just an hour’s drive from Hollywood and the LA music industry.

“I was a music major, but I was a terrible student,’ he admits. “The dean invited me into his office and then kinda invited me to leave the school. ‘Mr Webb, if you want to write songs, why don’t you get off your butt and talk to those guys in Hollywood.’ So, I did. I took a bunch of very poor reel-to-reel recordings of my songs, put them in a grocery bag and started knocking on the door of every publisher and record company I could think of.

“There was one song I had called This Time Last Summer. I was sitting in the reception of Motown West and this lady, Miss Vicky, took pity on me. She asked for the tape and took it through to the... guys. Y’know, the head honchos. Couple of minutes later, I hear the tape being played. Couple of minutes after that, Frank Wilson [Wilson was a top Motown producer and enjoyed solo success with his own song, the Northern Soul classic, Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)] poked his head round the door and said, ‘Could you come through, please?’

“That was the start of my real education. Motown West made me their mascot. I wrote songs, I learned how to use the orchestra, how to work the board in the control room, I learned about publishing. I was a songwriter. Me! The kid from Oklahoma.”

To call Webb a songwriter is something of an understatement. He wrote some of the greatest songs of the 20th century: By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, Galveston. He wrote easy listening classics: Up, Up and Away. His songs have been covered by musical legends: Sinatra and Streisand, the Supremes, Dusty Springfield, Nina Simone, Scott Walker, Dylan, R.E.M, Harry Nilsson. He’s won enough Grammys to fill a couple of mantlepieces. And he’s in London this month, playing one of his “fairly” regular UK shows.

Jimmy Webb: Songs and Stories is, as the name suggests, an evening of music and anecdotes. In most cases, that would send a discerning audience running for cover, but when it’s this bloke retelling those anecdotes, the crowd tends to sit tight. Like the one about him joining Harry Nilsson and John Lennon during the legendary Lost Weekend. In fact, Webb supplied some of the drugs.

Of course, there was a bit of me that could not believe I was hanging out with one of the Beatles. But the older I got and the more I indulged myself, the less I enjoyed my life. One day, I went out to buy some coke and ended up overdosing on PCP. Went into a coma. That’s how crazy things eventually got.

“Yeah, I enjoyed myself back in the ‘70s,” he says. “And ‘80s! I’d always subscribed to the Methodist philosophy of moderation, but when it came to John and Harry - and me! - moderation didn’t work. What started out as a bit of fun rapidly turned into debauchery.

“Of course, there was a bit of me that could not believe I was hanging out with one of the Beatles. But the older I got and the more I indulged myself, the less I enjoyed my life. One day, I went out to buy some coke and ended up overdosing on PCP. Went into a coma. That’s how crazy things eventually got.

“Drugs and creativity have a strange kinda relationship. I’m not talking about heroin, I’m thinking of alcohol, the psychedelics. The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper. A masterpiece. Would it have been as good without the drugs? Probably not. People tell me that my best album is Ten Easy Pieces, which came out in 1996. Just me, the piano and bottle of Jack Daniels. A couple of drinks helps you relax... it can enhance the creative process. If you look back through the years, there are a whole bunch of songs that wouldn’t have been made without alcohol.

“Unfortunately, not everybody can stop after a couple of drinks. Some people can’t stop in time to save their lives. I’ve been clean and sober for 25 years and my faculties are still intact. I got lucky.”

Webb has no doubt been asked about them a million times before, but it’s hard not to bring up the collection of songs that were recorded by Glen Campbell. Frank Sinatra called By The Time I Get To Phoenix the ‘greatest torch song ever written’. Wichita Lineman contains one of the great lyrical couplets ever written: ‘And I need you more than want you/And I want you for all time’.

“What surprises people about Wichita Lineman is that it was written in a hurry,” says Webb. “Glen needed a new song ’right now’. So, I wrote it. Couple of hours one afternoon. Had he given me more time, I would have looked at that couplet and taken it out. It’s a false rhyme. Plus, it doesn’t really make sense. Well, it does, in some kind of Einsteinian universe.

“I’ve always said that songwriting is a craft, like carpentry. You make a beautiful table by watching and learning how other great table makers make their beautiful tables. But there are some times when I’m sitting at the piano and it’s like I’m driving one of those racing cars. It’s instinct and the subconscious that allows me to point the car in the right direction. The song is being written, but I’m just along for the ride.

“It is the most wonderful feeling in the world,” believes Webb. “The words, the melodies, the chords have all appeared out of nowhere. In this modern age, we don’t believe in magic, but... maybe it’s still out there.”

Jimmy Webb: Songs and Stories is at the Cadogan Hall, London on 28 May