Song Lyric of the Day (Jimmy Webb, on “Dreams of Endless Summer”)

“Our dreams of endless summer
Were just too grandiose
Adios, Adios.”—Jimmy Webb, “Adios,” from his Suspending Disbelief CD (1993)

If I were to write A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man, I’d begin, as James Joyce did with his novel of initiation, with my first consciousness of sound—music, in this case. That would have been along about 1967 or ’68, when such songs as “Up, Up and Away,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” and especially “MacArthur Park” seemed to be coming from every transistor radio within earshot of me.

What all of these songs I just named had in common was that they were written by Jimmy Webb, a 21-year-old who was turning the music industry upside down in that season. Today, as hard as it is for me to accept, the composer turns 65.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know how crazy Webb would be about being known strictly as a “composer” or "lyricist." For just about as long as he’s had a career, he’s wanted to be known as a singer-songwriter. To his frustration, his solo works have never sold as well as the cover versions by artists who include Glen Campbell, the Fifth Dimension, Richard Harris, Art Garfunkel, Linda Ronstadt, Judy Collins, Joe Cocker….the list goes on and on. The quality of his voice doesn’t match (most) of these artists, of course, but that in itself is not a bar to success, as Bob Dylan and Neil Young have risen to the top of the charts with what might euphemistically be called “distinctive” voices.

No, as much as anything else, it might be Webb’s desire to take all kinds of chances with his lyrics and musical structures that has gotten in the way. Interviewed by Paul Zollo as part of a book called Songwriters on Songwriting, Webb practically chafes at the constraints imposed by the music industry:

“I can see a lot of things to be done with songs that haven't been done with them. We haven't seen a lot of songs written in free verse. We haven’t seen a lot of songs written in a chain of consciousness form with no particular verses, chorus or bridges.”

I started off this post with the James Joyce allusion partly because he’s a favorite of Webb. In fact, the famous opening chapter of Ulysses, which takes place in the Martello Tower in Ireland, is referred to, obliquely, in the songwriter’s “Sandy Cove.”

That title, as well as the hits of his early career, shows that Webb has one of the most powerful senses of place of any pop lyricist. For another example of this, consider the subject of today’s post, “Adios.” In quick strokes, this song (covered, hauntingly, by Linda Ronstadt) economically evokes young, heedless love, lived out against the backdrop of the California coast, with images of margaritas drunk in old cantinas and the “winter green” hills of the northern part of the state.

And then the above quoted lines, rendered in a dying fall, a kiss goodbye not just to a love affair (could it be the same woman who inspired "MacArthur Park," the woman with whom he was “besotted” in the mid-Sixties, Ronstadt’s cousin Susan?), but to an entire way of life, a world of the young that doesn’t have much use for the professionals in the workday world, not to mention the aging—a prospect understood years ago by Webb, the onetime wunderkind turned senior citizen today.

Suspending Disbelief went nowhere commercially—a crying shame, since it contained much of Webb’s most deeply felt, autobiographical work (see in particular “Elvis and Me”). But if you want to experience him at his peak as a solo artist, I’d recommend that you hunt down Ten Easy Pieces. I wrote earlier in this post that Webb didn’t really match the level of many of the singers who covered his work. Nevertheless, listen to what he does with his own songs.

After you hear the opening track, “Galveston,” in which he makes you rethink every way you've ever thought about this song, it will be impossible for you to think of anyone else who has so precisely located the empty spaces in the heart as well as this son of a Baptist preacher who was born in Elk City, Okla., on this day in 1946.