Quote of the Day (Jimmy Webb, on the Inspiration for ‘Up, Up and Away’)

“We jumped in the basket, they fired up the balloon and we slowly began to rise. The ascent was an epiphany. It was a beautiful day and the sun splashed across the balloon's surface. Looking up inside, the bright colors seemed like a cathedral's stained-glass window….Up there, Willie [deejay William F. Williams] and I joked with each other. He said, ‘We ought to make one of those teen beach movies, but in the desert about ballooning.’”—American singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb, on the genesis of “Up, Up and Away,” quoted in Marc Myers, “Anatomy of a Song: Why ‘Up, Up and Away’ Really Is About a Balloon Ride,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2, 2021

Okay, gather ‘round, all you aging baby boomers—and especially those with a mind-altering substance at hand (or just thinking of consuming one):

“Up, Up and Away,” one of the first hits by the precocious Jimmy Webb (all of 17 at the time!), is not—I repeat, not—a drug song. Got that?

That’s a tough pill to swallow for some Boomers, who in their heyday—their twenties and thirties—wanted to turn everything into a drug song, the better to transgress against the older generation.

They may have felt within their rights to think so, because so many of their musical heroes did use drugs and made no apologies for it. And if these counterculture icons were songwriters, that meant they were poetic and stuff, so the central ideas of their songs could very easily serve as metaphors for drugs, right?

Not quite. 

The list of songs reputed to be drug songs but disclaimed as such by their creators include “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Eight Miles High,” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” You can almost see these songwriters close their eyes as they’re asked for the millionth time about a tune they may have dashed off in no time but after its release got unwanted (and unwarranted) notoriety from the FBI, fire-and-brimstone preachers, and hippies who couldn’t help thinking how cool they were to know the real story behind it!

You can put Webb among those creators who, just this once, want to be taken literally about a song that embodies for so many fans a carefree way of life. 

Is it really so hard to believe, he seems to be saying, that his Grammy-winning tune—one of the first I ever heard pour out of a transition radio, in the version made famous by The Fifth Dimension—might really have been the theme for a movie that never got made—one of those Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello-style teen romps, but instead of “Beach Blanket Bingo,” maybe better called “Balloon Magic Bingo”?

We live in a skeptical age, but I, for one, believe Mr. Webb. After all, in his memoir The Cake and the Rain, he ‘fessed up to all other kinds of misadventures with drugs up to his late 20s. As long as he was making a clean breast of things, why wouldn’t he own up to this, too?

There’s also the matter of the above quote. It’s so detailed, so impressionistic, that it can only convey the kind of day that imprints itself forever in the memory. It’s gotta be true.

If you don’t believe it, too, I guess I’d rather be “suspended under the twilight canopy.”

Song Lyric of the Day (Jimmy Webb, on the Resilience and Reincarnation of the ‘Highwayman’)

“I'll fly a starship
Across the universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again.”—American singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb, “Highwayman,” released on his El Mirage LP (1977)

Jimmy Webb’s song, which came to him in a dream, did not score a hit for him or good friend Glen Campbell. But its four stanzas allowed solos for mutual friends Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson, who not only used it to climb the charts but also as the inspiration for their own country supergroup, the Highwaymen.

The aging and mortality at the heart of the song now figure into the fate of the quartet who recorded it. Cash and Jennings have already passed, and earlier this month the 84-year-old Kristofferson announced his retirement, leaving Nelson—who will turn 87 two months from now—as the last man standing.

In times past, a legend like Kristofferson might have concluded his career with a lengthy, lucrative concert tour. But COVID-19 has altered these plans, like so many others.

In what form will the Highwaymen exist after death? Who knows? It’s impossible to say if either traditional forms of Heaven or Webb’s notion of reincarnation will come to pass. (It may be especially difficult for Kristofferson, who—as the blogger at “Saving Country Music” reminds us in an affectionate post-retirement tribute—has been a Rhodes Scholar, military officer, helicopter pilot, Army Ranger, songwriter, singer, and actor.)

But country music’s Highwaymen—“wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,” to borrow Dylan Thomas’ phrase—might encounter a different afterlife given to only a few: musical immortality. Would Kristofferson ever have dreamed, for instance, that “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and “Me and Bobby McGee” would still be played?

But here they are, roughly 50 years after he recorded them, and the lyrics are also being sung by new artists. The odds are good that they will continue to be, long, long after he and Nelson “reach the other side” to join Cash and Jennings.

Flashback, March 1969: Campbell Scores With Another Webb-Penned Hit, ‘Galveston’

It’s not unusual for a recording artist to achieve a supernova of commercial success, even over a sustained period. Think of Elton John for the first half of the Seventies, or Michael Jackson from 1979 (Off the Wall) to 1991 (Dangerous). But it’s another thing entirely to achieve that level of broad acceptance not only on the radio but on film and TV. For that, we’re talking about Sinatra, Presley, the Beatles—and, in 1969, Glen Campbell.

In March of that year, Capitol Records released the 13^th album by the country singer, Galveston. To a burgeoning career as a recording star, he was now adding to his repertoire TV variety-show host (The Glen Campbell Good Time Hour) and even actor (True Grit), playing second male lead to the grizzled veteran John Wayne. Campbell had become, as his friend, the songwriter Jimmy Webb, would put it nearly a half-century later, “a small industry.”

Webb himself had become something of a “small industry,” if not with Campbell’s visibility. He did not have the singer’s number of media outlets, but he had an even wider array of people who clamored for his work. In 1967, he had come away with Record of the Year for the Fifth Dimension’s recording of his “Up, Up and Away.” The following year, he had simply set the music industry on its ear by composing an epic “pop cantata” that became a smash for Richard Harris, “MacArthur Park.”

But the recording star with the greatest affinity for Webb’s work was Campbell, who won a Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance for “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” then followed with Grammy and Country Music Award nominations for “Wichita Lineman.” 

Webb had initially begged off Campbell’s request for an appropriate follow-up to “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”—i.e., “something about a town”—with the weary observation that he “just about exhausted the Rand McNally phase of my career,” the songwriter recalled in his 2017 memoir, The Cake and the Rain. But then he yielded, turning out another geography-based smash, “Wichita Lineman.” “Galveston”—originally performed by, of all people, Don Ho—furnished Campbell with another hit in this vein that would serve as the title cut of another best-selling LP.

Both men enjoyed great appeal among the music spectrum through their association. The 22-year-old Webb, who had seen his tunes place among the rhythm and blues charts as well as pop, now found that the plaintive, storytelling qualities of his songs hit the sweet spot with country audiences. 

And Campbell, who had spent the previous decade cutting his musical teeth as a guitarist for the likes of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, The Beach Boys, and Phil Spector, could translate a distinctly regional sound into broader national appeal through both his musical gifts (wide vocal range and vast skill with multiple stringed instruments) and personal factors (boyish good looks and down-to-earth, humorous manner). Before Kenny Rogers, Taylor Swift, LeeAnn Rimes, or Lionel Richie, Campbell had shown the way as probably the first true country-pop crossover recording star. 

As a sign of that appeal, “Galveston” would be nominated for Country Music Awards for Album and Single of the Year and rise to #1 on the country charts, but it also made it to #4 on the U.S. pop charts. In a 2011 interview, Webb—who contributed another hit, “Where's The Playground Susie,” to Campbell’s 1969 LP—marveled at how Campbell managed to convert his songs into gold: 

"Glen was very, very good at commercializing my songs. He could come up with great intros and great solos, great breaks, and he wrote perfect strings, because he wrote very little. It was a minimalist approach and it just left Glen out there with the song and the guitar. I tended to write a little bit more as an arranger, and probably too much. So I could have done better to have stayed out of Glen's way, I think."

In another sense, though, Campbell’s single, dominated by producer Al de Lory’s thick layer of arrangements, was performed at an upbeat tempo totally at odds with its underlying message. A song about solitude, anticipated mortality, and loss, its lyrics need to be silently absorbed before they can even begin to be remotely understood.

I wasn’t moved by “Galveston”—I couldn’t concentrate on it, even—until I heard Webb himself perform it on his 1996 CD, Ten Easy Pieces. Campbell far surpassed Webb in the pristine quality of his voices, but stripped to the bone, with just the songwriter accompanying himself on the piano, “Galveston” throbs with all its intended melancholy.

Like another pop classic of the late Sixties, the Bacharach-David tune “I Say A Little Prayer," “Galveston” is a study in ambiguity, composed at the height of the Vietnam War, in the voice of someone separated from a lover because of wartime service. But Hal David’s lyrics are so general that they have been applied in contexts completely unrelated to the conflict (such as the 2010 revival of the team’s musical Promises, Promises, when it was inserted to boost Kristin Chenoweth’s role). It has been interpreted most often simply as a statement of undying commitment and love. I would be very surprised if more than one radio listener in a thousand has understood it in any other way.

“Galveston” has never had a problem being seen against a backdrop of war—indeed, it’s well-nigh impossible, with that lyric “while I watch the cannons flashin',” to regard this in any other fashion. But opinions remain divided about which war was meant. Some listeners thought Webb meant the Spanish-American War—not unnaturally, as the seaport served as the jumping-off point for servicemen on the way to Cuba. Less defensibly, others looked all the way back to the Civil War.

But Webb was deeply opposed to the Vietnam War. If he didn’t engage in fist-pumping protest songs, he forced listeners to work harder: to understand the pain of a military man far away from the 21-year-old woman he still remembers “standing by the water,/Standing there looking out to sea.” (A second verse, included on Don Ho’s version but not Campbell’s, makes the narrator’s pain even more explicit: “Wonder if she could forget me, I’d go home if they would let me/ Put down this gun and go to Galveston.”)

After a five-year hiatus, Campbell and Webb would collaborate on four more albums over the next four decades—including, most poignantly, Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb: In Session (2012), released after Campbell announced that he had Alzheimer’s.

The enduring commercial appeal of the two was recognized two years ago by Capitol Nashville/Ume, when the label reissued on vinyl the three Campbell albums that constituted his transformation from ace session player to solo superstar in his own right: Gentle on My Mind, Witchita Lineman, and Galveston. 

Webb may have groaned about songs with place names in the titles, but the quartet of hits that Campbell covered—“By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” and “MacArthur Park”—became pop classics that evoke the aching places in the heart. Whether Webb knew it or not then or not, love and loss have habitations and names, and millions of listeners have responded overwhelmingly to his evocation of them in the last half-century.

(The photo accompanying this post shows Glen Campbell in 1969 on his Glen Campbell Good Time Hour TV show.)

This Day in Pop Music History (Harry Nilsson, Golden Voice of ‘Without You,’ Dies)

Jan. 15, 1994— Harry Nilsson, a singer-songwriter of rare versatility and virtuosity, died at age 52 in his sleep at his Agoura Hills, Calif., home, two decades after his manic lifestyle ruined his voice, shortened his career and wrecked his health.

I first became aware of this musician’s work through watching TV as a child around 1970. An ABC animated “Movie of the Week” called The Point, narrated by Dustin Hoffman, featured stories and music created by Nilsson, with the musician singing his own songs. Moreover, the theme of the Bill Bixby sitcom The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, “Best Friend,” was an adaptation of a song from Nilsson’s Aerial Ballet LP, “Girlfriend.” 

A self-taught musician who learned piano chords from rock ‘n’ rollers who performed at L.A.’s Paramount Theater, where he worked as assistant manager, Nilsson was soon building a solid catalog of his own work (enough to eventually lead him to being recognized as one of Rolling Stone Magazine’s “100 Greatest Songwriters”), notably “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City,” “Jump Into the Fire,” “Gotta Get Up,” “You’re Breakin’ My Heart,” and “One” (soon covered by Three Dog Night). 

Ironically, though, Nilsson achieved his greatest commercial success as an interpreter of other’s songs, especially with Fred Neal’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” (featured in the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy) and Badfinger’s “Without You.”

Even now, it is only dimly appreciated how innovative Nilsson could be. More than a decade before Carly Simon and Linda Ronstadt, entering their “legacy years” as performers, tried out the Great American Songbook, Nilsson was experimenting with this rich (and, by now, neglected) mine of music with A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night. Furthermore, he compensated for his stage anxiety by taping a forerunner of MTV with his tune “Coconuts.”

John Lennon may have helped make Nilsson’s career with an enthusiastic endorsement of his talent (“Nilsson for President!”), but also helped ruin it with shared drug-and-alcohol-fueled hijinx several years later. 

When the ex-Beatle and wife Yoko Ono had a trial separation in the mod-1970s, Lennon entered a period often referred to as his “lost weekend.” The phrase only began to capture the intense, incomprehensible benders on which Lennon took his friend Nilsson —misadventures that led another Nilsson friend, songwriter Jimmy Webb, to describe their “mutually destructive aerial ballet” in his memoir, The Cake and the Rain.

Even more insane than their night-owl antics (Lennon narrowly escaped charges of assaulting a female photographer) were their studio sessions for Nilsson’s Pussycats LP, produced by Lennon. 

At one point, Webb, alarmed to hear Nilsson croak out a greeting and to see him vomiting blood into Webb’s kitchen sink, asked what had happened to his vocal chords. The laughing response: “I left it on the microphone.” Nilsson’s magnificent singing voice was never the same again.

Nilsson’s career was shorter than it should have been, but he made the most of his short window of time. I love this quotation from songwriter and admirer Randy Newman on this talent: “He had a gift for melody. Which is a rare, inexplicable talent to have. People like McCartney have it, Schubert, Elton John has it. Harry had that gift."

Video of the Day: Art Garfunkel, ‘All I Know’ Live—on the Sublime Singer’s 76th Birthday

CBS Sunday Morning featured a segment on Art Garfunkel today. The timing could hardly seem better: not only in support of his new memoir, What Is It All but Luminous: Notes from an Underground Man, but also right on his 76^th birthday. (He was born in Forest Hills, Queens, for those who don't know.)

As I listened to CBS’ Rita Braver interview the pop legend, I felt a vague sense of familiar unease when Garfunkel explained the motivation for his retrospective: “I suppose, if I examine my inner mind, I would say, 'Time to come out of the shadow of Paul Simon and establish yourself as a thinking artist who can sing.' I know myself to be a creative guy, and I think my profile out in show business is 'the guy over Paul Simon's right shoulder.'... I thought I was playing it too deferential to Paul."

My disquiet turned into an old sinking feeling as I heard Garfunkel acknowledge, late in the interview, that he and his onetime partner were at "one of their low points." (There goes any joint concert appearance for a while!)

As sensitive about the value of his solo career as he is articulate about his influences (“When in the temple, it's got a high ceiling, it's got wood walls—these are great for a singer, 'cause I thrive on the reverb”), Garfunkel craves affirmation of his work apart from What’s-His-Name. I, for one, don’t mind in the least providing that.

In mulling over which of his solo performances to highlight, I thought of a heart-rending mid-Seventies work, “Second Avenue.” I also carefully considered a comparative rarity, his theme sung over the opening credits to Gary David Goldberg’s gone-way-too-song comic valentine to his Fifties childhood, “Brooklyn Bridge.” (Oh, heck: just click on this YouTube link and see if you don’t get a lump in your throat as you listen to him warble the nostalgic lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman about “that place just over the Brooklyn Bridge/It’ll always be home to me.”)

But ultimately, I selected the biggest hit from his first post-Simon release, Angel Clare (1972), a cover of Jimmy Webb’s “All I Know.” Recorded live in 1996, this performance on YouTube is not only one of the best renditions of a seminal tune by one of my favorite pop singer-songwriters, but also gains vibrancy from its setting: Ellis Island, as special to Garfunkel as to those of us who grew up loving his angelic voice, a sacred place not unlike the temple where he first became aware of his God-given vocal gifts.

Quote of the Day (Linda Ronstadt, on the ‘Rare Artist’ of Song)

“The essential elements of singing are voice, musicianship, and story. It is the rare artist that has all three in abundance.”—Linda Ronstadt, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir (forthcoming)

In her heyday in the Seventies and Eighties, millions recognized Linda Ronstadt as that “rare artist.” All the more heartbreaking, then, the news that she has Parkinson’s Disease and, she acknowledges, she will never sing another note.

At the height of her career, Ronstadt was not only the bestselling solo female artist of the Seventies, but also, with her talent, looks, and participation in the fast-lane lifestyle of Southern California rock, a representative of the Dionysian exhilaration of baby boomers. 

But now, as we age, we discover that our icons—and we ourselves—are subject to the same processes of decay, disease and death as the parents we could never see ourselves resembling.

It was all so different when I saw her back in August 1976, at the Garden State Arts Center (now PNC Bank Arts Center) in Holmdel, NJ. Still early in a remarkable seven-LP run starting with Heart Like a Wheel, she stood at the microphone, this brunette waif commanding at first with a girlish, almost shy presence, until her voice carried to the limits of those on the grass just outside the amphitheater.

And though she would belt and growl and bring listeners to their feet with the likes of “Heat Wave” and other hits of the rock ‘n’ roll era, what haunted the memory was the way her silvery soprano transformed lyrics of longing and heartbreak into rock arias. 

It was Karla Bonoff who wrote “Save me, free me, from my heart this time,” but it was Ronstadt’s exquisite artistry that made “Lose Again” her song, and ours. (To understand what I’m talking about, see this YouTube excerpt of her in concert, only a few months after her New Jersey appearance.) It’s why Time Magazine, in a cover story from 1977, hailed her style of “Torchy Rock.”

At this point, it would be a shame if it took Ronstadt’s terrible disease to rectify two longstanding, interrelated injustices: exclusion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and refusal by Rolling Stone and other major outlets of critical opinion to take her work seriously.  I write “interrelated” because the magazine’s founder, Jann Wenner, is not only co-founder of the foundation that created the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but also plays an inordinately heavy-handed role in selecting inductees.

One result of the latter malign influence is the blatant sexism of Hall choices. An Evelyn McDonnell article for Salon in December 2011 noted that only 40 out of 296 inductees to that point were women. If one criterion for inclusion in the Hall is an artist’s impact on those who came after, as its defenders claim, then why did it take so long for Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro to be inducted?

As for Wenner’s magazine: How could it dare to leave off Ronstadt its list of the “100 Greatest Singers” in rock and roll history, while including in the ranking Karen Carpenter (who only made one album in the genre) and Madonna (who not only was a pop rather than a rock ‘n’ roll star, but whose tinny voice couldn’t hold a candle to Ronstadt’s—or, indeed, virtually anyone else on or off the list)?

New York Times critic John Rockwell made the clearest, most passionate (if half-apologetic, on account of their friendship) case for the singer in 1979, noting that she had “the strongest, most clearly focused, flexible, and simply beautiful voice in popular music.” Then, going on to forecast the highly eclectic path she was about to take in the next decade, he noted that the voice, “as a physical instrument…is capable of authoritative usage in almost any kind of popular music, and with a bit of technical work, could encompass almost any classical style, as well.”

While Rockwell made an excellent argument about the purity of her instrument, Ronstadt’s value extends far beyond that. Aside from Elvis Costello, how many other rock ‘n’ roll artists have been so breathtakingly versatile? 

Throughout her four-decade career, she has explored, in addition to rock ‘n’ roll, folk, country, rhythm and blues, new wave, Mexican mariachi, Gilbert and Sullivan (The Pirates of Penzance), and the Great American Songbook, through her 1980s collaborations with Nelson Riddle.  

(That musical adventurousness, by the way, amply refutes the silly notion that she mindlessly went along with the choices of producer Peter Asher, since she insisted on the Riddle LPs despite Asher’s strong initial doubts about the project.)

The advent of the singer-songwriter has made Rolling Stone—and, indeed, much of the rock ‘n’ roll critical establishment—dubious about artists who do not write their own songs (or, in Ronstadt’s case, only a handful of them). But again, if influence is an important consideration of an artist’s ultimate value, few can doubt the boost that Ronstadt provided by interpreting songs by the likes of J.D. Souther, Warren Zevon, Karla Bonoff, Elvis Costello, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Jackson Browne, Dolly Parton, and the Cretones. (She also co-produced a seminal CD by songwriting great Jimmy Webb, Suspending Disbelief).

Over the last decade or so, Ronstadt’s public appearances have grown fewer and fewer, as she raised two children in her native Arizona as a single mom, far away from the L.A. music scene, and coped with other health issues (notably, she acknowledged to Australian journalist Debbie Kruger in a 1998 interview, an auto-immune thyroid disease). 

Still, there was always the hope that she might emerge from semi-retirement for appearances onstage or on songs by others, as she did three years ago for a Jimmy Webb tribute album. Her newest health disclosure ends those prospects. Now, the next time we hear from her will be with the publication next month of her memoir, Simple Dreams.

And yet, though no new work will ever come from her again, that marvelous voice has not and will not be stilled. Listen to any of her work on CDs, or seek her out on YouTube, where you’ll find plenty of examples of her joy in communicating passion through song (such as this 1979 “It’s in His Kiss” duet from Saturday Night Live with another sterling voice, Phoebe Snow).