Sharing the secrets of a song

By Adam Gifford

Jimmy Webb's new book, Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting, has something which sets it above other "how to" books on the shelves. The author has written some of the most well-crafted, well-loved songs of the past 30 years.

Songs like MacArthur Park, Wichita Lineman, Galveston and Highwayman have given hits to others, but not to Webb, who plays in Auckland tomorow night.

His career began in the late 1960s as the Tin Pan Alley songwriters were transforming themselves into singers, but he's proud to be considered part of the older tradition.

"By 1971, when Carole King recorded her album Tapestry, most songwriters realised they had to at least attempt to be performers and singers if they were going to be part of the new age. I certainly did. I pitched in and made my solo albums like everybody else," says Webb, on the phone from New York.

The title Tunesmith comes from a science fiction novelette Webb read as a youngster "about a future society in which songs as we know them will have ceased to exist. I drew the analogy in my preface that we sort of live in a society where the songwriter and the song as we know it is kind of slipping away."

It's not because people can't write songs. "I believe youngsters given half the chance will take up the challenge and write great songs. I don't think they've had much encouragement lately. I don't think their elders have been particularly generous about passing along the secrets of the trade."

Webb takes a dim view of the snobbery involved. "It's simply a closed shop.
Youngsters and their songs are not welcome. Cabaret artists, for instance, are only interested in Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and the Gershwins ..."

He says the relationship between artists and the record industry, which was always too much "us and them," has almost completely broken down.

"The end result is we don't have any relationship any more and we don't have any record business any more. We've got half a dozen people right at the top and we've got a whole bunch of people who are nowhere and there's hardly any middle."

Such concerns have been evident from his first album, the 1970s Words and Music, where Webb recorded PF Sloan, a song about the staff writer and producer at Dunhill records, who penned dozens of surf, folk and pop hits before attempting to be accepted as a performer.

"Phil Sloan's most significant song was Eve of Destruction. I still think to this day that song holds up. That's what a song is supposed to do. It's supposed to capture the surround. In a way a good song is like a time capsule.

"PF went to the head of Dunhill and asked for permission to make his own record and was pretty much told, `No thank you.'

"This kind of gave him a romantic aura for me. This was one of the first guys. He'd written plenty of hits for others, he'd paid his dues, he went and asked to make a simple record and was basically denied."

Webb made nine albums over three decades, but not until 1997's Ten Easy Pieces did many of his best-known songs make their way on to a Jimmy Webb album.

"I perhaps have not always held those songs in the highest regard. Familiarity breeds contempt," he says. "And those were songs recorded by some of the finest singers on the planet. No way was I going to top Glen Campbell doing Wichita Lineman or By the Time I Get to Phoenix.

"I eventually did the album because a friend told me I had a way with those songs, had something to offer. He made me do it, and in a funny way it became one of my most enjoyable experiences. It's clearly my best album."

The second best? Webb picks 1982's Angel Heart.

It includes the luscious title track; the autobiographical Work For a Dollar ("I wrote that song for my dear departed mother. She always used to say, `Jimmy, you've got to work for a dollar to earn a dime.'"); the exquisitely simple In Cars ("That was my homage to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. I was profoundly influenced as a young man by their music, and when I was in California I had the opportunity to live that life"); and Scissors Cut, which was a reasonable hit for Art Garfunkel from his Watermark album.

"I was all over that album," says Webb. "We recorded it at Muscle Shoals" - which, of course, was the stomping ground of legendary Memphis producer and songwriter Dan Penn, who with writing partner and keyboards player Spooner Oldham shares the bill in Auckland.

Who: Jimmy Webb, Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham

Where: Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber

When: Tomorrow, 8 pm.

Pictured: Jimmy Webb.