| Composers -- United States -- Biography. |
| Country musicians -- United States -- Biography. |
| Autobiographies. |
| Webb, Jimmy |
| Composers, American |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Fairhaven-Millicent | B WEBB (JIM) WEB 2017 | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | B WEBB | BIOGRAPHY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Pembroke Public Library | BIO WEBB, J. | BIOGRAPHY | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"Novelistic, perfectly plotted and quite possibly the best pop-star autobiography yet written." - The Wall Street Journal
Jimmy Webb's words have been sung to his music by a rich and deep roster of pop artists, including Glen Campbell, Art Garfunkel, Frank Sinatra, Donna Summer and Linda Ronstadt. He's the only artist ever to win Grammy Awards for music, lyrics, and orchestration, and his chart-topping career has, so far, lasted fifty years, most recently with a Kanye West rap hit and a new classical nocturne.
Now, in his first memoir, Webb delivers a snapshot of his life from 1955 to 1970, from simple and sere Oklahoma to fast and fantastical Los Angeles, from the crucible of his family to the top of his longed-for profession.
Webb was a preacher's son whose father climbed off a tractor to receive his epiphany, and Jimmy, barely out of his teen age years, sank down into the driver's seat of a Cobra to speed to Las Vegas to meet with Elvis. Classics such as "Up, Up and Away", "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Wichita Lineman", "Galveston", "The Worst that Could Happen", "All I Know", and "MacArthur Park" were all recorded by some of the most important voices in pop before Webb's twenty-fifth birthday: he thought it was easy.
The sixties were a supernova, and Webb was at their center, whipsawed from the proverbial humble beginnings into a moneyed and manic international world of beautiful women, drugs, cars and planes. That stew almost took him down--but Webb survived, his passion for music and work among his lifelines.
The Cake and The Rain is a surprising and unusual book: Webb's talent as a writer and storyteller is here on every page. His book is rich with a sense of time and place, and with the voices of characters, vanished and living, famous and not, but all intimately involved with him in his youth, when life seemed nothing more than a party and Webb the eternal guest of honor.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this kiss-and-tell memoir, songwriter Webb longingly recalls his nights of hot sex with beautiful women, his love of fast cars, and his appetite for cocaine and drink (which almost killed him), but offers no insights into his songwriting. Webb is best known for his songs "MacArthur Park," Glen Campbell's "Galveston," and "Up, Up, and Away" for the Fifth Dimension. His magical touch in songwriting doesn't carry over to his prose, which is often flat. Webb fails to maintain a compelling narrative flow as he jumps back and forth in time to chronicle the highlights of his childhood as a preacher's son in Oklahoma and his decision to live in California; he describes his earliest attempts at songwriting in high school, and his decision to pursue it when Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine tells him to "just stick with music." Webb writes lovingly about the many musicians who ambled through his life, including Frank Sinatra, Richard Harris, Joni Mitchell, and Johnny Rivers. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
All the sweet icing melts down, and some bitterness and tragedy lie exposed in the life of the hit-making songwriter.Webb (b. 1946), famous for "MacArthur Park," "Up, Up and Away," "Wichita Lineman," and many other 1960s- and '70s-era pop classics, has a bit of a bone to pick. He wants readers to know, as if we don't already, that his songs have been transformative; an 11-page double-column appendix listing artists who have recorded them is just one bit of testimonial. But more, he's ticked at the "left-wing folkie exclusivity" that has relegated him, in the pantheon of songwriters, to the establishment-supporting, squaresville corner where has-beens like Marilyn McCoo and Glen Campbell live. Never mind that plenty of people worship both singers and that plenty of hipsters live and breathe by Webb. The chip on the shoulder never quite falls off, but thankfully, it gets less pronounced as the author presses on with this spry, mostly pleasing memoir that has more than its share of rough patches. For instance, he writes, when he came to Los Angeles from Oklahoma, he was a nice Christian boy who didn't smoke or drink. At the height of his fameand this book mostly dwells on the golden age of the late '60s and early '70she hoovered up a line of what was supposed to be good cocaine but turned out to be "a super dose of crude street level PCP, enough to kill an elephant." Along the way, mostly with an affect of not quite believing his luck, Webb recounts brushes with fame and his many high points, from idol Paul McCartney commissioning a song from him to losing a few brain cells during John Lennon's lost weekendto say nothing of sessions with Richard Harris, prime interpreter of his greatest and perhaps strangest hit. An insider's view of the star-maker machinery and a treat for Webb's many fans. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Singer-songwriter Webb's autobiography skips around chronologically: there's a chapter set in 1969, then one in 1941, then back to '69, then 1945, then 1970, then 1960, and so on. Confusing? Not really. Webb tells us about his childhood, early successes, and stardom in bits and pieces, in stories that take place in various stages of his life, and it all makes perfect sense. Autobiography as collage, perhaps? Webb made his name as a songwriter; he's worked with such artists as Johnny Cash, Rosemary Clooney, Frank Sinatra, Glen Campbell, Joe Cocker, Billy Joel, Barbra Streisand, and many, many more. He's written a lot of songs, but he's perhaps best known for the often-lampooned MacArthur Park (which contains the classic line about leaving a cake out in the rain). In the early 1970s, he transitioned from writer to performer, finding a whole new kind of success. Webb writes in a comfortable, conversational way, as though he's telling a few close friends some stories from his fascinating life, and the book makes a great way for a music fan to pass a few hours.--Pitt, David Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THERE ARE ROCK BANDS - the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys come to mind - with deeper catalogs than the Beatles, whose recording career lasted less than a decade. But is there another rock band whose catalog merits a book like IN THEIR LIVES: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs (Blue Rider, $23)? "The Beatles," Andrew Blauner writes, "provide more common ground with almost anyone, no matter their age, gender, race, background, than nearly any other topic." With that in mind, Blauner, who has edited several other anthologies, commissioned 28 essays, each about a specific Beatles song (or, in a few cases, more than one). The contributors are a mixed bag, including not just writers best known for their prose (among them The Times's Jon Pareles) but also the singer-songwriters Rosanne Cash ("No Reply") and Shawn Colvin ("I'll Be Back"), the cartoonist Roz Chast ("She Loves You") and the actor David Duchovny ("Dear Prudence"). Inevitably, the results are a mixed bag as well. I could have done with less "I remember the first time I saw them" navel-gazing and more focus on the music; a little nostalgia can go a long way. My favorite pieces are the ones, like Rick Moody's on the medley that ends "Abbey Road," that combine the personal ("I heard them on the radio practically from my first culturally aware moment") with the musical ("There's a whole argument about how the medley is in A when it's about 'greed' and in C when it's about the triumph over greed"). "In Their Lives" is full of pleasant surprises. Chuck Klosterman begins his essay by acknowledging that he has "never met anyone whose favorite Beatles song is 'Helter Skelter'" and that if he did, "my assumption would be that the person probably doesn't like the Beatles all that much," before going on to explain why he loves it. And speaking of people who don't like the Beatles all that much, this collection even has room for one of them: Pico Iyer, while recalling his karaoke performance of "Yesterday" in Osaka in the company of the woman he would later marry, writes smartly of the song's appeal while also noting matter- of-factly that "the Beatles have never been a group I've enjoyed." Further evidence of the Beatles' impact on popular culture can be found, if only in passing, in IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR: The Life and Soul of Wilson Pickett (Oxford University, $27.95), which somewhat surprisingly is the first biography of the singer its author, Tony Fletcher, calls "the very embodiment of soul music." Although Pickett became famous at a time when black and white artists coexisted peacefully on Top 40 radio, there was not much common ground between his raw and earthy brand of rhythm and blues, rooted in the music of the black church, and the expertly crafted pop the Beatles were making in the late 1960s. And Pickett himself, Fletcher writes, "initially recoiled at the thought" of recording a song by "a white pop band." But the guitarist Duane Allman - a white Southerner who was himself on the verge of pop stardom but at the time was just becoming known as a studio musician - persuaded Pickett that it might be a good idea to cover the Beatles hit "Hey Jude." With a typically impassioned Pickett vocal and sympathetic accompaniment from Allman, "Hey Jude" was, Fletcher writes, "a musical benchmark, a song often referenced as the highlight of his career subsequent to, and sometimes even including, the early trifecta of 'In the Midnight Hour,' 'Land of 1000 Dances' and 'Mustang Sally'" - quite a trifecta by any standard. Fletcher's account of how Pickett came to record "Hey Jude" is one of many fascinating stories in this meticulously researched biography. There are times, though, when the line between "meticulously researched" and "do we need to know this?" gets a bit blurry. Soul-music completists will no doubt appreciate the minute detail with which Fletcher recounts Pickett's recording sessions, even his subpar later ones. Others, myself included, would have preferred to see the exhaustive lists of personnel and repertoire confined to a discography. And there are only so many ways to say that Pickett was volatile, prone to violence, a drug abuser and a man who, in the words of the singer Lloyd Price, "could not stay out of trouble," before a certain monotony sets in. As any good biography of a musician should, "In the Midnight Hour" sends us back to the recordings, the best of which have not lost one iota of their power. And Fletcher (the author of books about Keith Moon, the Smiths and R.E.M.) has done his best to illuminate the man behind the music. If Pickett the man remains elusive - if we ultimately don't learn that much about him other than that we probably wouldn't have wanted to hang out with him - one can hardly blame Fletcher. But it may explain why there has never been a Pickett biography until now. In stark contrast with Pickett, whose first biography arrives more than a decade after his death at 64, the jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke has been the subject of biographies, analysis and - as Brendan Wolfe outlines in FINDING BIX: The Life and Afterlife of a Jazz Legend (University of Iowa, paper, $24.95) - a whole lot of mythology almost from the day in 1931 that he died, at the alarmingly early age of 28. "Finding Bix" is not a biography; despite its name, it is as much about what has been written about Beiderbecke over the years - as Wolfe puts it, capital letters and all, "What Bix Means" - as it is about Beiderbecke himself. Wolfe, the managing editor of the website Encyclopedia Virginia, writes admiringly about Beiderbecke's "bell-like tone" and the "cool reserve" of his playing. But he doesn't devote a lot of time to the music; he is more concerned with the big-picture issues Beiderbecke's life and career raise, among them the romance of the doomed artist, the battle between art and commerce, and, because Beiderbecke was white, what he calls "the longest-running argument in jazz - the argument over race." On one side of that argument are black writers like Albert Murray, who maintained that because jazz is an African-American art, a white musician like Beiderbecke could never be more than an "intruder." On the other side are white writers like Terry Teachout, the author of biographies of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, who told Wolfe in an interview: "Bix is indisputably a major figure in jazz who is white. This pushes all kinds of buttons in people." Although Wolfe ultimately judges his search a failure - near the end of the book he writes of his "chronic inability to find Bix" - the journey itself is well worth reading about. Michael Nesmith and Steve Jones do not have much in common, but they do have this: Both became known to the public at a young age for reasons largely beyond their control, and both have spent their careers defined by that early fame. Nesmith was one of the Monkees - a fictional rock band, created for a television show, that became a multimillion- dollar phenomenon and, briefly, an actual band (albeit one that never fully utilized his talents as a songwriter and musician). He has long seemed at best ambivalent about his Monkees experience, and considering everything he has accomplished since those years - a long list that includes producing films like "Repo Man" and playing a vital role in the early years of the music-video explosion - it's understandable that he might resent still being best known as Monkee Mike. But age seems to have mellowed him. In his beautifully written INFINITE TUESDAY: An Autobiographical Riff(Crown Archetype, $28), he does not devote all that many words to his Monkee phase, but he writes about it with considerable affection and charming self-deprecation. When he made the rapid transition from performing his folkish songs at the Troubadour in Los Angeles to appearing every week on network television, he writes, "I was under the impression it would require me to write, act, sing and play as one of the main cast members of a TV show about an out-of-work rock band" - only to learn "that I was somewhat right but mostly wrong." Of a subsequent invitation to contribute songs to the show, he says, "I had no idea how to write a pop song any more than I knew how to levitate." Nesmith's success as a Monkee, he writes, led to what he calls Celebrity Psychosis, one of his many inspired coinages. (Among the others: the Hollywood Mind, Hamburger Movie Tycoon and the book's spiritually resonant title.) "Whatever character flaws may exist in an otherwise simple, sincere person," he writes, "Celebrity Psychosis amplifies them by almost inconceivable orders of magnitude." The examples of his awful behavior in the Monkee years - and to an extent beyond - are chilling but also, because of the deadpan way he recounts them, often very funny. Steve Jones has played in numerous bands and has for many years hosted a popular Los Angeles radio show. But like Michael Nesmith, he remains best known for something he did decades ago: play guitar with the Sex Pistols, the band that, for fans and detractors alike, came to embody punk rock - and that, Jones reminds us in LONELY BOY: Tales From a Sex Pistol (Da Capo, $26.99), existed, with him as leader, before Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious entered the picture. Jones is nowhere near the prose stylist Nesmith is; indeed, since the rock journalist Ben Thompson is credited as his collaborator, I suspect that "Lonely Boy" was more dictated than written. But the bluntness and unapologetic crudity with which he tells his story are tremendously appealing. And, of course, he has a heck of a story to tell. Beyond the Dickensian details of his bleak London childhood and the eye-opening litany of the addictions with which he has dealt over the years - not just to drugs and alcohol but also to stealing (his hauls included David Bowie's equipment and Keith Richards's coat) and sex - Jones's focus is largely on the pride he takes in what the Sex Pistols meant, less as a cultural phenomenon or a political statement than as a really good rock 'n' roll band. Jones has some kind words - kinder than one might have guessed - for Malcolm McLaren, the Pistols' muchmaligned manager. But he dismisses McLaren's portrait of himself as a rock 'n' roll Svengali who called the shots and manufactured the outrage. McLaren, he says, never realized that what made the Pistols special was not the outrage they generated but the music they made. After the band gave a profanity-laced live television interview in December 1976 that resulted in tabloid headlines and canceled bookings, Jones writes, things changed, and not for the better. Before then, "it was like the normal progression you'd expect of a band"; afterward, the music "took a total back seat as far as Malcolm was concerned" - an attitude that in Jones's view reached its nadir when McLaren replaced Glen Matlock, who could play bass, with Sid Vicious, who couldn't. And while "us getting banned everywhere made for so much great press," he writes wistfully, "it would've been nice to play a few more gigs as well." The structure of the prolific songwriter Jimmy Webb's THE CAKE AND THE RAIN (St. Martin's, $26.99) is as unorthodox, and at times as puzzling, as the lyrics of "MacArthur Park," the oft-recorded Webb composition from which the book takes its name. (I must admit, though, that after reading Webb's explanation of the song's genesis, I find the lyrics a lot less obscure than I used to.) "The Cake and the Rain" is full of colorful anecdotes, well told and entertainingly punctuated by the steady dropping of names: Frank Sinatra was my friend! Louis Armstrong encouraged me! Elvis Presley knew my name! They range from harrowing tales of extreme partying to the origin of the monster hit "Up, Up and Away" - a musicbusiness friend Webb for some reason identifies only as the Devil (we never do learn his name) asked him to write a song about a hot-air balloon for a movie that never happened - to the remarkable account of a chamber music concert at his home for which everyone, the musicians as well as an audience that included Joni Mitchell and David Geffen, was required to be nude. But Webb's decision to present his narrative in nonchronological order - his first chapter, for example, keeps jumping back and forth between Las Vegas in 1969 and Oklahoma in the 1940s, just before he was born there - can make for a bumpy read. And the book ends abruptly in 1973, with the final chapter largely devoted to his long recovery from a hellacious overdose, leaving the reader wondering what happened next. Of course, leaving the reader hanging may have been the commercially savvy Webb's plan. Perhaps a sequel is already in the works. Anyone responsible for as many hit songs as Webb has written surely has another memoir in him. Dan Hicks was far less famous than Michael Nesmith, far less notorious than Steve Jones and - although anyone who writes a song called "How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away?" probably deserves a place in the Songwriters Hall of Fame - far less celebrated a songwriter than Jimmy Webb. But when he died last year at 74, he lefta legion of devoted fans and a legacy of brilliantly wrought, often hilarious and sometimes moving songs that, with their blend of old-timey genres (he liked to call it "folkswing"), could at their best sound both vintage and timeless. Hicks's posthumously published autobiography, I SCARE MYSELF (Jawbone/Quarto, paper, $22.95) - the title is also the name of one of his best-known songs - captures his distinctively droll voice, even when addressing (but by no means making light of) his long battle with alcoholism. Unfortunately, Hicks died before the book was finished, and it was leftto the music journalist Kristine McKenna, who had been editing the manuscript, to write a final chapter that covers, somewhat hurriedly, his last 20 years. She does a serviceable job. But the sudden disappearance of Hicks from his own story is almost as jarring in print as it was for many of us in life. What music memoirs have most inspired you? "Marianne Faithfull's 'Memories, Dreams and Reflections' is a gem; her luminous words light up the book's portraits and events in the way 'Luncheon of the Boating Party' is illumined by Renoir's colors. There are shadows no doubt, but in Faithfull's hands they serve to reveal and clarify. A fine memoir." - MICHAEL NESMITH PETER KEEPNEWS is an editor at The Times.