A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of spending the evening listening to songwriter Jimmy Webb share his thoughts on songwriting, or, as he put it, aimless rambling from a piano player. The setting was an intimate gathering put together by the Songwriters' Hall of Fame, into which Jimmy was inducted in 1986. Jimmy is the lyricist/composer of standards such as "By The Time I Get To Phoenix," "Didn't We?" "Galveston," "MacArthur Park," "Up Up & Away," "Wichita Lineman," and "The Worst That Could Happen." He is the only artist ever to have received Grammy Awards for lyrics, music, and orchestration.
Jimmy wanted to be a songwriter when he was 12 or 13 years old. His father was a Baptist preacher, and so the environment was rather antagonistic toward his aspirations. As he relates it, his parents wanted him to play hymns and not go to dances, which resulted in several escapades in his early teens in which he was caught "bailing out the rear window of the house to go to a dance and getting busted, which is a very bad thing because, as everyone knows, Baptists don't make love standing up because they're afraid someone will think they're dancing!" He cleverly manipulated himself into the chairmanship of the organ committee at the church. When the purchase of the organ was made, he managed to get one with a rhythm machine built into it, allowing him the opportunity to play rock-and-roll tracks when nobody was listening. Nobody, that is, until Jimmy and some of his friends cranked up the organ for rocking and rolling one Saturday night and ended up being busted by the cops and, shortly thereafter, Jimmy's father, who showed up in his bathrobe. "Not exactly a greenhouse environment for a pop songwriter," Jimmy commented.
But Jimmy became a songwriter by default, because, as he put it, it was the only idea he had, the only thing he could imagine that he wanted to do. After walking the streets of L.A. with a paper sack full of his tapes, he eventually managed to land a contractual commitment with Motown records. "They were a wonderful bunch of guys," he said, " who really took a lot of time to teach a white kid how to write songs, and they did it very well. They understood verses, choruses, bridges, hooks, drum breaks... they knew all the main parts of the anatomy. I think that's something that has not gone out of style. Something I would like to see more of in young songwriters today is a little more acceptance of the fact that songs have a head, they have arms and legs. And they taught me all of that -- a nuts and bolts education about how songs fit together, and what makes them work." But Jimmy was quick to point out that that's not to say anyone can teach you how to write songs like that. "Sometimes they can teach you how to write a hit like that, because it's almost like Dr. Frankenstein -- if you can hack up enough corpses, you can put together a fairly good-looking monster that will walk around."
