Jimmy Webb Interview in the Shropshire Star on 10 April 2015

Man behind the hits is taking to the stage

At the age of 68, Jimmy Webb is looking forward to a relaxed evening at Shrewsbury’s Theatre Severn on Sunday, as he told us over the phone from New York.

As the writer of some of the music’s most enduring songs of the past 50 years, Webb will be immortalised in tunes such as Wichita Lineman, Galveston and By The Time I get To Phoenix, all of which were hits for Glen Campbell.

So, by the time Webb gets to Shrewsbury, what can the audience expect?

“I don’t do stand up, but I do a lot of sit down.

“I’ve found my experience of making my living as a songwriter, as opposed to being a Sherpa or an astronaut, to be an uplifting, sometimes hysterically funny experience, and I try to get that across to the audience.

“It has its moments of pure nostalgia, because there are people there who fell in love to some of these songs, and you can see them hugging and kissing each other. It’s a tender moment for a lot of people, quite anecdotal and it goes on a journey,” he said.

Webb also penned the sprawling epic that is MacArthur Park, a Top 10 hit for Donna Summer in 1978, but originally written for the actor and producer Richard Harris.

It might not come as any surprise that Webb got to know the Irishman over a drink or two when the pair worked on a stage production in Hollywood.

“The first encounters I had with him were in bars. We would go out after rehearsal and start drinking
black velvets, with Jameson [whiskey] chasers, and that’s the first really heavy drinking I ever did in my
life,” Webb admitted, adding that their booze-fuelled evenings often ended in traditional Irish fashion.

"We would invariably end up singing a bunch of old Irish songs. I learned a ton of them, and somewhere one night, I said. ‘You know, Richard, we ought to make a record.’

“About two weeks later, I got a telegram from London that said, ‘Dear Jimmy Webb, come to London with record, love Richard,’ and I found myself up to my neck in this project. I had to come up with some songs for him, I was young and open to suggestion, and Richard, he was my leader there for a while, my big brother,” Webb recalls.

“MacArthur Park” reached No. 4 in the British charts in 1968 and is one of those songs that divides opinion, as Webb explained.

“Some people have, I’ll be frank with you, taken an enormous dislike to it and have issued threats against my body, I’ve had to argue with people for years about it.

“They come up to me after my shows and say, ‘What does the line, ‘Someone left the cake out in the rain’ mean?’ and I say, ‘I’m not going to tell you – If I told you I’d have to kill you,’” he explained with a
laugh, before revealing a literary source.

“W. H. Auden said, ‘When I look in the mirror, my face looks like a cake out in the rain.’

“I read that in college and thought that it was quite a metaphor, given that it appears in a completely different context, and it’s an obvious image, a cake left out in the rain is a pretty pathetic sight.

“The carelessness or the abandonment of leaving a cake out in the rain almost doesn’t need to be explained, so the song is, to a great extent, an epic protest against a love affair that’s melting,” he said.

Jimmy Webb is at Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury on Sunday. See www.theatresevern.co.uk for details.