Concert Review:
Jimmy Webb, The Cutting Room, New York City, December 8, 2007

By: David Shasha

What is the mark of a great artist?

The fine art of the American songwriter has traced a line from the populism of Stephen Foster to the cosmopolitanism of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and George Gershwin. With the emergence of new forms of Pop music in the post-War era, singers like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald formed a new template for the interpretive artist which relied on the robust canon of American songwriting and led to a new golden age of American music which fused elements of the African-American, European and nascent Pop traditions and which led to a mass movement that was raised to new levels of brilliance by artists like Ray Charles, Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke.

Any assessment of the 1960s and its contribution to the art of American music must include the classics of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Motown's Holland-Dozier-Holland, The Beatles' John Lennon and Paul McCartney and the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and the iconoclastic Bob Dylan. Each of these songwriters and songwriting teams added new components and motifs to Pop music while absorbing the genius of what preceded them. The recordings produced in the 1960s radically transformed the way in which music would be seen and understood not only by the mass audience, but by cognoscenti looking for the cutting edge.

As the 1960s developed, these new experiments in lyrical content and musical innovation - from Merseybeat to Soul to the Brill Building - led to an explosion of songwriting which looked further inward. Having absorbed all of this new artistry, the Counterculture threw out a number of brilliant and resolute new songwriters such as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and Robbie Robertson (of the Band) who all marked a new movement in the artistry of American music.

A songwriter who stood out from his peers as a visionary and a writer who had his feet planted in many of these different eras of American music was the Oklahoma-born Jimmy Webb. Webb came out of the Bacharach-Brill Building school, but in his finest work he had shown that he could absorb the finer points of the newer school of American songwriting as well. Songs like "MacArthur Park" and the triptych of classics that he provided for his friend Glen Campbell, "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Galveston" and "Wichita Lineman" were not the typical pop ephemera of earlier eras replete with jingoism and cliche, they were richly evocative personal statements that bridged the romance of the past with the relevance of the present.

Webb was not simply a master craftsman of American music along the lines of Burt Bacharach or Lieber and Stoller, who all came out of the New York Jewish tradition of Berlin and Gershwin, and whose job it was to feed the hit machine, Webb sought to tell stories in vivid images and startlingly striking human themes of love and longing that were only lightly handled previously.

Webb was a new kind of songwriter in American music who absorbed the classic ethos of the tradition, but took great care to ensure that his words took on a literate resonance that we now identify with the term "introspection."

In a classic song like "Galveston" that was a gigantic hit for Campbell, Webb adapted the "off to war" song in new and unexpected ways. He laid bare human emotions by generating some stark images that verged on the abstract. His rich and inspired melodicism, a gift that has never left him, established the specific "hook" of the song while his complex lyricism crafted a vision of fear, passion, loss and humanity over the course of a short and concise three-minute Pop song.

Webb's was a staggeringly rich art that attempted to navigate the increasingly complex world of American music; a music that had been transformed by the Countercultural revolution that began to reject the old forms and the icons who provided the culture with its most seminal moments. Attacking beloved icons from Frank Sinatra to the titans of Nashville, the new movement tended to value its independence and wished to reject much of what had come before it. Notwithstanding that at its very best, say the Grateful Dead's "Workman's Dead" and Neil Young's "Harvest," the reach of the new music back into the classic American tradition was marked, the figure of the classic American tunesmith was becoming outmoded.

With these new developments, Webb found himself caught between two worlds: the world of the past with its elegance and exquisite musical diction, and a new world of anti-formalism and experimentation which valued intimate and personal human experience more than anything else.

The singers who brought Webb's songs to life, people like the aforementioned Glen Campbell, Frank Sinatra, Richard Harris, and the Fifth Dimension were all seen as resolutely Middle of the Road performers and Webb a purveyor not of the cutting edge music of the Dylans and Hendrixes, but as a Pop hack. Having already shown their disdain for the classicism of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the Hippies maintained an ambivalence to the work of Jimmy Webb.

But as the years roll on, the reputation of the great songwriters becomes ever more pronounced and valuable to us. As paragons of a deeply American sensibility we can find in artists like Jimmy Webb and in their interpreters such as Art Garfunkel, an aesthetic that combines the old standards with the new sensibility.

In a classic Webb song like "All I Know," recorded by Garfunkel for his first post-Simon and Garfunkel LP, the images and themes are one with the past, with the love songs of the 1930s and 40s, but with a foot in the introspective sensitivity of the newer songwriters of the 1970s. It is a huge, gigantic brassy ballad that combines an epic sweep with a deeply nuanced personal touch.

Overt the past decade or so, since the release of his album "Ten Easy Pieces," a recording of ten of his most beloved songs, Webb has stopped trying to compete with the performers of the 1970s - as he did with the recordings that he made during that decade - and become more comfortable in his own skin. I would not say that his 1970s' albums were artistically insipid; on the contrary, one can still find in those recordings the genius of this brilliant man and the wealth of his great talent. It was just that in those recordings he tried vainly to become a part of something that was out of his reach - the Rock performer who happened to be a songwriter. Webb did not naturally fit the part that someone, say, like Elton John did. Webb was fated to remain primarily a songwriter whose ethos, as we have said, drew from Gershwin and Porter, as much as it did Bob Dylan.

As part of a short once-a-month residency at New York's Cutting Room club for the past few months, Webb stayed with the tried and true classics - his set was primarily drawn from "Ten Easy Pieces" - but embellished the songs with rich and vibrant monologues filled with his understanding of the significance of American Pop music and its cultural importance.

Opening with a stirring version of "The Highwayman," a song popularized by the group of the same name, a Nashville super-group comprised of Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson, Webb quickly set the tone for this extraordinary visit to the greatness of American culture and civilization: the audience would be treated to bracing performances of some of the greatest American songs of the past 40 years from the man who wrote them. Accepting his limitations as a singer, Webb infused the material with an electric passion that could only come from the person who wrote these gems.

Interspersed with the classic songs was some banter that acted not only as an entertaining diversion, but something that would effectively recount the history of American culture from a Webbian perspective. The audience was regaled by the rich banter which dropped names to great effect. Hearing the anecdotal tales of Joe Cocker, Frank Sinatra, Glen Campbell and so many of Webb's many friends, collaborators and acquaintances was not just mere star-gazing or celebrity ephemera; it was a veritable history of American civilization in individual chapters. These stories - each one of them precious not only for their recounting of seminal moments in the culture, but for their literate and informed understanding of the way that time and art intersect to form culture - assembled a more complete and total narrative, not simply of the career of one man, however important, but of the culture as a whole.

Webb's tales of Richard Harris in Ireland and Frank Sinatra taking Webb's dad to the Jockey Club and a recent reunion of some seminal musicians at a Los Angeles Mexican eatery where the poor musicians like the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and J.D. Souther - all of whom went on to superstardom - found a friendly place to congregate and eat for free when they were young, struggling musicians, all painted a picture just as vivid as that of the best songs Webb has produced over the many years of his career.

In stark contrast to a genius like Paul McCartney who it seems cannot truly embrace his own brilliance and who feels the need to primp himself up like the teenager he is no more, or in the prickly obscurantism of Bob Dylan who thinks he is some obscure bluesman like Blind Lemon Jefferson and not one of the most celebrated of American singers and songwriters of his era, Webb has freely embraced who he is in a profoundly unpretentious manner. He understands the ways in which his music was distrusted by the Hippies and how its complexities have functioned in the world of the mainstream. For this he makes no apologies as he clearly understands the place of his own work in the continuum of "Pet Sounds," "Rubber Soul," and "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" - those classic 1960s recordings that fused the old and venerable traditions with new and sweeping aesthetic and philosophical values.

The potent and often electrifying combination of the songs and the stories painted a portrait of an American artist who is not only aware of his place in the culture, but of the massive architecture of the culture as well. This was an evening to revel in and celebrate the gloriousness of American civilization and one man's place in it. It was as if the audience was magically taken on a ride through the 20th century to visit all the key moments and places in the American cultural landscape by an artist whose sensibilities are so deeply anchored in the greatness of what we are as a civilization.

The greatest disappointment of the evening was that Webb did not have the time to explore his richly evocative catalog more deeply. The greatness of songs like "All My Love's Laughter," "Marionette" and "Christaan, No" were absent this evening - as well as scores of other classics that would have extended the evening way beyond the 90 minutes that Webb so generously provided. In addition, a minor disappointment was the failure of Mr. Garfunkel to ascend the stage from his seat in the crowd to sing any of the wonderful versions of Webb songs that he has done in the past. Webb motioned for Garfunkel to join his for "All I Know" - but, as Webb quipped, anyone expecting for Art to ascend the stage "never had an argument" with the man and did not know his obstinate ways.

In spite of these admittedly minor quibbles, Webb held the packed club of some 150 audience members in spellbound fascination with performances of his classics and with the banter that fleshed out the role of the songs and their writer in the larger scheme of American culture. His outstanding renditions of "If These Walls Could Speak" and "The Moon's a Harsh Mistress" were enriched by brilliant readings of his lesser-known "P.F. Sloan" - perhaps the highlight of the evening - and an electrifying reading of a song he gave to Sinatra called "Didn't We."

Having in recent years seen the welcome re-emergence of Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson - perhaps the most worthy of Webb's peers as songwriters - to witness the sheer genius of Jimmy Webb was for me an out of body experience. Having been supernaturally taken for a trip into the very depths of the culture that I love so dearly was something that I will not soon forget.

Sitting mere feet away from a man who I consider to be a legend and an artistic genius and a personal hero is something I cannot be calm about. The evening was for me an opening to a world of artistic splendor and genius that reinforced for me the glory of the American artist as a leader in the world of culture and civilization.

Jimmy Webb is one of the most important American artists of the 20th century in an age where the art of songwriting has been dying in a sea of stale conformity to Pop trends that are culturally malignant and artistically illiterate. Though Webb himself expressed his disdain for this cultural loss, he did not do so with a chip on his shoulder or with an eye to stigmatizing any of the current practitioners of Pop music. By rising above the fray and sensibly articulating his own cultural vision in a forcefully articulate yet understated and deeply humble voice, Webb was the epitome of charm, warmth and class - just in the way that his great songs are. He cut the role of a wizened elder statesman for our generation in the way that Irving Berlin and George Gershwin once did for theirs.

In the end, it reaffirmed for me the greatness of Jimmy Webb - American songwriter, American humanist, American genius.

David Shasha is Director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, New York. He may be reached at davidshasha@aol.com

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